| I went on vacation recently to a town with spotty electricity, no cell service for my carrier and barely functioning Internet. I didn't realize there would be no cell service or Internet on my vacation. I brought only books, binoculars, clothes, paper/pen, food and myself. I stayed in a motel/cabin kind of lodging and did a lot of mindless driving. It was somewhat accidental forced unplugging/disconnecting. Between work stress, COVID, and my own slight Asperger's, I struggle to get myself out of mental loops. During this time away, my first few days, my dreams and every moment I closed my eyes was a flush of memories or thoughts of work. It almost felt like my brain was trying to process a backlog of stress and that process was "flushing" those thoughts (or brain chemistry) out. I went hiking, read some, and mostly took it easy, walked around, ate and rested. It took at least 3-4 days of a 8 day trip for my brain to barely start calming down. I had to keep repeating the "simpler activities" and just put out of mind literally everything else. I literally had to "escape" from my normal life entirely. I don't say this to be run of the mill, I literally had this anecdotal experience but a few weeks ago. I felt a little more like I had a handle on myself after this break, but only in a "just almost barely" kind of way. In other words, I had just started to come out of my loops and my fog, when my trip ended. Just like the work had a lingering effect, so did taking the time off. I am back at work and finding myself going back to some of my loops, but my trip gave me a little break and opportunity to take some perspective. Therefore, my non-scientific anectodal recommendation is to study your own rhythm and see how it changes when you disconnect or take a break, especially if it includes an aspect of "slightly forced disconnecting". If you can learn to become more self aware of the rhythms you experience or fall susceptible to, it might give you a chance to subtley shift or do something actively to tweak them in a way that helps you. I think it helped me, at least temporarily. |
Now that I think about it, I believe I also had this effect that when I disconnect after a longer work period, I'll have a sort of re-processing flashback when I finally have time to relax.
Also, it's quite visible with my son. At the end of the day, before going to sleep, he will usually recount his most interesting experience again. Yesterday it was "cows are loud".
I can imagine that it'll help the learning, just like how replaying history with updated state scoring is such an important part of AI reinforcement learning. So maybe the body is post-processing work stress akin to "we successfully escaped from the hungry lion, now let's review how to avoid that in the future".