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Joseph Jebelli believes burnout and overwork has reached pandemic levels, telling Holly Newson that it kills 750,000 people annually, with three out of five workers struggling to maintain a healthy work-life balance.

His 2025 book, The Brain At Rest, proposes that regular bouts of doing nothing can change your life. Finding time to let your mind wander and take a daily 30-minute nap can make you more creative and efficient, he argues.

In the fourth episode of a six-part podcast series focused on books about the scientific workplace, Jebelli describes the “productivity guilt” he felt during his neuroscience PhD at University College London, where he studied the cell biology of neurodegenerative diseases, followed by a postdoc at the University of Washington, Seattle. “It’s the guilt in which you equate your worth as a human being with your output, with how many hours you're in the lab. If it were up to me, there would be a napping room in all laboratories. We have to get it out of our heads that we’re switching off, shirking, or being irresponsible or reckless. We’re actually helping our brains produce our best work.”

Listen to Joseph Jebelli in conversation with Holly Newson.

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doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-026-00549-1

Transcript

Listen to Joseph Jebelli in conversation with Holly Newson.

Holly Newson 00:00

Welcome to Working Scientist, a Nature Careers podcast. I’m Holly Newson, and in this series, you’ll hear from authors who can help you in your career.

In this episode, I am joined by Joseph Jebelli, a neuroscientist and the author of The Brain at Rest.

A book that examines what our brains do when we rest, why that rest is so important, and how we can practice different types of rest to improve our lives.

Joseph, thank you so much for joining me.

Joseph Jebelli 00:26

Hi Holly, thank you so much for having me.

Holly Newson 00:29

So, to kick off with, I wanted to ask, what is it about our brains that improves with rest?

Joseph Jebelli 00:34

So, so much. So, when we rest, when we have true rest for the brain.

And as I discuss in the book, that could be things like mind wandering, daydreaming, having 30-minute naps throughout the day, spending time just staring out into space, spending time in nature, in green space, and many other...there are many other ways to truly rest your brain.

You know, scrolling on your phone, I’m afraid to say, doesn’t count or binge-watching Netflix.

But we now know that when you rest your brain, your brain activates a network that we call the default network.

And that’s basically a network of neurons that fans out across your brain.

And the really extraordinary thing is that when you activate your default network with rest, and the crucial thing to say here is it only becomes active when you rest.

So it only becomes active when you step away from your work, when you step away from a cognitively-demanding task.

I mean, in neuroscience, it’s actually called the task-off network.

And when you activate that network with rest, we now know you improve your intelligence, creativity, memory, problem solving abilities, decision making abilities, abilities to predict the future, and like quite a lot more.

It even lowers your chance of developing diseases like dementia and depression.

And so, I mean, there’s just an extraordinary amount of benefits and cognitive abilities that are gained when you rest your brain.

Holly Newson 02:08

And you use the term work pandemic in the book.

Why is that a term that you think is is relevant, is useful?

Joseph Jebelli 02:16

Because when you when you dig into statistics, the picture of our working lives and the levels of burnout is really quite worrying.

While it’s true to say that working conditions today are better than they were in the past, that there’s no doubt about that.

When you actually look at the data, we are in a dramatic regression in terms of burnout and overwork.

So just to give you a few statistics.

So we now know that 750,000 people die every year of overwork.

And the important thing to say is that that is a 20% increase since the year 2000.

We know that three in five employees now have a lack of energy, motivation and really struggle with their work life balance. And that is a 29% increase since 2019.

So, you know, things are moving in the wrong direction. There’s a reason we hear a lot about burnout and overwork now.

And you know, it’s, it’s, it’s happening, you know, all over the world, but it’s particularly prevalent, you know, in America and here in England and in Europe.

It’s a little bit better in Europe because they have better regulations, like, you know, your boss isn’t allowed to bother you on the weekends.

But in Japan as well, they have a real, they have a big problem w

Why labs need a napping room to help you work, rest and play