On strain and rest

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I have a rule. Or rather, a policy; If a couple of people that I trust (independent of each other) recommend or mention something to me, I should at least look into it. It can be reading a book, trying a sport or looking into a blind spot that I might have in my personal life.


I've heard a lot of people talking about the importance of good sleep over the past couple of weeks. For being able to make good decisions,  emotional well-being, live longer or just grow muscle, sleep seems to be a big underlying factor. I've known this from personal experience for quite some time, as I am someone who at quite a young age realized I was sensitive to not getting 8 hours. But I didn't really had a good way to quantify it. So I recently decided to gamify sleep and get a fitness tracker. One of those bands you have on your arm that basically tracks heart rate and can spit out lots of cool info about if you should take it easy or go hard that day. 




I have to admit super excited about this. Like mentioned in previous writing I'm a nerd when it comes to optimization, and this has the potential to better help me understand how I work, create good habits, and raise my overall quality of life.

A two-way street
This has also got me started thinking about the relationship between working and resting. Typically this dichotomy is framed as "you have to rest to be able to work". A thing that I've noted to be true as well though, and that is way less talked about, is that I need to work hard to be able to rest. This holds true both for sleep as well as being able to enjoy the time off from working, both for physical and mental strain.

The quality of my experience from the same activity, say watching an hour of Youtube, feels very different if I do it before or after something more strenuous. It's the difference in feeling between a person trying to escape from reality compared to someone who is on top of the world getting to enjoy something he has earned. And the funny thing is, when I do the work before I rest, I don't have the same urge to binge Youtube for hours on end. Because I'm no trying to run away from anything. I enjoy my life when I do the work. 

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