How does rest affect learning?
Not too long ago I listened to a really interesting podcast with Rich Roll, one of my favourite podcasters and he was interviewing Andrew Huberman, a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University and they spoke about a lot of different things in the field of neuroscience and how the mind affects the body, and vice versa. In amongst all the different topics they spoke about, one thing that really stood out to me was when they discussed the need for rest and how rest can affects learning.
We all know that rest is important and yet it’s the one area of life that we don’t always look after very well. When life gets busy, as it inevitably does, rest is the first thing that gets sacrificed, either by sleeping less or not spending time on downtime activities that reenergise and nurture us.
While we think that we’re doing something good, by focusing on all the things we need to get done, what we don’t always realise is how this lack of rest is affecting us. And this is what Rich Roll and Andrew Huberman get into in this podcast.
However, the main point that was of most interest to me, as an English language teacher, was what was said about the importance of rest and learning and it really got me thinking about how I could start using this with my students when it comes to their own English language learning.
We need time to process…
Andrew Huberman spoke about how, when learning something new, especially as adults, we need to give our brains time to process this new information and it’s best to do this by taking a break after we’ve had a period of study. In the podcast he spoke about taking a short nap, to let the brain integrate what it had learnt. While it might not always be possible to do this, especially in the middle of an English lesson (!), it’s useful information to know and possibly something that language students who study at home can start to implement, by giving themselves regular breaks when they are studying so that they can give their brains the best chance of remembering the information they’ve just learnt.
How can you prioritise getting more rest in your daily life, especially after you’ve been studying / learning a new skill?
Would you like to learn more about how rest can improve our ability to learn a language? If you’re interested in listening to this podcast I mentioned at the beginning of this post, you can find it here. And if you’d like to be kept up to date on when my latest blog posts are published, sign up to my weekly newsletter!
