Forget the Early Bird...

Maybe it's the warm weather or the (finally) sunny days, or maybe it's because I'd been doing a lot of running lately, but I've been instinctively feeling the need to rest. But intuitively speaking, that's not a bad thing since many people have been known to be the most creative or experience flashes of insight and inspiration when they're rested.

The problem is, in our society, rest is often misconstrued as laziness. We're taught that 'the early bird gets the worm' and we need to be always striving to reach the finish line – two concepts that often fly in the face of intuition. Our instincts may instead be leading us to be still and let someone else reach the finish line so that we can be ready to experience something different and better for us.

Periods of rest played a part in the success of some of our greatest thinkers. In fact, Winston Churchill, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein are all known to have been proponents of adding naps into their day in order to feel refreshed and be more effective in their lives. While I'm not one that takes naps during the day, I've found that I feel a sudden burst of energy in the afternoons when I've taken a break and rested my mind from the constant thinking, interviewing and writing that make up my day.

Intuitive Action Item: For the rest of the week, take some time in the middle of your day to rest. It need not be a nap; it could be 15 minutes of doing nothing but sitting in the sun, taking a brief walk or reading a chapter from a book or a magazine (but it has to be leisure reading, not reading for work or for professional reasons). Take note of how the rest of your day goes, and whether you find, in fact, that the rested bird is really the one that gets the better treasure in the end.

Intuitive Dreaming

You may have heard stories about people crediting dreams with providing some type of insight into their lives or even in some cases premonitions about the future.

---For example, horror writer Steven King credits dreams with giving him the inspiration for some of his novels.

---It is said that scientist Albert Einstein first got the idea that led to the Theory of Relativity in a dream.

---There are also stories that former president Abraham Lincoln dreamt about his own assassination.

A recent study described in this BBC News article supports the notion that dreams can provide information not readily accessible to your conscious mind. The University of California San Diego gave a group of volunteers some creative problems to solve. Some of the volunteers were told to stay awake to solve the problem while others were told to take a nap. The ones who napped improved their problem-solving ability by almost 40 percent.

Sure, a rested mind works better, but scientists conducting the study came to another conclusion, suggesting that during the stage of sleep in which dreaming takes place, you’re better able to integrate new information with past experiences. In other words, your subconscious mind can identify patterns and reach conclusions that your conscious mind simply can’t. It’s not rocket science, but do you take advantage of your dreams and the rich source of knowledge that they possess?

Intuitive Action Item: If you’re unsure about a course of action, write your question down before you go to bed and let your subconscious mind wrestle with it while you sleep. When you wake up, write down whatever you remember from your dream. Even if you don’t remember your dream, ask yourself how you feel about the situation and see if you’ve had a change of heart.