When we go on holiday or experience an interruption to our daily lives, we are often reminded that a change can be as good as a rest. But is doing something different actually better than doing nothing? If true, what kind of implications would this have for our society?

In this week’s episode, we discuss change vs rest. We discuss the origins of the proverb, models of fatigue, data on industrial productivity, psychology of rest, and ego depletion. Finally, we share the best and most recent change we’ve experienced.

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Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer for Aleph. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph and this week we're discussing whether change is as good as rest. Nick, you look like you could do with a change. Yeah, undoubtedly.

Well, let's start with that. So, as you know, I'm a member of the International Jet Set and I've been on, no, not one like the Normies, but two holidays this year. I went to Greece in the summer and only last week I went to interrailing with my family through various bits of Northern Europe. Sorry, when was that? Was it last week? Last week. Berlin, Hamburg and Brussels. Cool. Yeah. So the holiday in Greece was very much a relaxy type holiday. We did occasionally go for a walk or visit the ruins of Mycenae and that kind of thing. But then we spent lots of time on the beach reading, pool, board games, etc.

Sounds very restful.

The trip, whirlwind tour of Northern Europe, however, was very, you know, kind of filled with activity. So we were going out, we're walking all over the place a lot. We were spending very little time in our flat straight hotel. And you might think I would be a bit tired at the end of it, but no, actually the opposite. If anything, I was sort of more eager to get back to work and feeling, you know, energised and productive at the end of my week interrailing than I was after my two weeks. I found it very hard. You were feeling nice and changed. Well, and then lo and behold, what popped into my mind, the thought of the old sore that a change is as good as a rest. And I just sort of thought, well, is that what's at play here? Is basically what's happened is I didn't really, I felt like I needed a rest and I would probably have voted for two weeks sitting on the sofa. But actually one week interrailing and walking and seeing lots of new staff actually maybe is what in fact I needed. So yeah, is a change as good as a rest?

Mmm. Okay. So there's a few things to think about here, which is one of them. I kind of like your analogy.

Which one?

Well, holidays you're talking about essentially, that one of them was quite changey and one of them was quite resty. I'm not sure how changey one of them was, but I'll give you, it had sort of, it wasn't really very restful. Okay. But I just want to define, I think we can better define.

I think this characterisation is fine. I mean, I've done both kinds of holidays in the past. I think the kind of sitting around a hotel on beaches and pottering around the odd site is pretty low physically demanding. And you're not, after you've kind of seen part of the, you've seen the hotel, you're not gathering much new data. Whereas the interrailing thing, you're under pressure. You've got to get the train. You've got to go places. You're seeing lots of things. You're interacting with loads of people. There's much more data coming, information coming at you all the time.

Yeah. So I'm not sure because... Yeah. What's one easy about? Yeah. Because I'm not sure if we're defining change correctly because we're using the word change to mean activity, I think. But also we're using both change and activity to mean gathering new information. I'm not sure if I'm happy with that.

Are you about to single handedly destroy the beach holiday industry?

Well, no, I think I am a bit because actually, there's no doubt that our brains think we want sofa, right? That's how it feels. But actually, is that true? I think it is. And the fact that it's not obvious to us, I think is interesting in itself, because you think we have all people being people would have got the hang of what kind of rest we need. But no, I think we're very bad

at this. Peter, I think there might be a handle we could pull on this to get a little bit to examine it. So I was thinking about different types of tiredness or fatigue. And it so there are various different literatures, different types of different classifications of fatigue. But the ones that kind of ring most true to me that I can, I can, you know, feel like I have firsthand experience of the most are physical fatigue, classic physical, you're knackered after walking 10 miles, or you're will climb up a mountain and... Disappointingly rare experience in the modern world. Mental fatigue, where you've been working, you've had a day of answering emails, having conversations, writing things, typical Thursday, and you're just exhausted at the end of it. Then social fatigue, you've been at a, you've been partying with friends all afternoon. And you go home and you kind of just want to be alone. I think that's a kind of sensory emotional fatigue. And then I've got a fourth, which is I call, I think I came up with the word claustrophobic fatigue, which is where it's been raining for three weeks, you haven't really gone out really done very much. You've been stuck in the house with the family. I feel exhausted by that kind of claustrophobia that you get with that kind of situation. Think Christmas with the in-laws kind of thing. Yeah, it's sort of exhausting in its own special way. Different from social. Yeah, because I would call that a repetition fatigue. Yeah, something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Because you're doing the same thing. Yeah. You might, I might experience it if I've been, you know, doing a very menial job in a factory or something. Might feel similar. So you'll, no surprise that I don't, I find cycling as good as a rest. So if I've been working very hard, I'd go for a cycle and then I feel much more refreshed. And I think these types of fatigue feel very independent to me. So I might be pretty tired after a cycle, but still be mentally very ready to take on a new thing and start thinking about a new thing. Or I might be exhausted mentally, but ready to go to a party and socialise about it. So they feel quite different. It's like I'm tapping into different reserves for these things. Yeah. And they have a kind of,

what, a negative dependency or something, let's say. Yeah. And because when I'm, you know, if I

go for a cycle after working, doing lots of writing, come back from the cycle ready to do some more writing. So that's had time to top up or has been refreshed by the other activity.

