11 ms·

Why the Brain Needs More Downtime (2013)

436 points by tim_sw 9y ago

dodorex 9y ago
"Some researchers have proposed that people are also physiologically inclined to snooze during a 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. “nap zone”—or what some might call the afternoon slump—because the brain prefers to toggle between sleep and wake more than once a day." Anecdotally, Thomas Edison was said to sleep only 3-4 hours a night and take frequent (very frequent) naps throughout the day. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/thomas-edison-on-sleep-and-success/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/thomas-edison-on-sl...
- Tharkun 9y ago
  It's been suggestes that humans might naturally prefer biphasic sleep when removed from artificial light. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...
- epalmer 9y ago
  I'm extremely lucky as I have an office with a door. Most days I take a very short nap. It can be as short as 6 minutes but I like it to be 12 to 18 minutes. I drink a 1/2 cup of coffee before I nap most days. After darkening my space, I sit upright in my chair, close my eyes and nap. I use a android timer app and can glance at it with it if needed. I do find that most days I go out for a few mins, glance at the timer, out again till I get the amount I need in. I can turn around to my desk and be productive almost instantly after that short break. My workspace nap time is usually between 1:30PM and 3:00PM. On some days when I can't nap or don't I am foggy for the rest of the work day. On days when I nap this feeling is gone. I 63 years old and love naps anyway. On the weekend I can nap in the corner of the couch for 20 to 30 mins sitting up. I used to be a road (plane) warrior and traveled for work 45 to 50 weeks a year. I had to learn to sleep wherever, like airports, on the plane, etc. So now I can sleep anywhere most days. For example if I go to the doctor's office and have a long wait I can tap a nap if my body says it wants one. My team is a team of 2 and they work in an open space outside of my door. They seem to like it a lot but they respect each others need to be quiet. We work with another dev/creative team that is in an open office and is 8 people and they hate the open space. Everyone has headphones on but phone calls and visitors disrupt the quiet. Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in. Edit: typo
  - loco5niner 9y ago
    > Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in. I would love to have that option in my open office.
    - epalmer 9y ago
      Right now the other half of the scrum team has been relocated to the football stadium till office renovations are done. When the team practices they play music loud to simulate crowd noises. So their open environment is worse than imaginable.
hasenj 9y ago
I've always had a hard time sleeping/waking on time. What you might call a "night owl". I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9. Then on the weekend I would "sleep in" to make up for the lost sleep time. For some reason, if I sleep for 8 or 9 hours, I wake up feeling like I don't want to do anything. I don't feel sluggish or anything. I just feel "satisfied". Like there's nothing to be done. I can just "be". I can't bring myself to focus on any specific task. Nothing feels urgent. When I sleep 6 hours, somehow I can focus more. This is combined with not consuming caffeine. If I drink coffee after I have slept only for 6 hours, it makes me tired and sluggish.
- Swizec 9y ago
  > I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9. Same here but in a different way than you describe. I become scatterbrained and jump from task to task never able to focus on anything because my brain is just firing too fast for its own good. Of course dip too far below 6 hours and I once more can't focus. This time because my brain runs away from any perceived obstacle and opens the nearest distraction (like HN)
- echelon 9y ago
  Are you me? I feel like many engineers are better and more productive late at night. Mornings sap the energy from my body. I often need a solid three hours just to "boot up", but at night I absolutely kill it with productivity. I wish the world revolved more around our schedule.
  - danreed07 9y ago
    I have this with weekdays & weekends. I'm insanely productive on weekends, Monday and Tuesdays, not so much. It's like my entire schedule is shifted by two days.
  - bluejellybean 9y ago
    I find I work better at night as well. I have a hunch this is due to the lack of distractions. One doesn't get many useless shoulder taps, phone calls, or IMs at 3 in the morning.
jmcgough 9y ago
I find that I struggle with offices... you're stuck there for 8+ hours (even if you don't work that way, you need to create an impression), but after several hour of intense focus and the noise and chaos of an open office, I can feel drained and anxious. Some days I'll walk to a nearby park with wifi after work, meditate for a short bit, and then code from there. My focus and creativity comes right back after a bit of downtime in a relaxing space.
- ssijak 9y ago
  That is exact reason I negotiated "work from home whenever you want" with the employer. It was either I quit because I could not stand random daily useless noise and chatter of the office or I can work from home and be more productive.
  - jlangenauer 9y ago
    I'm kinda astonished that this even needs to be negotiated. It should be the default at any half-decent employer.
    - ido 9y ago
      The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.
      - ssijak 9y ago
        That could easily be seen by half decent manager or team lead.
      - mk89 9y ago
