Sebastian Abbott

My own personal brain drain

Now that I’ve completed my first full week back at work, I can confirm the suspicion I raised in my New Year’s post marking my return to blogging that the freedom and energy to write and blog that I discovered over the Christmas vacation have been severely reduced:

Alongside the where … it’s pertinent to ask, when would I write? Maybe blogging is principally something for the holidays, when I’m rested and have time to reflect and to write.

On the plus side, I am writing about it here!

The brain drain

Why is work - the non-physical work that I do- so draining? What am I doing all day that consumes so much energy, despite mostly sitting about, typing and clicking?

I’m involved in product development and launches, in technical support, in documentation and report writing, with many context and application switches throughout the day. The energy that I burn in these activities can’t be all that much by themselves. It’s the brain itself, I feel, that becomes tired and lethargic - motivation and discipline come in waves, and I do need to drift for a while - to daydream, or make a coffee, or (in the home office scenario) empty the dishwasher.

Mental tiredness is something that is analysed in depth in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow: that the amygdala running our instincts is the low-energy, high-intensity backup to the frontal lobes that take on most of our controlled, “slow” thought. When the mental energy balance is off kilter, decisions can be made faster, because instinct takes over - but they can be made worse, because of confirmation bias, of assumptions and hopes that the decision was good enough to survive.

I go for walks, or sometimes for a run during the course of a day, which does help to refresh things - but, at the end of the day, when the work is done and the children are in bed, I find it difficult to decide to engage in another bout of active thinking.

Audio strain

At the beginning of the first pandemic lockdown and home-office phase, I hadn’t really given too much consideration to my office setup: I had my decent keyboard, mouse and screen at home, but I quickly found that the laptop audio was killing my ears, and contributing to this energy drain.

I went through a sequence of trials with various headphones and found that, for longer web conferences, relatively loose-fitting, wired earbud type headphones were better than my professional over-ear ones, as I could hear myself less, the rest of the house could “seep in”, and yet I still had decent sound across the audio bandwidth (those tinny laptop speakers are a killer).

Slow overthinking, slow overdoing

Admittedly, I’m not the most energetic of workers or writers, or musicians, or fathers, or engineers, or communicators, or researchers, or sportspeople - I’m a mixed-mode “pulser” rather than a constant turbine. I think I’m pretty good at recognising when I need to “dash” or to relax, but stress does build up over time, as does exhaustion: I can have trouble switching off and sleeping, which is cumulative. Before the Christmas break, I recognised my own warning signs of work-life-induced exhaustion: tiredness with an inability to sleep, an unsettled digestive system and occasional lethargy and headaches. That has all receded, thankfully, but the next accumulation has already begun

Naturally, we’re back at the start of the work-vacation cycle, so things aren’t too bad: but the combination of this product launch, the Covid pandemic and everything else does mean that blogging here and over at engiphy.net has already slowed down.

At least it means you don’t have to read too much!

Hit or miss: fun on the mountain bike

Mountain biking (an all to rare occurrence for me these days) is not a purely physical exercise; the brain is given a real workout, too. I’ll concede straight away that it’s by no means an intellectual exercise - I’m not necessarily thinking of anything at all (also a rare occurrence, one to be encouraged). But sometimes I become aware of the sheer mass of calculations that the brain is performing whilst I’m on the bike. It’s thinking almost as hard as the legs are pumping.

Of the many types of calculations buzzing around in my head, the most satisfying for me is the “hit or miss” question. I’m pedalling along a trail, at best upwards, and there’s a rock in the way. Now, I can miss the rock with my wheels simply by steering away from it. But if things are tight and there isn’t much room for manoeuvre, I start wondering if I’m going to bottom out with my pedals - which is usually a worse situation than hitting a rock with the wheel.

Is that pedal going to hit that rock (and who's going to come of worse?)

Pedals don't have big fat tyres or squishy suspension. What they feel, you feel.

With the pedals entering a zone of uncertainty, the brain embarks upon a series of vector-style calculations, that goes something like this:

- my current gearing (including wheel size) is such that
- if I keep pedalling at the same rate
- from this current rotational position
- and with my pedals at this height from the ground, I will
- miss / just miss / hit that rock

If I am going to grind the pedal on that rock, with all the ensuing discomforts, I can take action with a few more calculations:
- at this vertical incline I have sufficient momentum to be able to stop pedalling briefly without completely losing forward motion
- I can change gear to change the rate of rotation of the pedal in question
- I can incline the bike to one side, raising the pedal height
- I can attempt to raise the height of the whole bike (by trying something silly like a bunny-hop)
- I will need to ride over the rock (thereby starting a new set of calculations)

But by far the most satisfying result of all of this is the near miss. It's a confirmation that everything the brain worked out was correct, and that gives it an immense sense of pride - whatever that means in brain-speak (hormones, of course).

So, whenever you're next out on your bike, even if you're out and about in town rather than downhilling, just be aware of and amazed at all the things you don't hit.