Take it easy! Rest and relaxation is a deeply serious business, finds Mary Halton
WE ARE all only
a night or two of decent sleep away from being successful members of society, right? If we could just sneak a magical extra hour of shut-eye, wouldnt the world be a better place? Such thoughts sustain many of us through hectic working days; the carrot getting us to the weekend is the chance for more rest. However, while sleep is the most obvious way we rest, neither naps nor nocturnal unconscious sojourns made it into the top 10 most popular activities revealed by the Rest Test, a survey of over 18,000 people in 134 countries. The results were compiled by the multidisciplinary team Hubbub, funded by the Wellcome Trust. As it turns out, from reading to daydreaming, rest is something we understand as a necessarily conscious experience, a deliberate disengagement from the rhythms of lifes obligations. But for Alex Pang, rest looks quite different. In Rest, his paean to a balanced life, he argues that work and rest are not opposing forces, but an essential, reciprocal partnership. With an emphasis on rests benefits for the creative mind, Pang proposes that it has a place in our lives as a learned skill one to hone and tend just as we would practise a musical instrument or train for a race. Citing everyone Our brain is nearly as energetic at rest as it is when we are busy 54 | NewScientist | 19 November 2016
from Charles Darwin to Steve Jobs, Mountain View campus, but
he suggests our approach should quite another thing on Londons be as structured as for other tasks. noisy, crowded, polluted streets He highlights the importance of on a rainy November day. a daily routine and of deliberately Although many of us accept stopping at an allotted time, even the idea that we work effectively if we are at our productive peak. for only 4 hours a day, sadly the Although he overlooks the wide creative experiences of writers, acknowledgement that we enjoy artists and Victorian naturalists more leisure than our historical Pang sees rest as a learned counterparts, it is useful to skill one to hone and tend explore the cultural implications as we would practise a of the competitive busyness musical instrument that pervades modern working life. Pangs examples from the past are largely male because are unlikely to cause the downfall rest, creative or otherwise, has of the 9-to-5-plus-checking-yourpresumably been alien to many emails-out-of-hours. women throughout history. But there is a slower side to rest Yet there is a very Silicon Valley too, as evidenced by artworks flavour to his approach. Walking inspired by the Rest Test that were meetings are all very well and recently on show at an exhibition, good in Googles aptly named Rest and its Discontents, curated
FERDINANDO SCIANNA / MAGNUM PHOTOS
Rest: Why you get more done when
you work less by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, Basic Books, $27.50
by Robert Devcic, founder of GV
Art London. To judge by them, our definition of rest is amorphous. For some, it is the opposite of work, for others, the antithesis of noise. And it appears to be more easily signified by the absence rather than presence of certain qualities: so, mapped out across a peaceful Mile End Art Pavilion in Londons East End, were fragmented responses to the idea of restlessness by artists, researchers and activists from the Hubbub collective. While it didnt provide much satisfaction for fans of hard data, there was a dreamlike quality to some of the film installations, which explored descriptive experience sampling a method used to document peoples thoughts when their minds wander distilled into aural and visual vignettes. Closing in on what the brain is up to during rest also features in one of Rests most interesting revelations: the default mode network. These interconnected regions of the brain switch on when we stop focusing on external tasks. Although this network has only been researched since the 1990s, studies indicate that it may have a vast influence on our lives, since it is implicated in everything from empathy to memory to cognitive impairment. This resting state is barely less energetic than the engaged brain. So while we may have a sardonic approach to deliberate rest and power naps, next time youre caught staring into space, remember youre busy exercising this vital neural network. Mary Halton is a writer based in London
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