Why your brain needs more rest
Studies of short sleep breaks, meditations, nature walks and habits of prominent artists and athletes show how breaks in brain activity increase productivity, replenish mindfulness reserves, strengthen memories and encourage creativity.
During the work week, usually around three in the afternoon, my forehead and temples begin to fill the familiar sensation of pain. It seems to me that the monitor screen is starting to glow brighter. My eyes run through the same sentence several times, but I cannot understand its meaning. Even if I bravely started my day, making my way through an ever-growing list of stories to write and edit, emails to send and answer, documents to read, at such moments it all seems as hopeless as climbing a constantly growing mountain. So much to do - and usually I really like my work - but the brain requires a stop. He is full, and he needs time for a break.
Freelance journalist and meditation teacher Michael Taft was experiencing his experiences with brain overflow. “On an ordinary working day in modern America, it feels like you have too much to fall on, and so much information needs to be processed that you simply cannot cope with all of this,” says Taft. In 2011, finishing his plans for moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, he decided to take a particularly long vacation from work and the usual crazy life. He sold the house, put all things in a locker and went to a small village community in Barr, pc. Massachusetts, about 100 km west of Boston, where every year people gather for a three-month "marathon of meditations."
Taft had been in such secluded places before, but never for such a long period. For 92 days he lived in the “Forest Shelter” rest home of the Insight Meditation Society, a community of lovers of meditation, without a word exchanging with anyone else. Most of the time he spent in meditations, yoga and walks in the fields and paths of neighboring farms and forests, where he met turkeys jumping from branches, and once he saw an otter playing fun in a swamp. Gradually, his brain sorted all the raw data and cleared of the accumulated disturbances. “When you go on such a long vacation, a certain basic level of mental tension and employment completely disappears,” says Taft. - I call this state "unfilled mind." Today's speed of life does not allow us to pause so that everything can be settled and reassured. ”
Many people in the United States and other industrialized countries will readily agree with Taft's words, even if they are not so actively engaged in meditation. A survey of 1,700 office workers conducted in 2010 by LexisNexis in the USA, China, South Africa, Britain and Australia showed that, on average, employees spend more than half a day working to receive and process information, and not to apply it directly to perform work. Half of the respondents also admitted that they had reached their point of no return, after which they were no longer able to perceive this flood from the data. In the European Union 20 days of paid vacation are obligatory, and in the USA there are no federal laws guaranteeing paid holidays, sick leave or even breaks on public holidays. In the Netherlands, it is typical to have 26 days of vacation [ In Russia - 28 days, while, for example, for workers in hazardous industries, vacation is at least 35 days, and for judges - from 30 business days, plus additional days, for long service - up to 45 days in total annually - approx. trans. ]. In America, Canada, Japan and Hong Kong, workers on average are on vacation 10 days a year. But according to surveys conducted by Harris Interactive in 2012, it turned out that Americans, on average, do not use 9 days a year from their vacation. And in some other polls, the Americans admitted that they were obsessed with checking and responding to emails of their colleagues, or feel obligated to do some work between kayaking along the shores of Kauai and learning the pronunciation of the word humor-fish for the fish, the English starfish - approx. trans.].
In general, Americans and their brains are busy working most of the time. At all times, people intuitively understood that such a puritanic dedication of permanent employment does not guarantee an increase in labor productivity, and does not particularly well affect health. What if the brain needs a tangible time to rest so that it can continue to work hard and produce its best ideas? “Idleness is not just a vacation, a whim or a vice; this is an imperative need of the brain, just as the body necessarily needs vitamin D, without enough of which we suffer from mental problems as ugly as rickets, ” wrote Tim Crader in The New York Times. "Disconnecting from all problems and silence, which idleness provides, is a necessary condition in order to take a step away from everyday life and embrace the whole life, and, perhaps, make unexpected connections and wait for inspirations, sudden as summer lightning strikes - paradoxically, but it is necessary for the successful completion of the work ".
To the intuition and stories from life, telling about the need to take breaks in mental activity, we can now add a huge amount of empirical evidence. The importance of periodic moments of rest for the brain becomes apparent against the background of a diverse collection of new research. They study the habits of office workers, the daily activities of prominent musicians and athletes, the benefits of vacations, meditation and time spent in parks, gardens and other quiet corners of nature, and how a nap, rest while awake and even blinking can improve the state of consciousness . However, studies also clarify that even when we relax or dream, the brain does not actually slow down its work or stop it. Instead, just as a huge set of molecular, genetic, and physiological processes occurs mainly or exclusively during sleep, many important mental processes require what we call idleness and other kinds of rest during the day. Idleness replenishes the reserves of attention and motivation of the brain, increases productivity and creative abilities, and is necessary both to achieve the highest level of efficiency and to form stable memories. Wandering consciousness helps us get rid of the present so that we can learn from past experiences and make plans for the future. Minutes of respite may even be needed to ensure that a person maintains a proper sense of self and does not violate moral judgment.
For most of the 20th century, many scientists ridiculed the idea that the brain can be productive during idleness. German neuroscientist Hans Berger did not agree with them. In 1929, after extensive research on electroencephalograms — obtained using a device he invented that recorded electronic brain impulses through a grid of conductors worn on his head — he assumed that the brain is always in a “state of significant activity” even when people sleep and relax. Although his colleagues recognized that some parts of the brain and spinal cord could work without respite to regulate the functioning of the lungs and the heart, they believed that if a person does not focus on a specific mental task, his brain is almost completely turned off; and any activity recorded by an EEG or other device at this time should be random noise. At first, the development of fMRI in the early 1990s even confirmed this theory of a lean brain, switching its sections on and off as needed. By tracking the blood currents in the brain, fMRI showed that different neural circuits became particularly active during the execution of various intellectual tasks, and caused energetic replenishment in the form of additional reserves of blood rich in oxygen and glucose.
However, by the mid-1990s, Markus Rachel of the University of Washington at St. Louis and his colleagues showed that the human brain is in fact a glutton , constantly demanding 20% ​​of all the body's energy, while energy consumption increased during problem solving or reading a book. only 5-10%. Reychl also noticed that a certain set of brain-scattered sites constantly became less active when the person concentrated on the intellectual task, but began to work actively when he simply lay in the fMRI scanner and allowed his thoughts to wander where he would think. Similarly, Bharat Biswal , now working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, described exactly the same coordinated exchange of information between different areas of the brain of resting people. Many experts were skeptical of this, but further research from other scientists confirmed that it was not an accident. As a result, this mysterious and complex circuit, reviving when people dream of something of their own, became known as the network of passive brain mode (DPR; default mode network , DMN). Over the past five years, it has been established that DSS is just one of no less than five different rest state neural networks (NRS) - circuits related to vision, hearing, movement, attention, and memory. But so far the AB is one of the most studied and probably the most important of them all.
