Aha, so relaxation IS productive!
Once again, modern science catches up with ancient yoga. The latest good news: working more doesn't make you more productive... relaxing more does.
Yup - "easy does it" is not just a hot yoga instruction; it's a scientific fact.
As athletes understand especially well, the greater the performance demand, the greater the need for renewal. When we’re under pressure, however, most of us experience the opposite impulse: to push harder rather than rest. - Tony Schwartz, author
We love telling you this as you tell us that you missed hot yoga because you had to work overtime and it's tax season and you couldn't leave work til that project was completed and you just had too much to do and not enough time. You blame your busy schedule, and who could blame you? Here's what your life looks like:
You wake up and check your e-mail before you get out of bed. Skip breakfast or grab something on the run that’s not particularly nutritious. Eat lunch at your desk while you're returning calls and emails. Run from meeting to meeting then rush home to make dinner and check homework. Leave work later than you’d like, and you're still check e-mail late into the evening.
You convince yourself that doing all this now means that someday you'll able to relax...until you get up the next morning and start all over again.
You never really get any further and here's why: you've got it backwards....
If you want to be able to manage your hectic life, you need to take more breaks. New evidence states that the more you relax, the more productive you'll be.
In other word, chilling out avoids burnout.
The real culprit in your overwhelment is in not taking time to rest and restore yourself. As you already know, hot yoga - what we call the 90 minute open-eye meditation - is a lovely respite from your schedule and the result: total renewal. Other forms of meditation are also simple solutions; the meditationsI love best are quick and easy 0 Toby Calandra's under-3-minute-Ask and Receive meditations we guide you througn on our Membership site.
Either way, rest and respite is the real answer.
It's understandable why you don't believe this.
The American work ethic is a powerful myth repeated to you from the time you're in Kindergarten. In school, learning means, how many subjects can you cram into each day? Despite your 8 hours in the classroom, you're told that's still not enough: homework, which has gotten to be an average of 3+ hours each night, comes to mean more learning. Make that grade, graduate with honors, go through another four years of college and your reward: the high-paying, high stress job that demands 80 hours of your time each week, some weekends, travel and no time for that 2-week vacation perk. After all, hardworkers are rewarded with more pay and more prestige. And if you're an hourly worker, you're trained to measure your value by hours put in, not by the contribution you make.
More time in + more work output = more rewards. Trouble is, it's not adding up.
A recent Opinion by author Tony Schwartz pubilshed in this week's Sunday New York Times says this:
The importance of restoration is rooted in our physiology. Human beings aren’t designed to expend energy continuously. Rather, we’re meant to pulse between spending and recovering energy.
Our bodies regularly tell us to take a break, but we often override these signals and instead stoke ourselves up with caffeine, sugar and our own emergency reserves — the stress hormones adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol.
Ever wonder why our Hot Yoga classes are 90 minutes long and why we take Savasana breaks so often after pushing to your max in a pose?
In the 1950s, the researchers William Dement and Nathaniel Kleitman discovered that we sleep in cycles of roughly 90 minutes, moving from light to deep sleep and back out again.... during the day we move from a state of alertness progressively into physiological fatigue approximately every 90 minutes....
Working in 90-minute intervals turns out to be a prescription for maximizing productivity....
Ahhh, hot yoga. When we tell you each class is 90 minute, there's a method to the madness. When we instruct you to to stand still between the poses, know that doing nothing is paying you back big time. And when we encorage you to stay afterwards for a nice long Final Savasana, don't tear-ass out of the hot yoga room, here's why:
In another scientific studio, doctors concluded that in order “To maximize gains from long-term practice, individuals must avoid exhaustion and must ....completely recover on a daily or weekly basis.”
Rhonda Uretzky, E-RYT
Reader Comments (1)
Gosh this makes so much sense; everything you do goes better when you're relaxed. Even procrastination is your body's attempt to make you wait for the right time - a more relaxed time - to do those things your mind is saying you must do NOW. Procrastination - like all your feelings - is a GOOD thing, and it can slow you down and help you relax if you go with it.