Descansar no és recuperar-se: quatre dimensions per reduir l’esgotament

You're tired. You click the video on how to rest. So you're probably exhausted and when you're exhausted for long enough, life sucks. And I'd love to tell you that you should just get more sleep and you probably should. But sometimes that's not possible. Or it's not enough. For me, I have felt exhausted for almost as long as I can remember. Until actually only just the last two or three years. I need to go to sleep tight, wake up tight. Weekend, tie it. Two weeks off, still tight. And to be fair, a lot of it was self-inflicted, working full-time while going through medical school and running my business while being a junior doctor. I either worked or studied over 100 hours a week for almost 10 years. And on top of that, I was trying to take care of my family. While I was sleep deprived and depressed and honestly, that's one of the big reasons why I learned so much about productivity and efficiency. But at a certain point, no amount of productivity was really helping. There was a point a few years ago where my YouTube was blowing up, business was growing, my family, and my loved ones needed me more than ever. During that time, feeling so exhausted, I realized that I just wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to wake up and feel energized. I wanted to feel like staying awake and being present and having emotional reserve was not a struggle every single day. And like I mentioned the last two or three years I think I've got an a lot better at resting. My life didn't get any less busy. I have the same amount of responsibilities arguably more, but I sleep well, I wake up rested, I have the energy to do stuff that I want and be there for the people that I love. Happily be there. So in this video I want to share with you some of the things that I've realized about rest and some of the things that I've learned about the science of rest and recovery. And hopefully this helps you feel like a human again too. So the first thing that I want to start off with is this realization that rest is not the same as recovery. So in my early 20s, I was really busy, not just working study, but also with hobbies. I was exercising a lot. I was spending a lot of time dancing, which was my main hobby at the time. And I remember feeling really busy and tired, but also energised.

I was sort of tired in a good way. Now as I got older, I started deliberately making more time for rest. I started worrying that I might burn out because I was doing so much stuff. I was also now in clinical placements, working in the hospital. So I really made it an effort to fit more time to just sort of do nothing and rest. And what I realized, and I only really realized this a few years ago, looking back, is that I think that actually made me more tired. Because by making more time for rest, I actually took away time from recovery. So there's a little bit of the science. In order for you to achieve recovery, you need to have relaxation. And relaxation in the research is defined as something that has a low level of activity for the system that you're trying to recover. So if you've been really physically active during the day, then to recover physically, you need to engage in some kind of activity that is a very low level of physical activity. Likewise, if you've been busy at work, doing really heavy cognitive tasks, or making lots of decisions in the household the family taking care of the kids, that's cognitively draining. So to recover, you need to do some kind of activity that is mentally, really low activity. And so for me, I, back then, I thought that resting was just about not doing anything. As long as I was just not very active, that would be relaxation. And what I ended up filling my time with was just these really low-effet tasks, like scrolling through social media, chatting with people, digital window shopping.

in my mind, low effort equals relaxation. But this is actually not the case. Low effort and relaxation are actually not that related to each other. And something like scrolling on your phone is a great example of this, because when you scroll on your phone, especially if you're on social media, you're actually at a constant level of baseline cognitive activity. You are constantly being stimulated, you are making all these micro decisions about what to watch, what to swipe, what to interact with. If the content itself is emotionally stirring, you're getting these rapid emotional fluctuations as well. And the nature of the apps is reinforcing addiction pathways with these constant dopamine hits, which means that you have inattention and distractability and restlessness when you're not being hit with those dopamine spikes all the time. So even though that is an activity that is low effort, it is not relaxing. It's actually more like low effort agitation. And what I now know at a neuroscientific level is that when you don't engage in a proper reduction of activity, then the neurotransmitters that accumulate in your brain as you're making decisions and executing tasks and planning, these neurotransmitters are never properly cleared. In fact, that actually continues to build up. And so at the end of your rest, you're actually more fatigue. And what I also noticed and what the research also supports is that going to sleep did not really cure my cognitive fatigue.

