It’s Good To Take Breaks

A surprise, to be sure, but a welcome one

I went back to work recently after taking a few months off for parental leave. When I first signed up for my leave, I hadn’t really conceptualized the “specialness” of it compared to other types of time off. My wife and I had done the usual preparation for our first child, and I had a general understanding that taking care of a newborn is a lot of work. I figured it’s a nice perk to get dedicated time off to just do that. But I didn’t have a good framework in mind for how to think about leave in the context of my life more broadly, and I just sort of compartmentalized it as generic PTO.

One thing I realized over the duration is that parental leave offers a very good glide path to go back to work. When my son first arrived, it was overwhelming. My schedule had already been upended by a few days of splitting my time between sleeping at the hospital and periodically heading back home to feed our cats. This was followed by an entirely new routine of getting up every few hours to feed him and change him, plus tackle all of the new housework there was to do - helping my wife as she recovered from delivery, cleaning bottles, setting up (and cleaning up) his play area, buying things he needed, and so on and so on.

I mean, no big surprises here. But at least for me, it was so much work that I think it would have been challenging to incorporate into my pre-baby schedule. Speaking honestly, I think I would have ended up compartmentalizing my family in a way that didn’t reflect my underlying values or priorities. (At least, that’s what I frequently see happen in my industry.) I’m really fortunate that I was offered the time and space to create an entirely new daily routine from scratch, which made it possible to get the best of the before and the after.

Leave turned out to be a lot more than just time off - it was a thoughtfully put together block of time that enabled me to re-configure my life from the ground-up rather than jamming in something new to an already busy schedule. And that got me thinking about the importance of rest, especially intentional, “active” rests like parental leave; and the thought occurred to me that perhaps I had undervalued rest up to that point. Maybe this was a wake-up call to take it more seriously.

Breaks Are Good

I never placed a lot of value on breaks. When I was younger, I had this sort of naive notion that you should just plug away at things as hard as you can in order to maximize performance. For example, I recall the first time I studied for a job interview as a particularly challenging grind. It was an uninterrupted blur of practice sessions and example questions. I would re-read parts of a textbook over and over to understand concepts that just wouldn’t “click”; when my eyes would start to glaze over, I would reach for a random cup of cold coffee to perk up, to try again, to see if this time would be the one where I would finally get it.

(Not surprisingly - in hindsight - this was also accompanied by a near-crippling feeling of anxiety and dread.)

I never thought deeply about the fact that I wasn’t prioritizing rest, and I maintained the assumption that this was sustainable well into adulthood. But I think this was a mistake. In fact, I don’t think it was ever sustainable.

For example, Peak - a book on performing at the highest level - frequently discusses the importance of rest during intense training regimens. The anecdote I remember best is a high-profile violin school for gifted children in Germany, which includes a long afternoon nap in its daily routine. I myself incorporate intentional rest into my distance running regimen, and I always remind myself that it’s in the resting periods where the body actually improves - when it repairs the injuries sustained during training, and makes itself stronger and faster.

I realized after leave that I needed to start thinking about rest as something I proactively seek out in all aspects of my life, instead of something that just happens on its own. I think I had somehow conceptualized myself like a battery that needs to be plugged in from time to time to keep on going, and I feel like that self-perception is… not healthy! It’s not to say that my life is terribly bad or anything like that, but rather that it just dawned on me how much I was missing out on. It’s like when you first start working on your flexibility, and you wake up one morning and realize that you don’t feel any aches or pains, and you think - jeez, how was I not doing this before?

I want to spend some time reading up on this subject; I don’t know much about it, which shows how little I’ve prioritized it up until this point. (A half-dozen books in my library on habit formation - and zero on taking a fucking nap!) But in the meantime I wanted to share some initial thoughts on taking breaks, particularly on where I think I’ve “gone wrong” in terms of not properly resting. I’m curious to see how my thoughts hold up once I’ve read up on this subject, and I figure now’s a good time to get it down on paper.

And - as much as I’ve enjoyed the last few weeks of rest - I need to publish this thing, so I can start working on my next article!

90 Days And Done

I’ve done a lot of grinds over the years - StarCraft II, Age of Empires II, Age of Empires IV, etc. Each one lasted between 3 and 6 months before I switched over to something else. I always wrote this off as inevitable - maybe I’d just reached a point of diminishing returns, a skill level that required a time investment that I couldn’t make at that point in my life; maybe I’d lost interest after hitting my goals; maybe I just didn’t care enough about competitive RTS to meaningfully appreciate the difference between top 1% and top 0.5%.

Maybe my wrists just hurt!

These are all reasonably fine things to say and I think they are explanatory to a certain extent as to why I always moved on from my grinds. But I also think a lack of rest is a contributing factor, too.

I think that way because I recall closing out each grind in a fairly ambivalent mental headspace. In StarCraft II, that meant literally getting worse at the game. In Age of Empires II, I had dreams of situations I didn’t know how to counter, and I would wake up feeling anxious. And most recently, in Age of Empires IV, I became easily tilted with the state of the ladder and the lack of balanced matchups, feeling like I could never get in a good practice game.

I think it’s fair to interpret all of these things as symptoms of burnout, caused by too much pressure and a lack of sufficient rest. And I especially started to feel that way after joining various running subreddits and realizing that many runners were not experiencing distance running in the same positive way that I was. They were getting tilted - by jogging! And they were reporting symptoms I’ve never experienced, at least not while running - that they’re so exhausted, that they dread the next run, that they can’t wait till the marathon is over so they can just stop.

And then I sort of thought to myself; ah, yeah. I remember when the RTS grinds would reach that point.

While I distance run year-round as a general purpose hobby, many of these folks were only doing a short-term marathon training plan, typically around 5 months in length. And that intense period of training was really taking its toll, to the point that it wasn’t sustainable.

That multi-month training window turns out to be very similar to how long I would stick it out with various RTS grinds. It feels to me like roughly the length of time you can apply yourself intensely toward one thing without rest; and while it produces good results, it burns you out to the point that you don’t want to do it again for awhile, and by the time you’re ready to do it again, you’re probably already doing another thing.

The issue is that if I want to pursue something as a long-term hobby, it’s not great to be wanting to quit after only a few months. And I feel like when it comes to real-time strategy games, rest is that missing piece that I’ve failed to properly incorporate. And that’s something I want to change.

Final Thoughts

I’m going to take some time to read more about rest, because it’s an area where I don’t have a good technical understanding. But what I’m going to try in the meantime is building in intentional rests into my grinds - maybe one short break per month, and a longer two-week break every three months. A two-week period where I just relax, really decompress and do something else for awhile. And while that two-week period will probably stress me out, I’ll remind myself that I’ll be much better at the end of the next 90 day period than I ever will be trying to push myself through burnout.

And hey - it’ll be a good chance to play some Factorio, too.

Until next time!
brownbear

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