Scientific Rest Act 2023
Scientific Rest Act 202
Our column has talked many times before about how to rest effectively. We’ve talked about the “Scientific Rest Method,” the “Precision Rest Method,” and “Strategic Rest,” and we know some good ways to-…
It is better to take short and frequent breaks than to work long hours followed by long breaks;
● It is better to leave the office when taking breaks;
:: Chatting and socializing are also breaks;
The best short break is to engage in a short sleep of no more than 25 minutes;
Meditation, walking, and exposure to nature are all good ……
These are all true, but rather sporadic. Recently there has been some new research on rest, where scientists have tested various methods of rest, some of them following tens of thousands of people, and have come to some more systematic conclusions. In this talk we’ll take a cognitive upgrade and sort out the latest understanding of rest, which could be called roughly the 2023 version of the scientific rest method.
✵
Let’s start with the principle. Resting is something that has only grown in importance in recent years, and this is because the way modern people work has changed. In the past, most people were engaged in manual labor, and rest was automatic: of course you need to take a break when your body is tired. Nowadays, the new topic is what kind of rest is needed by those who are engaged in mental labor and sit in the office all day long.
**The key difficulty is that your tiredness is not in your body, but in your mind.**There are two reasons for this.
One is stress. Any stress is a reaction to some kind of ‘threat’. People are in a state of being driven at work, maybe by a leader, or by a project, or by yourself. You have a task, you have a deadline, and there are consequences for not doing it well enough to complete it, and that’s a threat. This feeling, to put it seriously, is like being under the gun all the time.
In “stress mode” your sympathetic nervous system turns on and you go into a fighting stance. The average mammal is only briefly in this mode. For example, zebras on the savannah are in stress mode when they are being chased by lions, but zebras are not being chased by lions most of the time; they are usually very laid back. To borrow a famous expression, this is ‘why zebras don’t get stomach ulcers’ [1].
People, however, are required by the modern work scenario to be under a constant state of stress. This has a significant impact on health, which is why we need to actively switch ourselves into ‘relaxation mode’; we need to rest.
The second reason is that you will have to use willpower. You will have to do things that aren’t your favorite things to do, and you often need to force yourself to focus. For example, when dealing with clients, you have to act friendly and cheerful even when you’re clearly not in that mood, and it can be really tiring.
So rest is by no means trivial, it’s at least as important as work, it’s highly correlated with health, productivity and even overall quality of life. However, there is a paradox in modern times: the busier people are, the more they need to rest, but precisely the less time they have to rest. Then the scientific method of rest is even more important.
According to existing research [2], we can probably summarize scientific rest into three principles.
✵
- The first principle is that rest must be separate from work. You have to switch from stress mode to relaxation mode. *
This requires that we don’t think about work while we’re resting, which is called “psychological detachment. “A 2017 study [3] followed more than 26,000 people - among them judges, teachers, nurses, office clerks, and various other fields of practitioners - to see what they did after work. The result was that those who left work thinking about work were more likely to be tired. On the flip side, those who didn’t think about work after work were mentally happier and physically healthier.
This then presents a challenge for us in the epidemic and post epidemic era. How does this switch when many people now work from home and work and life are together? One researcher suggests that even if your home is your office, you should get a little ritualistic and separate your work and rest areas - the
Wear formal attire during work hours and immediately switch to casual wear as soon as you leave work;
Use a dedicated laptop for work and switch to another computer for leisure activities;
:: Minimize work phone calls and messages during non-working hours ……
I heard Ma Boyong share his work experience in an interview [4] that was very much in the spirit of this. Ma Boyong is a writer and could totally sit at home and work - but he rents an office specifically for that purpose, goes to work every morning, and gets off at 5pm. Whenever he wrote a novel he made sure to write it in his office, not thinking about the novel at home. This method gave him the best writing efficiency.