And what studies I've shown is that while physical exhaustion recovers really well with sufficient sleep, cognitive, mental or emotional exhaustion does not. Cognitive exhaustion can permeate through into your dreams. They can reduce the quality of your sleep, and it can persist for weeks. And so what I realized is that choosing my relaxation activity, based on the fact that it's low effort, is a very bad way of choosing the relaxation activity. And at some times, high effort activities actually produce much more relaxation. For example, when I started giving myself more rest, I also reduced how much I was exercising. And everyone knows exercises, good for you, you know, that helps you to take care of yourself, it keeps you optimum. But I think for me, the issue that I had was that even though I had heard that, I never really believed it. And I only became convinced of how important it was when I ignored it and felt that I was getting increasingly more tired. And then when I actually started learning about what neuroscientificly needs to happen for you to feel more rested and recovered. Which actually brings me to my next point in major realization, which is that it's not enough to just not be working. You have to be able to completely mentally switch off. And this was for me probably the most difficult part. I've really, really struggled with this. One as a doctor because it's so easy to take the problems of your patients home with you. And number two as an entrepreneur where there is no certainty and you have to be thinking about your business all the time, every entrepreneur will know what I'm talking about. And so not only was it difficult to stop thinking about it because the thoughts just plain my head, but I also didn't feel like I should stop thinking about it. I felt like if I don't think about it,

not only am I got to miss something which is sort of the anxiety talking, but also maybe that means I'm not a good doctor. Maybe it means I'm not a good entrepreneur because if I really care, I should just be thinking about it all the time. But the issue is that when you have that belief, it blocks you from activating something that's called psychological detachment, which is pretty much fancy way of saying that you are switching off. where you are leaving your problems at work. And psychological detachment is one of the strongest predictors and factors for effective recovery. And so if you're coming home from work and you're still thinking about it and you're checking your messages and you're checking your email just this once. And you're always planning your next day and running through the hypotheticals. Then you never activate psychological detachment. But studies have found that people who are able to psychologically detach report more satisfaction and life overall, they're less likely to burn out and they are just as engaged at work. But the issue, like I said before, is that I felt like I couldn't and that I shouldn't mentally switch off. And this is actually something that research is called the recovery paradox. The recovery paradox is that people recover the least when they need it the most.

When your workload is high at work, it is harder to detach from our work. And so in order to really allow myself to switch off and finally start recovering, there are three things that I had to do differently. The first one is just be really clear and honest to myself. That you can't pull from an empty cup. I remember one time I was working a late shift as a junior doctor, I was with one of my seniors and we had this never ending list of tasks to get to. We just finished looking at one patient and we had a nurse call us who want us to review another patient on a different ward. And I was kind of hurrying to the elevator to get to the next patient and my senior kind of pulls me along and says first we need to get dinner. And I obviously had this face of like, but there's so much work that we have to do because he said, you cannot treat your patients if you become the patient. And that message is always stuck with me, shout out, Dr. Mike Hayes, for telling me that, I use it as a constant reminder that when other people need the best version of ourselves, we owe it to those people to preserve the best of ourselves. The person that other people depended on was not the tired, angry, irritable, sleep deprived version of me. So that was the first big thing, just being honest with myself that I'm a human. I just can't keep operating like a machine, no matter how much I like to think that I can.

The second major change to support that was building in some really key routines. Relaxation and exercise became non-negotiables in my routine. I would protect it fiercely. And I also give you some tips later on on the types of routines that were really helpful for me. That I was able to fit into a busy schedule. And the third and final major thing, which I didn't do, but I wish I had done and I recommend that you do is to take some of the pressure off yourself. Some problems are easier to solve than others. For example, if you're spending hours every evening reading through documentation instead of relaxing and you're banging your head against it because you know that a week from now you're not going to remember what you're reading anyway, but you also don't have the time and mental capacity to learn how to learn more efficiently. You can solve that problem. Very easily. Four free with only three to five minutes of reading since straight into your inbox. Yes, we're talking about my free weekly newsletter. Sure, you can watch my videos and please do. But I've got hundreds of them. Wouldn't it be awesome if some of those key transformative insights, maybe like the ones that you're hearing right now in this video, could be distilled and delivered for you straight into your inbox. So you don't even have to think about what to learn next. What do I need to focus on? You just get an email sent from me that I write up with my hands using my brain saying, hey, this is what I think you should know.

