HEALING
Rest, Recovery, and Reward
The 3 elements that balance the stressors of ILR practice.
Stressors are the things in your ILR practice that activate your nervous system.
Too many places, relationships, and moments where stressors activate your nervous system is bad for your health and your ILR practice.
Rest, recovery, and reward work together to balance the stressors of ILR practice.
Rest refers to a calming of the nervous system where your body moves from an activated state to a relaxed state.
- The “rest and digest” response of your nervous system is when your body feels safe enough to reduce its activity.
- Being able to enter a relaxed state is essential to the wellbeing of your mind, body, and spirit.
- Entering a relaxed state impacts everything from you heart rate to your emotions to your capacity to connect with natural world.
Rest cannot be equated with sleep. It’s possible to sleep with an activated nervous system.
Recovery refers to when you have balanced your nervous system response.
- For example, you had a stressful immersion session but you go for a walk after and you feel recovered.
Recovery is not guaranteed. Recovery depends on rest and reward.
- If the you go on a walk, but the whole time you worry about the stressful immersion session that you had, then your nervous system will stay in an activated state.
Reward refers to when you experience an internal state of satisfaction, hope, or benefit.
- In the example above the ILR practitioner who feels like they are making improvement in immersion learning has a sense of reward.
The ILR practitioner who doesn’t feels like they are making improvement in immersion learning has no sense of reward.
- Without the feeling of satisfaction, hope, or benefit, it’s more difficult to respond with resiliency to stressors in the learning environment.