Alexander Laryanovsky led first regional and then international development at Yandex for six years. One of his projects was the opening and development of the company’s first “non-Cyrillic” business - in Turkey. In January 2014, Laryanovsky, unexpectedly for many, left Yandex and became a co-investor and managing partner in the online English language learning startup Skyeng.
Recently, Alexander wrote a post on his Facebook page about why and how an entrepreneur should rest.
I believe that one of the most important skills for a manager is the ability to rest. It is even more important than the ability to properly motivate employees, and slightly less important than the ability to delegate.
Postulate 1. I believe that the ability to relax, just like the ability to read or play a musical instrument, is not an innate skill. You need to train yourself to be able to do this efficiently.
Postulate 2. The ability to rest is necessary to be able (internal resources) to achieve what you want.
Postulate 3. Fighting fatigue takes away strength, rather than adding it.
Rules for rest after work
People are so immersed in everyday worries and affairs that after work or on the weekend they do not devote enough time to rest. At the same time, fatigue accumulates every day and it becomes more and more difficult to get rid of it. Following the rules of rest after work will help you avoid turning into a “tortured” person:
- Engaging in vigorous activity (this means physical activity). This is more true for office workers who, upon returning home, lie down on the sofa and relax. Since their work is associated exclusively with mental labor, passive idleness only worsens their well-being. After all, apparent physical fatigue is an illusion. A suitable pastime would be jogging or walking in the fresh air, visiting the pool (water is a great stress reliever), cycling, and so on. Thanks to such actions, the blood accelerates and the person feels a surge of energy.
- Going to a bathhouse or sauna is a sure way to relieve accumulated fatigue. Spa treatments and herbal tea will help you forget pressing problems and worries, refresh your head and prepare for bed. If you add massage to this method, then the next morning the person will feel reborn.
- Reading an exciting book . Here the genre depends on the preferences of the individual. Quiet reading helps to relax the nervous system and get rid of anxious thoughts. Even a couple of pages of an exciting work read can distract a person and provide a good night's sleep.
- Pleasant household chores - why not relax after a hard day? You can devote the evening to preparing an exotic dish or a new cake, taking care of flowers, trying on your favorite wardrobe items, and so on.
- Interesting help to distract and relax : knitting, bead embroidery, origami, drawing and modeling. Such hobbies allow you to relieve accumulated stress and enjoy the results of your work.
Clearly separate real fatigue from fatigue as a way for the brain to avoid solving problems
There are different types of fatigue. I clearly check fatigue in the following way. If I answer the question: “Sasha, they are now giving you a ticket to the Canaries - everything is paid for, including a car to the airport, but you need to collect documents right now (you don’t even need things, they will give you everything). Are you going? — I answer to myself: “Yes, of course,” which means I’m not tired at all and I have strength. If I answer: “No, anything, only later, now I’m not able to,” it means that I’m really tired here. This question can be replaced with “And if the most beautiful girls in the world appear in front of your sofa and start flirting with you,” what would you say to them: “Wow, hello!” or “Oh, girls, have fun for a couple of hours without me, huh?”
If the fatigue is imaginary, then you need to clearly understand what problem the brain is “protecting” me from. Usually people collect all their problems in a heap and then think about how to untangle this lump. This is such a “hot synthesis of problems”: I was late, I screwed up a task, I forgot to congratulate her cat on her birthday, I got stuck in a traffic jam - everything falls together into one lump, and this imaginary fatigue sets in. Sometimes the problems are more serious, but they also gather together.
Recipe: break the problem down into individual problems and think about their solution.
How to relax on the weekend
Rest is an important condition for a person’s psychological and physical health. It’s not for nothing that after the working week a couple of days are provided for “breathing”. To completely switch over and forget about everyday hassles, you need to figure out how to properly relax on the weekend. It’s a pity to waste your free time on routine cooking and cleaning. Therefore, it is better to organize yourself in such a way as to free up these days for doing your favorite and interesting things, such as:
- A trip to the sea and to other cities . This option is not available to everyone, but if possible, why not spend a couple of days sunbathing under the soothing sounds of the sea waves? A change of scenery is the best way to relax, and getting to know local attractions will provide a lot of positive emotions. After the “reboot”, annoying problems and worries will seem insignificant.