And here is the practical thing that for this week you should work on. And if imagining that fills you with the sense of relief, like this bird and has been lifted off from your shoulders. Remember, it hasn't been lifted off your shoulders yet. And what if for that bird and to be lifted, You need to go check out the link in the description below the sign up. Okay, now to be serious. Switching off when the stuff that's bothering you is related to work is already an easier problem to solve. And as I said, I will give you some tips on the types of routines to implement that are really helpful for you. But what if the stress, the thoughts are related to life? What if it's about your kids, family issues? For me, a few years ago there was a lot going on family-wise that I couldn't switch off from. In those situations, how do you activate the psychological detachment that is so necessary for recovery? And to answer that, I actually want to refer to this really great piece of research that was published by two researchers, Sun and Tag and Fritz. Sun and Tag is like one of the most prolific researchers in the sort of rest and recovery space. I actually only discovered this work recently as well. they published four different dimensions to recovery. We've already covered two of them. The first two is actually relaxation and psychological detachment, but they also have two other dimensions, which is mastery and control. And when I learned about these two extra dimensions, a lot of things clicked for me. So mastery experiences are about when you're learning something new. There is a sense of progress. So for me, going to the gym, feeling like I'm getting stronger that was progress. Getting better at the different lifts that I was doing that was mastery. I'm getting better at something, dancing. I was learning to dance better. Even something like doing a jigsaw puzzle where there's that feeling of progress. And the thing is that when you engage in a mastery activity, it also triggers psychological detachment. It becomes easier to mentally switch off and it helps to activate that relaxation. But it also has a compounding effect,

because as you get better at something, it also builds a new hobby, and that hobby becomes a relaxation asset for you moving forward in life. So for me, today exercise provides me a lot of very powerful recovery. But the only reason that so easy for me to use exercise as a recovery mechanism is because I have been engaging in the hobby of exercise for over a decade. Some people like fixing up their home, renovating stuff, could be co-tivating entire far-stubbindo appliance. Maybe learning a new language or a new instrument. Do those things that you've always wanted to do, and don't make the fact that it takes high levels of effort be the thing that stops you. Because engaging in that high-effet activity is actually going to allow you to recover more, which will make you feel more energized. That exhaustion and tightness that tells you No, you shouldn't do this because you already so tired, you're barely hanging there with just what you're doing now. How could I ever do more than that? That's not true. The reason you can barely hold on with what you're doing now is because you don't have enough of these recovery activities. But here's an interesting question I started asking myself a couple of years ago. And you might be thinking this right now. I was thinking about this. Every time I feel tired, drag myself to the gym, do a workout, good, bad, whatever it is. By the end of the workout, I always feel better. I'm always more energized. I'm in a better mood. So why has my brain not learned that exercise is something that I should just do and look for too? Why is it? That when I feel tired, it's always a challenge to drag myself to the gym. And it's not just exercise. I noticed that when I'm exhausted, I don't want to do anything. I just want to be a useless potato rolling around on a couch. And I know it's not going to make me feel better. And for a really long time, that gave me a little bit of stress and frustration and sort of disappointment in myself. Like, this feeling of guilt that I'm not doing the things I know I should do. And as I was looking into this, just a couple of years ago, what I learned was that as your day goes on and those neurotransmitters build up inside your brain like I talked about before that part of your brain that's involved in decision-making and planning and self-regulation starts getting fatigued. This is the prefrontal cortex and when it's

fatigued it's less able to make those high-effet decisions that require a lot of planning and coordination. Finishing work getting changed thinking about dinnath's timing and getting to the the gym before and after and you know, whether I'm energizing enough, this takes a lot of coordination. It takes no coordination just to give up on life and just sit on the couch. And what I learned was that our brain thinks differently when we're tired. Our ability to make decisions, when we're tired becomes impaired. And we become biased towards making decisions that require less planning and less effort. And this effect is actually so profound that this is one of the most accurate ways to reliably assess your true level of fatigue. Instead of just self-assessing and self-reporting how tired you feel like you are, which is wildly inaccurate, the better way is just to note the types of decisions you tend to make. When you tend to make decisions that are more low effort and require less planning, even when you know those are probably not the best decisions to make, that is a very strong indicator that your prefrontal cortex is in a state of fatigue. So the way that I combat that these days is that I just remove as much planning as possible and there are two things that I do for this. The first is I always decide an advance. I go to the gym twice a week and that decision on when I go is scheduled into my calendar a week in advance. So that's one decision removed. The second thing is I have to go post very close.

