I have a habit of writing essential articles for this blog around the start of a new year. This year is no different. This article isn’t terribly long, but it contains a simple wisdom that I believe everyone should know.
If you’ve seen or followed my work, you know that I do a lot. Like, you might know people that are productive or finish many projects, and then you have me. You might also know that I have a hyperactive brain and body, which is partially what allows me to do so many things.
Whenever people discover this, they always say the same thing: “Tiamo, you’re working way too hard! You need to take a break!”
People closest to me might even add worries about burning out, overworking myself, stressing out my body, etcetera.
And so, the past few years, I regularly stated I would “finally take a vacation” or “finally take some weekends off”. Most of the time, I had to revise that statement in the next update to say that I didn’t do any of that :p
In the eyes of others, this seems silly. It’s a running gag that you shouldn’t believe me when I say such things, while they shake their head and tell me I’ll give myself a heart attack some day.
But I am no superhuman. Far from it! I am actually a bit more restricted than others in what I can do, because of a chronic illness and general lack of money. If I was actually overworking myself non-stop, that would’ve shown at some point, wouldn’t it? The only period when I didn’t really do much for a few months, in the past fifteen years, was because of a different reason.
And guess what? Even that period—let’s call it a 2+ month long vacation—didn’t actually replenish energy, or help me “find myself”, or whatever people hope vacations will do. It never worked for me to take a break in that way. Anything close to a free weekend or holiday, or even evening, just made me feel restless and agigated. It drained more energy than it gave.
So what is it? What does it actually mean to “take a break”?
Well, here’s the summary. Of what I instinctively learned to do, many years ago, but now do on purpose and can explain.
Keeping your body/brain healthy requires balance, yes. But balance is not equal to “break” or “doing nothing”. Balance is equal to doing the things you neglected recently.
A first example
I touched on this in another recent article called The Battle For Diffuse Thinking. In a way, that article was just a stepping stone for this one.
In it, I describe how I naturally cycle between Focused Thinking and Diffuse Thinking. And how I recommend people do the same, because it actually rests your brain while leading to greater creativity and problem solving overall.
When focused, you force your thoughts to stay in their line and do/finish the task you set out to do. This is needed to actually hit deadlines, finish projects, prevent my hyperactive brain getting lost all the time.
When diffuse, you just let your thoughts go where they want to go. You follow tangents and interests, you don’t act on anything yet. And if nothing comes to you, that’s also fine. You’re just letting your mind wander and not forcing focus on any specific thing. (This is usually what should happen when meditating, too.) Usually, after hours of allowing that diffuse thinking, I have new ideas and actual great solutions to some problems.
Why does this work? Why can you switch between these two systems, which might technically constitute “working all day”, without getting tired?
Because it’s not the thinking that tires you. Your brain is always thinking anyway. It can’t stop!
It’s the thinking in the same way all the time that tires you. It’s the forcing your brain to stick to one task.
You can do that for a few hours, yes. But then you need to balance it by allowing your brain to work differently.
And then, of course, after a few hours of diffuse thinking, I feel “now it’s time to act again, let’s focus on X”.
Different kinds of rest
When people say “rest” or “relax”, almost everyone immediately assumes it’s about sleeping or sitting on the couch mindlessly scrolling your phone. But that’s not true. It’s just one kind of rest. The only way that scrolling through social media will relax you, is if you haven’t done it (or anything similar to it) in a long time.
To actually keep a balanced life style, you simply need to live in cycles. Do something, then do the opposite to balance it.
Work hard on a focused task, then let your mind wander.
Exercise your upper body one day, then exercise other parts of your body the next.
Maybe do a commercial project now, then switch to something purely for your own enjoyment.
Different scales
As you see, this applies on any scale.
It applies to the hour-to-hour of your day.
For example, after I’ve run 5 kilometers, I am not going to stand behind my stand-up desk. I’m going to sit and rest my legs for a bit. They are tired, I don’t want to overwork them. If I made a longer run that day, I might simply not be able to stand (while working) without feeling my legs won’t hold.
After sitting for an hour or so, however, I feel the need to stand up again. I’ve balanced putting pressure on my legs with resting them. I can stand and move around just fine now, even feel energetic again.
But it also applies on a much larger scale, such as with entire projects.
You might love your hobbies. You might absolutely love playing the piano, for example. But if you’ve only played the exact same piece for a year, you’re going to hate playing it with a passion. The same is true if you only did the same exercises, or played the same type of music or chords.
You might even love your job. You could be in your dream job, but if you only do the same project after the same project, you’re going to burn out. What is objectively not that hard, suddenly becomes very challenging and tiring. Despite liking what you need to do, it can still be hard to actually do it now, as you desperately feel you “need a break”.
That’s why taking a vacation or “doing nothing” for a bit tends to fail for many people. The issue is not physical exhaustion, the issue isn’t that some magical big reserve in your body has been drained. And so resting those things will help a little, but not much.