In a recent thought-provoking review of AB studies, Mary Helen Immordino-Young of the University of Southern California and co-authors claimed that during rest the brain does not rest at all, and that this time is not useless and not anti-productive - on the contrary, it is necessary to maintain mental processes that confirm our identity, it works through our understanding of human behavior and establishes an internal ethical code. All these processes are dependent on ABM. Idleness is an opportunity for the brain to find the meaning of what has been studied before, to bring up unresolved conflicts, and to transfer reflections from the outside world onto itself. During the dreams, we reproduce the conversations that happened on the same day, overwriting our mistakes so that we do not fall into them in the future. We sharpen imaginary dialogues by practicing giving resistance to those who offend us, or we are satisfied with the fictional speech directed against our enemy. We go through all these forgotten notes about half-completed projects and think over the least satisfactory aspects of our life, looking for solutions. We dive into scenes from childhood and transfer ourselves to different versions of the future. We subject our actions to a thorough moral evaluation and reflect on how we have been treated recently with other people. Such moments of self-digging is one of the ways to create an opinion about oneself; this is, in fact, an endless story that we constantly tell ourselves. When consciousness is given a free minute, it dips the pen into memory ink, an experience of sensations, disappointment and desire, in order to continue to write down this continuous story about first-person life.
A related study demonstrates that DM is more active in especially creative people , and some experiments have shown that the mind is working quietly on solving complex problems while our thoughts are distracted - many people experienced this while they were taking a shower. Insights come as if from nowhere, but often they are the result of unconscious mental activity taking place during relaxation. In a 2006 study , Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues asked 80 students at the University of Amsterdam to select the best car out of four possible. Prior to this, researchers conducted their ranking in size, mileage, maneuverability and other features. Half of the students were given 4 minutes to think about after studying the characteristics of the machines; the rest of the researchers distracted from purposeful reflection, taking their brains anagram. At the same time, the second group made much better decisions. Thus, it is possible to achieve solutions from the subconscious only if the distracting task is relatively simple - solving an anagram or doing usual tasks that do not require special concentration, such as brushing your teeth or washing dishes. The correct distracting action allows DSS to integrate more information from a wide range of brain regions, and it is more difficult to do this than when the brain consciously tries to solve the problem.
During idleness, the brain occupies itself with more mundane, but also important things. For decades, scientists suspected that when an animal or a person does not actively learn something new, the brain consolidates recently collected data, remembers the most vivid information, repeats recently acquired skills, recording them in its own tissue. Many of us watched how, after a good sleep, the words that we tried to learn the day before suddenly remembered by themselves, or how a technically complex melody turns out to be much easier to play. Dozens of studies confirm the fact that memory is dependent on sleep.
Recently, researchers have recorded what may be a physical confirmation of such a consolidation of memory in animals awake during their rest. When studying a new environment - say, a labyrinth - the brain of a rat shows a certain pattern of electrical activity. A little later, when a rat is sitting and resting, its brain sometimes recreates almost identical electrical impulses on the same sets of neurons. The more these neurons interact with each other, the stronger their connections become; secondary and ignored neural pathways are waning. Many studies show that in such moments — known as “sharp waves and ripples” —rats form new memories.
In a 2009 study by Gabrielle Girardeau, now working at New York University, and her colleagues trained the rats to search for snacks, which they constantly placed in the same branches of the eight final maze. After training, when the rats were sleeping or resting, the researchers passed a weak current through one of the groups of rats, which prevented the normal passage of sharp waves and ripples. The second group received electrical stimulation, which did not affect the ripples. As a result, the first group remembered much worse where to look for food.
Several studies have suggested that something similar happens in the human brain. In order to control convulsions, people with epilepsy sometimes undergo an operation during which they are drilled a skull and electrodes are implanted into the brain. In such cases, some patients allow scientists to record the electrical activity recognized by the electrodes — this is a unique situation that allows people not to be exposed to danger solely for research purposes. In a 2008 study , Nikolai Axmacher of Bonn University and colleagues showed patients a set of photographs of houses and landscapes, and checked how well they remembered these pictures after one night. At night, the researchers recorded electrical activity in the rinal cortex, which is responsible for certain types of memory. As expected, the more island-like ripples passed through the rinal cortex, the better the patients could memorize the images. Such ripples most often appeared not at moments of sleep, but when they were lying in bed, awake in the dark, shortly before or immediately after sleep.
A 2009 study conducted by Chris Meall of the University of Birmingham and his colleagues complements the previous one. 24 volunteers, while inside the fMRI scanner, tried to move the cursor in the center of the screen in the direction of the appearing targets with the joystick. Half of the volunteers worked with a simple setup: when they moved the joystick to the left, the cursor moved to the left. The other half had a harder time: imagine what it would be like to work with a mouse, the coordinates of which periodically turn clockwise - instead of going right, it goes down, instead of left - up. All subjects rested in the scanner before and after concentrating on the task.
The activity in the NSP of the first group did not change much from one break to another. But in the brains of those who had to suffer with the joystick, the activity in the two NSPs was more synchronized than usual. This coordination, most likely, reflects the strengthening of the links between these two circuits, as Miall believes, which, in turn, means that during the rest the brain fixed everything that he learned while working with a strange and confusing tool. The brain of the people who worked with an ordinary joystick did not recognize anything new. In the following, not yet published experiment, in which volunteers tried to press the buttons in a certain sequence, as well as in another study, where people studied a new language, scientists came to similar conclusions about how important brain activity is during training.
A very interesting experiment may indicate that the brain is probably trying to use any break in attention-related work to transfer the reins of the NRS. In last year's study, Tamami Nakano of the University of Osaka recorded electrical impulses in the brain of people who watched the clips of the British comedian Mr. Bean. The results showed that the brain can launch DSS literally in the blink of an eye. Every time we blink, the outlines responsible for attentiveness fade out and the LRB briefly turns on. What exactly DGS manages to do in such a short time remains unclear, but this may well turn out to be one of the types of memory consolidation or way of neurons responsible for mindfulness, to rest.