Yeah. I think this is a really good model. And I agree with Peter, it has an intuitive validity. I would imagine it'd be quite hard to measure, but it feels right to me. I think, as you say, Fraser, I think you were touching on maybe we could put together social and mental. Personally, I'd be tempted to leave them separate, but put social into kind of sensory to me. There's a sort of, you know, noise, which is things going into you, you know, which also, again, feels like listening to loud music or being out and about and hearing lots of things. Like sometimes it's nice to get away from that. But I think the key thing here is that. I think you can,

sorry, I think you can definitely, I would separate out sensory and emotional. I think they can be two very different things. But anyway, we generally agree. Yeah. So we've got

different, we've got these different kind of, yeah, as Peter says, reserves. I think I'm happy with that. It feels like, it feels right to me that, you know, they can be completely unaligned and OK, they're not totally. And I think we want to touch on that. Certainly for me and, you know, being mentally very tired definitely translates to physical time as really subjective experience of kind of being averse to doing anything physical if I'm mentally exhausted. But the so the question I think then is let's let's think about using those doing things as as basically tapping into those reserves. And we could then define a rest as effectively none of the reserves are being used. And so if you're asleep, that's definitely a rest that like basically where you aren't doing any of these things. So you switch. You mean, yeah, go on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So you're doing an activity where all of them are off. And I think so the question then is, is do they replenish at the same rate? Again, I'm just using this metaphor. I'm not implying anything about reality. But like, do do they? Let's say that I'm mentally tired and then, you know, either go for a walk or just sit at home. Now, is it true that the mental reserve will replenish at the same rate if I go for a walk versus sitting on the sofa? Or will the mental reserve replenish more slowly and it would be better to sit on the sofa to get that back up? Or is it in fact, that going for a walk, the physical activity somehow makes the mental reserve go up faster? And in which case, I suppose we could say that's, you know, a change is better than a rest in that regard. And if that's true, then yeah, as I said, I mean, I think this is this, you know, means means that we should plan

our lives very differently. Certainly. And as a data point, anecdotally, if I say, say, I say, if I come up with some equivalence of activity, so if I spend the whole afternoon, writing lots of things and answering emails and having meetings, like that's typical, we have a we have a crazy Thursday every week, which is basically nonstop, nine o'clock to four, five o'clock, constantly in meetings and writing stuff, always that I say that I feels roughly equivalent to me going and doing a fairly vigorous two and a half hour mountain bike in terms of overall fatigue. Anecdotally, it usually takes me till the next day of sleep and not doing very much to fully recover ready to do one of those two things again. Yeah. So that's that's without doing one or the other. But and another data point, anecdotally, again, is I feel if I do the morning of vigorous, you know, loads and loads of work and then get out in the afternoon for a cycle or a decent walk, I kind of come back ready to do it again. Yeah, I can't. I'm not quite ready to do all of it again, but ready to do another few hours of work in the evening that I wouldn't have wanted to do or don't necessarily want to do. I wouldn't be feel I have the capacity to do. So to me, definitely, it feels like physical exercise recharges the mental bank more quickly than not doing any. Gotcha. Just sleeping. I think you might be

right. And so probably just so before you do, I know we separated them out. And I think we may have said that. I think because you can deplete them all at the same time, I think. Right. So you can be physically, emotionally, mentally, sensor, sensorially tired, and you can do an activity that would affect all of those things and deplete them. And for that, I think you definitely need a rest, actually, because it's, you know, total burnout. Yeah. Yeah. No, I get that when anyway, I want to give I don't really want to give this example here. I will cut this when you

know, but when you when you're having a business meeting with someone you dislike and you're climbing at the same time. Exactly. Yeah. No, no. Right. So sorry, Nick, you were going to just going to mention data, because it'd be useful to sort of try and work out whether this is just Peter and me coming up with subjective metaphors or whether it's real. And the fact is, we just don't know that people have obvious like it's a subject of huge interest from a kind of industrial productivity point of view. So there's been lots of studies into things like frequency of breaks and, you know, the effects of fatigue. So, for example, if you've been awake for 17 hours, apparently that's the same as and cheaper than getting two glass two cans of beer. So and apparently, if you've been awake for 24 hours, it's the it's the equivalent of having three standard drinks and can put you in a very risky state in terms of decision making. So look, clearly, fatigue, it's not just something we don't like. It has a concrete impact on performance when you're when you're fatigued. So it's that kind of stuff. But it's been studied from a sort of pretty much exclusively like behaviourist angle, which is here's a worker, how often do we have to take them out of that box in order to maximize throughput for the day kind of thing? It's that sort of approach. I think, you know, the sort of psychology of rests that there isn't really very, I mean, it certainly isn't a kind of knockdown study or paper anywhere that I could find that says, oh, if you need a rest, you need to do precisely this much sort of physical activity. And then this much kind of rest and sofas aren't as good as chairs and so on. The almost that there were there were one or two absolutely unchallengeable findings, for example, sleep really is the king of all the rests. Like nothing else works in place of sleep. So whatever sleep does, only sleep can do that. Lying there with your eyes closed in the dark is just not going to cut it. So that's pretty uncontroversial. Like if you see how someone performs after they've slept versus having just lain there, it's a huge difference. So that's one of the few things we can say without a doubt. But it's oddly very difficult to find. Sorry, I don't want to say

it's in the wrong direction, but apparently, I mean, it's even more than that. Sleep isn't just rest. It's much, it's many, many other things aside from rest. But anyway, yeah. Sorry, Peter.