The issue is always more specific than that. It’s more personal and about the things you’ve been neglecting. To really rest, you need to do the thing that balances what you’ve been doing for the past days, weeks, months, maybe years. And yes, that often means you need to do the other thing for just as long.
During my biggest mental health struggles (as mentioned at the introduction), that was a common saying from therapists. If you’ve been in a traumatizing situation for a year, say, then you can’t expect to heal from it in a day. It usually takes just as long, if not double as long. Because a certain part of your needs or health has been neglected for so long, that you need to rest it as well for a long time. Otherwise you make a dent but don’t actually become balanced again.
They said this to set the right expectations and make you understand that it’s tiny step after tiny step. It’s not like I visited incredibly demotivating therapists :p
A personal example
This article is the reason why I do so many different things, and I will probably never stop.
Yes, it’s generally a bad idea for marketing or commercial success. Time and time again, it’s been proven that you should really sell yourself as a brand, by focusing on one very specific nice thing that fans can find and latch onto. You should make yourself that “cozy romance author” or “that game developer who makes really colorful games about mythology” or any other specific thing. That’s how you get fans, and by only sticking to that niche, you keep them.
I don’t actually have a counterargument to this. It’s simply something you need to accept. I don’t care about money or status in the slightest, and I have always lived extremely minimally, so it was perhaps easier for me to accept. But I know that I work 100x as hard to earn 1/100 of the money. And sometimes that’s a bit hard to swallow, yes, but I’m usually just not thinking about it that way.
Yes, it generally makes it impossible to get really good at one thing. Because you’re spread so thin. People are quick to say “jack of all trades, master of none”. Those people also never bothered to check out the full quotation, as it’s “jack of all trades, master of none, is still better than master of one”. And I agree.
Everyone in society is forced into a specific pigeon hole, into a specific skill set and job, and you’re rewarded for doing so and sticking to it your entire life. We desperately need people to have multiple skills. We need managers that actually understand what the workers are doing. We need the executives who greenlight movies to actually understand the different aspects of what makes a good film. You can easily get a beginner’s grasp on all the components involved in a process or business, then specialize in a few things. And I think that’s a far more efficient and effective way to do anything.
But in return, I can actually take the proper kinds of rest, while being far more productive and making things that I believe provide value.
After making a board game, I write a book again. After writing a lot, I rest myself by doing something else.
Even if I’m a bit stuck in the same mode, perhaps because deadlines force me to write a lot at once, I can switch it up. I can rest from writing “snappy short stories” by writing a longer novel again. I can rest from writing English by writing Dutch. I can rest from writing at all by just making the cover of that book.
And, as usual, people understand this when it comes to physical rest, but not mental rest. People understand that you shouldn’t train the exact same muscle over and over. People know that the best thing for your body is just to move a lot and get into different positions—even if you have a “perfect posture”, holding it for the entire day is terrible.
After doing some intensive training, athletes usually do … more training, but less intensive and of a different kind. For example, you can find many videos of soccer players training for hours, and then hopping onto a hometrainer later. Because cycling at a slow pace is a completely different activity than their other training, this doesn’t take that much effort and is just a nice way to keep the body warm as you cool down.
I say “as usual” because I find the same to be true everywhere.
Learning a skill? When it’s a physical skill, people understand that it just takes practice and play over a longer period of time. To become better at soccer, visit soccer practice and play some games every week. But for any other skills we invented SCHOOL that does none of that and is more than useless.
Want to remember something? People know that you can memorize a physical skill by practicing it a lot, then never forget it your entire life. Such as tying shoelaces. But anything else? People will magically assume they’ll remember it after hearing it once, and nobody ever thinks to attach it to some physical movement to help out.
If school would take all the lessons we learned from physical skills and memorization, it might suddenly actually be effective!
And that’s why, when I say I am tired and need a break, I don’t just stop working. I don’t just stay in bed a few days, or decide to binge watch a show the next days, and drop absolutely everything. Yes, that’s what everyone recommends. That’s the example I’ve seen all my life, and so I am still tempted to do that often.
But no, I just rest the thing I’ve been doing too much, then compensate it by doing what I’ve been neglecting.
For example, sometimes I don’t make any music for days. Either by accident or because of external circumstances. The absolute best thing I can do to rest my brain and body, to take a nice break from working hard, is to aggressively make some music :p It’s not “easy” to play multiple instruments, to flawlessly play hard songs from memory, to improvise non-stop for an hour. That’s definitely work, that definitely takes energy. But because “make music” is a clear need of mine, and I haven’t done it in a while, doing it now relaxes and rests me.
Especially hyperactive people will probably recognize this. It’s death for someone with ADHD to be told to “do nothing” or “relax, take the day off!” We can’t. We relax by doing something else that we haven’t done in a while.
The same is true for my to-do list every day. Yes, I write down what I need to do, and the order of priority. But half the time, I wake up and feel this just isn’t working. I don’t stop working or do nothing that day, no, I simply switch to tasks that I’ve been neglecting. Usually things that I wrote down for later in the week, which are now pulled forward. Or something I wrote down as “do sometime”—that really just means “do when it feels right”.
