Why Do We ‘Rest’?
From Age of Em, paperback edition, p. 195-6:
Today, mental fatigue reduces mental performance by about 0.1 percent per minute. As by resting we can recover at a rate of 1 percent per minute, we need roughly one-tenth of our workday to be break time, with the duration between breaks being not much more than an hour or two. We seem to prefer to take a break once an hour, relative to having breaks more often. Breaks help productivity more when they are short and frequent, when they happen in the morning relative to afternoon, and when the activities during breaks are preferred, social, work-related, and outside the office. There is also evidence suggesting productivity gains from napping for ten to thirty minutes one or a few times a day; a thirty-minute nap four times a day seems enough to stop performance deterioration.
While we seem to “need” breaks from work, many of our break activities often look a lot like “work”, in being productive and taking energy, concentration, and self-control. So what exactly is “restful” about such “rest”? Yesterday, I realized that the continuing generosity of a few hundred my Twitter followers to answer many poll questions offers a way to dig a big deeper:
A lunchtime/evening break from work is “restful” to the degree that you are more productive after the break. On a 0 to 100 scale, with 0 being continuing with usual work tasks, & 100 being most restful activity there is for you, rate these 20 activities on restfulness per hour.
— Robin Hanson (@robinhanson) October 31, 2020
Here are the results, sorted by mean restfulness:
As this mean uses the midpoint of each range, it overestimates near 10, as then most responses are in the lowest range. I’ve marked in red and blue two clumps with close means.
Note that even the blue clump is only half of maximum restfulness, and that one item in the red clump is to continue with work, but switch to rarer tasks. Clearly we can’t be doing this stuff only to regain productivity, or we’d either pick the max restfulness activity or do a “restful” work activity. Note also that there are clearly break activities that don’t give much rest at all. So this can’t be only about changing what you do periodically.
So why do we “rest”?
Hmmm... don't know. If you can't get away with being on call 24/7, you certainly have a strange combination of being low status enough, so that interrupting you is cheap, yet being high-status enough that you're needed all the time.Hospital interns?If your boss can interrupt you during family dinner time, that's not a general problem with "work at home".Unreasonable expectations and a lack of boundaries, more like. Those aren't a necessary part of the concept.
I think a lot of it is people not being needed on call 24/7 but they got addicted to the dopamine hits of push messages and checking their emails constantly.Push messages are on by default with any messaging service and many people don't know or care to change their settings.Also whenever you're uncertain about what to do next..... just check your email and there's possibly some relevant input! Mostly there's not, but when there is..... payoff. So there's a gambling aspect to it.Also.... bing, bing.... oh my.... what could it be?! Intrigue, mystery, suspense..... most of the time it's irrelevant, but then once in a while..... something really cool!I'm seeing this behaviour in students, that definitely don't need to be on call. But they check their phones all the time. Info hygiene just isn't a super obvious concept, since all this tech is fairly new.Though I think people figure this out eventually.
tl;dr: Your model of there being one variable called "restfulness" is too simple.
They [the many tasks you could switch to] may not be comparatively restful to a nap, according to the chart. But when in the grips of restlessness, you can't really take a nap, because your thoughts would just run on without end.
So you'd need the comparison chart for how restful each option is for those who end up not taking the seemingly restful option.
The introvert taking a break from people stuff might get an experience of rest, that's not needed/necessary or available for the extrovert who never gets tired of them.
Doing physical chores like folding laundry or dealing with dishes is probably the most restful thing on the list for me sometimes.It's useful, but non-stimulating.That's not quite it. TV and reading novels is arguably more relaxing in that my pulse would probably drop more, but that's also very dulling. And they are also memetic hazards, because they will create running loops and fantasies that pop up as distractions later.Video games are very energizing, but they reliably lead only to more and more video gaming.
Maintaining a consistent mental state isn't exactly easy. And if you fail at it totally, you can't self-predict, thus you can't plan, thus everything goes wrong, sideways or backwards. So you failed at uncertainty minimization hence you get stressed out.Worst case, you get ingrained flinch reactions at facing what's necessary.If none of that is relatable, well you see.... pretty sure, that the meaning of rest is more complicated and varies by individual.