How to rest so well you never feel exhausted

0:00 Okay, guys. I think I finally [music] found it. The most efficient, scientifically proven way to both recharge not only your body, but your mind. And it's all [music] based on neuroscience. Because I just read some of the most fascinating experiments ever done on human exhaustion. If you're always tired, this is going to change [music] everything. I'll teach you how to take a break that actually makes you feel better pretty much instantly. What's the shortest break [music] you can take that actually rests your brain? What you should be doing on weekends to [music] fully recharge and you no longer feel the Sunday scaries. And the exact four-step protocol I use to keep my energy consistently high throughout the day. Which, [music] by the way, makes working 12 plus hours a day actually feel effortless. We'll also [music] use science to answer questions like is a

0:45 power nap even a thing? And if so, how long should it be? And the weird thing you should keep in your room that gives you an immediate performance boost. Because as an ER doctor, I've been through it all. It's not just long days of studying, it's facing the stress of people's lives on the line. Having energy and being able to recover fast is not optional. So, let's start by tackling the most dangerous energy killing thing you own. It's usually next your left butt cheek, but it may even be in your hands right now. No, it's not your crack pipe. It's your phone. When you're tired and you want to take a break, what's the first thing you do? You pull out your phone, right? Unfortunately, this is secretly making you even more tired. Because stimulation is not the same as recovery. Recovery requires the engine to wind down.

1:31 Scrolling does the opposite. It keeps the engine running. Instead of one long sustained beam of focus, you're now forcing yourself to focus on a hundred things much more rapidly. A reel, a post, a comment, a face, a headline. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Which means the networks in your brain responsible for focus never switch off. You're simply juicing it with little dopamine hits. Forcing it to work harder because every time you do focus, you get a small dopamine hit. All those rewards teach you another lesson. Attention should only happen when there's a treat attached. So, you don't merely fail to recover, you're actively training your brain to refuse focus unless it's literally bribed. So, when hard work does come around later and there's no flashing lights, no catchy beats, no

2:17 funny Will Smith spaghetti memes, it looks stupidly boring in comparison. That's why focus on boring things becomes harder because neurologically it literally costs more to focus, which saps your energy even more. So, when you rest by scrolling, you end up depleted twice over. The engine never cooled down and you're quietly sabotaging your future ability to do hard work. This is the cruel little secret loop millions of people are trapped in. It's even more tragic because you end up blaming yourself, thinking it was shitty willpower or bad discipline, when in actuality it was never you. It was just your brain getting cooked over time. So, what are you supposed to do instead? Engage the specific part of your brain actually responsible for rest. It's called the default mode network or DMN

3:03 for short. The DMN is the daydreaming network of your brain. When you stop focusing and let your mind genuinely wander, the DMN shifts into a mode that does real restorative work. Scientists call this a soft fascination or attention restoration theory. Soft fascination is when something gently holds your attention without demanding it. A fire, a moving leaf, a bird, enough to occupy your mind, but never enough to make your brain do actual work. That's why a walk in a forest is nice while a walk through a city sucks. The city is all hard fascination. Sirens, traffic, is this bus going to run me over? Is this dark alleyway going to be filled with muggers? Is this man with a clipboard going to ask me to donate to his dolphin charity? Threats are everywhere. Your mind is trying to

3:49 drink from the fire hose of information and it's tiring. Does that not sound familiar? Is that not what happens when you're scrolling? There's a hundred things to pay attention to, to evaluate, to figure out what's worth paying attention to. Think about even the phrasing there, paying attention. It's something you have to pay to lose, to spend. Whereas when you are in nature, it all just lets you be. You're just gently floating from tree to cloud to bush to fuzzy squirrel. It's so calm. It's energizing because you're no longer paying attention. You're restoring it. In 2008, scientists tested this by deliberately tiring people out with a very boring task. Then they got them to do either a 50-minute walk either through nature or through downtown Ann Arbor, a city. Those who walked through nature had huge gains in focus and

4:36 memory compared to those who walked through the city. Three times the gains in fact. And they controlled for mood to make sure the benefit wasn't just because you felt all warm and fuzzy inside seeing a fat squirrel waving his tiny paw at you or whatever. Fascinatingly, you didn't even have to be there. Even just looking at a poster or a photo of nature gave you a performance boost compared to those who looked at a poster of a city. In fact, the city poster people actually had worse performance after the break. Is that not hilarious? Real recovery has another component to it as well though. It also requires you to calm down the part of the DMN that focuses too much on the self. We've all felt it before. Some nagging thought you can't let go of. Maybe somebody said some stupid thing that hurt your feelings or you're replaying some embarrassing moment that

