Justin Sung — How to Rest So Well You Never Feel Exhausted Again
Source: YouTube Channel: Justin Sung (2130000 subs) Duration: 23:11 Views: 408685 · Likes: 19835 Video: Watch on YouTube
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= About Dr Justin Sung = Dr. Justin Sung is a world-renowned expert in self-regulated learning, a certified teacher, a research author, and a former medical doctor. He has guest lectured on learning skills at Monash University for Master’s and PhD students in Education and Medicine. Over the past decade, he has empowered tens of thousands of learners worldwide to dramatically improve their academic performance, learning efficiency, and motivation.
Key Insights
You’re tired. You clicked the video on how to rest. So, you’re probably exhausted. And when you’re exhausted for long enough, life sucks. And I’d love to tell you that you should just get more sleep, and you probably should. But sometimes, that’s not possible, or it’s not enough. For me, I have felt exhausted for almost as long as I can remember, until actually only just the last two or three [music] years. I used to go to sleep tired, wake up tired. Weekend, tired. 2 weeks off, still tired. And to be fair, a lot of it was self-inflicted. I was working full-time while going through medical school and running my business while being a junior doctor. I either worked or studied over 100 hours a week for almost 10 years. And on top of that, I was trying to take care of my family while I was sleep deprived and depressed. And honestly, that’s one of the big reasons why I learned so much about productivity and efficiency. But at a certain point, no amount of productivity was really helping. There was a point a few years ago where my YouTube was blowing up, business was growing, and my family and my loved ones needed me more than ever. And during that time, feeling so exhausted, I realized that I just wanted to feel normal again. I wanted to wake up and feel [music] energized. I wanted to feel like staying awake and being present and having emotional reserve was not a struggle every single [music] day. And like I mentioned, the last two or three years, I think I’ve gotten a lot better at resting. My life didn’t get any less busy. I had the same amount of responsibilities, arguably more. But I sleep well, I wake up rested, I have the energy to do stuff that I want and be there for the people that I love. Happily be there. [music] So, in this video, I want to share with you some of the things that I’ve realized about rest and some of the things that I’ve learned about the science of rest and recovery. And hopefully, this helps you feel like a like a human again, too. So, the first thing that I want to start off with is this realization that rest is not the same as recovery. So, in my early 20s, I was really busy not just with work and study, but also with hobbies. I was exercising a lot. I was spending a lot of time dancing, which was my main hobby at the time. And I remember feeling really busy and tired, but also energized. I was sort of tired in a good way. Now, as I got older, I started deliberately making more time for rest. I started worrying that I might burn out cuz I was doing so much stuff. I was also now in clinical placement working in the hospital. So, I really made it an effort to fit more time to just sort of do nothing and rest. And what I realized, and I only really realized this a few years ago looking back, is that I think that actually made me more tired. Because by making more time for rest, I actually took away time from recovery. So, here’s a little bit of the science. In order for you to achieve recovery, you need to have [music] relaxation. And relaxation in the research is defined as something that has a low level of activity for the system that you’re trying to recover. So, if you’ve been really physically active during the day, then to recover physically, you need to engage in some kind of activity that has a very low level of physical activity. Likewise, if you’ve been busy at work, doing really heavy cognitive tasks, or making lots of decisions, you know, in the household, in the family, taking care of the kids, that’s cognitively draining. So, to recover, you need to do some kind of activity that is mentally really low activity. And so, for me, I back then, I thought that resting was just about not doing anything. As long as I was just not very active, that would be relaxation. And what I ended up filling my time with was just these really low effort tasks, like scrolling through social media, chatting with people, digital window shopping. In my mind, low effort equals relaxation. But, this is actually not
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