How to Rest Your Brain: Why Downtime Boosts Your Uptime!
If you think about it, our brains are kind of like our favorite dogs, they obey us and do whatever they can to please us. If we tell them to focus hard on a certain task for 5 hours straight, they do and if we tell them to work 60 or 70 hours a week, they do their best to make that happen!
However, at some point, our brains will fail because the expectations we have for them are unrealistic. There comes a time when our brain just cannot go anymore and goes offline. Think of those times where we have pushed it so hard that we end up at home just staring at the wall.
What is it that causes this to happen?
Well, according to Scott Halford, author of Activate Your Brain: How Understanding Your Brain Can Improve Your Work – and Your Life, It is due to the fact that our brain needs a little rest, which is the topic of today’s blog post – how to rest your brain!
The Benefits of Resting Your Brain Throughout the Day
While we know how important sleep is, what many of us don’t realize is how important it is to know how to rest our brain and take a little downtime throughout the day, in something called awake rest.
As Halford says:
“There are many known benefits to giving the brain deliberate rest throughout the day, but here’s one of the most convincing: There’s evidence that rest can slow the brain’s age-related shrinking and can actually increase brain volume in critical areas related to attentional focus, positivity, emotional regulation, and memory storage…When we rest our brains, we improve our chances of boosting those areas, and we don’t decay as rapidly. Rest gives us a chance to keep the brain healthy and vibrant into old age.” 1
Start Small, Start Now!
While it may be hard to stop ourselves from our obsession with non-stop work, the research shows that it is critical for keeping us from decaying as we would otherwise.
And as Halford points out:
“This is definitely a “start small, start now” suggestion—even if you start with short bursts of awake rest, you can start changing your mood, thinking, memory, and behavior for the better. You just have to give yourself permission to be smarter, and part of being smarter means understanding the limits to our brain resources.” 1
Brain Rest: It Isn’t a Guilty Pleasure
Knowing how to rest your brain is essential and not just a guilty pleasure, as Halford explains:
“Brain rest isn’t a guilty pleasure; it’s one of the ways we build stamina and energize the brain. Most leaders I’ve spoken to about this agree that they would prefer a well-rested brain in shorter spurts from employees than a fatigued one that’s trying to be productive throughout the day. They are essentially saying they don’t want to confuse the appearance of being busy with results.” 1
How to Rest Your Brain: 6 Ways to Achieve Awake Rest
Let’s now take a deeper dive into some of Halford’s suggestions for how to rest your brain and get some awake rest that can help activate the full power of our brains while protecting them against decline. Remember, you don’t have to do all of these, simply pick one or two and try them out.
(1) Taking time to reflect
How many of us run from meeting to meeting and jump from task to task, without taking any breaks? I would venture to say many of us. The problem with this endless flow of meetings and tasks is that our prefrontal cortex doesn’t get the chance to process information or rest for a minute. This ends up causing our contributions to deteriorate in quality as the day goes on.
To prevent this from occurring, Halford recommends that we do a couple of things relating to taking time to reflect:
Decrease the lengths of meetings
If you have the power, decrease meetings from 60 minutes to 50 minutes. Then with the extra 10 minutes that you have saved, use the first five to jot down what you said you would do and when you need to do them by. What this does is dumps this stuff out of your prefrontal cortex freeing it up for more important thoughts. Then use the second five minutes to think about your next meeting and what you need to focus on for it.
Take longer breaks
While ten-minute breaks are great and refreshing, we need downtime that is longer, deeper and non-work related as well during the today to improve our overall mental strength.
As Halford recommends:
“But during the workweek, try finding reflection time halfway through your morning, during lunchtime, and again halfway through your afternoon. Start with only five minutes each time. Close your office door or leave the building and go on a walk. Turn off your phone, your computer, or any other means of getting ahold of you. Sit for five minutes and just reflect on how the day or week is going. Take stock.” 1
Getting in the habit of doing this will help your brain slow down and consolidate everything that you have learned. During these breaks when your brain is not processing new inputs, it will be busy organizing old ones. The idea is to make time for 10 minutes of reflection 3 times a day for a total of 30 minutes. Better yet, unless you are totally absorbed in your work, work for about 50 minutes straight, then take a 10-minute break to reflect.