        Indeed! And also due to some bad apples, the entire category of people willing to work from home is considered as a bunch of slackers - so you want to "work" from home, uh? What they don't know is that when I work from home I produce 1.3-1.5x more than when I work at the office - do I like to work everyday from home, though? No!
uptownfunk 9y ago
I think I get a good six hours of actual work in the office. And then I need to check out and take a shower. Something about that after work shower just brings my focus and clarity right back. But if I have to crank with my team for a 12-15 hour day, after max 8 hours, we're all just physically there, but mentally have checked out long before that. On sleep, 5-6 hours is optimal for me. Too much can be bad, I feel groggy and have brain-fog the rest of the day. I can get by on fewer for one day, but more than that and it becomes painful. I think a lot of this also has to do with lifestyle. How often and when do you eat, have sex, get sunlight, drink water, go out doors, etc. Many levels can be played with here. Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep.
- majewsky 9y ago
  > Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep. I would be very careful with that. 6 hours is already very low. We (as in: science) could probably come up with a recommendation here if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep. There are of course a bunch of theories, but nothing definite enough to base policy decisions on.
  - nnd 9y ago
    >> if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep To give rest to the body and the mind (to a lesser extent during REM sleep)?
- greenshackle2 9y ago
  > Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep. I know a number of people who tried polyphasic sleep to 'waste' less time on sleep. They were doing the version where you only sleep 20 minutes every couple of hours. One of them told me the weird sleep schedule altered his mental faculties, but he didn't notice until he stopped doing it - one of the faculties affected was the faculty to tell his faculties were affected, apparently. Out of the dozen or so people I know who tried, only 1 managed to sustain it for more than one month.
  - 9y ago
ihateneckbeards 9y ago
I noticed I can be intensely focused for about 4 to 6 hours max, after that I'll be "washed out" and I become error prone for complicated tasks Unfortunately the 9 hour in office format constrain me to stay on my seat, so I'll try work on easier things at that time while beeing quite unproductive How to we bring this fact to companies? It seems only the most ""progressive"" companies like Facebook or Google really understood this
- jjeaff 9y ago
  Companies like Facebook and Google seem to understand that the least. Hence the endless services and other perks meant to keep you on "campus" as long as possible.
  - ihateneckbeards 9y ago
    Well they give you the opportunity to have down time when appropriate. And when you don't treat your employees like factory workers - surprise! They stay more with better satisfaction
laydn 9y ago
I've been noticing that I'm more tired and need more downtime in days where I make, (or forced to make), critical decisions. If I start the day by knowing what to do, then I don't really feel the burnout. For example, if I'm designing either a piece of hardware or firmware, and I know how to tackle the problem and it is just the matter of implementing it, I can code/design for 10 hours straight and when the workday ends, I still feel full of energy. However, if the day is full of "decisions" (engineering or managerial), at the end of the day, I feel exhausted (and irritable, according to my family)
- arketyp 9y ago
  I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.
- deepGem 9y ago
  This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.
  - JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.
    - maneesh 9y ago
      Set more non-cheatable time constraints.
nisa 9y ago
I'm having a hard time organising and especially switching tasks and getting meaningful work done when multiple things that are unrelated fall together. Having a single thing do to and beeing able to just leave work would be great but at the moment I'm freelancing and having multiple jobs and doing sysadmin-style work, learning theory and programming in a new language really just kills me and I'm not getting much done. Once I get traction in a certain task it's okay but the constant switching is killing me.
danreed07 9y ago
I'm ambivalent about this. I have a friend whose a Harvard math major, I've seen him work. He sleeps late and wakes early; when we work together, he always messes up my schedule by calling me in the middle of the night. I'm all tired and groggy the next day, and he's totally fine. I think some people just inherently have more energy than others.
- Moru 9y ago
  When I was younger I was like this. Sleep was 4-5 hours per night all days of the week. I had no troubles keeping awake and had plenty of times for coding, playing games and learn new stuff. And a fulltime job on top of that. Not so much any more, I need at least 7 hours of sleep but haven't started realy with coffee yet, don't believe the hype about it :-)
qaq 9y ago
Best option I experienced was working remotely from PST on EST schedule. So start at 6am done at 3 eat + have a drink take 1 hour nap and you have 8 hours which after nap fills like a whole new day.
mr_isomies 9y ago
What I find disheartening is the need to be "more productive" rather than confront the idea that work is eating too much of our lives. What percentage of overworked people can afford to go alone on a silent retreat for 92 days?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
pedrodelfino 9y ago
Great article. I remember seeing these ideas on Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work". I need more discipline to execute my "downtime plan".

