How to Create Recovery Periods For Your Brain

After you eat a meal, your body needs to enter “rest and digest” mode to “process” what you ate and absorb the nutrients from your food.

After a workout, your body needs rest to repair and rebuild the muscles.

Your brain is also a muscle. But how often do you think about giving your brain a rest?

Your Brain Never Shuts Off

Unlike other systems that need rest and recovery, your brain has no off switch. You naturally have times when you don’t eat or when you’re not moving or exercising. But even when your body is at rest, your brain is often still active.

Many of us keep our brains working overtime: even in our “rest” time, we’re listening to podcasts and audiobooks, taking in information in the background while we do other tasks.

This prevents the brain from getting the recovery it needs. The constant noise exposure can lead to hyper vigilance and a host of physical health issues: chronic inflammation, high blood pressure, higher heart rate, cardiovascular issues, as well as burnout and hyper-vigilance.

To prevent this detrimental impact, we need to create spaces of silence in which our brains don’t have to monitor the ambient sound.

The brain needs these periods of silence to process events, form neural connections, and recognize patterns. Think of them as the corollary to post-workout rest and recovery.

These moments of silence can be formal meditation, but they don’t have to involve sitting still on a cushion.

Where to Create Silence Without Meditation

Here are some places where you can create moments of silence to rest your brain:

• If you typically listen to podcasts or music on your commute, dedicate at least one trip per day to silence.
• Savor a long shower or bath without any external audio inputs.
• Keep the music or podcasts off when cooking dinner or doing dishes or laundry. These activities are the perfect opportunity to allow your mind to wander, activating the brain’s Default Mode Network.
• Take a walk in nature without any external background music.
• Lay or sit in silence for 5 minutes and listen to the absence of sound.

Even just a few minutes each day of savoring silence can be deeply restorative to your nervous system function.