why rest + hobbies are just as important for maintaining a balanced + fulfilling life

life gets in the way sometimes, and what’s the first to go? the time we have for fun things and rest. 

but what if I told you that these deserve just as much time as work and all the other things you do in your day-to-day?

in today’s episode, i’m giving it to you straight (as my capricorn in my 5th house would say) and reminding you just how important and deserving both your hobbies and your rest truly are.

i’m so excited to invite you to bloom, an immersive self-love experience event happening in long branch, new jersey on thursday, september 5th. presale tickets are officially live, but don’t wait because it only lasts until July 23rd. Get your tickets here and let’s bloom together 

+ download the #selflove100 here, 100 days of loving yourself more.

connect with julia on instagram @beautybyjulia + tik tok @juliasalvia

unlock more archive content on instagram @theselflovearchive + tik tok @theselflovearchives

sign up for the self-love archives newsletter: www.theselflovearchives.com

Chapters

• 0:00 episode 35
• 12:11 Marker
• 19:09 Marker

Transcript

Julia Salvia: 0:01

When is the last time that you put time aside for yourself? You deserve to put time aside for yourself. You deserve time for yourself, time to relax, time to rest, time to indulge, and time for your hobbies. You deserve that time. So, when is the last time that you really took a moment for yourself. Hello, hello. Welcome back to the Self Love Archives podcast. I am your host, Julia Salvia. Welcome. Welcome to the podcast. I am hosting an immersive self love experience here at the Jersey Shore, September 5th. And I am inviting you to spend time on yourself, for yourself, and with yourself at this event. It is a whole experience. Think vendor market meets expo event, but a little bit smaller, meets an influencer event. But it's not for influencers, it's for you. I wanted to create this space that feels welcoming, that feels inspiring, that feels all encompassing. The whole umbrella of self love in a space. There's going to be a curated vendor market. There is going to be light bites and drinks, comfy seating, little pop up immersive experiences for you to take photos at, or for you to experience a local brand or big brand. And of course you're going to go home with a goodie bag. I love a good goodie bag. Pre sale tickets are available right now. They are 55 and then they jump up to 75 for regular admission. So jump on that right now and grab your ticket to secure your spot there. They will be selling at the door, but if we sell out, I got, I got, I got nothing. I hope you will join me and everyone else that's going to be a part of this event. I'm super excited for it and I'm super excited for this to kick off. So much more to come. I'm so happy that you are listening and I am grateful. I want, like, it's, I'm being called to say I'm grateful for your presence. And I, I really am. I'm grateful for your presence. Just sounds very intergalactic. I am grateful for your presence, but I am. I'm grateful that you're here. I gotta give full props. To my boyfriend for this topic that we're going to be chatting about today I was figuring out how to bring it all together and he goes Why don't you talk about hobbies i'm like, okay And this is coming from someone who turns every single hobby that she ever has into work. So of course this is the perfect thing to talk about because I am sure I am not the only person on the planet that turns their hobbies into work real quick. It's very easy for me to turn a hobby or relaxation or rest into work because my job as a creator really overlaps my lifestyle., And it's a joke sometimes. It's a little bit of a laugh, but we also need to set dedicated time aside for rest, for our hobbies, for ourselves to do absolutely nothing to do with work, to do things that have absolutely nothing to do with our job, with other people. Things that we just do for us. Things that fuel our heart and our soul. You deserve that. My boyfriend's really good at this. Again, I give him a lot of props. He loves gardening and golf. Those are like two of few big things for him. The minute that the weather gets warm, he hops on. To the whole gardening train and the whole golf train, too. It's like, things go a little dormant in the wintertime and the minute that the sun starts to peak out, the weather starts to go just a tad bit over 60 degrees. It's like, the hobbies are now coming alive. And I have seen the amount of time, energy, and money he's put into these two hobbies, but most importantly, the pure enjoyment that he gets from both. It's almost like these are his, his children. I have seen somewhere that gardening I would say hobbies in general, but that gardening is the new pet and pets are the new children. I would even go a step further and say that hobbies are the new pets slash children. Everybody's taking on more hobbies and having less children and less pets. Though I am still in the market for a puppy. The way that he'll run inside to tell me about the new growth of one of our peppers outside or one of our tomatoes finally turning a little orange is the cutest thing in the world. But in that moment, it is a huge reminder to me, but to all of us, because I'm sharing that with you now. how important it is to have hobbies and to do things that we genuinely just get pleasure from doing. Just pure enjoyment for the sake of it being enjoyable. You know I love relating things back to astrology just so that everything can come full circle and we can really understand ourselves better. But this week, the week that I'm filming this episode, there is so much lovely astrology in regards to our relationships. And not just our relationships with other people, but our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with