For a long time I didn’t rest effectively. I spent much of my time either in long periods of deep focus, or be a zombie (i.e. play games or mindlessly scroll social media). I greatly preferred the former to the latter so I’d constantly be scheming to enter deep focus. Zombiehood felt pretty good for the first hour after exiting deep focus felt good, and never otherwise. Since zombiehood was the most “restful” thing I knew, this inevitably caused me to draw a connection between resting and failure.
(Possibly this this energetically bimodal lifestyle is what you get when one has a super addictive personality and has to exert a lot of willpower every day to not delete the whole day to addictions? If this were true, what would rest look like for such a person?)
I think the typology I eventually came up with is more applicable for people without a job than those with one. When I had a job, I was still bad at resting, but I didn’t have to think about how to rest effectively because my rest was so constrained (I would force myself to work as hard as possible during the day, come home and be a superzombie for 4 hours, then cram in creative projects / a social life whenever I had energy). At time of writing I do not have a job, and resting badly vs well is more impactful.
Typology
Here’s what I came up with. When I notice I need rest, I need to identify the exhaustion type first
1. Procrastination-guilt
As a person without a job whose ‘work’ is mostly self driven projects, this is actually the biggest source of exhaustion for me.
Solution: Work. Especially the work you are avoiding. Sorry. Here’s the Cheat sheet I use to not procrastinate. It works sometimes.
2. Choice exhaustion
Exhaustion after I’ve been making a lot of choices (e.g. packing to move, doing paperwork where I have to think before filling out the fields). Or in general exhaustion that follows activities that are cognitively intense without inducing flow state.
Solution: flow of some sort where you’re not making choices. For me this might be gaming, coding, art, reading addictive fiction, marathoning TV, or attending a social event that I’m not anxious about.
3. Loneliness
Not a true exhaustion but can manifest as a lower willingness to do tasks.
Solutions: Socializing, talking to an LLM about what’s going on in your life, cuddling someone and chatting, this type of metta meditation.
4. Physically tense/inert
Solutions: warm bath, social dance, challenging yoga.
5. Thoughts racing
I often get this after exiting flow, when I’m too tired to work but am still keyed up. I want to delegate “the contents of my mental narration” to something else, but I have energy to dump.
Solution: something that takes charge of my mental narration, and possibly makes use of the leftover energy. TV, concentration meditation, cooking.