I do not think about what I'm going to do at the gym. I don't think about how hard it's going to be. I don't think about how long I'm going to be there. What I care about is getting changed and getting there. And that means all the planning and decision making that I would normally be doing up front that adds that burden and makes me want to give up. That's gone. I don't have to think about any of that until just before I start. And I apply these two principles for anything that I know is good for me that I should do, but I know it requires a lot of effort and I'm going to be too tired in the moment to bring myself to do it. But even then, sometimes it's not enough. It's okay, it's just change, things come up, there's always competing responsibilities. And this is where this fourth dimension really comes in. That is control. Control is talking about how much control you have over what you do during your non-work time. And what it says that if you spend that time doing something that you intentionally decided to do just by the virtue of the fact that you were in control of your time makes it a recovery experience. even 15 to 20 minutes of self-directed activity that you chose to do and you wanted to do it can be beneficial for recovery. You are giving yourself permission to take control, selfishly of that time and just do the thing that you want to do. For me, I believe that this is one of the reasons why despite working so many hours, I wasn't as burnt out as I maybe could have been because my business, learning about learning science and coaching people and really understanding how to be a great learning coach as well as run a business. This was really fulfilling for me. Like I wanted to get good at that.

That was taking the box for me in terms of mastery, but it was time spent in the way that I wanted to spend it. And even on my busiest days, just 10 minutes after dinner, Let's just go for a walk. I'm gonna write in my diary. I'm gonna read a book, well listen to an audio book. Just paying attention to what you really want and what you need in letting yourself have that little bit of time. Personally for me, that was a life changer and I know that for a lot of people, they never let themselves do something just for themselves. So let me wrap up these four dimensions, my personal insights, everything I've talked about and to sort of like my final set of tips or how you can really start to feel more rested and energized. Number one, make a list of things that you think would be relaxing. Anytime you think of an idea that you think could be fun to try, could be relaxing, you might be interested in it, could become a new hobby, just write it down, just write it out. Have a list of ideas that you can browse through at another time. Number two, plan some key anchors of relaxation throughout your week. For me, those two anchors are exercise twice a week. These are the two activities that take a little bit longer to provide this really big amount of recovery that allows me to stay maintained throughout the week. Number three, pick just two or three of those things from your list of relaxing activities

and put aside a little bit of time, 10, 15 minutes in the evenings here and there, they just aren't working on it. Preferably something that involves a level of progression so that we're taking that mastery aspect. You don't have to get good at it. You don't have to commit to it. There's no minimum or maximum amount of time that you need to do it for. But if you've always wanted to get into painting, Why the canvas? By the pink, have it set up somewhere. Now, at least it's there. Maybe you only get to brush on it for five minutes every now and again. But it's there. And it's developing into a hobby asset. For me, one of the biggest block is I think in committing to picking up like a new hobby is the sense of having to commit to this whole new thing and all the planning involved. And how do I get myself there? And how long am I gonna do it for? And is it worse the time or the money? Well, there's all this kind of planning. And again, like I'm already fatigued, I'm already exhausted. So I just stopped. But the unlock isn't realizing, do you can't screw it up? There's no right way or wrong way of doing it. As long as you do it, it's providing the value for you. And just remember that even if it takes a bit of effort,

that effort will be rewarded back to you with even more energy. Now, if you are so exhausted, that you kind of even be bothered, thinking of all of that. You can't be bothered, thinking of your own hobbies and relaxation things. And you just want me to tell you one thing to do. Even though there is no magic pull for this, if you want, just one thing to do, find your nearest spot of nature and just exist in it for 30 minutes. There may be no magic pill to just suddenly feeling energized, but if there was, it's nature. Several years ago, I did my first overnight hike in the bush, no cell phone reception, completely off the grid. I came out of that hike, like a whole new human. Like I've been reincarnated. There is this deep neurobiological connection between humans and nature. Some researchers call it soft fascination, which is quite a unique mechanism that only really being observed with nature where you are effortlessly engaged by just the things in your environment that helps to renew your brain's attention and energy and also your working memory capacity. Now, the research guidelines on how much nature produces as long as benefit is around 30 minutes of exposure in a single session, or cumulatively about 120 minutes per week.

But more exposure than that can have better effects. So if you can't be wondering about anything, just find the nicest, nearest nature that you can find go and just sit there for 30 minutes. This is one of the reasons why I still live in New Zealand because I'm pretty much like a minute away from pretty good nature no matter where I am. So for me, understanding actually how to properly rest and recover has not only made me less exhausted, but also has made me more confident and handling exhausting situations. Because I know that when I rest, I will actually feel rested at the end of it. And I hope with this, you can feel the same way too. If you're interested in a few more tactics on how you can feel a little bit more energized in your evenings after work and use that time a little bit more effectively, then you might also be interested in checking out this video here, but otherwise, thanks so much for watching and have a good rest.