✵
*The second principle of scientific rest is that there must be an official break. Going home to do chores is not rest. *
Nowadays, companies usually give their employees annual leave, so you should go on vacation to have fun and not use it to take care of household chores. But the rest effect of vacation is limited.
First of all vacations are not as long as possible. Studies have shown that 1-2 weeks of vacation is all you need for maximum effect, any more than that is pointless. Further, studies show that after returning from a good vacation, employees do feel more energized and better able to engage in their work - but the effect of a vacation only lasts for a month at most. And what happens after that month?
So the most important rest strategy is not to take a long vacation, but how to rest during the week. Nowadays, it’s usually a five-day work week, with Saturdays and Sundays at home. However, as adults know, these two days on weekends are usually spent on bringing up children and doing household chores, which may be more tiring than going to work. Therefore, it is suggested that a more reasonable approach would be to work four days a week and take three days off: this way, after doing household chores, at least one or two days of rest can be guaranteed for oneself.
There is now a four-day working week experiment going on in the UK [5]. Seventy companies are participating, including those in education, banking, healthcare, telecommunications, construction, animation studios, hotels and restaurants. The model tested in this experiment is called ‘100:80:100™’, which means that you only work 80% of the week, but I pay you 100% of your salary, and I expect you to be at least 100% as productive as you were.
Can people do 100% of their work 80% of the time? The final results of the experiment aren’t in yet, but early data suggests the results are very good. There is a woman who cleans in a hotel, a mother of two, and working only four days a week allows her to spend more time with her children. There’s also a company manager who enjoys working out and playing soccer and now has more time to train. The effectiveness of these people’s work has not declined as a result of the current results.
Another yardstick is that within the eight or nine hours a day in the company, there should also be short break sessions. Studies have shown that providing short breaks in the workplace leads to better moods and work energy.
So in the middle of each day, you should set aside some time to talk to your coworkers, go out for a walk, get a little exercise, and take intentional breaks.
✵
*The third principle is to choose the form of rest according to your condition. Simply put, there are two forms of rest: one is pure relaxation (relaxation) and the other is learning something (mastery). *
If you feel particularly tired and can’t do anything else, what you need is relaxation. If the purpose of your rest is to recharge, to get more energy and excitement, you may want to learn something.
Pure relaxation is easy, find a place to lie down or sit for a while, take a walk, watch a movie, read a novel. For relaxation during work, you can do some low-intensity muscle exercises, gymnastics, yoga, stretching, whatever, without having to get your heart rate up.
But if you’re not running out of energy, but you’re feeling a little unfocused, you can’t get any energy, you always want to go paddling, you want to work with a little more energy and think a little faster, then you need another kind of break. You need to challenge yourself. If it’s during the workday, you can go out for a couple of runs to get the blood flow and heart rate up. If it’s at home, you’d be better off engaging in a learning-type activity.
It’s a bit counter-intuitive how learning becomes a break instead. The point is that learning something gives you a sense of control, and control provides solace. We’re not talking about learning any livelihood skills here, but gaining a sense of learning. For example, Fatty Luo is recently said to be learning to play the piano, and you can also learn to paint, learn a foreign language, learn a sport, and try to reach a certain level.
Studies have found that those who spend their downtime learning a skill come back to work with not only more energy, but also become more enthusiastic and very enthusiastic.
Enthusiastic is a particularly good word. It describes a person who does things with self-enthusiasm, is fully engaged, and is extremely interested. And those who get into this state at work are those who have hobbies in their spare time.
Learn something can be, but there is a condition: this project must be your favorite. No one is forcing you, it’s not for assessment, there are no deadlines, so you can have no pressure. If you have to cook tonight, that’s not a break; but if you’re doing it out of interest, wanting to work on a new dish, and cooking a meal, that’s the best kind of break.
This is why people should have hobbies. Hobbies are not a hindrance to work, they are a boost. Hobbies make your brain more flexible and your spirit more energized. Fill up your off-duty life!
