sids blog

You can work all the time; you don’t need breaks from hard work. The human brain doesn’t get tired like physical muscles—it doesn’t need rest except during sleep.

So the natural question is: why do we feel tired after cognitive work? The answer lies in how the brain handles opportunity cost. The moment you start doing something, you are implicitly saying no to a million other things you could be doing. Your mind keeps track of these unchosen options—sleeping, eating, socializing, checking your phone. Most of these are linked to your survival or mating instincts, deeply rooted in biology.

So when you stay focused on a mentally demanding task, your brain begins to tally the cost of all the things you’re notdoing. As time passes, this subconscious accounting grows heavier. The result? A sense of restlessness. A creeping fatigue that whispers, “Take a break.”

But observe closely: when you do take that break, you rarely do nothing. You scroll social media, chat, watch something—your brain is still working, just on something else. You didn’t rest—you switched desires.

Let’s call these competing urges what they are: desires. You are a desire machine. Walking through life, you collect them consciously or unconsciously. Some are fleeting; others are deeply embedded. But all of them compete for your time and attention. And that’s the crux: distraction is not a flaw in focus—it’s a war between desires.

Now consider this: how do some people work obsessively, joyfully, for hours on end? The answer is clarity. They’ve perfected their desire. They’ve filtered out everything else. At any given time, they have only one true desire. No inner conflict. No competition. That’s why their work feels like play.

Mastery isn’t about willpower. It’s about desire alignment. When you truly want one thing more than everything else, the noise fades. The fatigue disappears. And deep work becomes your resting state.