Host
Randy Mitchelle
Podcast Content
While sleeping might seem great in the moment, discrepancies can wreak havoc on your sleep cycle, making it harder to have a solid nights rest on a Monday. In addition to making you feel terrible, a lack of sleep will also harm your work performance. Not only does it reduce your productivity, it makes it harder for you to process new information. This can occur as a result of the smoker experiencing feelings of withdrawal while trying to fall asleep at night.
In a similar vein, although napping feels great, it also disrupts your sleep rhythm, especially if you are taking it during the afternoon or evening. Sleep scientists have found that even short naps are effective at replenishing your mind. Just as swimmers and Buddhist monks have learned to harness the power of their breathing to keep their energy up or to quiet their minds, busy people should learn how to take breaks in ways that will help them recharge both mental and physical batteries, as well as gain a boost of creative insights. Everyone knows to do some amount of resting, in practice, but with some work and insight, it is possible to learn how to do it much better.
For those who do information-driven work, or who spend a lot of time at a computer, taking mental rest can be particularly beneficial. Even just a few minutes of a variety of types of rest can help you to be more productive, creative, and content in your day. If that is the case, take a moment right now to consider when and where on your schedule you could begin creating and protecting a little quality time for rest. First, you need to get serious about rest, and give it high priority.
You may have to get creative: For example, set up a child care-swap arrangement with a friend, so you can both squeeze in some grown-up downtime; or work together with a partner, so that both of you agree to prioritize rest in the face of all other demands on your time. Realizing rest is about more than sleep means you cannot pile on at the end of the day. When you accept that being busy does not have to mean being productive, you can incorporate rest into your day without feeling guilty. When we treat rest like an equal partner in our work, acknowledge it as the creative minds playground and launching pad for new ideas, and learn ways to rest more efficiently, we lift it up to a precious commodity that can help to soothe our days, order our lives, free up our time, and help us accomplish more by working less.
No matter the details of your schedule, layering periods of work and rest, and aligning key working times with circadian peaks, will help you schedule better, work more efficiently, and create periods of day where your creative mind can ruminate on problems you have not solved -- and create solutions that have been elusive to your conscious efforts. You can keep yourself from really burning out by building in opportunities to take breaks in your working day. Although it may sound counterintuitive, the time spent resting does, in fact, make you more productive. Most times, when we are feeling burnt out, we are trying to make up for the lost productivity by getting more sleep.
While sleep is definitely a state of relaxation, much resting does not entail as much disengagement as sleeping. According to Saundra Dalton-Smith, PhD, sleep is not the only type of rest that we need. In a viral TED Talk from Dr. Saundra Dalton-Smith, she claims there are several types of rest--seven, actually--that cannot be fulfilled through sleep alone. If you are overweight, have a thick neck, snore, and you spend a fair amount of time in bed at night, yet you still feel fatigued, it is possible you may suffer from sleep apnea.
It is likely easier to detect whether you are lacking physical rest: Your body tells you whether you are hurting or if you are not getting enough sleep. Set yourself up to have good, restorative sleep starting in the afternoon. If you are prone to the common cold, making sure that you are getting at least eight hours of sleep each night can be really beneficial. SUMMARY Aiming for at least 8 hours of sleep may boost immune function and help combat common colds.
Try to understand - most of us do not get anywhere close to the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep per night, after all. People are sleeping less now than in the past, and the quality of their sleep has declined. Specifically, the underlings of leaders who modeled and encouraged bad sleeping habits got around 25 minutes less sleep per night than the individuals whose bosses valued sleep, and reported lower sleep quality. Leaders can do this by setting an example , or they can directly model employees habits by encouraging people to work through their normal hours of sleep .
If instead, you prioritize sleep, you will be a more successful leader that instills better work habits in your employees. Sleep is, of course, the ultimate form of rest, and it is a crucial component to creative, productive lives. You may be more deeply enjoying your rest, and be more refreshed and restored, by just working on your resting more. We probably cannot fully control these processes; but by learning how to rest better, we can support them, allow them to function, and take note when they reveal something worth our attention.