It’s actually kind of hard to name this post without the reader’s initial thought simply being: “Duh…”
My initial title was, “Resting is More Effective with Eyes Closed”. Which… Yeah. Of course.
But my actual thought is that if you’re going to have any downtime with the aim of restoring attentiveness, willpower, etc., then you should close your eyes and try not to think about anything complicated.
Here’s why. As mentioned in recent posts, when you exercise willpower or do anything cognitively demanding, you tend to exhaust your mental resources. Blood sugar drops, though I think that may be a symptom rather than the cause. And then you don’t have any more willpower and give in to temptation more.
The brain takes a ton of power just to operate. In particular, the visual part of the brain is massive, and takes more than its fair share. And it makes sense! Think about a computer. Graphics cards are known power hogs, and even they are not nearly as complicated as our visual cortex, which needs to make sense of everything it sees.
The higher logic parts of our brain are also pretty power-intensive.
So if you wanted to rest your brain, what should you do? Close your eyes to turn off all visual processing, and either focus on nothing (like when meditating), or just think of simple things like memories. Things that aren’t very visual and don’t require intense thought or concentration.
So to go along with my post about how phone use it probably preventing actual restorative downtime, I think one of the reasons this might be the case is because it’s usually all visual. You have text and info flying by, you’re reading, there are photos and video, and just in general your brain is in high usage.
How are you supposed to recover with that? It would be like jogging after a marathon in order to let your legs recover. it doesn’t make any sense.
You have to totally unplug, close your eyes, and try not to use your brain much. I suspect that even if you aren’t sleeping, the brain will recover much more quickly that way.
Try it out!
The biggest areas of the brain deal with vision, logic, and language. So ideally you wouldn’t be using any of those.
I think my initial suggestion to think about memories is bad, because it is likely to still use all three of those areas.
This may be why meditation is so effective. If you’re able to shut off most of the brain and just be in the moment and experience your sensations, you can restore the brain.
I think my recent comment on the other post mentioned here is relevant. I’m not sure that phone use prevents recovery just because it’s visual. I think it has more to do with dopamine.