- A trip out of town . For example, relaxing at a camp site surrounded by picturesque mountains, horseback riding, roller skating, a picnic in the forest, etc.
- Self-care activities . You can organize a bachelorette party at the spa, get a massage, manicure, pedicure, visit a cosmetologist and hairdresser. There are many options, depending on what a person can afford.
- Shopping . For women, this activity is ideal as a relaxation activity. It’s worth going through your favorite departments, buying new wardrobe items, chatting with friends over a cup of tea.
- Go on a trip . Yes, yes, exactly on a hike: with savages and with tents. Or go on a bike tour to beautiful places. Being in nature generally relaxes, relieves fatigue and fills a person with energy. If you add to this communication with strangers and unusual conditions, you will get an intense, bright vacation.
- Visit cultural events in the city : parks, theaters, philharmonic societies. Go to a concert of your favorite performer or an interesting performance.
- Meet old friends and enjoy fun memories in a cozy restaurant. As an option, sing karaoke or perform a fiery dance in a club.
There are many more ways to have a great rest and forget about “everything in the world” on the weekend. However, to achieve your plans, constant planning is indispensable.
Psychologist's advice: How to learn to relax and not blame yourself for idleness
Text: Anastasia Rubtsova
One day my husband and I flew, it seems, to Istanbul. Or to Kaliningrad. At the airport we got into a conversation with a woman who, very sternly, with a teacher’s intonation, listed us the main attractions of the city. And she added impressively: “How long did you arrive? Just for two days? Oh well. You will have to work hard."
This “work hard” later became our family meme, meaning something that contradicts the very idea of rest. Because we weren't going to go sightseeing. We didn’t want to squeeze the essence of “benefits” out of an unfamiliar city in two days, fill a bag with souvenirs, or travel to all the places indicated in the guidebooks. We just wanted to walk, laugh, eat, sleep, look around. Breathe. Draw our own map of this city, which will include, perhaps, a bridge in the drizzling rain, a funny waiter in a coffee shop, a rusty iron smell in the port, or maybe a ladybug crawling along the wall of a cathedral. Who knows.
I often remember this “work hard.” Usually when I hear stories from friends, clients and colleagues about how they used their long-awaited two-week vacation to go to training and “pull up their language.” Or I listen to a cheerful report about the trip (we rented a car, drove around the entire island, visited all the cathedrals, and in the evening we had time for a concert at the opera, went scuba diving every day, it’s a pity we didn’t get to the Uffizi Gallery, but tickets had to be ordered online for six months!). It almost always ends with the words: “We had a great rest, but somehow I’m exhausted like a dog.” And the dog here is no coincidence.
Any of our trips, any journey is stressful for the body. A small (and for some a rather big) test for the psyche. Let's say your head wants to go to Paris, to the Eiffel Tower and Notre Dame Cathedral. To the head, the words “Paris” and “cathedral” mean a lot: French Gothic, romance, aesthetics and prestige. They mean absolutely nothing to the body. The body reacts to many stimuli in the same way as it would have reacted a hundred, a thousand, and two thousand years ago. It can be imagined - very conditionally, of course - as a dog blindfolded. For a dog, air travel is a shock. And such seemingly trivial things as climate change, temperature and air humidity, new sounds and smells are a reason to be wary, bristle and spend a long time examining an unknown area for a threat to life. On any trip, our “inner dog” is on alert, and the level of anxiety increases several times. This means that a cocktail of adrenaline, cortisol and other stress hormones is released into the bloodstream. By the way, this is why, as a rule, you don’t sleep very well in a new, unfamiliar place or on a trip, especially when you travel alone. And the memories of travel remain so vivid and do not fade in memory precisely due to the high level of stress hormones in the blood.
