Your brain is literally shrinking. And you’re probably fine with it.
A few years back, I wrote about the dangers of “hustle porn”, that relentless social media nonsense where everyone’s up at 4 am, smashing cold showers, and grinding themselves into dust. Because apparently that’s winning.
Last week I was listening to The Supercreativity Podcast and neuroscientist Dr. Joseph Jebelli, talking about his book “The Brain at Rest.” It made me genuinely stop and think. Not in a woo-woo, wellness guru kind of way, but in a “bloody hell, this explains a lot” kind of way.
The data’s pretty grim
Globally, overwork now kills 745,000 people a year. That’s up 29% since 2000.
Three in five employees report a lack of interest, motivation, and energy. That’s a 38% increase since 2019.
When you overwork, it literally thins your frontal cortex in the same way that ageing does. It shrinks your hippocampus, which is crucial for learning and memory. Once you hit burnout, it takes your brain up to three years to recover. Three years. Just to get back to baseline.
In Japan, they call it Karoshi, or overwork death.
The tech trap
The tech space is probably one of the most competitive sectors going. Everyone’s chasing the next round of funding, the next product launch, the next quarter’s growth numbers. There’s always someone else building something faster, cheaper, better.
And so we’ve made overwork the default. Founders are expected to be all-in, all the time. Engineers are shipping code at midnight. Product managers are in back-to-back meetings from 9am to 6pm, then actually trying to do their work after hours.
It’s not just accepted, it’s celebrated.
Then lockdown happened, and we all started working from home. Suddenly, there was no commute to mark the boundary between work and life. No leaving the office and actually going home. Your bedroom became your office. Your kitchen table became your meeting room. Work just bled into everything.
It wasn’t workign from home but living at work.
And for a lot of people, it never stopped. We’re years past lockdown now and many white collar workers are still at home or hybrid, and that boundary between work and life is still completely blurred. You finish dinner and check your emails. You wake up on Saturday and knock out a few tasks. There’s no separation anymore.
This is a real threat. We’ve lost the physical and psychological separation that used to exist, and it’s making the overwork problem significantly worse.
What actually happens in your brain
According to Joseph, when your brain rests, it activates something called the default mode network. This network occupies about 20% of your brain. Compare that to the “work” network, which only occupies about 5%.
So when you’re grinding away at your desk, you’re using 5% of your brain. When you rest, you’re firing up 20% of it.
And that 20% is doing the heavy lifting for creativity, memory, problem-solving, and insight.
The shower thing is real
You know how you get your best ideas in the shower? There’s a reason for that.
Your brain is fuzzy when you wake up. It’s unwound. You’re not trying to think about anything in particular. You’re just standing there, letting the water run, mind wandering.
That’s your default network firing up. Blood flow increases to your frontal lobe. Your neurons become more active, forming new connections. You’re quite literally coming up with thoughts and insights that weren’t there before.
The same happens when you’re staring out a window, going for a walk without a podcast, or lying in bed just before sleep.
Jebelli mentions “preloading” which they teach at West Point Military Academy. Two hours before sleep, think about a problem you’re trying to solve. Then forget about it. Let your brain work on it overnight. That’s why you wake up with answers.
What the research shows
The 4-day work week trials in Iceland showed productivity either stayed the same or actually improved.
When you take a 30-minute nap every day, your brain is literally bigger than people who don’t. We’re talking 15 cubic centimetres bigger. That’s the volume of a small plum. Think about the millions of neurons and connections contained in that space.
Jebelli himself experienced this. When he was grinding it out until 11 pm every night, he felt exhausted and wasn’t getting anywhere. When he eased off, worked fewer hours, and actually rested, he became more productive. Not less. More.
The reality
The tech world demands more from people. Longer hours. Faster output. Constant availability.
And the more we give it, the worse we actually perform. Our memory gets worse. Our ability to think clearly declines. Our creativity tanks. We solve problems more slowly.
But we keep doing it because we’ve been told that the harder you work, the more you’ll achieve. That rest is something you earn after you’ve succeeded, not something that enables success in the first place.
We’ve got it entirely backwards.
The solution isn’t another productivity hack or morning routine optimisation. It’s about actually stopping. Taking breaks throughout the day. Going for walks. Spending 20 minutes in a park. Taking naps. Staring into space and letting your mind wander.
Simple stuff. Boring stuff. Stuff that doesn’t look like work at all. Which is precisely why it works. Your executive network can only stay active for so long before it’s exhausted. Your default network needs space to do its thing. And that space looks like doing nothing.
So what then?
The tech world is competitive, the market is tight, and deadlines are real. But maybe we need to stop treating rest like it’s optional. Like it’s a luxury we’ll get around to once things calm down.
Things won’t calm down. They never do.
Your brain either works properly or it doesn’t. And if you’re running it into the ground with chronic overwork, it doesn’t matter how many hours you’re putting in. You’re not performing at your best. You’re just performing at exhaustion.
The hustle culture merchants won’t tell you this because there’s no money in it. But your brain needs rest to function. Not as a reward for working hard, but as a fundamental requirement for actually doing good work in the first place.
And if you’re in tech, where your brain is literally your tool, this isn’t optional. It’s just biology.
What about you?
Are you being proactive about rest, or just hoping you’ll get to it eventually?
Are you doing anything with your teams to actually tackle this, or is everyone just expected to manage it themselves?
Now, I’m a realist. We need to work hard to achieve anything meaningful. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with that. Or that we can nap our way to whatever success we seek. But I think there’s a better way. Maybe something kinder to ourselves.
If you made it this far, congrats, and no doubt you’ll probably be interested in that Podcast episode that I mentioned at the top.
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