The dependence of learning and memory, both on sleep and on waking rest, may explain why some of the prominent artists and athletes choose the day regimen with intense workouts and short breaks followed by long recovery periods. Psychologist C. Anders Erickson of the University of Florida spent 30 years studying how people achieve the highest level of knowledge. Based on his own research and other works related to him, Erickson concluded that most people can concentrate on doing work without interruption, in which it is necessary to exceed their own achievements, no more than an hour. Also extremely talented people in many areas - music, sports, writing - rarely work more than four hours a day, and many experts prefer to start training early in the morning when they have large reserves of mental and physical energy. “If you do not limit the daily level of practice to subsequent rest and sleep, allowing people to restore their balance of power,” Erikson wrote, “they often get injured due to excessive exercise and eventually“ burn out ”.
These principles are derived from the rituals of prominent people, but they are useful for almost any person in any profession, including workers from nine to five. Corporate America will hardly ever allow four hourly days, but research shows that to increase productivity, you need to change the current model of a consistent 40-hour work week, shared by just two weekends, and sometimes short holidays.
Psychologists have found that vacations have real advantages. Holidays restore body and mind, keeping people away from work-related stress; placing people in new places, kitchen and social circles, which can lead to the emergence of unusual ideas; giving people the opportunity to sleep well; allowing their thoughts to move from one impression to another, rather than forcing the brain to concentrate on one task for several hours in a row. But a recent comprehensive meta-analysis by Jessica de Blum, now working at the University of Tampere in Finland, shows that these benefits usually disappear in two to four weeks. In one of de Bloom's own research, 96 Dutch workers reported feeling more energetic, happy, less tense and more satisfied with their lives after vacationing in a winter resort from 7 to 9 days. But after one week at work after the holidays, all such feelings disappeared. The second experiment with 4-5 days of rest led to the same results. A little vacation is like a cold shower on a stormy summer day - a refreshing, but quickly disappearing escape from reality.
Instead of limiting people to a single weekly vacation a day or several vacations lasting two to three days, companies should allow employees to take weekends in the middle of the week and encourage them to get rid of working moments in the evenings. In a four-year study, Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School and colleagues tracked the working habits of the employees of the Boston Consulting Group. Each year, the company insisted on regular employee rest, even when they did not think they should interrupt work. In one experiment, each team member planned one evening during the week so that he was devoted exclusively to personal matters, even despite the habit of working from home in the evenings.
At first, everyone resisted this, fearing that they would simply postpone work. But over time, the consultants loved this planned time, free from work, because it constantly replenished their desire and ability to work, which in general made them more productive. After five months, workers who experimented with purposeful periodic rest were more satisfied with their work, more focused on long-term cooperation with the company, more satisfied with the balance between work and life, and were more proud of their achievements.
Tony Schwartz, a journalist and CEO of The Energy Project , made a career of teaching people how to improve productivity by changing their attitude toward idleness. His strategy is based in particular on the idea that everyone can learn to regularly renew their reserves of physical and mental energy. “People work so much that they not only have no time left, but they also lose benefits in terms of their health and emotional state,” says Schwartz. - If a resource like time disappears, what remains? Energy".
Schwartz and his colleagues encourage employees to sleep 7-8 hours a day, use the entire vacation, practice nap and do many small interruptions during the day, practice meditation and do the most difficult things in the morning to use the entire attention resource. “Many of the things that we advise are in some sense very simple, and they are known to people - but they move with such tremendous speed that they have convinced themselves that they are not capable of such behavior,” says Schwartz.
At first, the approach of his project was not very much in demand - it contradicts the prevailing myth that the more busy you are, the better - but the organization already successfully collaborates with Google, Apple, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, Ford, Genentech and a wide range of companies from the Fortune 500 list. To measure the degree of improvement in staff time spent, Schwartz measures their level of involvement - how much they like their work, how much they are willing to exceed the limits of their job responsibilities - these properties are associated with productivity tew. Perhaps this is not the most accurate and direct measurement, but Schwartz says that their strategy is constantly increasing the level of employee involvement to levels much higher than the average, and that Google has liked their activities so much that it has been cooperating with their company for more than five years.
Many recent studies support the idea that our intellectual resources are being depleted during the day, and that various rest and rest methods can renew these reserves and increase their volume. See, for example, how even a very short day's sleep revives the brain.
In adulthood, most people get used to sleeping all night and staying awake all day - but this may not be the ideal option for our mental health, and this is clearly not consistent with the historical patterns of the day. Something like the Tolkien hobbits loved to enjoy the first and second breakfast, people who lived without electricity in pre-industrial Europe looked forward to the first and second sleep , between which there was an interval of about an hour. At this time they prayed, relieved, smoked, had sex and went to visit. Some researchers have suggested that people are physiologically predisposed to sleep from 14 to 16 hours, because the brain prefers to switch between sleep and wakefulness more than once a day. In the first century BC. e. the Romans regularly rested in the middle of the day, and called this process meridiari , from the Latin noon. Under the influence of Roman Catholicism, noon became known as sixth (the sixth hour by their hours), time for rest and prayers. Subsequently, the sixth turned into a siesta.
Many studies have found that daytime sleep increases concentration and improves the performance of both sleep deprived people and those who get enough sleep while performing all sorts of tasks, from driving a car to medical practice. In a 2004 study , scientists analyzed data for four years related to road accidents involving Italian police and concluded that a short sleep before night duty reduced the likely number of collisions by 48%. In a 2002 study by Rebecca Smith-Coggins of Stanford University and her colleagues, 26 doctors and nurses, who worked three 12-hour night shifts in a row, slept 40 minutes at 3:00, and another 23 of their colleagues worked without breaks sleep. And although with the memory test at 4:00, the doctors who slept during the day showed the worst results, but at 7:30 they surpassed the second group in the test for attentiveness, inserted the catheter more effectively in the virtual simulator, and demonstrated more attentiveness in the car simulator.
Long sleep works well if a person has time to recover from sleep inertia — a weakness that, in some cases, disappears two hours after sleep. Short sleep breaks in certain situations can be much more effective. An intensive study from 2006, which was conducted by Amber Brooks and Leon Lack from the University. Flinders in Australia compared with their colleagues to sleep breaks of 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes to find out which ones have the most restorative effect. For three years in a row, 24 college students on certain nights periodically slept for only five hours. The next day, they went to the laboratory to take a nap and pass attentiveness tests, during which they needed to quickly respond to images, search for words and copy the sequences of obscure characters correctly.
