Now that I’m well in to my 40’s I have come to love napping and mediation.
I don’t nap during work hours but I do have a tendency to doze off when I’m watching TV after I’m done with work. I do have a daily meditation-like ritual, though. This is what I do:
I have lunch at noon and at around 12:30 I lie on my bed for about 15-30 minutes.
During the first 5-10 minutes I “power down” . That is, I let my brain think about whatever it wants to think about.
During the next 5-10 minutes I “shut down”. That is, I let go and just lie there thinking about nothing.
During the last 5-10 minutes I “power up”. That is, I think about what I’m going to do for the rest of the afternoon. If it’s a Monday, that’s usually when I figure out what I’m going to write in this here blog that you’re reading right now.
I started doing this a few years ago and it gives me energy and focus. If you want to try meditation, here’s a pretty good article with some basic tips: https://zenhabits.net/meditation-guide/.
As to napping, here are a few stats and examples from the interesting LinkedIn article, “Why Successful People Spend 10 Hours A Week On “Compound Time”.
Naps can dramatically increase learning, memory, awareness, creativity, and productivity.Pulling from the results of more than a decade of experiments, nap researcher Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, boldly states: “With naps of an hour to an hour and a half… you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eight hour night’s sleep.” People who study in the morning do about 30% better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they haven’t. Modern science confirms that napping makes us not only more productive, but also more creative. Maybe that’s why greats such as Salvador Dali, chess grandmaster Josh Waitzkin, and Edgar Allen Poe used naps to induce hypnagogia, a state of awareness between sleep and wakefulness that helped them access a deeper level of creativity.
TIP OF THE WEEK
Whether it’s napping, mediating, exercise, yoga, or reading a book with a warm beverage, at some point during the day you should find time to recharge. Nobody can go full-tilt all day every day, especially with crazy-hectic schedules like a voice talent who is not only trying to build and maintain a career from scratch, but one who has to likely handle maintaining a home and getting kids & spouses off to school & work. You will be amazed at how much more productive, focused, and energetic you will be!
NEWS AND NOTES
Tuesday, October 24th: my next Edge Studio “Marketing 201” webinar topic will be ‘Keeping Clients Coming Back’. Click here to sign up.
Thursday, October 26th: my next Edge Studio “Business and Money 201” webinar topic will be ‘Time Management’. Click here to sign up.
November 1st to December 15th: ACA Enrollment
HAPPY HAPPYS
Happy World Food Day and Spreadsheet Day!
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
From my village to yours; this is Tom Dheere, The H is Silent, but I’m Not.
Tom Dheere is a 20-year veteran of the voice over industry who has narrated thousands of projects for clients in over a dozen countries. He is also a coach at Edge Studio, voiceover business consultant known as the Voice Over Strategist, and is currently producing the comic book “Agent 1.22”.