What Is Your Relationship With Rest?
Episode 27 of Wellness Me Up — Wellness Me Up Diary Entry
with Rest Consultant Miranda Brooking
Written and hosted by Amanda Reece, founder of Wellness Me Up.
Miranda Brooking is a rest consultant — yes that's a real job and yes we need it. This one covers the five areas of rest, burnout, permission, guilt, perimenopause, cold plunges, HRT, skinny dipping in a glacier lake on Vancouver Island, and why five minutes on the floor might change your life. Rest is not lazy. Miranda said so.
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Who Is Miranda Brooking?
Miranda Brooking is a rest consultant — and before you ask, yes that is a real thing, and yes the world desperately needs it.
She built the Rest Uncovered Method after multiple burnouts, including one that took her completely offline for a full year. During that year she did the deep dive into research, experimentation, and exploration to figure out what actually worked. And what she discovered changed everything she thought she knew about rest.
Rest is not just sleep. Rest is not lazy. And the guilt we carry around it is not serving us. Miranda is on a mission to change that narrative one permission slip at a time.
Rest Is Not Just Sleep
This was the first thing Miranda said that stopped me cold — and it completely shifts how you think about the whole topic.
We treat rest and sleep as the same thing. And while sleep matters — yes, of course — it is only one piece of a much bigger picture. Miranda teaches five areas of rest within her framework, covering everything from the physical to the relational to the emotional to the mental to the spiritual.
Which means if you are craving connection and you take a nap instead... you are going to wake up still craving connection. Because sleep cannot give you what connection gives you.
And if you are overstimulated and your brain is full and you go out with friends instead of taking some quiet time... you are going to come home more depleted than when you left.
The body is always telling you what it actually needs. The work is learning how to listen to it — and then actually giving it that thing instead of defaulting to whatever is easiest or most guilt-free.
The Guilt Is the Problem
This was the theme running underneath the entire conversation and Miranda named it beautifully.
So many people — especially high-performing women — feel guilty for resting. There is a narrative so deeply embedded in our culture that rest equals laziness. That if you are sitting down you should be doing something. That the more you produce the more you are worth.
Miranda is working to dismantle that narrative with actual science. There is a University of California study she references that shows what happens to a cell when it is rested versus stressed. Five components of a cell are directly affected by chronic stress and the absence of rest. When you see it visually it lands differently than being told to slow down. Because suddenly it is not about permission. It is about biological necessity.
Your body needs rest the same way it needs food and water. It is not optional. And treating it like a reward you have to earn is making you sicker.
Your Body Has Been Whispering. Are You Listening?
Miranda describes burnout as moving through three stages — whispers, warning bells, and alarm bells.
The whispers are easy to ignore. A little irritability. Skipping lunch. Holding your bladder for too long because you are in the middle of something. Feeling tired in a way that sleep does not fix. These are small signals and we are very good at overriding them.
The warning bells get louder. The body is working harder to get your attention. And still most of us push through.
And then the alarm bells go off. The body knocks you to the floor. A year of stress leave. A knee injury that forces you to stop. A car accident. A diagnosis. Something that makes continuing impossible because you would not listen when it was still easy to.
I have done this. I have re-injured myself repeatedly because I was so desperate to be out there moving after years of not being able to that I could not hear my body saying slow down. It took people in my life getting firm with me — actually telling me to sit the fuck down — before I listened.
Miranda said something that really landed for me here. A lot of people keep busy because they do not want to slow down. Not just because of guilt. But because when you slow down the stuff you have been avoiding comes up. The emotions. The thoughts. The grief. The things you shoved down because there was no time.
But those things are coming up for a reason. They are coming up to be moved through. And there is beauty on the other side of that — if you can just get through it.
Five Minutes on the Floor
This is Miranda's gateway drug to rest and I love it so much.
When you come home from errands feeling tired — before you check your phone, before you do the dishes, before you do anything — set a timer and lie on the floor for five minutes.
Just the floor. Nothing else.
She said clients hear this and think... that's it? That can't be enough. And then they try it. And they come back genuinely surprised by how much it helped. Because we have been so conditioned to think rest requires hours — a full night's sleep, a long holiday, a week off — that we forget the small moments are actually doing something real.
Five minutes of genuine stillness is more restorative than five minutes of scrolling. The body knows the difference even if we have forgotten.
Perimenopause, HRT, Cold Plunges, and a Glacier Lake
Okay so the WTF wheel asked what wellness trend we absolutely refuse to try and this went somewhere I genuinely did not expect.
My answer came first. I talked about all the fad diets and ridiculous things I have tried over the years. And then cold plunges. I cannot do them at a spa. I want to be cool doing them. I genuinely do. I see people walking into ice baths like absolute bosses and I think I want that energy. But my body says not today.
Miranda jumped in and said she used to feel exactly the same way — her nervous system was so shot from burnout that cold plunges were completely off the table. But she can do them now. And I cannot. And that is kind of the whole point with wellness — what works for one person is genuinely not going to work for another.
The same goes for HRT. Miranda tried it for three days. Her cortisol was already running high from burnout. Adding progesterone sent it skyrocketing. She could not sit still. Her whole body was vibrating. She felt like a fire had been lit under her and not in a good way. Three days was enough. She decided she would rather figure out what her body actually needed and give it that.
But HRT could be absolutely the right thing for someone else. That is the whole point. There is no one size fits all here. Cold plunges could be life changing for the right person at the right time. Miranda does them now in glacier lakes on Vancouver Island naked and alone and that is frankly iconic. I am still working up to the spa version. We are all on our own timeline.
And then she dropped the thing that blew my mind completely. The symptoms of perimenopause and the symptoms of rest deficiency are almost identical. Our bodies during perimenopause are literally rebuilding — hormones in flux, systems recalibrating — and what they actually need is rest. And instead we push harder. We try to mask the symptoms instead of asking what the symptoms are actually pointing to.
Also… Vancouver Island, everyone. Just go. Okay? Okay. That place is magic and I need to get my ass back there immediately.
What Is Your Relationship With Rest?
This is the question Miranda asks at the start of every workshop. And it is the question I want you to actually sit with after listening to this episode.
Do you feel guilty resting? Are you averse to it? Does slowing down feel unsafe because of what comes up when you do?
And then by the end of the workshop she asks again. Has anything shifted? Is there a little more opening? A little more permission?
That shift is what Miranda is working toward with everyone she works with. Not a complete overhaul of your life. Not hours and hours of rest you do not have time for. Just a small opening. A little more awareness. Five minutes on the floor. A walk instead of the dishes. A puzzle with your kids.
What Wellness Me Up Means to Miranda
Filling up. The desire to learn all the different ways that wellness can lift and light you up.
She described it like going to the store and looking at the shelves — picking what you actually need today. Maybe today it is naps. Maybe today it is a puzzle. Maybe today it is going outside and putting your feet on grass for five minutes.
And I love that image so much because that is exactly what this podcast is trying to be. A store. A menu. A place where you can look around and go... oh, that one. That one is for me today.
Want to work with Miranda?
Miranda Brooking is a rest consultant and creator of the Rest Uncovered Method — a framework for understanding what your body is actually asking for and giving it that. Free video series available, plus the Rest Reset monthly program and one-to-one coaching.
If this one made you want to lie on the floor for five minutes... do it. And subscribe to Wellness Me Up wherever you listen.
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