Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (Book Summary)


Alex Soojung-Kim Pang works as a consultant and he is a visiting researcher at Stanford University. This is an empirical discussion supporting less working time and a bigger grasp of the benefits of active breaks for boosting inventiveness and efficiency. For years, he worked at his top potential, then he went on a sabbatical. Having lots of free time and time for pursuits for some months was not only a grandeur – he rapidly recognized that he could finish a more significant job than anytime before.


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Chapter 1 – Boost your inventiveness and efficiency by getting an early beginning, then for approximately four hours, work.


Somedays, a workday consisting of eight hours does not seem satisfactory. Certainly, you should spend more time working if you desire to be the following bestseller in New York Times, correct?

Umm, probably not. The amount of work is not the consideration here, it is the time you work.

The best time to begin working is early in the day. If you have the desire to boost your inventive efficiency, you require to have a daily schedule that begins earlier during the day. Waking up during daybreak would allow you to mirror your effort with no interruption from everyday things.

Learn it from Scott Adams, the inventor of the Dilbert comic strip.

For the last two decades, he was getting up at 5 A.M. each day. The initial thing he performs is drinking a cup of coffee and having a protein meal. That makes the ideal breakfast to prepare him for the following four hours of doodling, responding to his e-mails, and handling administrative tasks.

After these four hours, his inventive energy is consumed, therefore, he went to the gym for lift weighting.

This schedule paid off a lot. Dilbert has been unionized by 2000 newspapers in 65 nations. Furthermore, Scott Adams has authored five more comic strips, nine nonfiction books, and created a TV show and a movie.

The main reason for his achievement is having the initial four hours to work for an aim, and scheduling a break time after work.

The reason is that it is more productive to work vigorously for a shorter time than working reluctantly the entire day. Furthermore, this provides more spare time to spend on hobbies, walking, or sleeping.

At a music conservatory in Berlin, scholars found out the same thing when they examined students’ studying routines in the 1980s.

Every best teen musician studied for four hours each day and their sleeping time was one hour more than their counterparts. Similar to Adams, they studied most vigorously earlier in the day. Afterward, they slept and studied a bit in the evening.

You can utilize this exercise although you cannot go in and out of the office as you wish. Just be certain that you are completely concentrated on what you are doing earlier in the day and take a break at lunch to renew.


Chapter 2 – Boost your later concentration by walking long or having a midday sleep.


The greatest way to renew from an energy-consuming cognitive effort? You can utilize two scientific techniques to revitalize yourself: taking a long walk or sleeping a bit.

Firstly, walking,

Taking a fresh breath is demonstrated to raise your connection with work and increase inventiveness. This is the reason why it is a great means to tap into your subconscious – a place where the greatest ideas are generated in your brain.

 Consider the 19th-century mathematician William Rowan Hamilton. He invented his most renowned algebra principle during walking around Ireland’s Royal Canal with his spouse. Later he told how he found out the idea, telling that a back influence of mind all of a sudden exposed itself after a light-up.

Walking is associated with inventiveness. Evidence is found in 2015 with research at Stanford University.

The scholars desired to examine students’ “divergent thinking skills” – a kind of consideration that concentrated on producing inventive ideas by looking at as many distinct potential solutions to an issue as one can. The study demonstrated that the subjects that had taken time for walking both outside and treadmill had greater scores than subjects who had sat.

An alternative great means to renew brainpower is sleeping in the middle of the day.

Having a little siesta is not only psychically renewing, but also increases memory and emotional guidance.

With his research, Olaf Lahl, a sleep specialist at the University of Düsseldorf in Germany, found that sleeping boosts the brain’s capability to keep new information. Lahl separated the subjects into two parts and wanted them to remember  30 uncommon words in two minutes.

The first group is allowed to sleep before the test, while the second group did not sleep. The group that slept remembered substantially more words than the other group.


Chapter 3 – Seizing the correct time to stop working and leave do miracles for your inventiveness.


It is told that it is best to leave it while you are upfront. This should be recalled if you work. Selecting the correct time to have a gap time substantially boosts your inventiveness.

Because nothing is poorer than overexerting oneself. If you captured a good scene in your script, do not try to tackle it in the next scene. Keep the next line unfinished and turn back to it the other day. One cannot predict what your subconscious will find until then.

It is crucial if you have found a fresh idea.

Hear it from renowned author Ernest Hemingway. He was persuaded that incubation was crucial for any inventive effort. His suggestion to prospective authors was “always take a break if you can sense what will occur next.”.

