224 | Rest Isn’t Lazy. It’s How You Heal From Trauma and Build True Resilience

Show Notes:

Do you feel guilty when you rest—even during recovery?

In this episode, Michael flips the common narrative about healing. Instead of glorifying hustle or productivity, he explores why real resilience and trauma recovery come from intentional pauses, mindful rest, and a healthier relationship with your smartphone.

Takeaways:

• Learn why your body needs rest and what happens when you truly honor it
• Shift your mindset from “pushing through” to “recovering with compassion”
• Discover a simple phone-free practice to support your digital and emotional wellness

Take a deep breath and discover how reframe your relationship with recovery and reclaim your resilience through mindfulness, not motion.

00:00 Introduction to Recovery and Digital Health

01:16 The Necessity of Recovery

02:30 True Strength and Resilience

03:33 Practical Tips for Recovery

04:15 Mindset Shift on Recovery

05:17 Improving Your Digital Health

06:00 Conclusion and Further Resources

Transcript:

 In this episode, you’ll discover a mindset shift that can help your recovery, and a tip to improve your digital health. Hey there, it’s Michael. Welcome to Whole again. A show about helping survivors a physical injury and trauma, reclaim their strength and resilience through the wisdom of Kazuki. On Fridays, I love sharing a microdose of wisdom with you to help you become whole again and step into the person you’re becoming.

In this episode, you’ll discover a different way of looking at recovery and a tip. To help your phone recover. How cool is that? But before we get there, I wanna take a moment to thank you for being here and thank you for being a fellow survivor.

Alright, since it’s Friday, we love talking about tips to end the week on a high note. So let’s start here. Recovery is not a luxury. I know we talk about recovery from our injuries and our illness and our trauma, but recovery isn’t a luxury. It’s a necessity. Let me share more. In today’s world, there’s a big part of our culture that glorifies pushing through the grittiness, the hustle culture, all of that.

I’m sure you’ve seen it on the internet. We have to work harder. We have to go for more showing up no matter what. It’s easy to believe that real strength looks like constant motion. And when it comes to our healing, whether we’re talking about injury or illness or physical trauma, we might think that we should always be pushing it, trying to do all that we can to heal.

As if healing has now become our full-time job. And in some ways it might, depending on what you’re going through, but this notion that constant motion, constant movement, constant doing is real. Strength, isn’t true. True strength, true resilience, what the body truly needs, it needs time to recover. That includes having the courage to pause, take a breath, as I like to say, and restore.

This is when the body actually does its healing. That’s why our sleep is so important as we recover. But beyond sleep, there are ways that we can offer moments during the day, moments where we’re offering our body and the mind a chance to recover. Let’s be clear. Real recovery isn’t about scrolling on the phone until your brain is numb.

Zoning out in that way, zoning out with all the noise still in the background. Scrolling on our phone as we do is really about numbing, not about nourishing, so we wanna take steps to nourish the body and the mind so we can recover. That might look like things that fill up your tank if you have the ability to walk.

It could be a quiet walk. It could be a really meaningful conversation with someone you know that you really trust and love. It could be a nap without guilt. I love those. That’s one of my go-tos. It could be journaling, it could be listening to music. Or simply watching the clouds travel across the horizon.

All these moments can be moments where you’re offering yourself some nourishment to help the body really recover. This topic of recovery is a really passionate one for me. I’ve long said that doing nothing is really something. It’s called recovery. So I really want you to hear this. Allow this to sink in.

You don’t have to earn your recovery. You don’t have to prove how exhausted you are, how much you’re doing in order to deserve a break. You’re worthy of rest just because you are human. We all are, whether we’re going through something or not. So know this. Deep, deep within every cell of your body, deep within your heart.

When you have moments where you feel like you just wanna do nothing, that’s something you’re recovering and it’s how you’ll step into the person you’re becoming. Now, let’s get to our tip because it’s Friday. To improve your digital health. Just like we can use moments where we’re not doing anything, your phone also appreciates it.

So here’s the tip. Over the next couple days, find moments in your life. It could be during meals or another time where you can have a phone free existence. You might start off with simply 15 minutes. It could be a half an hour, but play around with this in your life when you don’t have your phone and see what bubbles up.

Let me know what you experience. Again, thanks for being here, and thank you for being a fellow survivor.

In this episode, we shared a mindset shift on the whole topic of recovery, and you heard another important tip to improve your relationship with your smartphone so you can use it. Rather than it using you. As always, thank you for being here

and if you wish to further enhance your digital health, I’ll invite you to take my smartphone wellness check and you can access it through the link in the show notes, or you can visit my website, which is Michael O’Brien shift.com and it’s absolutely free. And it’ll help you scroll less and live more.

And of course, I hope you’ll join us here on whole again every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and discover how to heal, grow, and become more resilient and celebrate our scars as golden symbols of strength and resilience. Until then, remember, you can always come back to your breath. You’ve got this and we’ve got you.