Rest is not only the source of restoring physical strength, but also the source of restoring mental power.

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Editor’s note: The development of technology should have been liberating people, so that we can have more leisure time to rest, recharge and store, and achieve creative work, but we are increasingly being counted for countless work and identity-driven consumption. Increasing parental pressure, compulsive use of social media, and long commutes are overwhelming. Learn to balance work and rest in life, work and rest, remember that rest is always everywhere. The author is Niklas Göke, the original title If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too.

How does LeBron James recover from rest?

Picture: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images

LeBron James told efficiency guru Tim Ferriss on the show that he slept 8 to 9 hours a night, sometimes even sleeping for 10 hours. If the basketball star can’t sleep at night, the next day will be about 2 hours in the lunch break.

James pays attention to more than just sleep: when he chats with Feriss, you can hear some rustling. Mike Mancias, who has been with him for 15 years, explained that James is applying ice on his knees.

Mancias said: “The rest is always everywhere.”

Well, this sentence is too reasonable, you must remember.

“No matter how long LeBron plays every night,” Mancias said, “we will still take rest and recovery as a top priority, whether it’s nutrition, hydration, more flexibility, or at the gym. Rest is A never-ending process, really. In order to achieve success, these must be done.”

James is not the only top athlete who has a passion for high quality sleep. Usain Bolt, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova, and Steve Nash also believe that sleep is critical to their performance. Obviously, sleep is essential — Not only for physical activities such as sports, but also for knowledge work and creative careers.

But sleep is not the only problem. Rest and recovery are also important – not just for professional athletes. We all know how difficult it is to host a long meeting, or how exhausted after a few hours of whimsy. So why are we so reluctant to give ourselves enough time to recover?

It’s a luxury to sleep well

We can’t just stand the idea of ​​reducing our work in order to sleep more. Really, any idea that lets us reduce our work is not tolerable. This deep-rooted enthusiasm for worship is not something you can overcome with a long vacation and a few pills. This requires a huge shift in attitudes and awareness at the entire social level.

Our ancestors hunted and collected, “worked” for 3 to 5 hours a day. Many people today may not need to do so much work to survive, but we have been working hard. Since the 1950s, working hours have hardly decreased, and in fact there has been an increase.

Although sleep health in the United States has been improving, in 2018, only 27% of Americans reported that they had a recommended 7 to 9 hours of sleep on weekdays, and only 10% said they Put sleep in the first place. Encouraging employees to slam the corporate culture is still popular, Elon Musk admits that he is a fan of this culture, and one-third of Goldman Sachs employees feel “extremely nervous” about their work at the bank.

If sleep is really the key to success, why is it so hard to get people excited about going to bed? First of all, no matter how good sleep is for our body and brain, it feels like it is the time of death. No matter how hard we try, there is no real way to handle multiple tasks while sleeping. Unlike running, you can turn on podcasts and passively get ideas while running. Once you are in sleep, you are forced to do only one thing, and you can’t be sure how much time you will spend – it’s hard to accept.

Deeper questions

Sleep is just the tip of the iceberg. The real problem is much deeper – it begins with the status of “work” in modern culture.

This has both cultural and technical reasons. We invented machines to reduce manual labor, but later applied this model to creative labor and intellectual labor. Researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explains in his book “Rest”:

The modern office is actually a machine for organizing intellectual labor. It mimics the working structure of the factory, but this model is not entirely suitable for the creative industry, because productivity and product quality are not acceptable in creative and knowledge work.Easy to measure.

An eight-hour shift, an open and transparent physical environment, and time to punch – these are meaningful for units that produce tangible products. But what about the year-long projects that develop innovative business strategies? Nature has little meaning. However, we still have to be bound by 40 hours of work per week, open office and punching system.

At the same time, identity-driven spending, increasing parental pressure, compulsive use of social media, and long commutes also keep us busy outside of work—although due to washing machines and kitchen appliances With the development of smart home technology, our family life is increasingly automated.