A five-minute dream barely increased attentiveness, but a 10, 20, and 30-minute increase in students' results. But those who slept for 20 and 30 minutes had to wait half an hour or more until their sleep inertia passed to regain their vigilance, while 10-minute sleep breaks instantly improved performance by as much as longer breaks but without any lethargy after. Brooks and Lack believe that this can be explained by the presence of a " sleep switch " in the brain. One of the clusters of neurons is especially important for maintaining wakefulness, while in the other one certain outlines cause drowsiness. When neurons in one area are quickly activated, they suppress the activation of neurons in another area, thus playing the role of a switch. Neurons in the wakeful circuit can get tired, working for many hours all day, which allows neurons in the sleep circuit to accelerate and initiate switching to sleep. But when a person begins to nod off, then 7-10 minutes may be enough for him to restore the neurons from the waking circuit to their original state.
Although some start-ups and progressive companies provide employees with the ability to sleep in an office, most US employees do not have this opportunity. Walking in nature will be just as effective and probably more affordable to recover from intellectual fatigue — in the evenings, on weekends, and even during lunch, it is helpful to walk along a nearby park, along a river or some other area not suppressed by skyscrapers and city streets. . Mark Berman , a psychologist from the University of Southern California and a pioneer of a relatively young area, ecopsychology, argues that if the hustle and bustle of a typical city draws your attention, then nature restores it. Imagine the difference between walking along Tverskaya Street, where the brain is torn between neon lights, car hooves and crowds of tourists, and a foray into nature, where the mind quietly transfers the focus of attention from birds singing to the murmur of rivers, to the light that draws spots on the earth.
In one of the few controlled experiments on ecopsychology, Berman asked 38 students at the University of Michigan to examine the list of random numbers and try to recall them in reverse order before completing another attention task, in which they memorized the arrangement of certain words in the grid. Half of the students after that walked about an hour along the arboretum for about an hour, and the other walked the same distance along the streets of Ann Arbor during the same time. After returning to the laboratory, the students again memorized and repeated sets of numbers. On average, volunteers walking among the trees recalled slightly more numbers than those who walked around the city. The difference was small, but statistically significant.
In addition to restoring the mental forces necessary for concentration, rest can even increase their reserve - scientists have periodically observed this effect when studying meditation. There are almost as many definitions and types of meditation as there are people practicing it. And although meditation is not equivalent to sleep or idle dreams, many of its styles offer people to retire in a quiet place, close their eyes and turn outside attention inside their minds. One of the techniques of meditation involves focusing on your thoughts, emotions, and sensations at the moment. With this approach, many people keep a close eye on what their minds are busy with, rather than directing their thoughts consciously to the accomplishment of a particular task.
Over the past ten years, this type of meditation has become more popular than ever. It is used to get rid of stress, anxiety and depression. Many researchers admit that research on the benefits of meditation lacks scientific rigor, but today there is already a lot of evidence that meditation actually improves mental health, hones the ability to concentrate and enhances memory. Studies comparing long-meditating people with novices, or with people not practicing meditation, often find that the former show the best results in perception sharpness tests.
In a study from 2009, Sarah van Lewven of the University. Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Germany and colleagues checked the visual attention of three groups of volunteers: 17 people 50 years old, who practiced meditation for a long time, up to 29 years; 17 people of the same age who have not practiced meditation for so long; and 17 young people who have never tried to meditate. In the test on the screen flashed sequences of random letters, among which two numbers were hidden. Volunteers needed to identify both numbers and guess if they did not see one of them in time; It was more difficult to recognize the second digit, because it was hidden by previous images. Efficiency in such tests usually decreases with age, but people who have meditated long ago have bypassed other people of the same age as well as younger participants.
Helen Slagter from Leiden University in Amsterdam and her colleagues used the same attentiveness test in a 2007 study comparing 17 people before and after returning from a holiday home in Barr, where they had been meditating for three months, and 23 volunteers, interested in meditation, and engaged in it for 20 minutes a day. Both groups were equally successful in passing tests before the first group went to a holiday home, but after its return, it surpassed the second in the test results. Judging by the EEG records, 90 days of meditation made the brain more efficient, so it used less resources to perform the same tests.
Behind these improvements are quite profound changes in the structure and behavior of the brain. Many studies have shown that meditation enhances the connection between NSP sites and helps people to more effectively switch between AB and contours that are most active while concentrating on a specific task. Over time, the cerebral cortex of meditating people becomes covered by a more complex system of furrows . The cortex is the outer layer of the brain, which is necessary for many of the most complex mental abilities, for example, abstract thinking and introspection. Meditation increases the volume and density of the hippocampus , a region of the brain that resembles the shape of a seahorse necessary for memory to function; it increases the thickness of the frontal cortex, which controls emotions; blocks typical age-related wilting of areas of the brain responsible for concentration.
But it is not yet clear how quickly meditation can make noticeable changes in the structure of the brain and the intellect. But several experiments suggest that a couple of weeks of meditation or just 10-20 minutes of meditation per day can sharpen the mind. Also, several studies show that daily meditation is more important than the total number of hours of meditation for all time.
In a study from 2007, Richard Chambers of the University of Melbourne gave 40 people ages 21 to 63 years old various tests for operational memory and attentiveness - the ability of a person to temporarily store and process information. Half of the participants underwent tests before an intensive 10-day course of meditation, which they never did, and then passed the same tests immediately after this course. The second half also took tests twice, with a difference of 21 days, but did not practice meditation. After the meditation, people from the first group coped with the tests a little better, and the second group showed no improvement. Similarly, in another study of the same year, 40 Chinese college students showed the best results in attention tests after five days of just 20-minute daily meditation, while their comrades who were not engaged in meditation showed no improvement. A total of 12 minutes of meditation per day helped reduce the impact of military service stress on the operational memory of 34 US Marines in a 2011 study conducted by Amisha Jha, now working at the University of Miami.
“When soldiers have access to a gym, they practice there. When they find themselves somewhere on a mountain, they have to manage with what they have and push in to stay in shape, says Jha. - Meditation can offer something similar for your intellect. It doesn’t need technology and is easy to do. "Ja herself seeks any opportunity to practice meditation, for example, her 15-minute daily trip to and from work.
Similarly, Michael Taft agitates for special intellectual breaks at any of the available moments of the day - when traveling on the subway, at lunchtime, or even when going down to the basement. But he draws attention to the big difference between a positive attitude to an increase in the amount of time to rest and the real embodiment of this idea. “Getting out on nature on weekends, meditating, putting computers off from time to time - we already know that this needs to be done,” he says. “But this needs to be done more diligently, because it really matters.”
