Introduction

I always considered myself an ambitious and hard-working person. Things like education (learning) and self improvement were always important to me. They were so important to the point where it would interfere with other priorities - such as taking care of myself.

A good example of that is my love/hate relationship with algorithmic challenges. I am very fascinated by them and I feel great satisfaction whenever I am able to solve a particularly difficult problem. However, I easily get obsessed by them to the point where I keep thinking about them until late night hours, resulting in me getting only a couple hours of sleep.

When I learn new things, I easily get hooked. In those situations working out or going to sleep seem to me as things that were getting in the way of my self improvement. Sounds like a Workaholic, doesn’t it?

I recognized that is an unhealthy behavior that I need to work on. During my efforts of taming my workaholic tendencies, I learned that it is not a choice between taking care of yourself and self development, but that actually self-care can have a beneficial influence on your productivity.

How Self-Care Boosts Productivity

When I think of self-care, first things that come to my mind are: good quality sleep, regular physical activity, relaxing more (or stressing less). As I started getting myself more educated on those topics and learned about their benefits, I started noticing that all of those actually support my self-improvement efforts and ambitions.

Sleep supports learning - I learned about that from Why We Sleep, where the author goes through different studies showing the benefits of regular, good quality sleep. Sleep helps your memory in two ways: it prepares your brain for learning new things and helps you in not forgetting what you learned.

Physical activity stimulates the brain in a way that allows you to learn faster. In Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, the author describes that aerobic exercise stimulates the creation of new brain cells and skill based exercise with complex movement patterns (such as rock climbing, brazilian jiu jitsu) uses those new brain cells and creates connections between them. As a result there is additional brain infrastructure that can be then reused by your brain when learning or solving problems.

Have you ever felt regret after spending two hours watching Netflix or laying on couch without doing anything productive? After all we all heard the phrase No pain no gain or watched motivational videos showcasing hard working people that worked harder than their competition (or is it just me? lol). Turns out that resting can be as important as working hard.

In Effortless, the author says that to achieve either a mental or physical peak, you need to combine periods of work and rest and even mentions a study where the group that was not resting ended up with worse results than the group that rested regularly.

Dale Carnegie in How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, seemed have a similar opinion - Rest is working on replenishing energy. The author described a story of a construction worker that took more breaks when carrying heavy materials than others. At the end of the day the worker who rested more managed to move a larger amount of materials than the ones who worked harder.

A similar principle is used in strength training methods such as Greasing the Groove by Pavel Tsatsouline where he emphasizes the importance of rest - for example when you work on one arm push ups, you do half the reps that you are capable of (you do not max out!) and then rest for 15 minutes or before doing another set (source).

During periods of rest you can also benefit from your unconscious mind kicking in. The author of Deep Work described a study where a group that was not actively working on a problem ended up with a better decision than the group that spent the same amount of time actively thinking about the issue. Turns out that our unconscious mind is very effective in gathering insights within complex issues - in other words, you come up with solutions to the problems you are trying to solve while taking showers or doing the dishes.

Summary

I used to think that you need to balance between self-care and productivity, that it is one or the other and you can’t have both. Turns out that sleep, exercise and resting apart from their health benefits have a positive influence on your brain and can as a result boost your productivity. Therefore, next time you are working hard on something - go to sleep, go for a run or take a break. Not only will it make you healthier but will support you in achieving your goals.