Why rest matters & overworking is counterproductive
In a world where round the clock working is actively encouraged and the frequently uttered, ‘I’m up-to-my-eyeballs’ is met with nods of secret approval, rest is often seen as a luxury and timeout for the weak or under-inspired. In a challenging work environment, it’s easy to succumb to the myth that working longer means greater productivity. But in a creative business, the reverse is actually true. Creativity requires us to disengage – to let our thinking brain take a back-seat and relinquish control, whilst our minds wander freely. So whilst it might sound counter-intuitive, the creative mind often works hardest when it’s at rest.
To be clear, hard work should not be confused with over-working and neither should rest be confused with laziness. In the quest for great creativity, rest and hard work go hand-in-hand and neither should be more revered nor taken less seriously.
According to Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, the author of “Rest”, even when our brain is not directly focused on a task, it’s still active, using its internal attention system to solve problems and make new connections. Only by learning to ‘rest better’ can we support this subconscious creative process and allow it to work its magic.
However, even when we aren’t genuinely over-worked, most of us are addicted to busyness; filling every waking second with that gratifying feeling of constantly doing ‘something’, as we skim across the surface of our lives. It not only exhausts our ability to focus but it fills all the gaps in which we might otherwise be giving our brains a chance to do their vital inner-work.
According to author and journalist, Michael Harris, the diminishing numbers of us that have lived in both a pre and post internet world are struggling with a loss that, sadly, our children will find hard to grasp – “the end of absence”. With our restless greed for constant stimulation fuelling our inability to disconnect and be alone with our thoughts, “the daydreaming silences in our lives are filled; the burning solitudes are extinguished”. But at what cost?
The truth is, if we value the creative process and the people behind it, it’s time we started to ‘rest better’ and embraced the art of being constructively idle in both our professional and personal lives:
Daydream
Throughout the day the electrical energy in our brains cycles through different frequencies, depending on what we’re doing, thinking or feeling. The alpha-wave state, associated with daydreaming, is a highly creative condition of relaxed consciousness. In this state our minds are free to roam, allowing us to make unexpected connections and formulate original thoughts. Psychologist, Scott Barry Kaufman, calls it your ‘creative incubation period’ and recommends that when you’re working hard on a creative project, you alternate periods of intense focus with short periods of daydreaming, where you engage in a gentle activity like doodling or taking a shower. When we quieten down our ‘thinking brain’ and slip into this unfocussed state, we tap into our brain’s ‘default’ or ‘imagination’ network, where we tune into our inner worlds of memories, emotions and ideas, allowing us to access deeper creative thought. So even when we’re seemingly idle, we often have our best ideas or bursts of inspiration. As Kaufman says ‘mind wandering can be anything but mindless”.
Unplug
Picture the scene: you're part way through answering an email when a text pops up from your other half asking if you're doing the school run tonight. Before you can answer, three WhatsApp messages and a news alert flash across your screen, diverting your attention. Your mac pings, more urgent emails have landed; two are on fire and another helpfully points out that you still haven't replied to one from yesterday…and so the day rolls on in an endless sequence of half-finished thoughts and forgotten replies.
How can the fragile tendrils of creativity possibly survive this endless onslaught from the digital attention-thieves? The simple answer is - they can't. If you reach for your phone in every natural pause, you never give your brain the space to absorb, reflect and wonder. In his book, Deep Work, Professor Cal Newport warns that if we continue allowing ourselves to be distracted in this way, we will start to rewire our neural paths, permanently reducing our ability to think deeply and profoundly.
The fact is, there is no free time when you’re umbilically connected to your devices. So one of the critical steps to resting better, is to disconnect. As Catherine Price advises in ‘How to break up with your phone’, disable your notifications, mute your alerts and commit to never having your phone at the dinner table or in the bedroom. Also, restrict yourself to checking emails/messages/social media to just a few times a day (Apple’s recently installed Screen Time is designed to help iPhone users do just that). Lastly, consider this: recent data shows that the average person spends around four hours a day interacting with their phone. That’s 60 days a year people…
Walk
But before you settle into binge-watching Netflix this Christmas as an antidote to all that digital noise, take note, that active rest is the most restorative. In particular, research shows, that incorporating an outdoor walk into your daily routine (without your phone) is one of the best habits for creative thinking. Not only can it facilitate a meditative state that is particularly conducive to creativity but a recent study showed that walking in nature can instil a sense of awe, which promotes expansive thinking, opening us up to new creative possibilities. And you’ll be joining a long line of successful creative walkers: Wordsworth, Woolfe, Neitzsche, Hemingway and Beethoven are just a handful who used regular walking as part of their creative process. In fact, Darwin was so committed to his daily ambles, that he even built a path near his house for that very purpose. If you make one New Year’s resolution this holiday season, then committing to disconnect once a day and get outside for a walk, might just be the best creative decision you make all year.
Sleep
“Our creativity, ingenuity, confidence, leadership and decision making can all be enhanced simply by getting enough sleep.” – Arianna Huffington
When Theresa May recently announced that they would be working through the night to make progress on the last phase of Brexit negotiations, one assumes that was meant to be reassuring. It isn’t. Is anyone pleased that we are making such critical decisions in a state of sleep deprivation? Sadly there is a certain bravado attached to not sleeping in Western culture: Thatcher, Clinton, Obama and now Trump all claimed to have run their offices on very little sleep. And creative history is littered with insomniac geniuses from Mozart to Davinci.
But sleep is the ultimate, yet most underrated source of rest. We know that good sleep enhances our mental clarity, concentration, energy and mood, all of which impact creativity. But more than simply being restorative to the mind and body, developments in sleep science have shown that it actually facilitates the creative process too. A 2009 study at the University of California showed that the REM phase of sleep, in particular, aids creative problem solving, by helping the brain to make associations between unrelated ideas. It’s especially good for working through problems posed prior to sleep, so ‘sleep on it’ might actually be scientifically sound advice after all. So next time you’re thinking of pulling an all-nighter to hit a deadline (or worse, asking your team to do so), consider that a good night’s sleep might just get you to a better solution quicker.
Nap
Whilst napping can’t take the place of a decent night’s sleep, it has also been proven to have a powerfully restorative effect on a fatigued brain - boosting memory function and higher-order thinking. Studies suggest that naps between 10-20 mins are best – longer than that and you risk falling into deep sleep, which can leave you groggy rather than refreshed. For an extra boost, business writer, Dan Pink recommends the ‘nappucino’, whereby you down a shot of coffee just before putting your head down and awake 20 mins later, just as the caffeine kicks in, leaving you raring to go. That nap-room in the office might not be such a silly idea after-all.
As Arianna Huffington notes, rediscovering the importance of downtime requires us to roundly reject “our modern collective delusion” that overworking should be admired and burnout accepted as the price of success. Until rest, in all its guises, is actively encouraged and supported in the workplace, quite simply, the health of our people and product will suffer. So it’s high time we took rest seriously and recognised that it should be applauded for its essential contribution to our creative success.
But as Pang writes, “Rest is not something the world gives us…If you want rest, you have to take it”. So with Christmas around the corner, give yourself the gift of idleness this year: commit to disconnect and make sure you and your team take some proper time-off. Your creative output will thank you for it.