During the work week, usually around three in the afternoon, my forehead and temples begin to fill the familiar sensation of pain. It seems to me that the monitor screen is starting to glow brighter. My eyes run through the same sentence several times, but I cannot understand its meaning. Even if I bravely started my day, making my way through an ever-growing list of stories to write and edit, emails to send and answer, documents to read, at such moments it all seems as hopeless as climbing a constantly growing mountain. So much to do - and usually I really like my work - but the brain requires a stop. He is full, and he needs time for a break.
Freelance journalist and meditation teacher Michael Taft was experiencing his experiences with brain overflow. “On an ordinary working day in modern America, it feels like you have too much to fall on, and so much information needs to be processed that you simply cannot cope with all of this,” says Taft. In 2011, finishing his plans for moving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, he decided to take a particularly long vacation from work and the usual crazy life. He sold the house, put all things in a locker and went to a small village community in Barr, pc. Massachusetts, about 100 km west of Boston, where every year people gather for a three-month "marathon of meditations."
Taft had been in such secluded places before, but never for such a long period. For 92 days he lived in the “Forest Shelter” rest home of the Insight Meditation Society, a community of lovers of meditation, without a word exchanging with anyone else. Most of the time he spent in meditations, yoga and walks in the fields and paths of neighboring farms and forests, where he met turkeys jumping from branches, and once he saw an otter playing fun in a swamp. Gradually, his brain sorted all the raw data and cleared of the accumulated disturbances. “When you go on such a long vacation, a certain basic level of mental tension and employment completely disappears,” says Taft. - I call this state "unfilled mind." Today's speed of life does not allow us to pause so that everything can be settled and reassured. ”
Many people in the United States and other industrialized countries will readily agree with Taft's words, even if they are not so actively engaged in meditation. A survey of 1,700 office workers conducted in 2010 by LexisNexis in the USA, China, South Africa, Britain and Australia showed that, on average, employees spend more than half a day working to receive and process information, and not to apply it directly to perform work. Half of the respondents also admitted that they had reached their point of no return, after which they were no longer able to perceive this flood from the data. In the European Union 20 days of paid vacation are obligatory, and in the USA there are no federal laws guaranteeing paid holidays, sick leave or even breaks on public holidays. In the Netherlands, it is typical to have 26 days of vacation [ In Russia - 28 days, while, for example, for workers in hazardous industries, vacation is at least 35 days, and for judges - from 30 business days, plus additional days, for long service - up to 45 days in total annually - approx. trans. ]. In America, Canada, Japan and Hong Kong, workers on average are on vacation 10 days a year. But according to surveys conducted by Harris Interactive in 2012, it turned out that Americans, on average, do not use 9 days a year from their vacation. And in some other polls, the Americans admitted that they were obsessed with checking and responding to emails of their colleagues, or feel obligated to do some work between kayaking along the shores of Kauai and learning the pronunciation of the word humor-fish for the fish, the English starfish - approx. trans.].
In general, Americans and their brains are busy working most of the time. At all times, people intuitively understood that such a puritanic dedication of permanent employment does not guarantee an increase in labor productivity, and does not particularly well affect health. What if the brain needs a tangible time to rest so that it can continue to work hard and produce its best ideas? “Idleness is not just a vacation, a whim or a vice; this is an imperative need of the brain, just as the body necessarily needs vitamin D, without enough of which we suffer from mental problems as ugly as rickets, ” wrote Tim Crader in The New York Times. "Disconnecting from all problems and silence, which idleness provides, is a necessary condition in order to take a step away from everyday life and embrace the whole life, and, perhaps, make unexpected connections and wait for inspirations, sudden as summer lightning strikes - paradoxically, but it is necessary for the successful completion of the work ".
To the intuition and stories from life, telling about the need to take breaks in mental activity, we can now add a huge amount of empirical evidence. The importance of periodic moments of rest for the brain becomes apparent against the background of a diverse collection of new research. They study the habits of office workers, the daily activities of prominent musicians and athletes, the benefits of vacations, meditation and time spent in parks, gardens and other quiet corners of nature, and how a nap, rest while awake and even blinking can improve the state of consciousness . However, studies also clarify that even when we relax or dream, the brain does not actually slow down its work or stop it. Instead, just as a huge set of molecular, genetic, and physiological processes occurs mainly or exclusively during sleep, many important mental processes require what we call idleness and other kinds of rest during the day. Idleness replenishes the reserves of attention and motivation of the brain, increases productivity and creative abilities, and is necessary both to achieve the highest level of efficiency and to form stable memories. Wandering consciousness helps us get rid of the present so that we can learn from past experiences and make plans for the future. Minutes of respite may even be needed to ensure that a person maintains a proper sense of self and does not violate moral judgment.
And the rest is history
For most of the 20th century, many scientists ridiculed the idea that the brain can be productive during idleness. German neuroscientist Hans Berger did not agree with them. In 1929, after extensive research on electroencephalograms — obtained using a device he invented that recorded electronic brain impulses through a grid of conductors worn on his head — he assumed that the brain is always in a “state of significant activity” even when people sleep and relax. Although his colleagues recognized that some parts of the brain and spinal cord could work without respite to regulate the functioning of the lungs and the heart, they believed that if a person does not focus on a specific mental task, his brain is almost completely turned off; and any activity recorded by an EEG or other device at this time should be random noise. At first, the development of fMRI in the early 1990s even confirmed this theory of a lean brain, switching its sections on and off as needed. By tracking the blood currents in the brain, fMRI showed that different neural circuits became particularly active during the execution of various intellectual tasks, and caused energetic replenishment in the form of additional reserves of blood rich in oxygen and glucose.
However, by the mid-1990s, Markus Rachel of the University of Washington at St. Louis and his colleagues showed that the human brain is in fact a glutton , constantly demanding 20% ​​of all the body's energy, while energy consumption increased during problem solving or reading a book. only 5-10%. Reychl also noticed that a certain set of brain-scattered sites constantly became less active when the person concentrated on the intellectual task, but began to work actively when he simply lay in the fMRI scanner and allowed his thoughts to wander where he would think. Similarly, Bharat Biswal , now working at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, described exactly the same coordinated exchange of information between different areas of the brain of resting people. Many experts were skeptical of this, but further research from other scientists confirmed that it was not an accident. As a result, this mysterious and complex circuit, reviving when people dream of something of their own, became known as the network of passive brain mode (DPR; default mode network , DMN). Over the past five years, it has been established that DSS is just one of no less than five different rest state neural networks (NRS) - circuits related to vision, hearing, movement, attention, and memory. But so far the AB is one of the most studied and probably the most important of them all.