things, our relationship with stuff, our relationship to our hobbies. And today, Monday, July 8th? What is, what is the date? I think it's the 8th. It is indeed the 8th. Venus is sextiling Uranus. And what that means is that we are being pushed to find pleasure and connection in new and different ways. Venus, the planet of love, Uranus, the planet of change, are coming together in this beautiful place where it's just asking us to find pleasure in new things. And the way that I'm interpreting that is like, hey, find pleasure in new hobbies. Find pleasure and connection in different kinds of ways, whether that's connecting with someone, going to do something. That you haven't tried before or trying out something that maybe you haven't done in a long time And although this astrology specifically is happening today as i'm filming this for you on monday july 8th Look back to your calendar and see what what went on monday july 8th. It's still a really important point to push ourselves to try new things to do new things to Focus on the pleasures and the connections in our lives. And again, whether that's with other people, with ourselves, or with things like our hobbies. So that's the astrology happening with our whole world. Now for you personally, you're going to look to your fifth house. It represents children, it represents creativity, fun, kind of like how you come out into the world. Like, literally, like the things that you enjoy. The enjoyment that you get from the world. It has to do with sex to some extent. The fifth house is the hobby house As I like to call it. It's like it's basically the fun house and not none of that clown stuff fun house I'm, just talking about the pure like pleasure of life kind of like fueling this Younger version of you if you will I have capricorn in the fifth house, which If you get it, you get it I appreciate a Capricorn and that's just because they are straightforward and they just kind of do things by the book. But when I think of a Capricorn, the initial thought is like money, finances. And maybe that's just me thinking of Capricorns like that.'cause my dad was a Capricorn and he was like all about those things. But it just makes sense. Looking at this, that I have this creativity, this fun, this inspiration in the fifth house of Capricorn. My fifth house is in Capricorn. So it makes sense that I would turn my hobbies into work. And it also makes sense in the grand scheme of things, why I need to be doing something for work that I enjoy and I get inspiration from. But I think that can get super lost sometimes. When I'm not actually dedicating time to just enjoy life. To just enjoy things that I enjoy. So look to see what you have in the fifth house. If you know your rising sign, then you know what you have in your fifth house. You just need to count from whatever sign you have as your rising sign. Five signs down. So I'm a Virgo rising and the fifth sign after Virgo is Capricorn. If you are like my boyfriend, he is a Taurus rising and the fifth sign after Taurus is Virgo. So he is Virgo in the fifth house. And the easiest way to look this up to get a little bit better of an understanding is you could use ChatGBT, you could use Google. I recommend ChatGBT because it'll actually give you a lot more information, but just tell ChatGBT, hey, if I have Capricorn in the fifth house, what does that mean? And it'll give you all the things that you need to know. But even if you don't know your astrology, take a second and ask yourself, what are your hobbies? Do you actually make time for those hobbies? If you do make time for those hobbies, do you actually get enjoyment and connection and inspiration and creativity from them? Or do you not? Maybe some you do and some you don't. Some you wish you could make more time for and some maybe less. If you don't have any hobbies, ask yourself, what do you enjoy? The hardest thing for me was that for the longest time, my hobby was what I do as my career. So back in 2012, I started sharing videos on YouTube. I started making content and putting on makeup and doing all of these, all of this creative content. And that was my hobby for a really long time. 2012 into 2013 was when I went to college, my freshman year of college, and Instagram came out. This feels so long ago. I am so sorry if I am like giving you a blast from the past year. I'm making myself feel old. We are not old. I'm only 30. It's not old. It's really not. So for the longest time, This, what I had done as my career, was a hobby. It was something that I got pure enjoyment from. I enjoyed sitting down at my dorm desk and setting up my little camera and filming a makeup tutorial, especially Halloween makeup tutorials. I got so much enjoyment from that. And as the years went on. It was hard for me to sit down and do it because that hobby turned into a job. It got me excited to put on makeup and film something and share it with the world. But now I wasn't doing this out of pure enjoyment. I was doing this in this very humanity sense of because I have to. Because this is how I make a living. So if I woke up one morning and I really didn't feel like filming, but I had a sponsorship due the next day. I kind of needed to do it. Whether I was doing it out of pure enjoyment or not. So when asked what my hobbies were, I didn't really have much to say. Because I didn't have any hobbies. There was nothing that I specifically did for the sake of enjoyment. For the sake of pleasure. For the sake of Making myself happy or taking time for myself. Absolutely everything that I did had a purpose. Had a level in which it had to be done. See, when you're creating something or doing something out of a place of enjoyment and pleasure and connection, there is no per se, expectation that you're holding yourself to. Because you're not doing it