Filling your mind with deliberate thought makes you feel exhausted even though you have not begun working. Therefore, allow the idea to rest for some time and rest, or change what you are doing.

However, do not only look at what Hemingway has said.

In later research, scholars at the University of Sydney’s Center for the Mind demonstrated the way selecting the correct time to have a break is advantageous. They wanted two clusters of students to find out possible inventive uses of a paper.

One cluster worked on it without taking a break, however, the other cluster changed to another analytical work before heading back to the prior task.

The second cluster found more creative uses for a piece of paper than the first cluster.

The main part to recall is that only since you have timed up for the day does not show that your brain has timed up too.

Your mind would be working for finding fresh ideas. You should only take a break to provide your brain with time to examine. At your next start at your desk, you will be shocked by the progression!


Chapter 4 – A night of great sleep is important for your brain to prepare for the next day’s work.


Great sleep? Seems as brain sleep!

“Sleep it off” is not just a wonder treatment for bad times at work, hangovers, or separations; it combats brain toxics as well. Sleep assists in renewing the entire body. This is why when you sleep, your body recharges your consumed energy and repairs, grows cells.

Your brain does not stop functioning too. It works at night to reexamine the day’s experiences, retaining memories, and subconsciously working on issues that have been disturbing you.

Everything occurs during distinct cycles of sleep.

Stage 4 and REM intense sleep, for instance, are the most significant cycles considering brain advancement and memory collection.

Stage 4 sleep, in other words, “slow-wave sleep”, is the time your body extricates a growth hormone named GHRH, a hormone for fixing bruises, combat infections, and altering old cells.



REM, on the other hand, is the time your body generates myelin, a shielding fat that is staminal for the healthy working of neurons and memory.

Great sleep would also assist in saving you against different degenerative situations.

A 2013 research conducted at the University of Rochester discovered that mice eliminated the toxin beta-amyloid – a protein associated with Alzeheimer’s – twice as rapidly if they sleep.

Having a great night’s sleep is important for other things as well – such as bad decision-making and important physical ailments linked to lack of sleep.

A 2004 questionnaire brought to light that American pilots that are in service in Iraq do not sleep as much as 36 hours. They had been bombarding opponent locations with sleep deprivation.

These types of exhausting tasks caused all types of accidents. Approximately 64 percent of all deaths in the first week of the Iraq War were because of mishaps and friendly-fire cases, which were because of being tired.

Nighttime employees would face unfavorable influences of lack of sleep as well.

Failing in sleeping would disturb the circadian rhythms, causing a variety of health problems from ulcers to heart disease and breast cancer. More evidenced influences involve obesity, higher percentages of hypertension and diabetes.


Chapter 5 – Have some time to break and refrain yourself from over-working and then heal.


In all companies, there is that person who is timed each day and did not have a vacation day in the past 15 years.

Even though it is frequently shown as a good exemplification of hard effort and devotion, it is not healthy. He dedicates his full potential to the work. As we will discover in the near time, he is potentially close to burnout.

Similar to sleep, vacations are staminal for our health and happiness. Holidays are the times you feel tired and allow your brain and body to heal. 

The data collected by the Framingham Heart Research, longitudinal research between 1948 and 1991 that observed female homemakers demonstrated that subjects that had a vacation every six years were twice more probable to have a heart attack as those that had a holiday twice a year.

Furthermore, there is a questionnaire of 971 workers conducted by Oxford Economics in 2015. Which demonstrated that unutilized vacations are priced to companies at $224 billion annually.

Even poorer are the things that occur in the office. Workers deprive their enthusiasm for work, turn out less empathetic in their relationships with clients, and are more inclined to burnout, depression, and even suicide.



It is clear to observe how significant healing is. Let’s learn the ways to maximize the break times.

If you ask the German sociologist Sabine Sonntag, there are four elements to beware of: relaxation, control, mastery experiences, and mental detachment.

Relaxation is almost all that you consider it to be. It is very easy. Close your eyes and think about a relaxed holiday at the beach or in a spa, and you can understand what relaxation is.

Control is a little bit more complicated. Simply, it is about the time you need to take a break in full to heal. Sonntag highlights that this differs from condition to condition.

Employees with a lot of work, family, and chore responsibilities beyond their control, for instance, require longer rest times than employees with more dominance over their programs.

Mastery experiences consist of cognitively inspiring, difficult, and lucrative tasks that you are great at – consider chess, any cognitive games, or making music with an instrument. They are excellent means to relax since they take you in a lot.