In a recent thought-provoking review of AB studies, Mary Helen Immordino-Young of the University of Southern California and co-authors claimed that during rest the brain does not rest at all, and that this time is not useless and not anti-productive - on the contrary, it is necessary to maintain mental processes that confirm our identity, it works through our understanding of human behavior and establishes an internal ethical code. All these processes are dependent on ABM. Idleness is an opportunity for the brain to find the meaning of what has been studied before, to bring up unresolved conflicts, and to transfer reflections from the outside world onto itself. During the dreams, we reproduce the conversations that happened on the same day, overwriting our mistakes so that we do not fall into them in the future. We sharpen imaginary dialogues by practicing giving resistance to those who offend us, or we are satisfied with the fictional speech directed against our enemy. We go through all these forgotten notes about half-completed projects and think over the least satisfactory aspects of our life, looking for solutions. We dive into scenes from childhood and transfer ourselves to different versions of the future. We subject our actions to a thorough moral evaluation and reflect on how we have been treated recently with other people. Such moments of self-digging is one of the ways to create an opinion about oneself; this is, in fact, an endless story that we constantly tell ourselves. When consciousness is given a free minute, it dips the pen into memory ink, an experience of sensations, disappointment and desire, in order to continue to write down this continuous story about first-person life.
A related study demonstrates that DM is more active in especially creative people , and some experiments have shown that the mind is working quietly on solving complex problems while our thoughts are distracted - many people experienced this while they were taking a shower. Insights come as if from nowhere, but often they are the result of unconscious mental activity taking place during relaxation. In a 2006 study , Ap Dijksterhuis and colleagues asked 80 students at the University of Amsterdam to select the best car out of four possible. Prior to this, researchers conducted their ranking in size, mileage, maneuverability and other features. Half of the students were given 4 minutes to think about after studying the characteristics of the machines; the rest of the researchers distracted from purposeful reflection, taking their brains anagram. At the same time, the second group made much better decisions. Thus, it is possible to achieve solutions from the subconscious only if the distracting task is relatively simple - solving an anagram or doing usual tasks that do not require special concentration, such as brushing your teeth or washing dishes. The correct distracting action allows DSS to integrate more information from a wide range of brain regions, and it is more difficult to do this than when the brain consciously tries to solve the problem.
During idleness, the brain occupies itself with more mundane, but also important things. For decades, scientists suspected that when an animal or a person does not actively learn something new, the brain consolidates recently collected data, remembers the most vivid information, repeats recently acquired skills, recording them in its own tissue. Many of us watched how, after a good sleep, the words that we tried to learn the day before suddenly remembered by themselves, or how a technically complex melody turns out to be much easier to play. Dozens of studies confirm the fact that memory is dependent on sleep.
Recently, researchers have recorded what may be a physical confirmation of such a consolidation of memory in animals awake during their rest. When studying a new environment - say, a labyrinth - the brain of a rat shows a certain pattern of electrical activity. A little later, when a rat is sitting and resting, its brain sometimes recreates almost identical electrical impulses on the same sets of neurons. The more these neurons interact with each other, the stronger their connections become; secondary and ignored neural pathways are waning. Many studies show that in such moments — known as “sharp waves and ripples” —rats form new memories.
In a 2009 study by Gabrielle Girardeau, now working at New York University, and her colleagues trained the rats to search for snacks, which they constantly placed in the same branches of the eight final maze. After training, when the rats were sleeping or resting, the researchers passed a weak current through one of the groups of rats, which prevented the normal passage of sharp waves and ripples. The second group received electrical stimulation, which did not affect the ripples. As a result, the first group remembered much worse where to look for food.
Several studies have suggested that something similar happens in the human brain. In order to control convulsions, people with epilepsy sometimes undergo an operation during which they are drilled a skull and electrodes are implanted into the brain. In such cases, some patients allow scientists to record the electrical activity recognized by the electrodes — this is a unique situation that allows people not to be exposed to danger solely for research purposes. In a 2008 study , Nikolai Axmacher of Bonn University and colleagues showed patients a set of photographs of houses and landscapes, and checked how well they remembered these pictures after one night. At night, the researchers recorded electrical activity in the rinal cortex, which is responsible for certain types of memory. As expected, the more island-like ripples passed through the rinal cortex, the better the patients could memorize the images. Such ripples most often appeared not at moments of sleep, but when they were lying in bed, awake in the dark, shortly before or immediately after sleep.
A 2009 study conducted by Chris Meall of the University of Birmingham and his colleagues complements the previous one. 24 volunteers, while inside the fMRI scanner, tried to move the cursor in the center of the screen in the direction of the appearing targets with the joystick. Half of the volunteers worked with a simple setup: when they moved the joystick to the left, the cursor moved to the left. The other half had a harder time: imagine what it would be like to work with a mouse, the coordinates of which periodically turn clockwise - instead of going right, it goes down, instead of left - up. All subjects rested in the scanner before and after concentrating on the task.
The activity in the NSP of the first group did not change much from one break to another. But in the brains of those who had to suffer with the joystick, the activity in the two NSPs was more synchronized than usual. This coordination, most likely, reflects the strengthening of the links between these two circuits, as Miall believes, which, in turn, means that during the rest the brain fixed everything that he learned while working with a strange and confusing tool. The brain of the people who worked with an ordinary joystick did not recognize anything new. In the following, not yet published experiment, in which volunteers tried to press the buttons in a certain sequence, as well as in another study, where people studied a new language, scientists came to similar conclusions about how important brain activity is during training.
A very interesting experiment may indicate that the brain is probably trying to use any break in attention-related work to transfer the reins of the NRS. In last year's study, Tamami Nakano of the University of Osaka recorded electrical impulses in the brain of people who watched the clips of the British comedian Mr. Bean. The results showed that the brain can launch DSS literally in the blink of an eye. Every time we blink, the outlines responsible for attentiveness fade out and the LRB briefly turns on. What exactly DGS manages to do in such a short time remains unclear, but this may well turn out to be one of the types of memory consolidation or way of neurons responsible for mindfulness, to rest.