to be the best in the entire world. You're doing it because you just enjoy it. When we take me sitting down filming a makeup tutorial just because I enjoy it versus sitting down filming a makeup tutorial because I need to do it for work, the expectation levels of both of those are very different from each other. One is gonna have a higher expectation level because it's to please a company that I'm working with. It's to be at the level of expectation for what they're paying me for. Or I'm sharing this with the expectation of all of the eyes that are going to be on it. So what I came to after all of these years of having this huge hobby that then turned into a career, to then kind of hating what I did for work. And hate is a strong word. I wouldn't say hate, but just it was tough. I, I, I wasn't going in the, in the direction that I wanted to, which is why we're here today and which is why I talk about self-love. But to go from hobby to career to feeling like I'm not getting any enjoyment anymore out of what I'm doing, I realized that I needed more hobbies. That I needed to take time for myself and do things for myself that I enjoy doing. For no prize, No goal with no expectation for no one else, for just myself. like, All right, what do I enjoy doing? I don't have to be good at it, but what do I enjoy doing that I don't have to share with the world? If I want to, I can no big deal, but like, I don't have to, and I don't feel obligated to. And for me, that was making flower arrangements. I got a pure joy going to Trader Joe's, picking out all my flowers, making them all color coordinated and aesthetic looking, and then coming home and putting the flowers together in some sort of arrangement around the house. One, it gave me enjoyment seeing them around the house, but two, I felt this sense of creativity that came from actually putting these arrangements together. I would go on YouTube and look up how to put a flower arrangement together the proper way. I would look up how to fold the paper the right way. I would give some of the bouquets that I put together to, you know, gave them away to my friends or to my neighbors. I got a pure enjoyment from making flower arrangements. It's so incredibly important to find things that you enjoy. Whether it's a bigger hobby, like my boyfriend's of gardening or golf, at least I see those as big hobbies because they're definitely not my hobbies. Or as small as maybe putting a flower arrangement together. It does not matter if you suck at it. What matters is. Asking yourself the question, do I get enjoyment out of this? Do I get pleasure, connection, creativity, inspiration? What do you get from this hobby of yours? And these hobbies of yours deserve their own specific time, their own specific moment in your week, in your month, in your day for you to dedicate time to. Because without enjoyment, then what, what are we living for? What are we here for? I can list now for you so many different Hobbies of mine. Cooking, making flower arrangements. I do like going for walks outside, not when it's 95 degrees, but when it's, you know, more like that fall New Jersey weather. Love it. But ask yourself all of these questions and figure out what your hobbies are and remind yourself that you do deserve to have time to enjoy yourself, to enjoy those hobbies, and not have any expectations around them. not have any goal per se, if you don't want to have a goal, I'm not a big fan of competition. So when I go into these hobbies of mine, like it, there is no competition. I don't want to compete with anyone. I just want to enjoy what I'm doing. And I hope that you can take the time to enjoy those hobbies, at least a little bit. We also need to prioritize our rest. Although, I have been prioritizing rest definitely for the past year. I think hobbies too. I've definitely been on top of prioritizing them, but I haven't been great at them in past years. It might be very obvious as to why you need to prioritize rest, and now you know why you should prioritize hobbies. But let me tell you a little story. I used to be the girl who would pull all nighters. I wouldn't go to sleep, either at all, or until 5, 6 a. m., until the sun came up. And then I'd go to sleep for a couple hours, wake up at like 11 or 12 o'clock, and go about my day and do it again. And I realized, after all of the years of pulling all nighters, that of course we know all nighters are not good for you. Drinking tons of caffeine just to stay up till 5, 6 o'clock in the morning isn't really the healthiest But I genuinely thought that I was getting so much more work done by pulling an all nighter than if I were to just go to sleep at maybe, What's considered a normal ish hour. Turns out I was incredibly wrong. And I have had multiple lessons just like that, where I have shoved so much work or so many to dos into one or two days, just to find myself on the third day absolutely crashing and having no energy, no matter how much caffeine I'm intaking, To contribute to any task. I'm talking like, can't even contribute to making myself something to eat. If there is anything that I have written on my weekly recaps, or monthly recaps is rest. What can you do better next week? Rest. What can you do better next month? Go to sleep earlier. And I have noticed, I'm, proof is in the pudding, as they say. When you prioritize rest, you actually make more time for other things. There's this crazy thought around, you know, there's only so much time in a day. I wish there was more time in a day. You ever hear someone tell you that if Beyonce could do it in 24 hours, so can you take your favorite celebrity or someone that you look up to and if they could do it in 24 hours, so can you with rest. When I started prioritizing my rest and actually getting an adequate, if not more than adequate amount of sleep. And