✵
One final thought. I understand the essence of taking a break is to release a state of stress. If you enjoy your work so much that you’re not stressed at all, then you can probably work as long as you want. But for the average person, the 996 workday is clearly inappropriate.
If the results of that British experiment with the four-day workweek are right, it shows that excessively long working hours reduce work performance. Not getting off work at the end of the day and having to stay in the company to work overtime is not good for the work itself, but is actually a kind of behavioral art that is done to the boss and colleagues, a prisoner’s dilemma. Those who work 996 all day should be ashamed.
It is a backward value to work longer hours with more honor and to regard no rest as devotion. Didn’t Deng Xiaoping say. “Those of us in leadership positions should not be too busy. Often, the busier we are, the worse we are.” The higher the level of work, the more we should talk about rest.
Today’s world honors a style of work that is enthusiastic, energetic, efficient, dynamic, energized, and creative, rather than grinding away and consuming the progress bar. But look around you, look at your leadership your colleagues your subordinates, everyone has such a good style, can you give a drive.
- Justifying the need for rest is also part of the modern sense of boundaries. * To separate work from rest is to separate work from life is to be a person with multiple identities. You’re not just a company man, you’re a man in some hobby club; you’re not just a parent to your kids, you’re you. You are an all-around person with a career, a life, a hobby, and an ego.
This sense of boundaries requires a basic etiquette of not calling people at work during non-work hours. Some companies require cell phones to be on 24 hours a day to answer calls at all times, and what leader’s WeChat must be answered within how long, this kind of thinking is so earthy and backward. It’s not only disrespectful to employees, but it’s also bad for work. If your organization requires people to be online all day, it’s like admitting that your job doesn’t require creativity, enthusiasm or energy, as long as someone is present at all times, and that means you’re in a very low-end job - isn’t that also self-defeating?
We can also relate the work/rest switch to ‘positive thinking’. The greatest benefit of positive thinking training is that it teaches one to live in the moment. A person who works is down-to-earth and fully engaged; when he or she is not working, he or she doesn’t think about work, and studies have shown that such people have the best job satisfaction and control of all kinds of emotions.
This is a realm of ease of entry and exit. If you want to work, you can immediately enter the work state, and if you want to rest, you can immediately leave the work state, which is very refreshing. If you think about things at home all the time when you are working, and then worry about your work when you get home, and you can’t take it or put it down, that’s not that you’re hardworking, that means you don’t have enough practice.
In fact, human beings are not fully adapted to office work. Our column said that the office culture has developed to a certain extent, we should be to tan for beauty; but now China is still in the primary stage of white for beauty. In fact, a large number of people in China have been working in offices for just one or two generations, and we are still adapting.
Things like the eight-hour workday were set up for manual labor in factories in the past. The subject of how brain workers should scientifically approach work and rest is still going on. I believe there will be a healthier workplace culture in the future.
Annotation
[1] Elite Day Classes Season 2, a bit of “pattern” awareness
[2] Chris Woolston, The “recovery paradox” explains why you’re burnt out, December 31, 2022. https://www. freethink.com/health/burnout-recovery
[3] Bennett, AA, Bakker, AB, Field, JG. Recovery from work-related effort: a meta-analysis. J Organ Behav. 2018; 39: 262- 275. https://doi .org/10.1002/job.2217
[4] “The Sound and the Fury” Podcast #229: Ma Boyong chats about The Great Healer: the light of idealism in a chaotic world, Sep 15, 2022.
[5] https://www.4dayweek.com/news-posts/uk-four-day-week-pilot-begins
Highlights
The current scientific understanding of scientific rest in 2023 can be summarized in three principles.
The first principle is that rest must be separate from work. You have to switch from stress mode to relaxation mode.
The second principle is that there must be formal breaks. Going home and doing chores is not rest.
The third principle is to choose the form of rest according to your situation. Simply put, there are two forms of rest: one is pure relaxation and the other is learning something.
The essence of rest is to release the state of stress. Justifying the need for rest is part of the modern sense of boundaries.