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 begunNaturally, 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!
