It has only been recently that I have learned to identify in myself when I am mentally tired. In hindsight, I can see why, because the fundamental problem is that you have to use the very same mind that is tired to examine whether you are tired or not, and then make a decision from that point onwards. It's the same thing with emotional overwhelm: we vastly underestimate how much inner turmoil we'll have to face, because we assess emotional disturbances from a place of relative composure, the place that allows us to introspect and plan for the future, but the real challenge lies in dealing with the chaos while being submerged in it. It's one thing to know the storm from the outside, (or even from other people's reports of it) but to know it from the inside, and survive it, is another thing altogether.
Coming back to mental tiredness, the signs of when it happens in me are fairly clear now: I find myself unable to think clearly, which means I can hardly write or create anything, and to the extent that I can it is slow, unenjoyable and repetitive. My ability to make decisions grinds to a halt, which makes me prefer activities which don't require meaningful decision-making, like scrolling or playing video games. And overall I sort of feel removed from life, like there is a barrier between me and what is happening. I can't get "into" real life as much, actively engage in it, I'm like a spectator of events, but I also can't enjoy much of it either. This is what mental tiredness looks like in practice to me.
Aside from the fundamental problem I have mentioned, the way that you have to look at the distortions of your own mind with the very same distorted mind, another holdup for me is the simple fact that I was not comfortable with doing nothing, with actively deciding to rest.
This is its entire topic, but it's not hard to see that we live in a world that incentivizes for a form of performative activity, the need to show yourself as someone who works for long hours, perhaps 8, 10 or even 12 hours a day. What few are willing to admit is that most of those hours are wasted because it's impossible to stay mentally sharp for such a long period—from my own assessment of my coworkers, I think few people can actually stay focused for more than 2 hours a day on mentally challenging tasks—which is why in practice, most office jobs consist in a lot of busy work and bureaucratic meetings, and very little actual productivity.
Most people would probably be a lot more productive if they focused on 4 to 5 hours of deliberate work with full attention, and use the rest of their time on a combination of relaxation, socialization and physical activity—walking outside is particularly effective to get new ideas and a fresh perspective on old problems—but alas we adopt a need to work to impress, rather than a need to work to solve real problems, or even work for our own fulfillment. We live in a misaligned world (again, too big of a subject to address here).
What this means in practice is that I am usually quite reluctant to simply drop off all activity and take a mental break, something which I am fully responsible for, I acknowledge. Scrolling on social media is not a break, but it is also not a mentally engaging activity either. It sits in this awkward middle ground where it is neither totally creative nor regenerative, even if I do get some value from it from time to time to think of a new idea.
A real break for me consists in dropping off all mental activities, and doing something like sitting in silence with my eyes closed. Not necessarily meditation, but something similar to it, letting go of the need to think and control anything.
In the past, people didn't need to actively take mental breaks as much because firstly, jobs were more physical rather than mental, secondly, they didn't have an abundance of information to engage with, because newspapers and books provided for bounded forms, and thirdly, they didn't have a constant access to the internet like we do now, which means that they would naturally have mental breaks throughout their day, in the form of 'transitional' activities like walking around, or in the form of more necessary activities, like mothers knitting or cooking. 1
I bring up the past because it shows the obvious but important fact that our environment influences our behavior, most notably in its choice and salience landscape. If your phone didn't have colors or sound, and was somehow 3x more uncomfortable to use, you would tend to use it less, even if nothing particular in you changed, simply because the "landscape" that you inhabit, which informs your tendencies and choices, did change.
Mental tiredness is thus a result of a feedback loop between an individual and their environment, which is hardly a revelation because all chronic patterns in human beings can be described in this manner, but the consequence is that you must understand the problem in time, not merely in any given snapshot of your life.
Just like an inbox filled with unread emails is the result of an ongoing dynamic which results in more emails arriving than are being processed, likewise a chronically tired mind is the result of a life which leads to an accumulation of mental "baggage" which is faster than how it is being processed.
Thus we can tackle the problem of mental tiredness in several directions, any of which can produce noticeable change by themselves. The 3 directions I consider for this problem are: 1) influx 2) processing 3) resting.
§1. Influx is about understanding why the inbox is getting filled so much, (volume) what those things even are (capture), and whether you can filter those down to the things which matter to you (filtering).
§2. Processing is about what you do with your mind throughout the day (again, capture), whether it is aligned with what you care about (direction), and whether you are doing a good job with your energy or not (efficiency).
Influx is about what I 'consume' 2, processing is about what I do. The importance of looking at the latter is that there is a form of activity which leads to more creative energy than simply resting. Energy is not just a finite resource, it is also something you generate, though we of course also have to replenish it, the same way that muscles grow through exercising, but also require rest.
