How to beat the afternoon slump (Deep Rest)

Most people lose two hours each day to the afternoon slump. It’s a period of low alertness & motivation (or energy) that occurs between 1-3 pm. As it turns out, we can beat that slump and reclaim 10 hours each week.

Yet, most people got this all wrong. They try to push through the afternoon slump — often fueled by late caffeine, which destroys their deep sleep at night). Luckily, there’s a better way.

What to do

When you are tired or unmotivated in the afternoon, get 10 to 30 minutes of deep rest.

Why it works

Humans evolved to sleep twice throughout their 24-hour (i.e., circadian) cycle, once during the night and once during the day. That's why we all reach a circadian trough at some point in the afternoon, usually between 1 pm and 3 pm. 

Even if we get serious about preventing the caffeine crash and taking breaks strategically during the first half of our day, we experience an energetic trough to some degree during the second half. We then feel tired, unmotivated, or both.

Deep rest techniques are amongst the most effective and quickest ways to recharge our energy. In 10 to 30 minutes, these techniques reliably relieve sleep pressure and/or increase motivation. Here are three brutally-effective types.

How to do it

1) The simplest fix for feeling less alert than you’d like is taking a “siesta”. Like sleep at night, brief naps relieve sleep pressure by reducing the level of the “sleepiness chemical” adenosine in your system. According to research by NASA, this improves alertness by 54% and job-related performance by 34%.When taking a nap, both duration and timing matter. Go for naps of 26 minutes or shorter to avoid sleep inertia. Take them no later than 8 hours before bedtime to not compromise your sleep at night. And avoid them entirely if they make falling asleep at night challenging for you.

2) If napping is not for you, use Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s (pictured above) favorite variant of deep rest: “non-sleep deep rest”, or NSDR. NSDR has been found to recover our ability to focus and improve our levels of dopamine, the "molecule of motivation", by 65%.

NSDR, which is also known as Yogic Sleep, combines exhale-emphasized breathing and a body scan. It’s simple: Find a quiet place, lie or sit down, and listen to a script. Stanford’s Prof. Andrew Huberman, who coined the term NSDR, offers free scripts on YouTube. Similar to sleep, NSDR has an “amazing ability to reset your energy levels and focus”, according to Huberman.

3) Neither into napping nor NSDR? Rest assured: you can still beat the slump. The third Deep Rest type is my favorite: “non-focus deep rest”, or NFDF (admittedly, I came up with that term). It’s all about focusing on, well, nothing. Here’s how: set a timer for 10-30 mins, sit or lie down, and close your eyes.

Then, it’s no effort for or against anything. No focus. Whatever happens, happens (h/t to Naval Ravikant). If your mind wants to think, let it think. If sensations or feelings come up, let ‘em. And if you fall asleep, that’s fine, too! In a word, you entirely drop the pass-fail. No matter where your mind goes during NFDR, it will help you beat the slump.

Want to reclaim 10 hours a week?

Habitualize a power nap, NSDR or NFDR whenever you feel tired or unmotivated. You’ll get two days of energy in one.

And if you can think of one person who could benefit from learning how to do the same, please share this post with them:

Until next week,
Christian