Eventually, detachment. Mental detachment means escaping from your common schedule both physically and spiritually. Having a week in Italy or a long vacation in the mountains eliminates your stress and the possibility of burnout.


Chapter 6 – Workout to make the performance of your brain better.


The thing that Rhodes scholars, Nobel Prize laureates, and footballers all do know? They all grasp the importance of physical workout for the body and brain.

This is why mental thoroughness and athleticism go together.

Look at the football player Byron “Whizzer” White, who ran for the Pittsburgh Pirates and Detroit Lions in the 1930s. Or Pat Haden, a 1970s LA Rams performer, and Myron Rolle, who performed for the Tennessee Titans and the Pittsburgh Steelers between 2010 and 2012.

Each of these three was Rhodes scholars with distinction. White even continued to be a Supreme Court justice.

Academic achievement is frequently linked to fitness.

Marie Curie, a scientist who participated in the 1903 Nobel Peace Prize, and won just herself for Chemistry in 1911, was a passionate cyclist. On her honeymoon in France, she cycled with her husband around France.

Physical workout is excellent for your cognitive health as well. Nelson Mandela realized this better than the majority.



He continued a rough daily fitness diet of a boxer after he was imprisoned on Robben Island by the discriminatory government in 1962. Until his release in 1988, his daily exercise consisted of running for 45 minutes, doing 100 push-ups, and 200 sit-ups.

This was the program that hindered the government from attaining its goal of defeating Mandela. As he said, “I worked better and thought more clearly when I was in good physical condition.”.

The close bond between workout and mental performance has been evidenced many times over and over again.

A 2015 German-Finnish research, for instance, examined the brains of overweight and obese subjects before and after a fitness schedule for three months. The grey and white matter in their brains, which saves the central nervous system, raises in volume as the subjects lose weight.

Furthermore, researchers have discovered that working out assists the body in generating neurotrophins – proteins that are vital to neuron expansion and development.

And there is an instance. Intensive aerobic performance boosts the advancement of smaller blood vessels, which can provide oxygenated blood to your brain much better.

That is great news. A 2012 research discovered that as your maximum oxygen potential raises, so too your episodic recall.


Chapter 7 – Gain a hobby and spend some time doing it.


Did you hear that Winston Churchill’s hobby was painting when he was not shaping the fate of the world? Similar to workout, art is a kind of deep play, more to a clear means to utilizing your inventiveness.

But, what is deep play?

The expression “deep play” originated from Jeremy Bentham, however, a cultural anthropologist named Clifford Geertz made it famous.



It is any task that is cognitively attractive, transforms your concentration, gives a new context for your capabilities, and provides a deep feeling of fulfillment in addition to a link to your previous times.

For Churchill, it was oil painting, specifically landscapes and seascapes.

What he enjoyed the most was how appealing it was to sit to the fore of a black canvas. He wrote a book “Painting as a Pastime”, and wrote there that there was no similar pastime activity that would “more entirely absorb the mind”.

Deep play is a means to test the present capabilities of investigation, strategy, and problem-solving in a low-importance place.

Without any surprise, Churchill thought that painting was similar to military strategy, telling it was “like fighting a battle”. He placed his ideas on it.

However, the deep play gives you space to breathe as well. It is as fulfilling as work but less chaotic.

In other words, you can appreciate the little details. Churchill liked the kaleidoscope of colors, for instance, and had excellent fulfillment in a thing as basic as squeezing paints from their bottles.

He started painting in 1915, during the second year of World War I, a short time after wanting the Allied attack on Gallipoli, Turkey. This was an order that caused huge losses and shaken Churchill’s whole career.

Painting, as he explained afterward, “came to me as lifeblood” at the times he was down to the ground. It was a curing exercise at the times of individual and political shocks.

You may not enjoy painting, however, there are a lot of other things that may provide the same advantages. You can define your activity. For example, playing chess, hiking, or cooking can be rewarding for you, and thus be your deep game!


Book Review


This book has entirely transformed how we view inventiveness. Creativity is something that we fail to recall in our culture that places a lot of importance on overworking. However, spending time for healing and renewing is very significant to an efficient and wealthy life. It is great to consider work and break as equally valuable. Taking a break and having rest add up to us so that we can realize our full potential. Eventually, without suspicion and with evidence, it boosts happiness, health, and increases effective outcomes; therefore, teachers and parents should tell teenagers about the ways to break intentionally, and how to make work and hobbies, workouts, and sleep go together.


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Savaş Ateş

I'm a software engineer. I like reading books and writing summaries. I like to play soccer too :) Good Reads Profile: https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/106467014-sava-ate

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