22 December 2021. Rest | Drugs
Rest isn’t an afterthought | The strange case of ecstasy and the disarmament talks
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#1: Rest isn’t an afterthought
I’ve been following the work of the futurist Alex Pang over a few years, as he’s moved from worrying about technology distration, through to writing about rest, through to working less.
He has a useful guide to rest in Aeon.
(Photo by m01229/flickr. CC BY 2.0)
He starts with an interesting historical point: that rest used to be regarded as a complement to work, but no longer:
Popular books such as What You Do Is Who You Are (2019) by the venture capitalist Ben Horowitz carry the implication that being and doing are synonymous. Busyness is a badge of honour, even a sign of moral superiority. Rest, in contrast, is often treated as if it’s passive and pointless. Indeed, I’ve noticed many people hardly think of rest as its own thing. It’s just a negative space defined by the absence of work.
This perspective is completely at odds with recent research:
Recent work in neuroscience and psychology (shows) how it allows us to recharge and stimulate our creativity, and gives us the mental space to cultivate new insights, and even helps us have longer, more sustainable creative lives. Moreover, studies show that good rest is not idleness. The most restorative forms of rest are active, not passive. Further, rest is a skill: with practice, you can learn to get better at it.
He has a whole set of recommendations about what this practice involves, and I’m just going to pick out a few here.
The first is to take rest seriously.
He suggests you need to look at your diary and work out what you’re going to clear to make space for rest:
(S)pend some time now thinking about when and where in your schedule you can start to make and protect some time for quality rest. If there’s no apparent space, what are you willing and able to give up to make the necessary space?
The second is to establish clear boundaries around your work.
The people in high-stress jobs who have good work-life boundaries, take weekends off, and regularly take vacations are less likely to burn out than those who don’t.
In particular, don’t try to work and rest at the same time: that email you write while your daughter is running around the playground is likely to be badly drafted and annoy your daughter. And as with gaining fitness, it helps to do rest with others:
Also, try to schedule regular restful activities with other people, whether daily walks with a spouse or monthly outings with friends – doing so will increase the chances you’ll stay committed to the plans and focused on rest.
You should treat rest as a form of deep play.
He references Churchill’s leisure time spent painting, of which Churchill said that ‘a new field of interest must be illuminated.’
If you are used to keeping busy and hate the idea of slowing down, it might be comforting to realise that some of the most restorative rest is active, not just passive. Rest isn’t stopping.
This might be why business leaders sometimes take up anything from ocean sailing to distance running to climbing. Although that could just be alpha-type ego-driven behaviour.
And, don’t neglect sleeps or naps.
A study of violinists at a Berlin conservatory found that the best students slept the most.
the ‘best group’ (superstars in waiting, as he called them) and the better students (very good, but not superstars) napped more in the afternoons than the third, merely ‘good’ group. The top two groups practised harder, and they appeared to nap more often as a way to recover.
And one more fact: a 20 minute nap gives you the same boost as a cup of coffee—without the crash that follows.
#2: The strange case of ecstasy and the disarmament talks
(MDMA molecule. Image: Jynto, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The only thing new in the world is the history you didn’t know. That’s the only possible reaction to a story in the Atomic Bulletin that suggests that two Americans dished out a lot of MDMA (ecstasy) to Russian negotiators before the Reagan-Gorbachov 1985.
The story gets a passing reference in Michael Pollan’s book on drugs, which I have mentioned here before. Rick Doblin was at the counter-cultural Esalen Institute in California, when he met Carol Roslin, who was then working as a consultant on space and missile defense issues in Washington D.C.
The story is that Doblin gave Roslin 1,000 ecstasy tablets—they were still just then legal in the USA—and she put them in a suitcase, and took them to Moscow. The rationale was that MDMA is well known for breaking down barriers between people and creating empathy.
Pollan was sceptical about whether the plan worked. He told Atomic Bulletin,
“I think it’s highly unlikely Rick’s gift reached its intended recipient—surely someone prevents top government officials from taking pills sent by someone in an adversary’s population.”
But Roslin, now 77, says that she knew many of the Russian scientists and defence community personally, so was able to pass the drugs on that way.
And although Pollan is sceptical about whether anything happened, he doesn’t think it is a bad idea:
“The potential of MDMA to mediate conflict seems to me something well worth researching. We know that the drug opens a space in which people can discuss difficult issues without being defensive, and that it promotes an almost instantaneous bond of trust between people. So I don’t think it’s crazy at all, though admittedly untested in the context of arms negotiations or Mideast peace talks. It’s interesting to think what sort of experiment could test these ideas.”
Rick Doblin later founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and he says that you wouldn’t want to make any actual decisions while taking drugs:
“Whatever decisions you make under drugs should be tentative, and you should review them after you’re down from the drugs,” Doblin says. “It’s more about hearing and listening to the other person’s concerns.”
So: we don’t really know whether this happened, or of if it did happen, what effect it might have had. But, given what we now know about psychedelics, it sounds like it could have been a good idea.
Update: I know I’ve been primed here, but no sooner had I written about octopuses yesterday than I saw a story today about plans for a commercial octopus farm, in Spain. Researchers say the plans are “ethically and ecologically unjustified”. But octopuses—although defined as ‘sentient’ creatures—are not protected under EU animal welfare laws because these apply only to vertebrates.
j2t#233
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