Mental Health: Work while they sleep: Neuroscientists explain why this speech is a trap

The demand to always be producing appears in all places and situations in our society. Whether at school, college, work or even some personal life project. If you didn’t, it’s because you didn’t try hard enough.

On social media, it is common to come across posts from influencers or career coaches that use the term “work while they sleep”. These texts, which are intended to be motivational, focus on the logic of success or failure as just a matter of personal effort and exclude the social, financial, racial and even support network contexts that each person has.

As if that were not enough, the idea of ​​working to exhaustion and not taking time for rest and leisure, in addition to generating disorders such as anxiety, depression and burnout, is also not a good attitude from a neuroscience point of view. Human beings need to relax and sleep well so that memory, learning, creativity and motivation work properly.

“Sleeping badly affects all systems of the brain, including those involved with motivation. If a person sleeps poorly, he feels less motivated and procrastinates more, he becomes lazy. With stress it’s the same thing. Stress changes the way you the brain will calculate the cost-benefit of the tasks, it becomes more difficult to be motivated”, says neuroscientist Andrei Mayer, professor at the Department of Physiological Sciences at UFSC (Federal University of Santa Catarina) and administrator of the podcast Blame it on the brain.

Livia Ciacci, neuroscientist of the Supera method – Gymnastics for the Brain, draws attention to the fact that, in addition to underestimating the importance of rest, this discourse increases the pace of recovery.

“First, there is physical tension and mental fatigue caused by the repetitive routine and the pressure of deadlines. The person maintains a constant demand rhythm and becomes increasingly sensitive to stimuli, leading, for example, to irritation in circumstances where you normally wouldn’t get angry,” he notes.

Ciacci explains that you need to take rest seriously. When this pause doesn’t happen and the person spends all the time trying to handle everything, the mind starts to understand everything as a threat. “This leads to an increase in alertness, the brain tells the body to release hormones, such as adrenaline for example, which makes the muscles contract,” he says.

“Contracted muscles compress nerves, leading to the appearance of pain in the body. Accelerated thoughts begin to alter the quality of sleep because, under these conditions, the brain cannot go through the normal stages of sleep, not being able, in fact, to rest. behavioral changes such as loss of interest in pleasurable things and other symptoms of anxiety appear.”

The neuroscientist says this is a physiological issue. “Resting your body and mind will actually support your development in the short term.”

Below, Ciacci points out five benefits of a rested brain so you don’t fall for the “work while they sleep” trap:

Rest to make better decisions

Several experiments have shown that fatigue makes our decisions bad and this is taken very seriously in some professions, such as airline pilots.

Rest so your memory works better

Emotions and mood directly influence the ability to memorize episodes and information. The more tired you are, the worse your memory will be.

Rest to be more creative

Creativity is an action that depends on background processing, outside of consciousness, and they happen mainly in moments of rest.

Rest and Prevent Alzheimer’s Disease

Maintaining a healthy rhythm of rest and sleep facilitates the processes of cleaning the metabolic waste that remains in the brain tissue after intense mental activity. This prevents disorders and diseases such as Alzheimer’s

Rest and have more friends

A rested brain is more humorous and will be able to socialize better as it will be more likely to see life with excitement and motivation.

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