In this way, I can finish 10(+) books in a year, without feeling tired or burned-out by writing. How I can be this consistent every day. Not by forcing it, or by being a workaholic, or by “grinding”. Because whenever I feel other needs are neglected, I am flexible and move away from writing to balance it. Once those other needs are met, once I’ve rested writing enough, I naturally go back and aggressively write again.
Common kinds of rest
And so we come to the end of this article. I wanted to list common kinds of rest, but it’s such a broad idea and it’s such a personal thing, that I really couldn’t find something to say.
Instead, I’ll just be slightly more specific to give you some more tools.
I think you can break down the “types of rest” a person needs by looking at the biggest pillars that create our personality and body.
- Physical: alternate putting pressure on muscles with relieving them. Alternate sustained cardio exercise with sustained periods of not getting your heart rate up. Get into the habit of switching up your posture, movements, exercises, everything. It’s better to be varied than to stick to a strict regime.
- Mental: as per the first example I gave, switch your modes of thinking. Alternate between Focused Thinking and Diffuse Thinking. Alternate between listening to your heart and problem solving logically.
- Relationships: alternate periods of being alone with those of social contact. Even extraverted people need alone time; even introverted people like social contact.
- Hands: alternate doing some physical task (with your hands) with doing a more mental task (such as most office work or school work). Humans were made to build stuff and use tools with our hands. In fact, our hands are one of only a handful of “upgrades” we have over monkeys, and it’s a far more important one than people think. (Yes, I know shit like this because I write the Saga of Life about the origin of life and the history of humans :p I can whip out the weirdest facts at parties. I am very fun, yes.)
- Sensory: alternate using a sense with not using it. That means, don’t sit in a smelly room all day, but also don’t go a day without smelling a thing. Yes, it’s actually healthy to purposely take in the smell of food, or roses, or whatever. Don’t listen to music all day, but also don’t shut yourself off and sit in silence all day.
- Work: vary the kind of work you do. Vary the skill set, the genre, the approach, the structure, the people with whom you work, etcetera. Even if you have a great workflow/team and it’s all going great, still change it up. Because if you keep your workload the same at all times, you neglect the many other parts of your brain that want to think about different problems or work on different things. (Again, this is a bigger issue with hyperactive people. Neurotypical people are more likely to be absolutely content and not neglecting anything.)
- Emotional: this is an interesting one. I think this is why we love stories so much. Why we read books and watch movies with made-up problems that make people cry. We need to feel a wide range of emotions. Most people know that. They say that it’s “good to have a nice cry once in a while” or to “let out the anger”.
- As I grow older, I learn more and more that the biggest missing piece in my writing is that emotional aspect. My early work focuses too much on funny characters and tough mysteries to solve, but lacks very deep emotions. And yes, if you haven’t read a funny light-hearted story for a while, then this is a great way to balance that need! But stories are too long to stick to only one emotion, or one that you can get (more easily, I suppose) in other ways.
- This doesn’t mean, of course, actually doing stupid stuff or hurting others. You can be angry and go hit a punching bag or something, or just do what I did and write an entire book about why school is hell on earth.
- In a way, as I always said, creativity and self expression is nothing but a way to feel emotions in a regulated, safe way. Many people make art just to be angry, or sad, or show their disgust for something.
Conclusion
If you believe I missed some common type of rest, or have your own thoughts/experiences on this, let me know!
Otherwise, I hope the article has been clear and informative, and that this helps you out. We just need to shift our thinking about what rest, breaks, or holidays mean. We need to shift away from believing “relaxing” always means lounging on the couch, or doing nothing, or doing nothing productive.
To truly “rest”, you simply need to balance your needs in the major areas. If you’ve been doing the same thing physically/mentally/sensory/etcetera for a while, do something else. If you feel tired, figure out what you’ve been neglecting and do that.
And don’t feel bad about neglecting it either. This is just the natural cycle of life. All living things go in cycles instead of being constant. It’s far more healthy to be happy sometimes and sad at other times, than to somehow force yourself to be “stoic” or “neutral” at all times.
It’s absolutely fine to be tired at the end of the day, to the point you can’t focus or do anything anymore, because then you go to bed. That’s the cycle. If you weren’t dead tired, you wouldn’t sleep well, and you wouldn’t actually rest and stay balanced.
The important part here is to work hard on one thing, then work hard on the compensating thing.
I truly believe this will make people both more productive and more rested and healthy. We, humans, are naturally built to mostly stay active all day. Our stamina and flexibility in that regard are those other plusses we have over monkeys. That’s why people say “sitting is the new smoking”. The statement is often ridiculed and called insane—at least in my circles—but it is absolutely true. Humans can easily stay active and change postures all day, and you don’t get tired, you just get fit and feel great. While most people who sit in chairs all day still say they’re tired and struggle to get out of them.
Those were my thoughts. Have a nice start to 2025,
Tiamo