Sometimes it is very difficult to give yourself the right to relax, not to be “helpful” and “effective”
For some people, the level on the excitement scale jumps to joyful excitement, their “inner dog” is full of strength, does not expect tricks and joyfully jumps along the grass or along an unfamiliar pavement. And for some, anxiety goes off scale to the level of panic - what fun is that? And the former, of course, do not understand the latter; they are accused of laziness, lack of curiosity or mossy conservatism. Although the characteristics of our individual reaction are very much tied to the constitution and physiology, as well as life experience.
However, often the flip side of high levels of anxiety is precisely the idea of “efficiency”, the idea that we need to make the most of every minute, every day, otherwise we will be overtaken by terrible shame and a feeling of worthlessness. To protect ourselves from these feelings, we draw up an intense cultural program - so that there is no opportunity to sit down, so that we can go to the Louvre in the morning, go to the flea market in the afternoon, and go to the organ hall in the evening, and in between all this we also study higher mathematics. And we additionally load the psyche, which needs exactly the opposite.
The nervous system requires rest. This, by the way, explains the desire to return time after time to a familiar, well-studied place, which for some reason is considered a little funny and a little shameful. Although recognition is pleasant, and return is calming. The body does not waste time and effort testing the environment (“dangerous” - “safe”) and immediately plunges into blissful idleness.
Sometimes it is very difficult to give yourself the right to relax, not to be “helpful” and “effective”. This applies to vacations both on vacation and on weekends, weekday evenings and even during lunch breaks. Rest has no correlation with any “should” or any benefit at all. This is pure “wanting”, this is playing and doing nothing. The mantra “there is no word “want”, there is the word “need”” has seeped into our everyday language everywhere: it is repeated by men and women, old and young, even today’s schoolchildren. The depravity of this formula is not that there is a word “must” - this is a fact, in life there are quite a lot of things that have to be done, they are useful and necessary, although sometimes boring. The trouble is that there is no word “want”. In this formula, any desires turn out to be not entirely legal, and “should” turns into an instrument of coercion and violence against oneself. You need to read ten books (“for self-education” or “for work”). We need to go through an intensive course. We need to go on five excursions in two weeks (“don’t lie on the beach like a vegetable”). All this is not rest, but a more or less clever substitution of one “need” for another.
Rest is needed when we are tired, and travel is needed when we are full of energy and thirst for something new.
In the modern world, our working tools are our heads and our own psyche. Simple common sense dictates that tools need periods of rest. The brain and its creative abilities are restored only in peace and idleness. Even fitness trainers like to tell you that muscles grow during periods of rest, not during periods of maximum activity. With the psyche everything is the same. I wouldn’t mix vacation and travel at all. Rest is needed when we are tired, and travel is needed when we are curious, full of energy and thirsty for something new.
Another underestimated factor that is extremely important for relaxation is silence. Our brain habitually filters out the noise around us when we are awake and asleep, and we rarely manage to notice how much there is. We can only guess about this in contrast, when suddenly, in the silence and wilderness, we manage to magically get a good night's sleep, as we never can in the city.
Therefore, every time we plan a vacation (be it a three-week vacation in a foreign country or an afternoon walk in the park), it makes sense to remember our “inner dog.” What is rest for her? Surely a good place to sleep (not an old sagging mattress, not an uncomfortable folding sofa), comfortable clothes and shoes. Maybe more movement, or maybe more silence. Maybe new people, or no people at all. In any case, you shouldn’t try to organize a meeting schedule for yourself during your vacation, like the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and meet with all your friends and relatives whom you haven’t seen for six months. Rest is a time to draw your own map, to restore what is depleted and to reconfigure what is upset. And it’s not always worth using it to plant seven rose bushes, whitewash the walls and get to know yourself.
