Relaxation Centric Vacations
Summary:
Dollia: I find it disorienting when i when i first get into mit break. To make these type of relaxation centric vacations work, i have to bring work with me. Arnold bennett said that the mind needs sleep and diversity of activity but doesn’t need tho just sit and look at the sunrise for hours a time. It wants to do things like read or watch net flicks for hours on end....
Transcript:
Speaker 2
i am daient with your medical student, and my problem is how to relax properly after a long period of focus. And that applies to on a daily level and during breaks, like summer breaks. So after a long period of focus, liking examps, i find it disorienting when i when i first get into mit break. And it takes me a long time to properly relax and tuan in myself, to reflect how. My question is how to do it more effectively, how to transition into a break and make the most out of it? Well,
Speaker 1
dollia, i think you might be putting too much importance on relaxation. It’s something we fetishize in this culture. Is what we really need is this moment of being in a hammock, no worries on our mind, no thoughts on our mind, just staring out over the ocean. Ind there’ll be something restorative about this lack of activity, but i don’t actually know that that’s true. Let’s take myself as an example. Early in my married life, my wife and i, we used to go on vacations that involve travelling places internationally. And so the vacations were very active. You know, you would be sleep te ived and driving rental cars around europe, and every day had a big itinerary theire, very busy or active trips. S. Then when we had kids, the types of vacations we would do shifted now because we would have a baby and a and a slightly older kid, or whatever the situation was. Now we’re renting houses by the beach, that type of thing. And so this was a change. Iis the first time ihad really been exposed to relaxation centric vacations. And as we learned, i’m terrible at it. It would really stress me out. It would really make me anxious. This just being there, being at the house, being at the beach, i would just not feel happy. I would feel off. And we finally realize, oh, i see. To make these type of relaxation centric vacations work, i have to bring work with me. Now, the key was, it should be different than the work i was doing before. So get away from the stuff that i don’t like, like emale. Shuld have to do any emale in vacation, and get rid of the time sensitive work or the stressful work. But i would bring with me, typically speculative, interesting, but non time sensitive projects, like, let me read and think about a new book i want to write. You know, i remember when y my oldest was a baby, we rented a house on the bay, the delaware bay, and i brought with me a whole stack of books, and that became the, this the research foundation of deep work. I also remember, at that trip, i was working on, specifically. I can remember the math prom i was working on, which ended up leading to a few public s. But it was not like there was some dead line. I just wanted to think about this math probem a. It was a vacation a few years ago. I think we ere down in the bahamas, where i got the idea for digital minimalism. You know, i was i want to work on book ideas. I want to work on yo. I need things to work on, and then that makes me happy. Then the vacation works. Non stressful, interesting, non urgent work, but work none the less. Its going to make me much happier than just being in the hammock or trying to have a completely clear mind. So you might be in a similar situation. Complete relaxation, like having nothing on your mind, not working on anything, might not be a state dallia that’s going to make you very happy. So what are the guide lines here to make sure that you don’t accidentally burn yourself out? Well, if we look to arnold bennett, we look to his early twenti twentieth century self help book, how to live in four hours a day. His essential argument is that the mind needs sleep, and the mind needs a diversity of activity, but it doesn’t need non activity. It doesn’t need tho just sit and look at the sunrise for hours at a time, or equivalently, sit and watch net flicks for hours at a time. Are a sort of modern digital equivalent of the sunrise. It wants to do things. And he talked about reading poetry and books and philosophy and whatever. He had a particular list of activities, but his whole point was, the mind doesn’t need the rest. It just needs a rest from the type of work you were doing, doring the workday, diversity of activities, and then, of course, sleep is what the mind needs. Now i would add, from my experience, a third element that the mind also needs, which is regular and sustained freedom from stress. Where stress, at least the type of stress i’m thinking about, is almost always caused by time pressure’s something i learned from when i was working with students and helping students specifically with stress issues. That feeling of stress almost always comes from, at least in the work context, this is due, and this is also due, and i don’t know if i can be able to get it done in time. It’s not great to be bathed in the relevant hormon they come along with the stress reaction for sustained periods of time. So seeking to have regular periods free from that type of urgency driven stress is also good for you. So we get here, i think, a much more approachable set of bench marks for what relaxation after a hard period should be, it means you should work on things that are different in the hard work you were do before. It means that you should mst keep getting sleep. Ah, and that you should have no stress. So you should, whatever you are working on this not have like a tight time dead line that you’re worried about hitting. That could be just as restorative as the hammock with the pinacolata, and not a thought on your mind for for days and days at a time. Nho, other people really like that. They get a lot out of that. They really want to shut down their brain completely. But i’ll, i’m saying, dollia, some people don’t. And you might be one of those people. So i would, i would a, i would worry less about if you’re properly relaxing, or if you’r etting relaxed enough, and just follow those simple guide lines, and i think you will find that you will have plenty of restoration to your cognitive state, to your psychological state, to your energy, all without having it completely shut down. So i’ve been hearing a lot of questions and chatter recently about time block planning. So i figure we should take a couple of questions on this topic. (Time 0:07:38)