5:22 made you feel small. You keep on replaying the scenario in your head over and over again. That's rumination. It's not a surprise why this is exhausting. It's simply another form of focus after all, except on the self. We all have this image in our minds of who we are. This is the story we tell ourselves. And when that story comes under attack, we become these incredibly needy people where we spend all our energy defending ourselves. No, I'm not an idiot. You're the idiot for thinking I'm an idiot, idiot. Being on the phone does all this again, right? You're on social media comparing yourself to others. There's likes, comments, status cues. You're wondering if you're good enough, if you're somehow behind. You're annoyed because someone replied to you saying he doesn't agree with you and that's just not okay. I need to be right. I need this person to admit he's the idiot. I need to feel

6:09 good about myself. I need to look good. I need this. I need that. >> [sighs] >> Nobody enjoys being around someone who's needy and incredibly high maintenance, right? It's exhausting, but you're doing the same thing, but to yourself. You're exhausting yourself with your own psychological neediness. Thus, to truly rest, you need your thoughts to flow, to wander, all without this egoic fix. Soft fascination works because it takes the attention away from you completely. You're softly fascinated by the world around you. You lose yourself in the world, in the flow. It's why sometimes focusing on other people's problems is actually incredibly helpful. It takes the spotlight away from yourself. That's why real rest is not the absence of attention, but the absence of compulsive

6:55 attention. But, if you can't get to a magical forest, how do you recover when you only have 10 minutes? You build the state yourself. That was the exact situation I found myself in when I worked in the ICU doing 36-hour shifts. To survive, I developed my very own recovery protocol. I call it ultra rest, which deliberately recreates the recovery state on demand. By the way, if you want to learn all the protocols I use to maximize my day and rewire my brain, join me in level 100, the productivity accelerator built for busy professionals looking for peak performance. There's a reason why I've been able to graduate from Harvard and Yale, be the director of an ER, dance professionally, and build this YouTube channel. It's the same set of scientific performance principles. But, this isn't

7:40 just another course because you also get 24/7 live accountability. Moment you procrastinate, your coach will text you. Ignore that, and they call you. Ignore that, and they call your mom. I'm serious. If you don't make more progress in the next 60 days compared to the entire past 365, we keep working with you for free. First few people to sign up get a bunch of bonuses, too. one-on-one coaching with me and access to the infinite memory system, which teaches you how to memorize and learn anything. It's what I used to crush medical school. Anyway, there are four pillars to ultra-rest. The first one is the pillar of complete bodily relaxation. Before the mind can rest, the body has to rest first. Deep work is physically taxing in ways you don't even consciously register. You're sitting,

8:26 slouching, hunching, scrunching. Your posture's crap. Your jaws clenched, hands curled in these awkward little claws over a keyboard. Your body is a map of knots, sore spots, all which becomes a low-grade distraction that slowly eats away at your focus. So, the first move is to hunt every one of them down and let go. All of it. Let yourself melt completely. Lie flat on the floor and fully surrender. I do a head-to-toe body scan. Whenever and wherever I notice tension, I turn it to jelly. Little by little with each little pass of the body scan, every ounce of tension is found and removed. Then I move on to step two. I call it the pillar of passive flow, which recreates the soft fascination experience. Instead of leaves, branches, and squirrels, you let your mind wander with what's in front of

9:13 you. Whatever your mind drifts toward, a sound, a sensation, the feeling of a shirt on your back, you simply follow it gently and with no effort nor steering. This works best if you're in a non-engaging non-threatening environment because again, you don't want hard fascination triggering the hard focus. Practically speaking, just find the calmest spot wherever you are and let your mind drift. Then you do pillar three, what I call the pillar of no narrative. When you let your mind drift, the drifting has to stay loose, disconnected. Just like in a forest, it's just branch, bird, sunlight, squirrel. There's no underlying story. The instant those snapshots start linking to a plot, the branch, the bird, the oven, oh, I left the oven on, the house, crap, is the house on fire? Worry worry insecurity insecurity

