Transcriber: Robert Tucker
Reviewer: Ariana Bleau Lugo Hello! OK. Well, I'm going to tell you something
you're not going to like, I'm sorry. Actually,
part of you's going to really like it and say, "God please,
listen to this lady!" And the other part is going to say,
"Ah, ah, not me!" And it's this.
Are you ready? We need to rest.
We need to take more breaks. Because, you see,
taking breaks is actually part of life. It's part of being active, it's part of being productive
and having endurance, it's part of being creative, it's part of being happy. So what I hope to convince you
about today in this talk is that you should be taking breaks
on a daily basis, on a weekly basis,
on a yearly basis, and if you do,
you'll be a better person. OK. So we need to take breaks.
But it's not just you. Every person, every plant and animal
on this earth needs to take breaks. And here's why. Here's the Earth spinning on its axis. Imagine, every day we get
the night and the day from the Earth spinning on its axis. It tells us when to be up in this upstate,
where we get to go out in the world and explore and find our riches, and then the downstate, right,
the nighttime, we get to go home, check all these things out and
then go to sleep and dream about them. This happens every day. That's every plant and animal
on the surface of the Earth for 4.54 billion years uses this cycle. That's 1.65 trillion nights! And here's a secret about life. If something happens every day,
since the beginning of time, it's probably important. You might want to think about it. So we all sleep, right?
Nighttime tells us when we should be sleeping,
and we all sleep. So doctors, lawyers, babies,
even President Obama sleeps – hopefully. And so what do we sleep for? Well, science shows us
that sleep is very important for restoring our basic functions. And they know this by looking at people
who aren't sleeping. People who aren't sleeping
have messed up metabolism and their insulin regulation is messed up. And what does that do? Well, it makes them reach
for more high fat, high sugary foods, and makes them gain weight more quickly. And even with 5 nights of sleeping,
say even 5 hours at night, you start looking
like you are prediabetic. So, if you think about the epidemic
of obesity and diabetes in this country, maybe we should also be thinking
about how people sleep. So along with these problems
with metabolism, not sleeping enough
also creates larger risks for cardiovascular disease, depression
and impaired cognition. OK, so a lot of you might be saying,
well, some of you might be saying, "Well, you know Sara, I sleep fine, I get like 7 to 8 hours
of sleep at night." And to you, the few, the proud,
the well-rested, I have this to say, "Listen to this next part,
this might be more relevant to you." So, in my lab I have decided to look into:
Well, how do people who are well rested actually deal with just being awake
all day long? So we brought people into the lab
and we tested them for 4 times in 1 day on a really simple visual memory task. And what you see here
is the graph of their results. We tested them at 9, noon, 4 and 7. And as you can see, their performance
continued to decline. Across each day, with every test session
they got worse and worse. The astonishing thing about this result
is that we tried several different methods to get them to actually get
their performance back to their baseline. In one case we told them, "We'll give you some money,"
which is a big motivator. We say,
"We'll give you 25 dollars for every test session you could get
just back to your baseline." Well, sadly for these subjects
we didn't have to give them a single dime, because they couldn't get
their performance back to baseline. We thought, "OK,
motivation didn't work, what about just letting them take a little break
by just resting quietly?" So, we had them sitting
with their eyes closed between noon and 4. And these people still,
their performance just declined. So what was the one thing we did that got them to actually get
their performance back to baseline? It was taking a nap. So when we gave a nap
in between noon and 4, just about a 60 minute nap.
What happened? Their performance went back to baseline and it stayed there
for the next two sessions. So we thought, that's pretty surprising. This little nap in the middle of the day could make you maintain
your performance across the day. So we decided to replicate this. But
this time we just tested people twice, at 9 and 7. So here is people's performance at 7 pm
if they didn't nap. And here is people's performance at 7 pm
if they did nap. And as you can see, their performance
actually went back to baseline and even exceeded baseline, so
they actually showed perceptual learning, they showed improvement in performance. We were pretty surprised by this
and we thought let's just compare that to people who have a whole night of sleep,
maybe they are going to show even more. And as you can see, a night of sleep
is the same as a daytime nap in terms of this performance. People are actually
getting the same benefit from a nap as a night of sleep. So we thought,
we should test this across a bunch of different
memory and cognitive domains And they showed the same result. In one case we looked at creativity. The reason we did this is
because many creative people have said that they had gained an insight into a problem that they were having
during sleep. Such as Paul McCartney wrote "Yesterday",
Mary Shelley wrote "Frankenstein", Frederic Kekule actually designed
the benzene ring in his dream. OK! So, we thought,
we'll bring people into the lab, give them a creativity test
in the morning, and then either have them have a nap
or no nap in the afternoon, and then retest them again
in the evening. So here's the results. As you can see, when you had no nap you don't have a change
in your creativity. But when you have a nap, you have
a 40% increase in your creativity. So what's going on?
