Cognitive Rest – The Secret to Learning Everything Faster

By now, we all know how important it is to be capable if you want to become a badass. I’ve been hammering that point in every article, after all.

Becoming a badass means building a whole heap of knowledge and learning a whole heap of skills.

Unfortunately, we all know that learning can be a slow process. You don’t learn how to speak fluent Spanish overnight, nor can you become a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu in just a few classes.

But because the learning process is so slow by default, anything that helps you speed that process up becomes a golden ticket.

Which brings me to the point of today’s article, something that most people don’t think about.

Let’s talk about cognitive rest.

Cognitive Rest

Most of us already understand recovery, at least in a physical sense. We all know that we need to recover from workouts by having a break, sleeping, eating some good food, and so on.

But, for some strange reason, we don’t give ourselves the same courtesy for mental workouts.

A deep, focused learning session is extremely taxing for the brain. The levels of intense focus required are pretty much impossible to maintain for long periods.

Because of this, your brain needs breaks. Periods of lower intensity that help it recover and adjust. That’s cognitive rest in a nutshell.

Many of you will be resistant to this, and I get it. Allowing for ‘brain breaks’ can feel unproductive or wasteful on the face of it. But this is just a feeling. It’s not true. These breaks are actually both a vital part of the learning process and something that will help you continue to be productive in the long term, while avoiding any dips in performance. You need to give your brain this space regularly.

Now let’s talk about the how.

How to Do Cognitive Rest the Right Way

To keep things simple, there are 2 key principles I want you to follow:

1. Allow your mind to wander after learning

After a learning session, give yourself 10 minutes of peace. Do something that relaxes you and calms your biochemistry down – in the same way that you’d want to be calm before sleep.

This process will give your brain a much needed rest from the intense focus required during the learning session. On top of that, it’ll help your brain start preparing for the neural rewiring that will occur during sleep, to reinforce the new things you’ve just learned.

As for specific methods to relax yourself in this way, here are a few recommendations:

• Walking

• Listening to slow tempo music

• Anything that you find makes you zone out and daydream (showering is a common one for many people)

Hopefully, you won’t have to fight too hard to make this one happen. Most of us find ourselves doing it naturally, vegging out and resting our tired minds after a long day of grinding.

2. Get a good night’s sleep

The learning session itself is important, of course, but it’s nothing without the sleep you’ll get afterwards. 

This is because that’s when the changes are actually happening in your brain. It’s during sleep that all those little neural circuits are rewiring themselves, to help you remember important knowledge and perform skills more smoothly and effortlessly.

With that in mind, give your brain every chance to make the necessary changes by ensuring you get plenty of sleep.

However, keep in mind that it’s not just about the number of hours you spend in bed. You also need to make sure you’re getting high-quality sleep as well. 

This could be a whole article by itself but here are a few simple tips:

• No alcohol

• Avoid caffeine later in the day (this one should probably go without saying, but here we are)

• No eating within 3 hours of bedtime

• No screens or bright lights within an hour or two of bedtime

• Do something relaxing in the hours leading up to sleep, like reading, stretching, or whatever you find works for you. This will also provide some extra cognitive rest before you’re even asleep.

One Final Talking Point

An interesting concept that I encountered recently is the idea that there’s no such thing as overwork, there’s only under-rest. 

Whether that’s true from a biological standpoint is up for debate but it’s absolutely a useful reframe to keep in your back pocket.

When you think about those times in life where you feel totally burnt out and overwhelmed – it’s not removing some of your workload that would fix it, but adding more rest.

Often, they equate to pretty much the same thing: spending less time at work and more time sleeping or reading your favourite book. 

But the meaning behind it makes all the difference. Overwork is disempowering. It makes people panic, with every minute spent working potentially taking them one step closer to their inevitable collapse.

Under-rest is the opposite. It means each of those minutes of work are fine, as long as you’re prepared to add some rest as well.

I think it’s a much more appropriate angle for all the badasses out there, who will inevitably encounter periods of overwhelm on their journey.

Food for thought.