This is one of my favorite pieces of study advice, and not just because it’s the one where I can kick my feet up on the couch and sprawl out like I’m impersonating a sloth uploaded into a human body. I mean obviously that’s a big reason, but an even bigger reason is that it works. Unlike the lesser-spotted couch-sloth. Or the mind-upload technology required to create it. What does work is a lot of real science explaining how you should stand up, stretch, and go outside for a bit.
The simplest fact is that working all the time means you’ll soon be barely working at all. Instead you’ll be exhausted, sitting in a stew of guilty obligation while about four per cent of your brain screams at the rest of it that they have to finish this page. Living things need to rest. It’s the most obvious fact of existence.
We sleep for eight hours a day and we don’t even really know why, but we do absolutely know that we have to. Absolutely have to. And unconsciousness isn’t the only kind of rest. Even lionesses prowling the savannah to find food for four utterly adorable cubs take breaks. And no matter how important question nine in the seventh of fourteen term assignments in one of eight courses might seem, we can all agree it’s not as important as feeding baby lions.
The harder we work the further we dig ourselves into a pit of single-mindedness. A pit where we can’t see anything else. A pit where we make the mistake of trying to force ourselves to finish a task before taking a break, even though the lack of break is slowing our brain to one-tenth the normal speed.
It’s not just better to take breaks, it’s faster. A fresh brain will blast through difficult problems while an exhausted one will make an hour’s work out of one misread equation, and I know because I’ve done that far too often, and I was being kind to myself by pretending I only wasted one hour one time. Tired people make many mistakes, the worst of which is refusing to rest.
You don’t want to waste any time. Which is why it’s important to remember that relaxing for a bit isn’t a waste. It’s one of the smartest things you can do.
The simplest fact is that working all the time means you’ll soon be barely working at all. Instead you’ll be exhausted, sitting in a stew of guilty obligation while about four per cent of your brain screams at the rest of it that they have to finish this page. Living things need to rest. It’s the most obvious fact of existence.
Even lionesses prowling the savannah to find food for four utterly adorable cubs take breaks.
We sleep for eight hours a day and we don’t even really know why, but we do absolutely know that we have to. Absolutely have to. And unconsciousness isn’t the only kind of rest. Even lionesses prowling the savannah to find food for four utterly adorable cubs take breaks. And no matter how important question nine in the seventh of fourteen term assignments in one of eight courses might seem, we can all agree it’s not as important as feeding baby lions.
The harder we work the further we dig ourselves into a pit of single-mindedness. A pit where we can’t see anything else. A pit where we make the mistake of trying to force ourselves to finish a task before taking a break, even though the lack of break is slowing our brain to one-tenth the normal speed.
It’s not just better to take breaks, it’s faster. A fresh brain will blast through difficult problems while an exhausted one will make an hour’s work out of one misread equation, and I know because I’ve done that far too often, and I was being kind to myself by pretending I only wasted one hour one time. Tired people make many mistakes, the worst of which is refusing to rest.
You don’t want to waste any time. Which is why it’s important to remember that relaxing for a bit isn’t a waste. It’s one of the smartest things you can do.
