#58: Increasing Productivity Through Rest with Nina Nesdoly

“Research still shows that even if you're highly engaged, invigorated, challenged, and excited about your work, it contributes to strain. It wears you down and depletes your bodily resources,” explains Nina Nesdoly, founder of Workplace Clarity. As a work stress and burnout prevention speaker and researcher, Nina’s mission is to spread the word on the benefits of rest for increasing productivity.

Entrepreneurs often end up burned out quickly because they think they need to be working intensively for 8 hours a day or more. In a corporate environment, much of the day is spent on non-work activities, socializing, or sitting in meetings. Most people aren’t going hard at their work and being super focused for more than 3 or 4 hours in a row. If you try to keep up the pace of working intensively for so many hours, you will deplete your body of valuable resources and risk burn out. By incorporating rest into your day, you will be able to be more productive while also being less stressed.

Rest comes in many forms, but the main categories are stress relief and work recovery. Stress relief activities tend to be more active and are meant for getting the tension out of your body, whereas work recovery activities are meant for protecting your resources. Incorporating quick wins like leveraging sensory cues, detaching from work related thoughts, and not waiting until every task is done for stress relief, can be a large help in building opportunities for rest into your day.

Quotes

“Your brain and your body have a finite capacity for productivity. You can only focus and be productive for so many hours in a day.” (1:53-2:03 | Nina)
“Research still shows that even if you're highly engaged, invigorated, challenged, excited about your work, it contributes to strain. It wears you down and depletes your bodily resources.” (2:11-2:23 | Nina)
“When you are resting and when you are not focused on work specifically, your mind can wander, form new ideas, attach existing ideas. Your mind is focused on future planning and ideation, and that's sometimes where we get our best ideas.” (2:49-3:08 | Nina)
“If you take a look at sensory information, what you see, smell, taste, hear, and even feel, the clothes on your body that you associate with work verses that you associate with personal time, you can create differentiations between those. So either get the work cues away from yourself, so that you can really detach, or create contrasting cues in your personal time.” (16:07-16:32 | Nina)
“The goal is to get to a place where rather than feeling like you need to survive periods of your life and your business, you can enjoy them. Your life is not on the other side of some accomplishment or of some milestone in your business, your life is happening now. So long term, our goal is to get to a place where we are consistently enjoying the journey.” (19:31-19:55 | Nina)

Links

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Connect with Nina Nesdoly

Instagram: instagram.com/workplaceclarity

TikTok: tiktok.com/@workplaceclarity

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nina-nesdoly/

Website: www.workplaceclarity.com

Connect with Kiley

Social: @kileypeters + Linkedin.com/in/kileypeters