436 points by tim_sw 9y ago

"Some researchers have proposed that people are also physiologically inclined to snooze during a 2 P.M. to 4 P.M. “nap zone”—or what some might call the afternoon slump—because the brain prefers to toggle between sleep and wake more than once a day." Anecdotally, Thomas Edison was said to sleep only 3-4 hours a night and take frequent (very frequent) naps throughout the day. https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/thomas-edison-on-sleep-and-success/ https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/11/thomas-edison-on-sl...

Tharkun 9y ago
It's been suggestes that humans might naturally prefer biphasic sleep when removed from artificial light. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_sleep https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biphasic_and_polyphasic_slee...
epalmer 9y ago
I'm extremely lucky as I have an office with a door. Most days I take a very short nap. It can be as short as 6 minutes but I like it to be 12 to 18 minutes. I drink a 1/2 cup of coffee before I nap most days. After darkening my space, I sit upright in my chair, close my eyes and nap. I use a android timer app and can glance at it with it if needed. I do find that most days I go out for a few mins, glance at the timer, out again till I get the amount I need in. I can turn around to my desk and be productive almost instantly after that short break. My workspace nap time is usually between 1:30PM and 3:00PM. On some days when I can't nap or don't I am foggy for the rest of the work day. On days when I nap this feeling is gone. I 63 years old and love naps anyway. On the weekend I can nap in the corner of the couch for 20 to 30 mins sitting up. I used to be a road (plane) warrior and traveled for work 45 to 50 weeks a year. I had to learn to sleep wherever, like airports, on the plane, etc. So now I can sleep anywhere most days. For example if I go to the doctor's office and have a long wait I can tap a nap if my body says it wants one. My team is a team of 2 and they work in an open space outside of my door. They seem to like it a lot but they respect each others need to be quiet. We work with another dev/creative team that is in an open office and is 8 people and they hate the open space. Everyone has headphones on but phone calls and visitors disrupt the quiet. Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in. Edit: typo
- loco5niner 9y ago
  > Sometimes one of them comes to my open space and sits at one of the tables to get some quiet time in. I would love to have that option in my open office.
  - epalmer 9y ago
    Right now the other half of the scrum team has been relocated to the football stadium till office renovations are done. When the team practices they play music loud to simulate crowd noises. So their open environment is worse than imaginable.

hasenj 9y ago

I've always had a hard time sleeping/waking on time. What you might call a "night owl". I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9. Then on the weekend I would "sleep in" to make up for the lost sleep time. For some reason, if I sleep for 8 or 9 hours, I wake up feeling like I don't want to do anything. I don't feel sluggish or anything. I just feel "satisfied". Like there's nothing to be done. I can just "be". I can't bring myself to focus on any specific task. Nothing feels urgent. When I sleep 6 hours, somehow I can focus more. This is combined with not consuming caffeine. If I drink coffee after I have slept only for 6 hours, it makes me tired and sluggish.

Swizec 9y ago
> I'm starting to notice that on weekdays I actually perform better with 6 hours of sleep rather than 8 or 9. Same here but in a different way than you describe. I become scatterbrained and jump from task to task never able to focus on anything because my brain is just firing too fast for its own good. Of course dip too far below 6 hours and I once more can't focus. This time because my brain runs away from any perceived obstacle and opens the nearest distraction (like HN)
echelon 9y ago
Are you me? I feel like many engineers are better and more productive late at night. Mornings sap the energy from my body. I often need a solid three hours just to "boot up", but at night I absolutely kill it with productivity. I wish the world revolved more around our schedule.
- danreed07 9y ago
  I have this with weekdays & weekends. I'm insanely productive on weekends, Monday and Tuesdays, not so much. It's like my entire schedule is shifted by two days.
- bluejellybean 9y ago
  I find I work better at night as well. I have a hunch this is due to the lack of distractions. One doesn't get many useless shoulder taps, phone calls, or IMs at 3 in the morning.

jmcgough 9y ago

I find that I struggle with offices... you're stuck there for 8+ hours (even if you don't work that way, you need to create an impression), but after several hour of intense focus and the noise and chaos of an open office, I can feel drained and anxious. Some days I'll walk to a nearby park with wifi after work, meditate for a short bit, and then code from there. My focus and creativity comes right back after a bit of downtime in a relaxing space.

ssijak 9y ago
That is exact reason I negotiated "work from home whenever you want" with the employer. It was either I quit because I could not stand random daily useless noise and chatter of the office or I can work from home and be more productive.
- jlangenauer 9y ago
  I'm kinda astonished that this even needs to be negotiated. It should be the default at any half-decent employer.
  - ido 9y ago
    The problem is that a lot of people aren't capable of working remotely and/or treat work from home as a day off.
    - ssijak 9y ago
      That could easily be seen by half decent manager or team lead.
    - mk89 9y ago
      Indeed! And also due to some bad apples, the entire category of people willing to work from home is considered as a bunch of slackers - so you want to "work" from home, uh? What they don't know is that when I work from home I produce 1.3-1.5x more than when I work at the office - do I like to work everyday from home, though? No!

