How To Rest Your Brain?
Contrary to what we often imagine, to relax overheated neurons, it is not enough to do nothing or to try not to think about anything! Because brain rest also involves certain activities, you can give your mind a break without sleeping or falling into complete inaction. Here's how to rest your brain.
Learn to spot the signs of fatigue
When you've spent the day at work managing multiple tasks at once and under pressure to perform/profit, it's common for the brain to send signs of fatigue, but few people know how to recognize them.
If you want to give your neurons a break, the first thing you need to do is learn to spot these signals, including:
- the moment your concentration goes off the rails and your mind wanders
- Saying or typing one word for another
- feeling like you can't keep up with what is being said in a meeting or what you are reading...
These different symptoms are signs of intellectual fatigue indicating that it's time to rest your brain.
Avoid stress
Contrary to popular belief, our brains are not most fatigued by intellectual effort. This organ is made to work and solve problems. For it, reading, learning a foreign language or writing a report at work are perfectly normal tasks.
The main sources of brain exhaustion are rather emotional, such as the stress we can feel when we have to concentrate in a noisy open space or when we have to finish a file in a hurry.
Our neurons get tired when we are put under pressure, have to do several things at once or have to contain ourselves, like children who have to sit still for hours in class and hold back from talking.
So the first tip to remember to rest your brain is to avoid sources of stress such as noise and multi-tasking as much as possible.
If you have to do something that requires attention, you can only do one task at a time. Don't try to handle everything at once, or your mental load will be too heavy and you risk burnout!
Provide relaxation activities
The best way to rest your brain is not to do nothing but rather to privilege activities that relax it. In practice, these are activities that solicit brain capacity without stress or a performance goal.
Any activity that keeps your hands or feet busy but allows you to let your mind wander is restful for your neurons. For example, it can be taking a walk, cooking, gardening or knitting ...
Focus on what you like
As you can see, there are many possible activities to rest your brain, so choose among your favorite hobbies those that allow you to put your cogitations or ruminations on pause.
The goal is not to think of nothing (which is impossible anyway), but rather to let your thoughts wander while you are busy doing something else like swimming, walking or knitting.
Paradoxically, concentration games and mindfulness meditation where you focus all your attention on one object are also ways to recover from mental fatigue.
In this case, you don't let your thoughts wander but, by focusing on one thing like your breathing for example, you stop scattering your attention over a thousand different stimuli. Your mind has only one thing to deal with, which it finds relaxing.
Multiply the activities that give you pleasure and do not feel guilty because these moments of relaxation are not wasted time. When the mind has time to wander and is more relaxed, it is easier for it to find solutions to various problems. In fact, it is said that it is good to let problems 'rest' until the solution emerges on its own.
Even though sleep plays a crucial role in memory and brain health, daytime activity is also important. Don't hesitate to experiment with several sports or hobbies to determine what relaxes and resources you the most. Besides, nothing prevents you from changing your mind and varying your pleasures because the brain likes diversity.