What's happening here in the brain that you can actually have
such increases in memory and heightened creativity? Well, the thing to think about
is that during sleep your brain can do things
that it just can't do during waking. Because during waking we are
constantly bombarded with new information. On a moment to moment basis
we have to interact with the world. But when we sleep, we turn off
the external world -- we go internal. We start to repair our tissue and bone,
we promote growth. We start to protect all
of those new memories that we just learned and consolidate them
into long-term memory. So once these new experiences
are in long-term memory, then we get to associate them with
everything that we know about our lives. The things we think, the things
we believe, the things we feel. So say you're going on a job interview,
or you're writing a song, or you're dealing with a relationship, all those waking experiences that
you have when you go to sleep, you start to play around with them,
you start to associate them with the things that
you already know about life, you start to dream about them
and start the hypothesis test. What if she said this?
What if I did that? What if this happened? And then when you wake up, you have
a new appreciation for the situation. Your brain is refreshed,
the slate is blank, and you're ready to go out there again
and gain new information. And there are these unconscious processes
that go on during sleep, which are these invisible influences,
right? And these are the things
that make us who we are. They make us who we want to be. The surprising thing is that
they can happen in a short, daytime nap. But let's move on to a bigger scale. So now we learned about sleep.
Well, what about something even larger? Like a week.
Let's look at an entire week. How do we do? Well, there's 7 days in a week, right,
there's 5 days of work to 2 days of rest. That's basically like a 2:1 ratio. So, one day of rest,
approximately two days of work. Well, that's kind of the same ratio
as night to daytime, right? So, basically, a third of our lives
we spend either asleep or in the weekend, and the rest of it
we're just working our asses off. OK. Do you see something wrong
with this picture? Didn't I just show you that
across the day we're miserable at actually keeping
our performance at baseline, that we just continue to deteriorate
across the day? Well, why do we then think
that we are going to not deteriorate across a week of 5 days
of long-ass work? That's the question. You know, you begin to wonder
why people look so exhausted by Friday. I think it's because
we're not actually, naturally supposed to be working this much. So what do we do? What do we do in order to not listen
to the internal signals from the down state
that tells us to relax, and we just keep our nose
to the grindstone? Well, we self-medicate, right? We use caffeine at record levels; 90% of North Americans
drink caffeine on a daily basis. Or we go for the harder stuff, right?
Adderall or Ritalin. 75% of college kids say
that they use Adderall, and that number has tripled
in the last 10 years. Something to think about. So we thought about it in my lab,
and we thought, "OK, let's see, let's compare the benefit of a nap to caffeine." We brought people into the lab and
gave them two different kinds of tests. One was a verbal memory task, where basically they just had
to remember a list of words very similar to an exam,
you know, like a vocabulary list. The other one was a motor task
where they just had to type with their non-dominant hand
a sequence of numbers, kind of just a typing task. So they'd take these two tasks
in the morning, then they get split into 3 groups. They get either a nap, they get a dose of caffeine
which is approximating a cup of coffee, or they get placebo,
which is no drug. Then in the afternoon, in the evening,
they get retested. All right. So here is the performance
after a nap on the verbal task. Here's the performance with the placebo. So placebo is always
an interesting category, right, because in this case
it's really the effect of what you think
is going to happen to you when you take that drug. So here's the effect of what you think
is going to happen to you when you are on caffeine. And here is the effect
of what actually happens. Decreasing in performance, right? OK. So that's too bad! So caffeine may not help
for a verbal exam, a memory exam, but let's think of something more simple, like the motor test, which just could be
sort of speeded motor action, could be helped by caffeine. OK. So here is the nap. And so now we have the performance
after a nap. And now we're going to look
at the performance from placebo. Pretty good! Right?