also putting time aside for my hobbies and enjoyment. And not just sleep rest, but rest rest, like just sitting on the couch and doing nothing. Kind of like giving yourself a rot day. When I started doing that, I started to notice that I actually did more. I had more energy. It's kind of like when We all know this is a thing. You have your phone for a year, two years, and you start to notice that the battery on that phone starts to not work as well as it did when you first bought the phone. That's you. Cause you never gave yourself a second to re energize yourself with a hobby of yours or to appropriately rest or charge yourself. And because of that. Now your battery depletes more quickly. If there's any piece of advice I can, can provide in regards to sleep. And I cross checked this with a sleep doctor. I happen to be doing a woman's makeup and her husband was in the hotel room and he just happened to be a sleep doctor. So I confirmed these findings, you know, when Google is just not enough. That was one of these moments. Sleeping in 90 minute intervals. I've talked about this. In regards to the self love 100 challenge if you want to download the self love 100 I will link it in the show notes below It is my challenge of 100 days of loving yourself more where you push yourself to complete these tasks daily And at the end of the 100 days, I can surely promise you that you will love yourself more Just like when you put time aside to rest Dedicate time for your pleasure and enjoyment and your hobbies. You will love yourself more. That's why we're here talking about this, of course. But one of those tasks, one of those daily tasks on the self love 100 is to sleep in 90 minute intervals or to get adequate rest, to sleep, to rest. Have you ever slept like 15 hours? 10, 15, 12, something. Or something, something crazy like something like just a lot and asked why am I still tired? It's because you didn't sleep or wake up in an interval in a 90 minute interval. Our bodies have sleep cycles and most of us have a full sleep cycle at 90 minutes. Some of us, it's a little bit longer. Some of us, it's a little bit shorter. For me, it's just a little bit shorter than 90 minutes. But if we were to wake up during this deep part of our sleep, so let's say that we woke up at five and a half hours. We went to bed at 12 and we woke up at 5 30. We are waking up in the middle of one of those 90 minute sleep cycles. It's putting our body in this state of kind of incomplete. And that is why we don't feel well rested when we've slept for so incredibly long, or when we've slept for too little, or when we are waking up in the middle of one of those 90 minute cycles. Now this doesn't mean that you're waking up every single 90 minutes, this just means that when you do decide to wake up, to wake up an hour and a half, three hours, four and a half hours, six hours, seven and a half hours, nine hours. The adequate amount of sleep does depend on where you are. If you are a woman or someone who does have a cycle, you are going to have different amounts of sleep that your body needs according to where you are in your cycle. When we menstruate, there is a higher amount of sleep that our body and rest that our body is going to need because it's doing all the things. I truly, now, at 30, do my best to get no less than seven and a half hours of sleep. Nine hours on a really great night, and six hours if I'm really just crunched for time. I don't even want to say it like that, but six hours if maybe the time went over my head and I need to wake up early But other than that, I really try not to get any less than that and most nights I would say six out of seven nights a week. I am getting seven and a half hours of sleep. So Try this see how it works out for you Sleeping in 90 minute intervals. Like I said some of us have a little bit less than 90 minutes. Some of us have longer sleep cycles but figure it out for you and give it a try. Why not? It's like we said in the beginning of this episode, why not give something a try? Whether that's a hobby or a different way to rest. The other thing I will throw in there. I'm not a nap girl, but that sleep doctor, said that if you are going to take a nap, take a nap that is less than 20 minutes or one that is an hour and a half, because before 20 minutes, you're not in that deep sleep. You're not awakening yourself from a deep sleep. You're not really in completing a cycle just yet, or complete a whole sleep cycle by taking a nap for an hour and a half. Try that out. Let me know how it goes. The most important thing I want you to take away from today's episode is that you need to prioritize Rest you need to prioritize Enjoyment you deserve to do that because if we don't our batteries are going to Start to short circuit start to die out on us sooner than later Prioritizing our rest and prioritizing time for pleasure and enjoyment in life is going to help us keep a healthy battery. And I truly believe that if you start to believe that you deserve, believe and know that you deserve to prioritize your rest and to prioritize your enjoyment and to just make time for those things, you will have a healthy battery and you will have more energy to do all of the other things that you want to do and get done. Coming from a healed Virgo, rising. Thank you so much for tuning into this week's podcast episode. I appreciate you to the moon and back as always. Don't forget pre sale tickets for my event, Bloom. are available now at theselflovearchives. com. All the info is in the show notes as well as the free download for the self love 100, 100 days of loving yourself more. Thank you for tuning in once again, I will see you guys not next week, but the week after podcast episodes go up bi weekly 12 o'clock Eastern time. I love you a ton, and make some time for yourself this week. Bye.