9:59 right? I always do this, what is wrong with me? I'm so dumb. That's how a story starts to form, right? You have slipped out of recovery and into self-rumination. If you're not careful nor aware, all thoughts eventually lead back not to roam but to the self, which is exactly what you're working to prevent. It's not that having a narrative is inherently bad, it's just that the narrative becomes the canary in the coal mine. If a narrative is already starting to form, then you should be aware. Uh-oh, I'm just one step away from potentially forming another story about the self, and those stories are typically the ones that drip with neediness again, which is why if pillar four is important. This is what I call the pillar of no ego. I gently adopt a mindset that I am not me. I'm just an observer sitting inside

10:46 this body, simply watching. These aren't my thoughts or my problems, they're just thoughts, sensations, passing through. The instant you stop being invested in the main character that is you, the instant those stories lose their fuel. I mean, think about all the problems and suffering other people are going through. Objectively, it sucks, but somehow they don't absorb your energy in the same way your own problems do. There's some distance. In real rest, you must treat your problems in the same way. They're there, but they're fundamentally not yours. And while you do all this, if you fall asleep, that's okay. A nap does not mean you did it wrong, it just means your body entered a different state of rest. Speaking of which, let's now talk about the power nap. Is it a thing? And if so, how long

11:32 are you supposed to nap if it is? According to science, a power nap is a great way to rest, but how long you nap changes depending on what you want out of it. If you want optimal alertness, energy, [clears throat] and reaction speed, 10 minutes is the sweet spot. There's an experiment that compared all these different nap times, verified by EEG, which if you don't know are these little probes they put on your head to make sure you're truly sleeping, and found that 10 minutes maximized how alert people felt and how fast and accurately they performed, which is interesting because even though the 30-minute nap contained 12 times more deep sleep and three times more total sleep, it didn't matter. In fact, the longer naps were worse because they made you groggier. This is called sleep

12:17 inertia and takes about 35 minutes to clear. But even then, after the grogginess goes away, the longer 30-minute naps were still no better than the 10-minute ones when it came to performance. But the number changes if you're optimizing for how much you want to learn. Let's say you're studying calculus and you want to better remember what you just studied. If you nap a 60 to 90 minutes, you end up hitting the REM cycle of sleep, which is when short-term memory gets truly printed into long-term memory. In fact, the research shows a 60-minute nap gives you just as much in printing as a full night's of sleep. Which means with just one 24-hour cycle, if you nap 60 minutes and then have a full night's of rest later, you will have had two full nights worth of rest in printing what you just learned.

13:02 Okay, but if you want to optimize your ability to learn, not just imprint what you have learned, research says to flip the order. Nap before you study. 30 minutes is the magic number here. So, the protocol goes, nap, then wait half an hour for any grogginess to go away, and then start learning. Speaking of naps and rest, have you ever wondered what's going on in your brain when you're tired? There are a few competing theories here. One theory is that you use up all the brain's glycogen in your brain cells. By the way, glycogen is the storage form of glucose, which is essential fuel for the brain. So, when you rest, it's theorized that you rebuild this fuel. But then there's the glutamate theory. Glutamate is the brain's main excitatory neurotransmitter, the chemical packet one brain cell sends to another when

13:49 they talk to each other. Researchers put people through 6 hours of hard mental work and found glutamate accumulating in the lateral prefrontal cortex, precisely the region that does effortful self-control. And the more glutamate that built up from hard work, the more people drifted towards lazy, impulsive choices because too much glutamate is actually toxic. And so, perhaps breaks allowed this neurotransmitter to be cleared out. Then there's the glymphatic theory. It states that the brain has a secret cleaning system that only comes online when you rest, specifically when you go into deep sleep. In this state, this network of helper cells in your brain act like tiny hydraulic presses. They expand and contract and create gaps between your brain cells for cerebrospinal fluid flow through. It's

14:35 almost like a mechanical pump that power washes the brain, clearing it of toxins like beta amyloid, lactic acid, and tau proteins. The stuff associated with Alzheimer's disease. So, anytime you aren't getting adequate rest, you're basically skipping the brain's power washing cycle and letting all this gunk build up in there. And that's why rest is something you need to invest in, which is why I use a Manta sleep mask to get a 100% blackout experience. I'll do this even when I nap because the C-shaped cups put zero pressure on your eyes, so it doesn't even feel like you have anything on. And if you really want to get better sleep, I'll use the sound mask with Bluetooth speakers built right into the fabric to put on some relaxing meditations. I'll combo this with Manta's white noise machine to create a 100% optimized audio experience. They