If the purpose of civilization is indeed to make us more civilized, then we seem to reverse it. We are either busy replacing computers to do the wrong task, or trying to get the computer to work in areas that obviously don’t work, such as thinking and creating.

How important is rest?

Let’s get back to the beginning of the article by Tim Ferriss and Lebron James: “The break is always everywhere.”

Obviously, good sleep habits are only part of a larger vision: if we really want to show our best, we must use seemingly unrelated activities as a supplement to our work.

Restoration and rest are key, and it will play a bigger role than passive recovery. This is a positive recovery. Just as James’ daily activities include ice, hydration, special exercise and stretching, each of us can find a way to recover and give ourselves some time off in the day.

Pang pointed out in the book “Rest” that rest is a “skill”:

I think we should treat work and rest equally. We should treat rest as a skill, and active rest can achieve the best results. If used properly, rest can make us more creative and efficient, without letting us fall into the mud of endless work and rising expectations. Taking life seriously is a more creative life. When we have the right to rest, when we make rest make sense, we also make our lives richer and more meaningful as we improve our rest skills day after day, year after year.

This is why rest and recreation are of value to creative workers or intellectual workers, as much as sleep and nutrition are of value to world-class athletes: rest is not only a source of physical strength but also a source of restorative brain power.

How can we rest well?

Thinking of rest as a skill or a habit that needs to be developed, not just a necessity, the psychological benefit of doing so is that you feel more control over your life.Pang has the following suggestions on how to change this way of thinking:

  • Get up early. Due to the circadian rhythm, the hours before noon are the most sober of our day, and this time is of course the most helpful for creativity.

  • Four hours of focused work is better than eight hours of distraction. Studies have shown that the longer the working hours, the lower the return on productivity.

  • A long walk or nap in the middle of the day can give your brain a chance to relax without having to work, making your brain work better.

  • Like Hemingway, stop when you complete a task or artistic creation, so that when you start over, your brain will have more good ideas. Interrupting the research task is another kind of “incubation effect.”

  • Any form of regular exercise is beneficial, it will improve your memory, your thinking and your mental health, not to mention the positive effects on your body.

  • Cultivate your own hobbies, such as painting, climbing, and even playing video games, giving you a chance to breathe in difficult times. Developing a hobby is also a great way to rest and recover.

Pang’s concept of “deliberate rest” shows that rest is a state of mind. “You will start to think of work and leisure as two sides of a coin: a proper rest will help you to be beautiful, happy, and Meaning of life.” You will start looking for a moment of calm anywhere, rather than supporting it in a busy state. Rest is always everywhere, remember?

Once you get used to this method, you can rest in many situations. You can meditate or observe your companions in the subway instead of sending emails or listening to podcasts at 1.5 times the speed. You can go to a colleague’s desk instead of calling them, or even just looking out the window from your desk and letting your mind wander. All of this is rest – giving us strength after a brief recovery.

Write at the end

World-class athletes like James learned to cherish good sleep early in their careers. But then again, they must learn, after all, there is a price to bring their body to the limit.

People who do not need so many physical professions may not immediately feel the consequences of creative work or intellectual work, so for them, sleep and other rehabilitation handsSegments can be an obstacle to success.

In fact, our biggest obstacle is the idea of ​​not being able to give up work. Sometimes the quickest way to get a new perspective and move forward is to take a step back and divert our attention. The next step is to take two steps. When we are too desperate to stick to work, we are likely to regret losing what we most want to get from work.

Only when we really learn to rest and accept rest, we can truly do our best, come up with the best ideas, and live the best life. This requires you to actively and actively relax. In fact, it is very simple. It may be to reduce the time of work, rest more, and cultivate a purely fun hobby.

But it also requires us to turn rest into a real habit and attitude. To do this, we need to find a quiet moment – ​​really, a moment that will make our hearts and minds peaceful – whenever and wherever.

If we really achieve a balance between work and rest, we can see what we want in the next grade: not a life full of work, but a life full of balance.

I think, LeBron dreams of night, it must be such a balanced state of life.

Translator: Xitang