You're performing really well if you think you're going
to get caffeine. Well, here's what happens
if you actually do get caffeine. Ouch. So on two different cases,
caffeine isn't really helping you with what you think
it's helping you with. It might make you feel more alert, but is it actually helping you with
the stuff that a student actually needs, memory processing? And the thing is, none of these tests
have actually been done in Adderall or Ritalin. So we don't really know
what those drugs are doing. OK. But let's just say we've been taking
some caffeine or anything else, and finally we decide,
OK, let's get to sleep because now I've done studying,
I finally get to sleep. The problem is that these drugs
are in your system for a long time, 6 to 8 hours is the half-life
for caffeine. So, what's the next most
reasonable thing to do when you want go to sleep,
I mean besides, obviously, you know, stopping taking all the drugs? Right! Take more drugs! Because now you can take a pill
that will help you get to sleep, and then another pill that'll help you
stay asleep throughout the entire night. I mean, the problem there is
you've got to set your alarm, wake up in middle of the night,
take the pill, and then get back to sleep,
but once you do, you sleep like a baby. I don't know… I just wonder whether
there's some better way to get through the work week. My thought is, if you think
about the weekend as the night, well then, somewhere
in that week, we need to have a nap. My thinking is this: If we really wanted to be as insightful and creative and thoughtful
about our work and what we were doing, we would take
every Wednesday afternoon off. We would work really hard all day long
Monday and Tuesday, knowing that Wednesday afternoon
we were going to get that time off. And during that time we'd be able to do
what we really wanted to do, right? We'd be able to spend more time
with our families, maybe catch up on our sleep,
hang out with our friends and play guitar or take a walk, all of these things
that actually restore us. And then Thursday, Friday
when we hit it back, we'll have two more power days. Doesn't that sound great? Yeah, but there are some people in here
think... ha, ha (Applause) But I know there's some people out there
who don't believe me. Right? You guys
of the naysayers out there who think, "Oh, there's no way. This is just a joke.
She's just saying that." So would it surprise you to believe
that this is already happening? All over the world? So in Europe, the average work week
is no longer 40 hours. The average work week
in France is down to 30, and the average work week
in The Netherlands is down to 25. And this conversation
about decreasing our work week has actually come to the US shores. US economists are predicting that if we actually decrease
the work week, it'll save our sagging economy. Because decreasing work weeks overall actually raises the amount of people
who get to work. More part-time jobs for everybody. And really excitingly,
it actually balances the sex differences in the labor force,
because, finally, women with families,
who cannot actually work 40 hours a week, will get a chance of having more jobs. As well, the idea of decreasing
the work week, or just decreasing the hours
that we work, also has a potential
to slow global warming, because it decreases carbon emissions. So let's hear it
for the Wednesday afternoon break. (Applause) All right.
(Applause) But I don't think everybody should just
run home and take a nap on Wednesdays. I mean I get that naps
are not for everybody, as much as I want them to be. You know, I mean,
take my husband, Will. He hates to nap. When he naps,
he oversleeps, he feels groggy, he feels terrible -- actually,
I have to correct that -- I feel terrible because
I've got to deal with him. So, for him, what he needs to do
is just switch tasks. Do something different. Go play guitar.
Play with our daughter Violet. Do something that's going to
really inspire him. So when he gets back to work,
he'll be refreshed. The point is that taking breaks
comes in all different shapes and sizes. What we want to do is get our mind
and body off one obsessive theme and let those unconscious processes,
those invisible influences take over. I think you'd be surprised
about what you found. So I want to take this
one step even larger. Let's move out into the year. If you think about our year, Americans get under 2 weeks
of vacation a year, when people in Europe
are getting around 5 to 6. And the ridiculous thing is
that Americans are actually decreasing in the amount of vacation days
that they're taking. These are vacation days that
they're paid to take. And it's just silly, because
there's many studies that show the more vacation that you take,
the more productive you are at work, the happier you are in your job,
and the longer you stay. There was even a study that showed,
that the more vacation days you take, the better your performance is
as rated by your supervisor. So, the good news is,
is that the US economy, or the new structure of business,
is actually bringing a lot of these positive things
to the work force, such as taking shorter work weeks,
and unlimited vacation. What?! Unlimited vacation? That's right! There's companies that have
unlimited vacation, and what they're reporting is
a 200% increase in their productivity. It's exciting! Can you imagine working
for an employer who actually gave you the choice,
believed that you should have the choice to decide what kind of break
you should have, how long and when? Because that employer knew that
by giving you that choice, you would actually be more productive? That's a pretty good world that we want
to actually strive to live in, right? OK! So I hope today
I've explained a little bit about why it's a good idea to take a break,
that it's important to do it, and that there's many benefits
taking a break. And I've given you some options
about how you might want to take a break. You could take a nap, you could take
Wednesday afternoon off, you could take a vacation. The question is now,
what are you going to do to give yourself a break. Thanks. (Applause)
