The importance of active rest

I have been reading a lot about sleep, rest and productivity lately and I’m becoming more and more convinced that we should work less and rest more. If you think about it, the 35-40 hour/week work pattern is a (recent) human creation, and, as history teaches us, when something is no longer suitable for us, we should consider changing it.

It is estimated that the average person can ‘waste’ up to 4 hours a day with all sort of distractions, interruptions and unnecessary meetings whilst at work. 4 hours! Think about what we could achieve if our day was organised in focused bursts of four to five hours instead and we had the remainder of the time to rest.

By rest I don’t necessarily mean sleeping or taking a nap (although good sleep is the number one insurance policy for a long healthy life) but doing an activity that we enjoy and that will take our mind off work. There are a lot of studies that look at the importance of down time to increase productivity, focus and creativity, and I’m sure you have probably experienced this first-hand.

Think for example at a time when you were stuck trying to solve a problem at work or wanted to come up with a plan or a solution that would make things better. You might have spent hours thinking about it, brainstorming with others in endless meetings, talking things through with very little progress. Perhaps on your day off you went for a walk with a friend and, all of a sudden, something came to you and there you had it, a solution that would almost certainly work! This is an example of how the brain was still working on the problem in the background and by taking your mind off the problem, you manage to find a solution.

This happens to me on a regular basis – often during meditation – and therefore I try to plan my day in a way that helps me be more focused when I need to be and have enough down time to be able to actively rest.

How does your active rest look like?

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