Editor's note: The development of technology should have liberated people, allowing us to have more leisure to rest, to accumulate energy, and to achieve creative work, but we are increasingly overwhelmed by countless jobs, identity-driven consumption, increasing parenting pressure, compulsive use of social media and long commutes. Learn to balance work and rest in life, combine work and rest, remember that rest is always everywhere. The author of this article is Niklas Göke, original title If LeBron James Needs Rest and Recovery, You Probably Do Too.
Pictures: Thearon W. Henderson/Getty Images
LeBron James told efficiency master Tim Ferriss on the show that he slept 8 to 9 hours a night, and sometimes even 10 hours a night. If the basketball star can't sleep at night, he will take about 2 hours off for lunch the next day.
James focuses more than just sleep: when he chats with Feriss, you can hear some rustling sounds. Coach Mike Mancias, who has been with him for 15 years, explained that James is applying ice on his knees.
Mancias said: "Rest is always everywhere."
Well, this sentence makes so much sense, you must remember it.
"No matter how long LeBron plays the ball every night," Mancias said, "we will still make good rest and recovery a priority, whether it's nutrition, hydration, more flexibility exercises, or at the gym. Rest is a never-ending process, really. To achieve success, these are all necessary."
James isn't the only top athlete with a special liking for quality sleep. Usain Bolt, Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova and Steve Nash also believe that sleep is crucial to their performance. It is obvious that sleep is essential—not only for physical activities such as sports, but also for knowledge work and creative careers.
But lack of sleep is not the only problem. Rest and recovery are also important – not just for professional athletes. We all know how hard it is to host a long meeting, or how exhausted it is to be after hours of whimsy thoughts. So, why are we so unwilling to give ourselves enough time to recover well?
Sleeping well is a luxury
Not only can we not stand the idea of reducing work to sleep more, but to be honest, we cannot bear any idea of reducing work to us. This deep-rooted worship of busyness is not something you can overcome with a long vacation and a few pills. This requires a huge change in attitudes and consciousness at the entire social level.
Our ancestors hunting and gathering, "working" 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 actually increased.
Although sleep health has been improving in the United States, in 2018, only 27% of Americans reported that they had sleeped as recommended for 7 to 9 hours on weekdays, and only 10% said they put sleep first. The corporate culture that encourages employees to rush hard is still popular. Elon Musk admits that he is the supporter of this culture, and one-third of Goldman Sachs employees are "extremely nervous" about their work in the bank.
If sleep is really the key to success, why is it so difficult to make 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 time to die. No matter how hard we try, there is no real way to handle multiple tasks at the same time while sleeping. It’s not like running, you can turn on a podcast and passively get ideas while running. Once you're sleeping, you're forced to do only one thing and can't determine how much time you'll spend - it's hard to accept.
Deeper problem
Sleep is just the tip of the iceberg of the problem. 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 physical labor, but later applied this model to creative labor and intellectual labor. Researcher Alex Soojung-Kim Pang explained in his book "Rest" that the modern office is actually a machine that organizes intellectual labor, which imitates the work structure of a factory, but this model is not completely suitable for the creative industry, because productivity and product quality are not easy to measure in creative and knowledge work.
Eight-hour shifts, an open and transparent physical environment, clocking in time—these make sense for units that produce tangible products. But what about those projects that develop innovative business strategies for a year? Natural meaning is very little. However, we still have to be bound by 40 hours a week, open offices and clock-in systems.
At the same time, identity-driven consumption, increasing parenting pressure, compulsive use of social media and long commutes have also left us busy outside of work – although our home life is increasingly automated due to the development of washing machines, kitchen appliances and smart home technologies.
If the purpose of civilization is indeed to make us more civilized, then we seem to have made it reversed. We are either busy doing the wrong tasks instead of computers or trying to make computers work in areas that obviously don't work—such as thinking and creating. How important is
rest?
Let's go back to the beginning of the article Tim Ferriss and Lebron James' conversation: "Rest is always everywhere."
It's obvious that good sleep habits are just part of a bigger vision: If we really want to show our best, we must supplement our work with seemingly unrelated activities.
Recovery and rest are key, it will play a greater role than passive recovery. This is a positive recovery. Just as James' daily activities include ice filling, hydration, special exercises and stretching, each of us can find our own way of recovery and give ourselves some rest during 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 regard 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 get stuck in the quagmire of endless work and rising expectations. Taking a resting life seriously is a more creative life. When we have the right to rest, when we make rest meaningful, and when we improve our rest skills day after day, year after year, we also make our lives richer and more meaningful.
This is why rest and entertainment are of no less valuable to creative workers or intellectual workers than sleep and nutrition to world-class athletes: rest is not only a source of physical strength, but also a source of mental strength.
How can we have a good rest?
View 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. Regarding how to change this way of thinking, Pang has the following suggestions:
- wake up early. Due to the circadian rhythm, the few hours before noon are the most awake time of our day, and this time is of course the most helpful for the erection of creativity.
- Four hours of concentration work is better than eight hours of distracted work. Research shows that the longer working hours, the lower the return on productivity.
- A long walk or nap in the middle of the day can provide your brain with an opportunity to relax properly that is not related to work, allowing your brain to work better.
- Like Hemingway, stops halfway while completing a task or art creation, so that when you start over, your brain will have more good ideas. Stop the research task and then pick it up is a "hatching effect".
- Any form of regular exercise is of great benefit, it will improve your memory, thinking ability, and mental health, not to mention the positive impact on your physiological aspects.
- cultivate a hobby of your own, such as painting, climbing mountains, and even playing electronic games, which can give you a chance to breathe in difficult times. Cultivating hobbies is also an excellent way to rest and recover.
Pang's concept of "deliberate rest" shows that when cultivating rest as a mentality, "you will start to see work and leisure as two sides of a coin: proper rest will help you live a beautiful, happy, meaningful life." You will begin to find a moment of peace anywhere, rather than struggling to support it in a busy state. Rest is always everywhere, remember?
Once you get used to this method, you can rest in many cases. Instead of sending emails or listening to podcasts at 1.5 times faster, you can meditate or observe your companions. You can walk to your colleague's desk instead of calling them, or even just looking out the window from your desk and let your mind wander. All of this is rest – empowering us after a brief recovery.
written 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, it comes at a price to put their bodies to their limits.
People who work in careers that don’t require that much physical strength may not immediately feel the consequences of creative or intellectual work, so for them, sleep and other means of recovery may become obstacles to the road to success.
In fact, our biggest obstacle is the idea of not being able to give up on work. Sometimes the fastest way to get a new perspective and move forward is to take a step back and divert our attention, and step back is to take two steps forward. When we stick to work too hard, we are likely to regret losing the things and moments we want to get from work the most.
Only when we truly learn to rest and accept rest can we truly achieve the best, come up with the best ideas, and live the best life. This requires you to actively relax. In fact, it is very simple. It may be to reduce work time slightly, rest more, and cultivate a hobby that is purely for fun.
But this also requires us to turn rest into a real habit and attitude. To do this, we need to find quiet moments—that really, moments that can make our minds peaceful—whenever and where.
If we really achieve a balance between work and rest, we can see what we want when we get older: not a life full of work, but a life full of balance.
I think LeBron dreamed of this kind of balanced life state must be like this.
Translator: Xi Tang
