Phone scrolling during breaks doesn't actually rest your brain. It still drains your mental energy, leaving you more depleted when you return to work. Real recovery means disconnecting from screens entirely.
Do you take breaks throughout the day, or what does that look like to help recover and recharge?
Generally speaking, when you're maybe working on your computer, you've got an exam and you're studying, what tends to happen is we tend to want to grab our phones because we think, I need a mental break, so I'm just going to task switch to phone use, which is perceivingly calming and perceivingly sort of relaxing. But what I've seen in the research is that it's actually still using up this mental currency. So if you have a finite amount of resources for things that you can give this money to, phone usage is still taking away from that currency. So people then come back to the task at hand and feel even more depleted. Now the thing with the mental currency or this energy expenditure is that if you don't take a mental break, your brain will do it for you in the least convenient time. So making sure that we are effectively taking these mental breaks where we're clocking off from anything that's externally stimulating means that we can replenish these energy resources and then be better equipped for whatever is going to come next.
The Library of Minds: Brain Coach: How to Stay Sharp When AI Does the Thinking | Jim Kwik
