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Some ramblings on slumps

Within the past couple of months I experienced two instances of minor burnout. In both cases, the cause was straightforward. I had to put in a lot of extra work beyond my typical efforts to prepare for urgent events. Although both events went well, I fell into a slump after each event passed and the work burden was lifted.

By slump, I mean that I felt unmotivated, emotionally flat, and unable to bring myself to work at even a quarter of the baseline level of productivity I had been maintaining before these events made it onto my calendar. All in all, it took over a week after each event to get back to my previous productivity routines.

There's nothing surprising about needing time to recover after an extended period of strain, and maybe a week of recovery is totally reasonable given the nature of those efforts, but I feel I could've dealt with the slumps in a better way.

After the immediate stressor disappears, I have a strong urge to mentally vegetate. In my case, this usually results in mindlessly binging YouTube content or reading articles from online aggregator sites. Talking with other people, I think this kind of binging response is common. While the behavior feels good in the beginning, after a day or two it starts feeling icky and is difficult to stop. I quickly want to get back to reading, studying, and working on my projects, but it feels like I'm missing the activation energy needed to get back into that groove.

Perhaps the loss of motivation and the urge to vegetate is an unavoidable response to the prolonged stress. When it comes to exercise and physical training, after an extended series of workouts exceeding recovery capacity, it takes a period of rest to recover from the accumulated fatigue. When there's a deep fatigue debt, exercise that previously felt easy now feels hard.

In the case of physical fatigue, you need to take it easy for a while, but maintaining some amount of low-intensity "active recovery" work will help clear the fatigue far more effectively than staying on the couch all day. My hypothesis is that a similar principle should hold for cognitive fatigue. It clearly takes some time to recover motivation and get back to prior productivity levels, but the way I rest should have an impact on how effectively I can recover.

When the second urgent event passed, I anticipated the slump that would follow and planned to respond differently from the first time. My plan was to do the following as a form of "active recovery":

I was somewhat successful in my plan. I had a few days where I went on a long walk, wrote some things down to organize my thoughts, or just sat on a park bench to zone out. Those activities certainly felt good, but I was still unable to keep myself from the pull of the internet, so did end up also content binging.

Unfortunately, in the end, it's unclear how effective my recovery efforts were. I have no knowledge of the counterfactual situation where I had instead only internet binged and not spent time on these other activities. Maybe I would've been in a slump for longer? Intuitively it feels like the binging prolongs the slump, but I don't really know if that's true.

My life isn't a productivity optimization game, and I have no desire to treat it as one, but I think it's worthwhile to build better self-understanding and to improve the consistency of my efforts towards objectives I value. There are a few questions that I'd like to think more about to better understand my behavior.