"You promise yourself you'll power through, but deep down you know you're running on empty. We've been conditioned to call this laziness. To push harder. To believe that needing a break means we're weak or uncommitted. But here's what I've learned after years of mistaking exhaustion for a personality trait: that mentally "full" feeling isn't a character flaw. It's your brain waving a red flag, desperately trying to tell you it needs maintenance."
"Think about how we talk about our minds. We "process" information. We "recharge" after a long day. We worry about our "bandwidth" and "capacity." We've adopted all this mechanical language, but our brains aren't computers that can run indefinitely as long as they're plugged in. When I had a health scare at thirty (that turned out to be nothing serious), it completely shifted how I viewed the stress I'd normalized."
People often stare at screens and re-read sentences when mentally exhausted, experiencing a heavy, overwhelmed feeling after task switching. Societal conditioning frames that exhaustion as laziness and promotes pushing harder instead of resting. The brain signals when it needs maintenance rather than indicating character flaws. Mechanical metaphors like "processing," "bandwidth," and "recharge" obscure biological limits. A personal health scare can reveal normalized stress and prompt questions about actual rest. Brains require downtime to sort information, form memories, and clear metabolic waste. Brains consume about 20% of the body's metabolic energy, so each thought and decision uses real biological resources.
Read at Silicon Canals
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