Mental defrag – Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden
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Defragging - screenshot by Jhaxelxy75 on Wikimedia
I can ride out a wave of stress to meet a deadline or finish an emotionally intense activity, but as soon as it’s over and I let myself relax, I hit a wall and become functionally useless, woozy almost. Zombified. It’s not a blood sugar crash, though feels similar. At that point I basically just need to lay down and do nothing for an hour or two. I usually can’t sleep — it’s a different kind of fatigue. I think of it as mental defragging.
(If you’re younger than me you might not have ever defragged your computer — basically back in the day computers weren’t very good at allocating disk space and so when you noticed your computer was bogging down you’d run a defragmentation utility that consolidated information. You couldn’t do anything else on the computer while it was running, and it would show you a representation of all your jumbled shit slowly becoming tidier. Depending how much junk was on your hard drive, this could take quite a while — you might even start it before bed to run overnight.)
I am trying to turn to computing metaphors for thinking (and machine metaphors for bodies) less often — our analog brains are functionally and materially distinct from digital computers — but this describes my experience better than other descriptions and metaphors I can think of:
deferred exhaustion?
delayed stress release?
nervous system reset?
allostatic recalibration?
synaptic torpor?
adrenaline flush?
battery recharge?
brain cleanse?
It feels like my brain is catching up with the present, like I put off a bunch of mental functions that now all need time to run, or like I stored up the cumulative stress into one intense dose that hits all at once.
After granting myself that chunk of time, I go from total brain melt to simply tired. Bodies are amazing.
Tags
embodiment, fatigue, machines, metaphor, mind, personal, recovery, rest, stress
By Tracy Durnell
Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at tracy@tracydurnell.com or @tracy@notes.tracydurnell.com. She/her.
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3 replies on “Mental defrag”
Do you do anything during the defrag? I always feel I should sleep, but can’t, so read or listen to something, but wonder if that’s counterproductive to recovery. What do you think?
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I think it works best for me if I don’t do anything, or listen to mellow music, but sometimes I’m not patient enough to just lay there so I’ll read something mindless 😄
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[…]I think this is a useful and apt metaphor, but then again I’m old enough to remember what defragmentation is. I’ve often thought it’d be wonderful if you could just recharge your body as easily as a phone.[…]
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Tracy Durnell
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Writer and designer in the Seattle area. Reach me at tracy@tracydurnell.com or @tracy@notes.tracydurnell.com. She/her.
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