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A Rest is important, and A Scientific Rest to Maintain Good habits for Growth. I suppose you have read many articles discussing effective ways to rest, including “scientific rest methods”, “precise rest methods”, “strategic rest”, and so on. We know some good methods such as:

• Short and frequent breaks are better than long breaks after long hours of work.
• It is best to leave the office during breaks.
• Chatting and socializing are also considered as breaks.
• The best short break is a nap of no more than 25 minutes.
• Meditation, walking, and connecting with nature are all good ways…
  

In fact, all of these methods are correct and can be used to maintain good habits for our growth, but they are relatively fragmented. Recently, there have been some new studies on rest. Scientists have tested various rest methods, some of which are follow-up studies on tens of thousands of people, and have drawn some more systematic conclusions. Here we will upgrade our knowledge and sort out the latest understanding about work, which can be called the 2023 version of the scientific work method.

Let me talk about the principle first. Rest is something that people have gradually paid attention to in recent years because the way modern people work has changed. In the past, most people were engaged in manual labor, and rest was automatic: of course, the body needed to take a break when it was tired. The new question now is what kind of rest is needed for those who are engaged in mental work and sit in the office all day.

The key difficulty is that your fatigue is not reflected in the body but in the mind. There are two reasons for this.

One is stress. Any stress is a response to some kind of “threat”. People are under pressure at work. They may be pressured by leaders, projects, or themselves. They have tasks and deadlines. If they fail to complete them, there will be consequences. This is a threat. This feeling is like being under constant pressure.

In “stress mode,” your sympathetic nervous system turns on and you enter a fighting stance. Normal mammals are only briefly in this mode. For example, zebras on the grassland are in stress mode when they are chased by lions, but most of the time zebras are not chased by lions, and they are usually very leisurely. To borrow a famous saying, this is “why zebras don’t get stomach ulcers”.

However, people are required to be in a state of stress for a long time by the modern work scene. This has a big health impact, which is why we need to actively switch ourselves into “relaxation mode”, we need to rest.

The second reason is that you have to use willpower. You’ll have to do things you don’t enjoy doing, and you’ll often have to force yourself to focus. For example, when dealing with customers, you have to be friendly and cheerful even when you are not in that mood, which is really tiring.

So rest is by no means a trivial matter. It is at least as important as work. It is highly related to health, work efficiency, and even the overall quality of life. However, modern people have such a paradox: the more busy people are, the more they need to rest, but they just have less time to rest. Then the scientific rest method is even more important.

According to existing research, we can probably summarize scientific rest into three principles. So next week, let’s start with the first principle.