§3. Resting is about recharging the batteries, what you do when you aren't 'consuming' or doing things. This can be very difficult to do because as I have mentioned, we are conditioned to engage in performative activity, even performing for ourselves, and because not-doing requires a different set of capacities than doing. The reason why it can be so difficult to not do is because it forces us to confront things we've been too afraid to feel, which is why people who are perpetually busy tend to have a lot of emotional and relationship problems, because those are precisely the parts in life that require us to feel rather than bulldoze through problems.
This post could not possibly address all of the aspects of even those three parts of the mental loop, because it can get very deep and subtle. An overabundance of mental information for instance can be a defense mechanism against uncertainty and fear in your life. This is why people hoard things, whether materially or digitally. Thus as you examine the influx part of your life, you might find that you struggle deleting and letting go of certain things, and that you need to understand what your resistance against that is.
Processing, what you actually do with your mind, is a massive subject, quite honestly much of project management would fall under this category, and many other things which are beyond simply getting things done, but for now I prefer to keep the mental loop model simple and reduce it to one thing.
One way we can think of processing is that it is a series of pipes, whose size reflects the size of the corresponding project/activitity we are engaged in, and which are transporting a fluid which can be seen as your mental energy. A healthy process is when your mental energy flows well in all of the pipes, when the pipes deliver on things that you care about, and when there is a healthy separation between different contexts.
In that lens, disruptions can happen when:
I think by and large it is good to start optimizing for flow first, and then focus on other aspects later. If you enjoy the things you are working on, then you will naturally want to solve any problem that shows up along the way, and things which you find yourself naturally working on are very likely to be aligned with what you care about to begin with.
The discussion is more complicated in practice because there are systemic problems which can make an activity very unenjoyable—it's hard to enjoy programming with a scuffed IDE for instance—but in practice it's a helpful guideline to focus on flow rather than results at first, because it leads to a positive feedback loop which will eventually deliver on some results down the line.
Finally, when it comes to rest, there is the entire can of worms of how the 'self' that finds peace in silence is not really the same 'self' that engages in the usual activities in our life, and which we are rewarded for. It can quickly get esoteric/woo/spiritual, and I don't think I have particularly good frames for it, but the general intuition I have is that rest is not really a 'problem' you can 'solve', the same way that you can meal prep more efficiently, or learn to run faster.
Problems allow the mind to have something to focus on, discrete parts that causally interact with one another and which it can model, and the whole thing obviously works because we have science and all sorts of empirical frames that deliver on real results.
But the deeper issue is that all of those deal with representations with Reality: you can optimize for quantities, like how heavy the weights you lift are, or how long you can run for, or even how much you meditate, but none of those things are the quality that you really desire. Perhaps you want to be strong so that you can feel confident about yourself, or you want to meditate so that you can be more at peace, and those methods are obviously not entirely useless in that regard, but they can steer you in the wrong direction, the direction of optimization as opposed to having a direct contact with Reality, control instead of simply living.
Which is why at the end of the day, all self-help models (or even spiritual/esoteric/woo, you name it) are kind of bullshit, because they are only models. I can develop the most sophisticated model of mental tiredness and how to see it in terms of a mental loop, and while that might be useful, it will never be the real thing, because knowing is fundamentally different than being.
The illusion that intelligent people have is that they can solve everything through knowledge and method. What they realize eventually, if they are honest and perceptive enough, is that there are some problems (and I would say that the deepest ones are of that kind) which can only be solved through changing one's being, but the latter cannot be influenced in a behavioralist sense through additional methods, it really has to come from within.
It's impossible to explain in purely rationalist terms how to find more rest, or how to find what is important to you, because those things come from an intimate relationship with Reality, which you are always in contact of, and which knowledge and the mind get in the way of, because they deal with representations, not Reality itself. In that regard, the breath is much closer to that intimacy than the mind ever could be. Breathe slower, and it's almost like your sense of time slows down, and you can start living more consciously, rather than reactively. 3
1 It's also worth noting that people in the past did also have their equivalent of a "turn your brain off" activity in the form of watching television, so to the extent that they were better at managing their mind and attention, it's difficult to say whether it's because it's intentional in any way, or simply because they didn't have the mind-sucking distractions that we have now.
2 Not a word I'm a fan of but it is at least self-descriptive.
3 Although we have to note here that focusing on the breath can also turn it into a mere method of control, once again. The way that the self always reaches for more grasping, more control, because it cannot understand what non-grasping is, the same way that a torch cannot understand what darkness is, or that a knot cannot understand what unknotted means, is a deep existential problem. Beyond the scope of this piece.
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Tiredness Discernment Consciousness
2026-04-30