Hard but workable
The dependence of learning and memory, both on sleep and on waking rest, may explain why some of the prominent artists and athletes choose the day regimen with intense workouts and short breaks followed by long recovery periods. Psychologist C. Anders Erickson of the University of Florida spent 30 years studying how people achieve the highest level of knowledge. Based on his own research and other works related to him, Erickson concluded that most people can concentrate on doing work without interruption, in which it is necessary to exceed their own achievements, no more than an hour. Also extremely talented people in many areas - music, sports, writing - rarely work more than four hours a day, and many experts prefer to start training early in the morning when they have large reserves of mental and physical energy. “If you do not limit the daily level of practice to subsequent rest and sleep, allowing people to restore their balance of power,” Erikson wrote, “they often get injured due to excessive exercise and eventually“ burn out ”.
These principles are derived from the rituals of prominent people, but they are useful for almost any person in any profession, including workers from nine to five. Corporate America will hardly ever allow four hourly days, but research shows that to increase productivity, you need to change the current model of a consistent 40-hour work week, shared by just two weekends, and sometimes short holidays.
Psychologists have found that vacations have real advantages. Holidays restore body and mind, keeping people away from work-related stress; placing people in new places, kitchen and social circles, which can lead to the emergence of unusual ideas; giving people the opportunity to sleep well; allowing their thoughts to move from one impression to another, rather than forcing the brain to concentrate on one task for several hours in a row. But a recent comprehensive meta-analysis by Jessica de Blum, now working at the University of Tampere in Finland, shows that these benefits usually disappear in two to four weeks. In one of de Bloom's own research, 96 Dutch workers reported feeling more energetic, happy, less tense and more satisfied with their lives after vacationing in a winter resort from 7 to 9 days. But after one week at work after the holidays, all such feelings disappeared. The second experiment with 4-5 days of rest led to the same results. A little vacation is like a cold shower on a stormy summer day - a refreshing, but quickly disappearing escape from reality.
Instead of limiting people to a single weekly vacation a day or several vacations lasting two to three days, companies should allow employees to take weekends in the middle of the week and encourage them to get rid of working moments in the evenings. In a four-year study, Leslie Perlow of the Harvard Business School and colleagues tracked the working habits of the employees of the Boston Consulting Group. Each year, the company insisted on regular employee rest, even when they did not think they should interrupt work. In one experiment, each team member planned one evening during the week so that he was devoted exclusively to personal matters, even despite the habit of working from home in the evenings.
At first, everyone resisted this, fearing that they would simply postpone work. But over time, the consultants loved this planned time, free from work, because it constantly replenished their desire and ability to work, which in general made them more productive. After five months, workers who experimented with purposeful periodic rest were more satisfied with their work, more focused on long-term cooperation with the company, more satisfied with the balance between work and life, and were more proud of their achievements.
Tony Schwartz, a journalist and CEO of The Energy Project , made a career of teaching people how to improve productivity by changing their attitude toward idleness. His strategy is based in particular on the idea that everyone can learn to regularly renew their reserves of physical and mental energy. “People work so much that they not only have no time left, but they also lose benefits in terms of their health and emotional state,” says Schwartz. - If a resource like time disappears, what remains? Energy".
Schwartz and his colleagues encourage employees to sleep 7-8 hours a day, use the entire vacation, practice nap and do many small interruptions during the day, practice meditation and do the most difficult things in the morning to use the entire attention resource. “Many of the things that we advise are in some sense very simple, and they are known to people - but they move with such tremendous speed that they have convinced themselves that they are not capable of such behavior,” says Schwartz.
At first, the approach of his project was not very much in demand - it contradicts the prevailing myth that the more busy you are, the better - but the organization already successfully collaborates with Google, Apple, Facebook, Coca-Cola, Green Mountain Coffee, Ford, Genentech and a wide range of companies from the Fortune 500 list. To measure the degree of improvement in staff time spent, Schwartz measures their level of involvement - how much they like their work, how much they are willing to exceed the limits of their job responsibilities - these properties are associated with productivity tew. Perhaps this is not the most accurate and direct measurement, but Schwartz says that their strategy is constantly increasing the level of employee involvement to levels much higher than the average, and that Google has liked their activities so much that it has been cooperating with their company for more than five years.
Give reason to rest
Many recent studies support the idea that our intellectual resources are being depleted during the day, and that various rest and rest methods can renew these reserves and increase their volume. See, for example, how even a very short day's sleep revives the brain.
In adulthood, most people get used to sleeping all night and staying awake all day - but this may not be the ideal option for our mental health, and this is clearly not consistent with the historical patterns of the day. Something like the Tolkien hobbits loved to enjoy the first and second breakfast, people who lived without electricity in pre-industrial Europe looked forward to the first and second sleep , between which there was an interval of about an hour. At this time they prayed, relieved, smoked, had sex and went to visit. Some researchers have suggested that people are physiologically predisposed to sleep from 14 to 16 hours, because the brain prefers to switch between sleep and wakefulness more than once a day. In the first century BC. e. the Romans regularly rested in the middle of the day, and called this process meridiari , from the Latin noon. Under the influence of Roman Catholicism, noon became known as sixth (the sixth hour by their hours), time for rest and prayers. Subsequently, the sixth turned into a siesta.
Many studies have found that daytime sleep increases concentration and improves the performance of both sleep deprived people and those who get enough sleep while performing all sorts of tasks, from driving a car to medical practice. In a 2004 study , scientists analyzed data for four years related to road accidents involving Italian police and concluded that a short sleep before night duty reduced the likely number of collisions by 48%. In a 2002 study by Rebecca Smith-Coggins of Stanford University and her colleagues, 26 doctors and nurses, who worked three 12-hour night shifts in a row, slept 40 minutes at 3:00, and another 23 of their colleagues worked without breaks sleep. And although with the memory test at 4:00, the doctors who slept during the day showed the worst results, but at 7:30 they surpassed the second group in the test for attentiveness, inserted the catheter more effectively in the virtual simulator, and demonstrated more attentiveness in the car simulator.
Long sleep works well if a person has time to recover from sleep inertia — a weakness that, in some cases, disappears two hours after sleep. Short sleep breaks in certain situations can be much more effective. An intensive study from 2006, which was conducted by Amber Brooks and Leon Lack from the University. Flinders in Australia compared with their colleagues to sleep breaks of 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes to find out which ones have the most restorative effect. For three years in a row, 24 college students on certain nights periodically slept for only five hours. The next day, they went to the laboratory to take a nap and pass attentiveness tests, during which they needed to quickly respond to images, search for words and copy the sequences of obscure characters correctly.