(2) Letting your mind wander
I am sure we have experienced a time when we get “stuck” while working on a project. One way we can get unstuck is to simply let our minds wander in such a way that we create flashes of insight. What the flash of insight really is is our brain coming up with an answer that we have known all along. What usually happens is that our prefrontal cortex is operating under such as heavy load that we don’t notice the answer. By letting our mind wander, it gives our brain an opportunity to capture what we already knew.
Halford gives a 6-step process we can use to help identify one of those flashes of insight:
(1) Find out as much as you can about the problem you’re trying to solve.
(2) Find out what others have done about it in the past.
(3) Think of as many new approaches to it as possible.
(4) Allow yourself to come to an impasse, along or in debate with another person.
(5) Remind yourself of the question that you are trying to solve.
(6) And then go distract yourself. Go let your mind wander. 1
(3) Play a game
Games are a type of mental wandering and they can also help you gain insight as well as reduce the cortisol that is associated with the anxiety of trying to solve a problem. While the brain is great at finding insights when you are in a relaxed state, it also can find them when you are doing something completely unrelated like playing a game. Taking time to play a game, even if it is solitaire for 10 minutes a day, can be a great way to rest the brain.
(4) Meditation
In discussing the benefits of meditation, Halford says, “…we must acknowledge and learn from a practice that has been around for literally thousands of years; neuroscience is now showing that those who do it on a regular basis have better memory, less dementia, less overall brain shrinkage, increased cortical thickness, and higher reported levels of fulfillment.” 1
If you want a quick primer on how to meditate, check out our recent post on simple meditation. Remember, all it takes is 5 to 10 minutes per day.
(5) Visualization
Another excellent way for how to rest the mind is through guided imagery or visualization. As we discussed previously in a post on visualization techniques, skilled athletes and performers use visualization to improve their ability to improve their skills. The reason being is that it has been shown to activate brain regions in a similar way to how they are activated by actually doing that skill.
(6) LOL: Laugh out loud
The last way to achieve awake rest is via laughter and joy.
According to Halford:
“Laughter has so many benefits that an entire encyclopedia could be written on them. It releases chemicals in the brain that allows us to refocus and feel more alert, it dulls pain receptors, it helps improve the immune system and heart health, and it feels just plain good.” 1
One thing you may consider is to bookmark funny YouTube videos or stupid jokes that have been sent to you that make you laugh and smile and then take a couple of minutes to look at when the need arises for a little LOL’ing.
Remember, It’s All About Setting and Managing Expectations
As I said in the introduction, our brains are like our favorite dog, they do whatever they can to please us as long as our expectations are realistic.
By giving our brain a little downtime during the day, we can give them the rest they need to perform at their best.
Speaking of dogs and unrealistic expectations, that reminds me of an unrealistic expectation we had for our dog growing up, which was that she would drink out of the bowl of fresh water we laid out for her.
Unfortunately, that expectation was a bit unrealistic. You see, if someone forgot to put the toilet seat down, she would drink out of the toilet instead of her bowl!
Until next time, set realistic expectations for your brain by giving it the awake rest it needs, use these tips for how to rest your brain, keep your toilet seat down if you have a dog, and as always…PYMFP!
–Rick
P.S. Wanna know more? Check out the entire book.
Use it or Lose It – How to Rest Your Brain
The six ways for how to rest your brain and get some awake rest are:
(1) Taking time to reflect
(2) Letting your mind wander
(3) Play a game
(4) Meditation
(5) Visualization
(6) LOL: Laugh out loud
When to Use It
Use these ways for how to rest your brain every day to get the important awake rest that your brain needs.
What Do You Think?
What do you think of these ways for how to rest your brain? Do you currently take time to rest your brain using any of the suggestions above? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!
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You have to take breaks during the day, to reload and refresh. Its to the point now that the most effective method is to take a nap. When I worked (way back when), I took breaks maybe every hour to hour and a half. I’d go outside, smoke a cigarette, wander around, and let the brain flat-line. Often our department secretary would join me – we traded bad jokes, she caught me up on the office gossip, stuff like that.
Sometimes the muse of bad poetry would slap me upside the head, and I would compose unpublishable verses such as “Ode to a Blonde’s Ass”. That ought to tell you where my mind wandered to.
Thought for the day – “I frequently let my mind wander, sometimes it does not return.”
Hi Dave, Totally, agree on taking breaks and as you know I too am a big fan of taking naps, the science behind it is impossible to ignore. I love where your mind wandered to, lol, but that is the point, to let your mind wander, let ideas sink in and connect and come up with new ideas. And I like your thought for the day. Thanks for reading and commenting! Rick