Now we have another good reason to
take breaks, to make time to rest and relax.
A number of recent studies show that people who sleep seven plus hours a
night, take daytime naps, and go on regular vacations perform significantly
better than people who don’t. It makes
sense and shouldn’t surprise us: Who does
well at anything when they’re burned out and exhausted? Still, as Tony Schwartz points out in a recent
New York Times article, “Relax! You’ll Be Productive”, “When we’re under
pressure, most of us experience the impulse to push harder rather than rest.” Nevertheless, what Schwartz calls “strategic
renewal” turns out to be crucial. It
reminds me of how someone I know once spent an entire Saturday sitting on her
couch watching TV – she couldn’t make herself do anything else, not even change out of her pajamas – then the next
day she had the most productive day of her life. (See Grappling
with Procrastination, Or Letting the Monkey Off Its Chain.)
Like
I said, none of that is particularly surprising, though it might be hard to put
into action. What’s more interesting in
the article is news of another discovery:
the brain follows a pattern of roughly 90-minute cycles, both when you’re
asleep and when you’re awake. When
you’re asleep you move from light to deep sleep and back out again every 90
minutes, and when you’re awake you move from “a state of alertness
progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes.” So your body wants you to take a break every
hour and a half, and, according to one study, “the best performers typically
practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes.”
Without
knowing any of that, I decided, when I started working as a writing coach, to
meet with my clients for telephone sessions lasting an hour and a half. And I’ve found that that little formula
works great: It’s hard to get much done
in only an hour, but any longer than an hour and a half and the client and I
both start feeling our powers of concentration waning. Tony Schwartz, author of
the New York Times article I refer to above, says he wrote two books, each one
in less than six months, by writing in three uninterrupted 90-minute writing
sessions a day. He also says he learned that
“it’s not how long but how well, you renew that matters most. Even renewal requires practice.”
This
is the part of the article that most intrigues me. It would be great if we could all work in
90-minute sessions and take breaks in between, and I, for one, intend to put
this advice into practice even more than I already am, whenever I can. (So, for example, I think I’ll start writing
in hour-and-a-half chunks of time instead of two hour ones.) But what if you can’t take breaks every hour
and a half, or your life is so hectic you can’t even remember you’re supposed
to take breaks every hour and a half?
Maybe
we need to start simple and just focus on the idea of strategic renewal. I think that for many of us, the real
stumbling block is feeling like it’s okay to stop working for a while. Work – not just job work but life work too,
the work of running errands, paying bills, catching up on whatever there is to
do – is like water: Wherever there’s an
opening, there’s more that can rush in and fill in the gap. I’ve noticed that on my days off from
coaching, I find myself thinking that I should be writing, and if I take a day
off from both coaching and writing, I think about all the other stuff I
could/should do: catching up with laundry,
cleaning the house, doing my filing, and so forth. And there’s probably even another wave of could/should
do’s in my life beyond that (painting the kitchen, building a website, etc). So to really take a break – i.e., practice
strategic renewal – I have to consciously build a dam to hold back all that
work: I have to pick a time when I’m
going to rest and make myself stick to it.
I have to build boundaries around that time by not scheduling
appointments during it no matter how urgently I might feel they’re needed
(after all, I can put those appointments in some other time slot, it’s not like
I’m completely ignoring them); by not caving in and doing something other
people want or need me to do; by not allowing my anxiety about everything that’s
on my plate (yuck, I hate that expression) to keep me from taking that
break. Of course, there are times when
real emergencies or even just important contingencies crop up and it only makes
sense to turn my attention to them instead of, say, lying on my daybed reading
a novel. But most of the time that’s not
really what’s going on; most of the time I’m just caving in for whatever reason
-- changing my mind about, giving up on, or even forgetting about my strategic
renewal time before it happens.
It helps to know
that we’re actually doing something good
instead of something bad by doing
nothing for a while, as we now know from Tony Schwartz’s article – we’re
helping ourselves and even others, increasing our productivity, boosting our
health, improving our job performances. Still, it may not be that easy to remember
that when the time comes to lie down on the daybed and ignore everything else
that’s calling out for your attention. (If
it’s a child that wants your attention maybe you can take a break by watching a
movie, playing a game, or doing some other restful mindless thing with
them.)
I have found that
practice makes perfect; the more I set aside times for breaks the more able I
am to stick to them. And I’ve found
that the more I think, talk, and write about how breaks are important and
necessary, for me and everyone else, the more I actually begin to believe it.
So what about resting
effectively, renewing well, as Tony Schwartz says he has learned over time to
do? One of his ways of “rapidly and deeply”
quieting his mind and relaxing his body is going running. Running doesn’t sound restful to me, but I’m
willing to entertain the possibility that it could be for someone else. A long time ago I learned that I have the
ability to take power naps pretty much at will, where I lie down and sleep for
exactly one-half hour and wake up feeling completely refreshed, like I’ve
erased my mental blackboard and now there’s room to write on it again. Lying around reading novels is another way I
love to rest, so an ideal break for me involves a power nap followed by some
reading. (It has to be novel-reading, the
more compulsively readable the novel the better; non-fiction feels like work.)
Whatever we do to
renew, the most important thing, it seems to me, is to not think obsessively or
even at all about what else we should be doing, all the things we have to do, while
we’re resting. It’s our minds more than
our bodies that really need to rest. So
we should try to avoid guilt, worry, anxiety, we should cut down on decision
fatigue and all the other mental fatigues, by erasing our mental
blackboards for a while, maybe by meditating, or reading a novel or watching
some dumb movie, by going running, or by going to sleep.
--
Mary Allen
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