A five-minute dream barely increased attentiveness, but a 10, 20, and 30-minute increase in students' results. But those who slept for 20 and 30 minutes had to wait half an hour or more until their sleep inertia passed to regain their vigilance, while 10-minute sleep breaks instantly improved performance by as much as longer breaks but without any lethargy after. Brooks and Lack believe that this can be explained by the presence of a " sleep switch " in the brain. One of the clusters of neurons is especially important for maintaining wakefulness, while in the other one certain outlines cause drowsiness. When neurons in one area are quickly activated, they suppress the activation of neurons in another area, thus playing the role of a switch. Neurons in the wakeful circuit can get tired, working for many hours all day, which allows neurons in the sleep circuit to accelerate and initiate switching to sleep. But when a person begins to nod off, then 7-10 minutes may be enough for him to restore the neurons from the waking circuit to their original state.
Although some start-ups and progressive companies provide employees with the ability to sleep in an office, most US employees do not have this opportunity. Walking in nature will be just as effective and probably more affordable to recover from intellectual fatigue — in the evenings, on weekends, and even during lunch, it is helpful to walk along a nearby park, along a river or some other area not suppressed by skyscrapers and city streets. . Mark Berman , a psychologist from the University of Southern California and a pioneer of a relatively young area, ecopsychology, argues that if the hustle and bustle of a typical city draws your attention, then nature restores it. Imagine the difference between walking along Tverskaya Street, where the brain is torn between neon lights, car hooves and crowds of tourists, and a foray into nature, where the mind quietly transfers the focus of attention from birds singing to the murmur of rivers, to the light that draws spots on the earth.
In one of the few controlled experiments on ecopsychology, Berman asked 38 students at the University of Michigan to examine the list of random numbers and try to recall them in reverse order before completing another attention task, in which they memorized the arrangement of certain words in the grid. Half of the students after that walked about an hour along the arboretum for about an hour, and the other walked the same distance along the streets of Ann Arbor during the same time. After returning to the laboratory, the students again memorized and repeated sets of numbers. On average, volunteers walking among the trees recalled slightly more numbers than those who walked around the city. The difference was small, but statistically significant.
In addition to restoring the mental forces necessary for concentration, rest can even increase their reserve - scientists have periodically observed this effect when studying meditation. There are almost as many definitions and types of meditation as there are people practicing it. And although meditation is not equivalent to sleep or idle dreams, many of its styles offer people to retire in a quiet place, close their eyes and turn outside attention inside their minds. One of the techniques of meditation involves focusing on your thoughts, emotions, and sensations at the moment. With this approach, many people keep a close eye on what their minds are busy with, rather than directing their thoughts consciously to the accomplishment of a particular task.
Over the past ten years, this type of meditation has become more popular than ever. It is used to get rid of stress, anxiety and depression. Many researchers admit that research on the benefits of meditation lacks scientific rigor, but today there is already a lot of evidence that meditation actually improves mental health, hones the ability to concentrate and enhances memory. Studies comparing long-meditating people with novices, or with people not practicing meditation, often find that the former show the best results in perception sharpness tests.
In a study from 2009, Sarah van Lewven of the University. Johann Wolfgang Goethe in Germany and colleagues checked the visual attention of three groups of volunteers: 17 people 50 years old, who practiced meditation for a long time, up to 29 years; 17 people of the same age who have not practiced meditation for so long; and 17 young people who have never tried to meditate. In the test on the screen flashed sequences of random letters, among which two numbers were hidden. Volunteers needed to identify both numbers and guess if they did not see one of them in time; It was more difficult to recognize the second digit, because it was hidden by previous images. Efficiency in such tests usually decreases with age, but people who have meditated long ago have bypassed other people of the same age as well as younger participants.
Helen Slagter from Leiden University in Amsterdam and her colleagues used the same attentiveness test in a 2007 study comparing 17 people before and after returning from a holiday home in Barr, where they had been meditating for three months, and 23 volunteers, interested in meditation, and engaged in it for 20 minutes a day. Both groups were equally successful in passing tests before the first group went to a holiday home, but after its return, it surpassed the second in the test results. Judging by the EEG records, 90 days of meditation made the brain more efficient, so it used less resources to perform the same tests.
Behind these improvements are quite profound changes in the structure and behavior of the brain. Many studies have shown that meditation enhances the connection between NSP sites and helps people to more effectively switch between AB and contours that are most active while concentrating on a specific task. Over time, the cerebral cortex of meditating people becomes covered by a more complex system of furrows . The cortex is the outer layer of the brain, which is necessary for many of the most complex mental abilities, for example, abstract thinking and introspection. Meditation increases the volume and density of the hippocampus , a region of the brain that resembles the shape of a seahorse necessary for memory to function; it increases the thickness of the frontal cortex, which controls emotions; blocks typical age-related wilting of areas of the brain responsible for concentration.
But it is not yet clear how quickly meditation can make noticeable changes in the structure of the brain and the intellect. But several experiments suggest that a couple of weeks of meditation or just 10-20 minutes of meditation per day can sharpen the mind. Also, several studies show that daily meditation is more important than the total number of hours of meditation for all time.
In a study from 2007, Richard Chambers of the University of Melbourne gave 40 people ages 21 to 63 years old various tests for operational memory and attentiveness - the ability of a person to temporarily store and process information. Half of the participants underwent tests before an intensive 10-day course of meditation, which they never did, and then passed the same tests immediately after this course. The second half also took tests twice, with a difference of 21 days, but did not practice meditation. After the meditation, people from the first group coped with the tests a little better, and the second group showed no improvement. Similarly, in another study of the same year, 40 Chinese college students showed the best results in attention tests after five days of just 20-minute daily meditation, while their comrades who were not engaged in meditation showed no improvement. A total of 12 minutes of meditation per day helped reduce the impact of military service stress on the operational memory of 34 US Marines in a 2011 study conducted by Amisha Jha, now working at the University of Miami.
“When soldiers have access to a gym, they practice there. When they find themselves somewhere on a mountain, they have to manage with what they have and push in to stay in shape, says Jha. - Meditation can offer something similar for your intellect. It doesn’t need technology and is easy to do. "Ja herself seeks any opportunity to practice meditation, for example, her 15-minute daily trip to and from work.
Similarly, Michael Taft agitates for special intellectual breaks at any of the available moments of the day - when traveling on the subway, at lunchtime, or even when going down to the basement. But he draws attention to the big difference between a positive attitude to an increase in the amount of time to rest and the real embodiment of this idea. “Getting out on nature on weekends, meditating, putting computers off from time to time - we already know that this needs to be done,” he says. “But this needs to be done more diligently, because it really matters.”
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