My realizations about how to treat Burnout, while at CFAR:
1. Rest Days vs Recovery Days
Rest Days are important and can work to refresh you. Most people do not know how to take Rest Days. They instead use weekends and vacation days as Recovery Days or days where their mind is still in “working” mode.
A Recovery Day is where you’re so tired or under-resourced that you can’t do much of anything with yourself other than: stay in bed / sleep a lot, binge on Netflix or video games, stay in your room all day, don’t talk to anyone, and feel unmotivated to do much except easy, stimulating, and/or mind-numbing things. This is a Recovery Day and does not count as a Rest Day, but it is fine to take the time for them. But you aren’t going to be refreshed from them. In order to really refresh, you need to take another day that counts as a Rest Day.
Another way a person might take time off is to do things that are /like work/ but easier. Video games are a prime example. I play a lot of video games that involve optimizing systems, and I find these really motivating and fun. But I notice that this is a kind of “work”—my mind is trying to solve problems and implement solutions. The difference is that because it’s easy and doable, I get addicted to them, and it’s a way from me to escape the problems at work, which are harder and clunkier to solve. This also doesn’t count as Resting.
Rest Days are days where I have enough energy and resources that I feel motivated and able to get out and about. (One way I can tell I have energy is that sometimes I spontaneously feel like cooking, a rare occurrence.) On a Rest Day, your prime directive is to attend to your stomach (or, the felt senses coming from your stomach), and just “follow your gut” for the entire day. And just do “what you feel like doing” in the moment.
There can be no obligations on a Rest Day. No scheduled calls or meetings. No promises to show up to a party. You can go to the party if you actually feel like going to the party, but you won’t be able to know until last-minute. You cannot be “on-call” for anything. No one should depend on you unless it’s someone you actively like being depended on for things, like a person you care about.
There can be exceptions to these, but I like to make Rest Days sacred in these ways. (This might resonate with Ben Hoffman’s post on Sabbaths and Zvi’s post on Slack.)
Things my stomach tends to want to do on Rest Days:
be in the present moment
eat tasty things
have a picnic in a park / take walks / enjoy nature
draw
read a book
cook
spend meaningful social time with friends
go dancing or do yoga or similar
useful errands or home-improvement stuff (I installed some curtains once)
My stomach rarely wants to:
spend a lot of time on Facebook or social media
binge TV
play video games
I think more people should try to implement Rest Days for themselves. It seems good to have them regularly, but I’m not sure how often. Once a week is the sort of ‘traditional’ thing to do.
Yes! I have independently discovered this exact same thing for myself, though my terminology is almost the opposite of yours—I think I had always thought of “rest days” as days mostly spent in front of the TV or online (corresponding to your Recovery Days), whereas what I now realize I need to do regularly is “doing whatever I want” days, which I also sometimes call “desire days”—I end up doing a lot of things I don’t really think of as rest but which are much more restorative than just resting.
(If I’m really tired or anhedonic on a designated “desire day”, I end up just doing “rest day” stuff anyway; sometimes this is the right choice, other times it doesn’t really help but it’s better than doing “rest day” stuff on a day I had meant to get stuff done, so it’s possibly still better than not setting that day aside.)
Some things I’ve ended up doing on desire days:
cooking, baking, making jam
putting on some music, opening the windows, and dancing around my living room
reading French poetry
learning new songs on guitar
having a somewhat useful emotional crisis
doing some self-therapy, like writing down my thoughts / working out what I care about
figuring out how much I owe in donations this year
reading and taking notes on Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series
reading the 80K career guide
playing a typing game
doing things that I’m annoyed about having put off for a long time
fiddling with spreadsheets to make a useful graph of my mood-tracking data
My realizations about how to treat Burnout, while at CFAR:
1. Rest Days vs Recovery Days
Rest Days are important and can work to refresh you. Most people do not know how to take Rest Days. They instead use weekends and vacation days as Recovery Days or days where their mind is still in “working” mode.
A Recovery Day is where you’re so tired or under-resourced that you can’t do much of anything with yourself other than: stay in bed / sleep a lot, binge on Netflix or video games, stay in your room all day, don’t talk to anyone, and feel unmotivated to do much except easy, stimulating, and/or mind-numbing things. This is a Recovery Day and does not count as a Rest Day, but it is fine to take the time for them. But you aren’t going to be refreshed from them. In order to really refresh, you need to take another day that counts as a Rest Day.
Another way a person might take time off is to do things that are /like work/ but easier. Video games are a prime example. I play a lot of video games that involve optimizing systems, and I find these really motivating and fun. But I notice that this is a kind of “work”—my mind is trying to solve problems and implement solutions. The difference is that because it’s easy and doable, I get addicted to them, and it’s a way from me to escape the problems at work, which are harder and clunkier to solve. This also doesn’t count as Resting.
Rest Days are days where I have enough energy and resources that I feel motivated and able to get out and about. (One way I can tell I have energy is that sometimes I spontaneously feel like cooking, a rare occurrence.) On a Rest Day, your prime directive is to attend to your stomach (or, the felt senses coming from your stomach), and just “follow your gut” for the entire day. And just do “what you feel like doing” in the moment.
There can be no obligations on a Rest Day. No scheduled calls or meetings. No promises to show up to a party. You can go to the party if you actually feel like going to the party, but you won’t be able to know until last-minute. You cannot be “on-call” for anything. No one should depend on you unless it’s someone you actively like being depended on for things, like a person you care about.
There can be exceptions to these, but I like to make Rest Days sacred in these ways. (This might resonate with Ben Hoffman’s post on Sabbaths and Zvi’s post on Slack.)
Things my stomach tends to want to do on Rest Days:
be in the present moment
eat tasty things
have a picnic in a park / take walks / enjoy nature
draw
read a book
cook
spend meaningful social time with friends
go dancing or do yoga or similar
useful errands or home-improvement stuff (I installed some curtains once)
My stomach rarely wants to:
spend a lot of time on Facebook or social media
binge TV
play video games
I think more people should try to implement Rest Days for themselves. It seems good to have them regularly, but I’m not sure how often. Once a week is the sort of ‘traditional’ thing to do.
Yes! I have independently discovered this exact same thing for myself, though my terminology is almost the opposite of yours—I think I had always thought of “rest days” as days mostly spent in front of the TV or online (corresponding to your Recovery Days), whereas what I now realize I need to do regularly is “doing whatever I want” days, which I also sometimes call “desire days”—I end up doing a lot of things I don’t really think of as rest but which are much more restorative than just resting.
(If I’m really tired or anhedonic on a designated “desire day”, I end up just doing “rest day” stuff anyway; sometimes this is the right choice, other times it doesn’t really help but it’s better than doing “rest day” stuff on a day I had meant to get stuff done, so it’s possibly still better than not setting that day aside.)
Some things I’ve ended up doing on desire days:
cooking, baking, making jam
putting on some music, opening the windows, and dancing around my living room
reading French poetry
learning new songs on guitar
having a somewhat useful emotional crisis
doing some self-therapy, like writing down my thoughts / working out what I care about
figuring out how much I owe in donations this year
reading and taking notes on Nate Soares’ Replacing Guilt series
reading the 80K career guide
playing a typing game
doing things that I’m annoyed about having put off for a long time
fiddling with spreadsheets to make a useful graph of my mood-tracking data
proofreading things for people
laundry
Link to Zvi’s sequence on LessWrong, which includes the posts you mentioned: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/HXkpm9b8o964jbQ89