uptownfunk 9y ago

I think I get a good six hours of actual work in the office. And then I need to check out and take a shower. Something about that after work shower just brings my focus and clarity right back. But if I have to crank with my team for a 12-15 hour day, after max 8 hours, we're all just physically there, but mentally have checked out long before that. On sleep, 5-6 hours is optimal for me. Too much can be bad, I feel groggy and have brain-fog the rest of the day. I can get by on fewer for one day, but more than that and it becomes painful. I think a lot of this also has to do with lifestyle. How often and when do you eat, have sex, get sunlight, drink water, go out doors, etc. Many levels can be played with here. Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep.

majewsky 9y ago
> Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep. I would be very careful with that. 6 hours is already very low. We (as in: science) could probably come up with a recommendation here if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep. There are of course a bunch of theories, but nothing definite enough to base policy decisions on.
- nnd 9y ago
  >> if we had any fucking clue why we actually sleep To give rest to the body and the mind (to a lesser extent during REM sleep)?
greenshackle2 9y ago
> Would be interested in hearing any hacks for getting by on less sleep. I know a number of people who tried polyphasic sleep to 'waste' less time on sleep. They were doing the version where you only sleep 20 minutes every couple of hours. One of them told me the weird sleep schedule altered his mental faculties, but he didn't notice until he stopped doing it - one of the faculties affected was the faculty to tell his faculties were affected, apparently. Out of the dozen or so people I know who tried, only 1 managed to sustain it for more than one month.
- 9y ago

ihateneckbeards 9y ago

I noticed I can be intensely focused for about 4 to 6 hours max, after that I'll be "washed out" and I become error prone for complicated tasks Unfortunately the 9 hour in office format constrain me to stay on my seat, so I'll try work on easier things at that time while beeing quite unproductive How to we bring this fact to companies? It seems only the most ""progressive"" companies like Facebook or Google really understood this

jjeaff 9y ago
Companies like Facebook and Google seem to understand that the least. Hence the endless services and other perks meant to keep you on "campus" as long as possible.
- ihateneckbeards 9y ago
  Well they give you the opportunity to have down time when appropriate. And when you don't treat your employees like factory workers - surprise! They stay more with better satisfaction

laydn 9y ago

I've been noticing that I'm more tired and need more downtime in days where I make, (or forced to make), critical decisions. If I start the day by knowing what to do, then I don't really feel the burnout. For example, if I'm designing either a piece of hardware or firmware, and I know how to tackle the problem and it is just the matter of implementing it, I can code/design for 10 hours straight and when the workday ends, I still feel full of energy. However, if the day is full of "decisions" (engineering or managerial), at the end of the day, I feel exhausted (and irritable, according to my family)

arketyp 9y ago
I think the somatic marker hypothesis is relevant to what you're describing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_marker_hypothesis These managerial decisions have, by their very functional nature, a heavier body load.
deepGem 9y ago
This has been my experience as well. What I've found helpful is to just take a decision real fast and move on. Sure, it might be a bad decision but it's a done deal nonetheless. I tend to feel less burned out even if the decisions turned out to be bad, vs spending an inordinate amount of time debating decisions. And I have gotten myself stuck in some real holier than thou decision wormholes, for instance, which programming language to learn now.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  I seem to only be able to do this when I have a severe time constraint. I wish I could do it other times because it feels great to just decide and move on.
  - maneesh 9y ago
    Set more non-cheatable time constraints.

nisa 9y ago

I'm having a hard time organising and especially switching tasks and getting meaningful work done when multiple things that are unrelated fall together. Having a single thing do to and beeing able to just leave work would be great but at the moment I'm freelancing and having multiple jobs and doing sysadmin-style work, learning theory and programming in a new language really just kills me and I'm not getting much done. Once I get traction in a certain task it's okay but the constant switching is killing me.

danreed07 9y ago

I'm ambivalent about this. I have a friend whose a Harvard math major, I've seen him work. He sleeps late and wakes early; when we work together, he always messes up my schedule by calling me in the middle of the night. I'm all tired and groggy the next day, and he's totally fine. I think some people just inherently have more energy than others.

Moru 9y ago
When I was younger I was like this. Sleep was 4-5 hours per night all days of the week. I had no troubles keeping awake and had plenty of times for coding, playing games and learn new stuff. And a fulltime job on top of that. Not so much any more, I need at least 7 hours of sleep but haven't started realy with coffee yet, don't believe the hype about it :-)

qaq 9y ago

Best option I experienced was working remotely from PST on EST schedule. So start at 6am done at 3 eat + have a drink take 1 hour nap and you have 8 hours which after nap fills like a whole new day.

mr_isomies 9y ago

What I find disheartening is the need to be "more productive" rather than confront the idea that work is eating too much of our lives. What percentage of overworked people can afford to go alone on a silent retreat for 92 days?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

pedrodelfino 9y ago

Great article. I remember seeing these ideas on Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work". I need more discipline to execute my "downtime plan".