How to properly rest during working hours
It has been proven that if you devote at least ten minutes to rest and distraction during the working day, this will increase your ability to work and reduce the level of fatigue. Recommendations on how to properly rest during working hours will help you organize this process correctly:
- People in developed companies have the opportunity to take a half-hour nap after lunch. However, there are few such lucky people, so an alternative option is to go outside, take a walk or sit on a bench without thinking about anything.
- When working at a computer, it is recommended to take a break of 10-15 minutes every hour. This is good for vision and overall health.
- Washing or wiping your face with cold water will help to freshen up.
- Ventilation of office space. It is better to do this 3-5 times a day, as the feeling of stuffiness appears.
Regular adherence to these recommendations will allow you to work more efficiently and get less tired.
Prevention
Most people with whom I spoke on this topic know how to “catch” a pre-cold, pre-sickness state, but do not know how to use these sensations to prevent the disease. Although it is obvious that at this moment a small intervention (tea, vitamins, tablets) can help the body cope even before the onset of the disease. Moreover, this state does not last very long: an hour or two or three. And it’s important to be on time.
It's the same with fatigue. If you catch the symptoms BEFORE, then much less strength is required. You need to learn to listen to yourself and catch these symptoms. Personally, for me (the result of training) it looks like this: if my brain starts throwing different ideas at me, “let’s go/go/work out,” I understand - yeah, it’s warning me that fatigue is approaching.
Vacation rules
It’s a shame when, after a long-awaited vacation, a person does not feel a surge of strength and a lift in mood. To avoid such a scenario, it is better to familiarize yourself with the holiday rules in advance. The best option is a change of activity. This does not mean that you need to do renovations or a summer house. It is better to devote this short precious time to receiving new positive emotions and impressions. This could be traveling to distant exotic countries, mastering an unusual craft, such as modeling or drawing, or participating in sports events.
May your days be filled with interesting communication with pleasant people and positive events. The main thing is activity and dynamism. You shouldn’t sit still and do your usual things, otherwise your vacation risks turning into everyday life and routine. Here, too, you can’t do without detailed planning; it will help you not waste time and get the most out of your vacation days.
Adequate rest while on vacation is the key to excellent performance for the next few months.
Actually, the ability to relax
My colleagues know that if you come to me with the phrase “Oh, I’m so tired, can I go on vacation,” then by hook or by crook I will refuse. Coming with the phrase “I’ll take a walk tomorrow because I want to hit the road...” - you can practically get a “Uh-huh.” If a person is tired and could not put himself in order, a vacation will not help him. He needs to be taught to rest. And this is my task - to teach him to rest. A rested employee is an excellent fighting unit. It is beneficial for me that he rest.
Recipe: You need to understand your internal “wants” and create scenarios. “If I have N time to rest, then I will...”. That is, learn to create and implement rest scenarios for 1 minute, 5 minutes, half an hour, an hour, an evening, a weekend, etc. And consciously (until it becomes a habit) use them. Some scenarios work for years, some for weeks, some for one-time use. But the task is to always be able to clearly answer this question (to dream up your imagination, setting a time limit, not a resource limit).
What is important
Rest should not be associated with the same mechanical actions as work. That is, if we work at the computer, then we relax NOT at the computer. Even including “watching movies on the computer” or “playing toys.” It is highly advisable to rest according to this principle. Or, in any case, violate it as little as possible.
The main task of relaxation is to gain as many impressions as possible that are different from work and everyday life. What this means: when the day is busy, it seems like the morning was a week ago. And when it is “empty”, it flies by unnoticed. The more intense the rest, the longer (in sensations) you will rest. That is, if it’s a weekend, then write it down in your mind as closely as possible. If you’re on vacation, don’t do the same thing two days in a row, change it up. If at work, talk (for example) about different topics with different colleagues.
Unfortunately, there are no universal or specialized methods of relaxation. To each his own. But everyone, if they ask themselves this question, can easily figure out how to “relax themselves” in the time they have.
