Rest is part of the work
Originally written in Chinese. Translated with AI, reviewed by Gary. Read the Chinese original →
For a while, I used to push myself to read some books every week.
Mostly the "serious" stuff: business, management, startups, investing.
But this year I've wanted to loosen up a bit. I didn't want every book I opened to be about which framework or strategy I could learn.
So lately my reading has been all over the place.
Sometimes literature, sometimes history, sometimes whatever I see, I pick up and flip through a few pages.
Recently I happened to pick up Why We Sleep.
I didn't read it chapter by chapter from the start either. Mostly I flip through a few pages before bed. Chapter two today, maybe straight to chapter six tomorrow.
A few things in it struck me as quite interesting.
Coffee doesn't give you energy
The first is about coffee.
When I'm tired, I usually say:
"Let me have a coffee and top up my energy."
But coffee doesn't actually give me any new energy.
The longer you stay awake, the more your brain keeps sending the signal "you're tired, time to rest". What caffeine does isn't eliminate the tiredness, but temporarily block those signals.
So after a coffee you feel alert, but your body is still tired. You just can't feel it for a while.
It's like having a RM100,000 supplier bill to pay today.
Coffee doesn't suddenly hand you RM100,000.
It's more like the CFO putting the supplier's invoice in a drawer and telling the boss:
"Nothing to see here, carry on with the meeting."
😂
The bill hasn't gone away.
You just can't see it for now.
So coffee doesn't repay your sleep debt. It just puts the debt collector's calls on mute for a while.
Sleep itself is part of learning
The second one I find even more interesting.
I always thought it went:
Learn → brain gets tired → sleep.
But maybe it should be seen the other way round:
Sleep → learn → sleep again.
Sleep the night before gives your brain the capacity to take in new things the next day.
Sleep the following night organises and consolidates what you learned during the day.
So sleep isn't the rest you take after learning is done.
Sleep itself is part of learning.
It's a lot like a warehouse.
If stock keeps coming in every day but you never organise the warehouse, you end up with more and more goods and can't find anything.
The brain is the same.
More input doesn't mean more learning.
It also needs time to organise.
And when you're asleep, the brain isn't simply pressing a save button.
During the day you take in A, B, C, D, E.
At night the brain may start noticing:
A is actually related to C. B can explain D. Some things don't matter and can be thrown away.
Some things that had nothing to do with each other, put together, become a new idea.
I love this line:
By day we collect the dots. Asleep, the brain connects them.
It also explains why sometimes we spend three hours in the office on a problem and get nowhere.
The more we think, the messier it gets.
Go home, sleep on it, and the next day while driving it suddenly hits you:
"Eh, why not just do it this way?"
It's not that you didn't try hard enough yesterday.
It may just be that you kept thinking the same way.
A → B → C, stuck.
Then again:
A → B → C.
Call another meeting, and everyone goes A → B → C together.
After a night's sleep, the brain reorganises the information, and the next day it might suddenly become A → F → C.
And there's the answer.
There's another point in the book I find fascinating.
Some skills, after practice and a night's sleep, actually improve by the next morning.
The thing is, you didn't practise at all during those hours.
On the surface you did nothing, but your brain was still learning.
That really goes against how we usually think about productivity.
We easily believe that only working, reading, thinking, sitting in front of the computer counts as progress.
But sometimes progress happens precisely when you stop.
Sleep shapes judgment
The last one, I think, matters especially for founders.
Sleep doesn't just affect energy.
More importantly, it affects judgment.
When you don't sleep well, you get more emotional and more likely to misjudge things.
When a boss sleeps badly, the most dangerous thing may not be getting a cell wrong in Excel.
It's a small problem suddenly feeling very serious.
A decision that should wait two days suddenly feels like it has to be made today.
A normal low season in the business suddenly feels like the whole company might be finished.
Sometimes the problem hasn't got bigger.
The brain looking at it is just in worse shape.
Sleep's most underrated value isn't rest, or even energy. It's the quality of your judgment.
I used to think:
We rest so that we can keep working.
But now maybe it should be put differently:
Rest is part of the work.