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Sleep and Rest: Your Brain Needs More Downtime

Do you ever seem to crash around 3 PM in the afternoon?  This happens to me religiously; and it is my cue, if my schedule permits,  to do my afternoon 20 minute meditation.  Although I have been practicing TM since the 70’s,  I don’t always do it the best way.  Sometimes my dog interrupts me or insists on getting on my lap,  or perhaps I need to work through that mid-afternoon period because of scheduled appointments.  But when I do it my mind rests, and sometimes I even fall asleep.

There is significant scientific research now that demonstrates that following periods of  productive activity, our brains need a rest.  We are constantly bombarded with information  from many sources, creating information overload.  For those of us with jobs that technically end on Fridays, we continue to answer emails over the weekend. Our smart phones continue to ping us, we process the week that just ended and start to think about the following week.

A recent article in Scientific America cited  a 2010 LexisNexis survey of 1700 workers in the US, China, South Africa, the UK and Australia that revealed that on average employees spend more that half their time receiving and managing information  rather than using it to do their jobs.  Americans and their brains spend much of their time preoccupied with work.  We seem to think that busyness promotes productivity, and don’t understand the need for idleness. But  there is now a plethora of empirical evidence supporting the need  for downtime to replenish attention, motivation, encourage productivity and creativity, and to achieve our highest level of performance .

And it’s not just sleep that is important.  Downtime, the time we spend daydreaming, helps us to make sense of the information we have learned   and to develop powers of reflection to help us make sense of the world.  This is now known as the Default Mode Network (DMN).  During this  down time we may plan future conversations, remember things that were not on our to “do list” and mull over any dissatisfaction in our lives.  Our creativity soars as we wash the dishes, brush our teeth, or drive to work.  We may actually talk to ourselves out loud.

Dozens of studies have also found that sleep is a key component of memory.  Learning and memory depend both on sleep and downtime.  A psychologist from Florida State University  spent 30 years studying how people achieve the highest level of expertise.  He concluded that persons can push themselves beyond current limits for only hour without rest, and that extremely talented people in the arts and sports rarely practice more than four hours a day.  Psychologists have also established the benefits of vacations, but find that the benefits fade within two weeks. In two studies by The Boston Consulting Group where groups took one night a week or one day a week off, employees reported greater job satisfaction and better feelings about their work-life balance.  These studies emphatically indicate that there are diminishing returns on productivity and health when  it comes to longer work hours.

With this information, it seems that organizations should rethink  work schedules and experiment with alternatives that allow for both more sleep and more rest for their employees.   In a previous post I mentioned the benefits of telecommuting  up to 15 hours a week to increase job satisfaction and a sense of better work-life balance.  Combining this with down time from work may help improve both job satisfaction, productivity and creativity.

 

 

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About the Author:

Deborah Brown (Debbie) founded Atlanta based D&B Consulting, Inc. in 1993 to provide executive career and leadership coaching, and executive career transitions and outplacement services to organizations and individuals. She is a Master Practitioner of the MBTI personality assessment and a Certified Social + Emotional Intelligence Coach® through the Institute of Social + Emotional Intelligence® of Denver, Colorado. Debbie earned the SPHR (Senior Professional in Human Resources) certification.