The Magic Number That Helps Renew Your Life

The original article “Relax! You’ll Be More Productive” is an opinion post written by Tony Schwartz on the New York Times that talks about effects of the amount of time people sleep and take rest on their work efficiency. Tony Schwartz is the president, founder, and CEO of The Energy Project a company that helps individuals organizations perform better and more sustainably. He started his career as a journalist, and published several books about work and productivity. In this short essay, or rewritten article, I am mostly forwarding Schwartz’s idea of the relationship between people’s work efficiency and their lifestyle. His article is mostly written on the manner of professionals, and I tried to rewrite this on the casual level of college students’ lifestyle with some extra personal voice. I used some school related examples so that we easily understand, and are able to aware of the usefulness and importance of the relaxation in our lives. This essay (or blog post) is written to be sounded more casual and relatable to my blog’s audiences such as my classmates, but I also kept and adapted some lines, examples and studies Schwartz used in his article to support the essay more intelligently.  

The Magic Number That Helps Renew Your Life:

By Joo Young Kim

THINK for a moment about your typical school day. Is it hard to get up and go to your 8-am class? Can’t you remember anything after reading 10 pages of text book? Do you drink gallons of coffee and energy drinks every day? Did you fail your mid-term after 10 hours of studying?

Then, you must have done something wrong. You may look diligent and smart when you are studying for hours, but that does not mean you are the most productive. The result would only be burning out. I mean, do you even have time for yourself at all?

In today’s society, we value and emphasize on the ability of multitasking, which means we should be able to achieve more in less time. This kind of mind has been set since we were young, and we always have believed “More is better.” We try to stay awake for a longer time during day and night, and sleep less so that we can work more, study more, and play more. However, this type of lifestyle in fact lowers our work efficiency, and harms our health. In other words, you will fail the test, feel very stressed, and blame everything for it. In contrary, people who work for a short period of time, take rest and play in between work, and sleep more are able to achieve more than other type of people, which sounds unfair for us.

As we grow up, the world requires more and more to make us fit into our society. The amount of work we deal with every day increases constantly. Unlike finishing 10 problems of math homework in your second grade of school, we are working for two majors, one minor, different school organizations, future employers, and so on. We are trying to deal with unlimited work in a limited time. Nonetheless, many studies suggest it is better for both our body and work to shorten work hours and extend rest hours. Professor K. Anders Erisson and his colleagues at Florida State University have studied and found that the best of ELITE performers typically practice in uninterrupted sessions that last no more than 90 minutes, and rarely work for more than four and a half hours in a day. In simple words, they only work about four hours, and eat, play, and sleep for about twenty hours per day. That sounds fantastic. It sounds like if we study for four hours, and eat, play, and sleep for twenty hours per day, then we all would be super geniuses!

However, that is not so true; we should not miss a very scientific, important aspect on this. The only reason these “elite” performers are able to work well is that they are well balancing their ability of body energy. There is such a thing called Basic-Rest Activity Cycle or BRAC named by researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman in the 1950s. BRAC was initially indicating a cycle of roughly 90 minutes during our sleep, but a decade later, Kleitman discovered that this cycle recapitulates during the waking lives as well. During the day, our body gets physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes, and body tells us to take a break within each 90 minutes. See, 90 is a magic number.

Therefore, sitting and staring at your screen on chair for hours and hours do not help your essay done at all. However, you may want to go back to your dorm room and take a nap for a while, because instead of wasting finite time of your life, you are recharging energy of your body for the next set of work. According to a sleep researcher, Sara C. Mednick, a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep. Again, the magic number. And don’t forget to have a healthy meal, which also recharges your energy. If you see your peers are sitting and eating something so ambitiously, don’t judge them. They are just saving some energy and joy for later the day. Their downtime is not wasted time, and so neither is yours.

Now, stop working on your homework. Go to your room. Take a rest. You will find out you do not have to rely on caffeine anymore, but still achieve more, because “when you’re renewing, you’re truly renewing, so when you’re working, you can really work.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/relax-youll-be-more-productive.html