15:21 also have silk masks, which feels like a tiny spa on your face. Anyway, use the link in the description and use code spoonfed study for 10% off. Let's answer a different question now. What is the shortest break you can take for it to count? There was an experiment done where university students sat through a long lecture and were quizzed throughout the talk. One group had a single 10-minute break half way through the talk, while the other group had a 90-second micro break every 10 minutes. Guess who scored better on the quiz? While the long break did produce a dramatic score rebound right after their one break, the gains evaporated almost immediately. But those who took the micro breaks, well, they scored better and kept steady performance throughout. But to give yourself an even better performance boost, there's something you can do during your breaks that changes

16:07 the size and timing of how much energy you get back. To understand, we have to first unpack the concept of energy. There's actually two components to energy: fatigue and vigor. Fatigue is what it feels like to wear a heavy backpack all day. It's backwards-looking. It's what you feel now as a result of all the things you did in the past. Vigor, on the other hand, is forward-looking. It's what am I willing to do next? It's a state of motivation, an ability to engage in future tasks regardless of how heavy your backpack is. Like, put a gun to my head and tell me to do a bunch of push-ups. I don't care how tired I am, I'm going to start doing push-ups. That new energy is vigor. Naps help fatigue, but it doesn't help with vigor. Caffeine helps with vigor, but doesn't help with fatigue. Drinking coffee doesn't make

16:54 you feel less tired. The heavy backpack is still there. It just hides it a bit and gives you this sort of forward, let's move type energy. Ideally, you want your break to do both, which is why I'm about to show you what the ultimate break protocol actually looks like. It's based on experiment that studied students in a 4-hour lecture. Four groups were studied. One group took no break, second group took a 6-minute break at their desk doing whatever they wanted, third group got up and exercised, and the fourth group did a 6-minute body scan meditation. Which one do you think recovered more? The do-anything-at-my-desk group was the weakest option. It didn't touch fatigue. It only raised vigor a tiny bit. So small you almost wouldn't even notice it, which is funny because that's what most people do when they take breaks, right? Interestingly, exercise boosts

17:42 vigor the most dramatically out of all them. It was cheap and fast and very obvious, and it also drove fatigue down in a meaningful way, too. Over time, though, this boost started to wear off, but it was the body scan that was the weirdest because while nothing happened right after the scan, 20 minutes later, fatigue went down more than any other group, even more so than the exercise group. Well, vigor also didn't increase and caught up to that of exercise by 20 minutes, which means the most optimal break may actually be a combination of the two. Exercise breaks give you an immediate energy boost while the body scan or meditation break starts kicking in later to keep you going for much longer. This is exactly what I do now and is why I can work for 12 hours a

18:27 day. Every 50 minutes or so, I'll take a break. I'll start with 3 minutes of an ultra rest protocol, which, in my humble opinion, is a more comprehensive version of the body scan, followed by 5-minute workout to get that immediate energy boost. I do a mix of dumbbells and cardio and yeah, I truly do feel it immediately. There's a clear before and after difference. Way more energy. And then 20 minutes later, the delayed benefits of ultra rest start to come online for that extra energy boost just when the workout starts to fade. Okay, but how do you truly recharge on weekends? According to a meta-analysis of almost 100,000 people, the most restorative thing you could do over the weekend isn't to turn your brain off, it's to do something hard. To understand this, let's talk about the three

19:13 recovery types. The first one is called psychological detachment, where you stop thinking about the work. Second type is relaxation, which is just doing chill things like taking a walk or having a nice bubble bath with your best friend Bob. Third recovery type is actually called mastery, which means doing an absorbing personal challenge that builds skill, like learning the guitar or playing a sport. Most people use the weekends to detach or to relax, right? The first and second types. But the science says that's not enough because while switching off does make you less exhausted, it does nothing for life satisfaction and actually harms creativity and personal initiative. Not to mention is completely useless for the Sunday scaries, the feeling you get knowing you have to go to work on Monday. Having a genuinely demanding hobby where you feel your skills growing

20:00 helped almost every dimension, mood, life satisfaction, well-being, creativity, work engagement, and performance. So, on the weekend, don't just sink into your couch and mindlessly watch Netflix. Sure, relax and have fun, but don't forget to set aside time to grow a new skill. Maybe that's chess, muffin making, hamster adopting, whatever. Just make sure it's something that actually makes you feel like you're leveling up. Speaking of which, if you want to level up as quickly as possible and pick up a skill in just under 24 hours, watch this video next. I'll see you there.