The people I looked at are able to construct daily schedules that allow them to draw on that process in little increments. And then once it has arrived at one that looks promising, that is what pops into your head as an Aha! moment. The experience of having the mind slightly relaxed allows it to explore different combinations of ideas, to test out different solutions. When you do things like go for a long walk, your subconscious mind keeps working on problems. The critical thing to recognize is that when we are mind-wandering, when our minds don't have any particular thing they have to focus on, our brains are pretty darn active. What is the brain doing when we are at rest? There is also a long-standing assumption that not working hard is morally suspect. We have adopted industrial-age attitudes, and they don't really work for us. This is true of machines, so why shouldn't it be true of us? Well it’s not. It seems self-evident that more work equals more output. Why does modern work culture undervalue rest and encourage nonstop busyness? For them, restful activities were often vigorous and mentally engaging but they experienced them as restorative because they offered a complete break from their normal working lives. These are people who go on long walks covering 15 or 20 miles in a day or climb mountains on vacation. For people in my study, their idea of rest was more vigorous than our idea of exercise. We tend to think of rest as putting your feet up and you've got the margarita and you're binge-watching Orange is the New Black. It's not necessarily completely passive for one thing. What I mean by rest is engaging in restorative activity. How have you come to define rest and what are some of the biggest misconceptions about it? Rest is something we all know how to do naturally, but it’s also something we can treat as a skill. What I found is a community of people including scientists and artists and authors who follow this pattern of working very intensively a few hours a day and then resting deliberately in various ways. I started to think that maybe the secret had to do not just with how they work or their innate intelligence but also with the way they rested. Living in Silicon Valley and growing up in an era that assumes overwork is the norm, the idea that you could go in the opposite direction and yet still do really amazing stuff was really compelling. But when you look at how many hours a day they spent working, it's a surprisingly small number. It got started when I noticed a paradox in the lives of some really creative people: people like Charles Darwin, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, who are obsessed with their work. ![]() Contributing editor Ferris Jabr, who wrote “Give Me a Break” for our special workplace package in this issue, spoke with Pang to learn more about the importance of giving rest and relaxation the respect it deserves. ![]() Pang, a senior consultant at Strategic Business Insights and a visiting scholar at Stanford University, draws on biographical accounts of famous artists and scientists and a trove of psychological studies to make his case, exploring the benefits of sleep, naps, play, sabbaticals and exercise. In his engaging new book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, to be published this December by Basic Books, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that respite is an essential component of both productivity and creativity.
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