I want to, I just want to bring in a thing that Nick and I, a concept that Nick and I are both sort of keen on, although there is controversy around it, which is ego depletion. We think it, Nick and I both agree that it's a very useful concept that explains phenomena that we have, you know, we directly observe in ourselves. What is ego depletion? Ego depletion is the idea that if you're, you're, you're, well, willpower is a battery. Yeah, willpower is a battery. So if you think, so if you, if you agree that one of the kinds of fatigues you might have is resisting the urge to eat biscuits and eat burgers and just be, you know, you're trying to lose weight, say, you're trying to lose weight, you're fighting against urges that want to make you eat high calorie food. The ego depletion kind of hypothesis is that there's a sort of battery of willpower that you have that you can draw down on throughout the day to shore up your willpower. But at a certain point, you run out and that's when you start scoffing biscuits. And that's, that's the thing that gets topped up when you rest or you have a change. And then you've got more willpower again. Now there's, it's one of the, it's one of the, it's one of the casualties of the reproduction crisis that psychology has sort of had in the last 10 years or so. However, there's a bit of controversy about the controversy. The replication crisis hasn't replicated. Yeah, well, no, not that, not that particular, not that wider thing. But there's a good article on clearerthinking.com, which is a favorite sort of pop psychology outlet of mine, that actually maybe, maybe we, maybe we, when we talk about willpower, actually, maybe we've lumped together too many things. And actually, if we broke that a bit down, down into smaller components, then ego depletion might be true for some and not others. Because of the way it's been tested, it might be testing part of it and other studies, testing other parts of it, ego depletion might be, might exist elsewhere. So it's kind of like, it's, yeah. So I just wanted to shout out to ego depletion because

I don't think it's dead yet. No, no, I will. And yes, I just refused, refused to believe that something like it isn't real. It may be explicable by like rational processes in your brain, eg, you know, actually thinking or be, you know, obviously physical activity, but also thinking hard is actually does actually use up quite a lot of energy, right? So, you know, the fact that you might be more highly motivated to eat a biscuit after thinking for a day is not, is not, yeah, it could be, it feels to me like. There's got to be some explanation for it. Yeah, yeah. Because there's no doubt that that's real. Yeah, right. You can stick to a diet, but one stressful day or five meetings in a row will chuck it under the bus because yes, you will, you'll be on the phone

to the kebab shop. Are there any ways we can think of to sort of hack our reserve, be it of ego or for other other thing for these other kind of battery that we're drawing down when we're tired?

I'm super interested in this because at the moment, as fine a physical specimen as I am, I'm reached, I'm on a new sort of level of self-improvement, right? Okay. Which you can probably see that journey in front of you. Yeah. So recently I've got this sort of personal trainer type person and I've got like the physical side of it that it's all planned out for me, what I need to be doing, but probably more importantly is the nutritional side of it. And I'm having trouble with the nutrition side of it because I do like vegetables. Well, I do. I mean, but for example, just to say I had fillet steak two nights in a row with broccoli and as much as I like fillet steak, it's, you know, I'm getting a bit, but also having it with broccoli sounds awful. Yeah. It's not, it's not great. I mean, don't get me wrong. I do feel sort of physically better and all that's fine, but I can't stop about an hour after shoving a load of chocolate biscuits in my

face. So Peter? What's the idea? Are you on a low carb diet? No, no, no, no. I'm just on a slight

calorie deficit diet, that's all. But trying to eat the right things within that, whatever that might mean, but I can't, every now and again I have to stuff Chris in my face and I just can't stop

Yeah. And so what's that correlated with? I mean, what, what is it that, are there like particular types of stress that make you less likely to stick to it? Or is it time of the day when it

happens? It's time of day. Mid-afternoon? I think there's a mid-afternoon and a late night thing going on. But also, that hints at one of my hacks, right? Brilliant. Fantastic. Okay. And then the other thing is yes, straight after one kind of food, I need another kind of food. So straight after proper food, I need something sugary. I need a KitKat. There you go. Yeah. So I'm throwing myself at your mercy. I need help. I need help. Have a change. Have a KitKat. Let's have a break. That's a break is as good as a rest. Yeah. Yeah. But I mean, how do I have a break? But anyway,

I want to hear this hack. This idea is very contingent on whether or not your work, etc. life allows you to do it, but having flexibility to do it. But I find the optimum time for me to do exercise is around two o'clock after lunch in that sort of afternoon doldrum period when you're really starting to flag. And you're really starting to sort of that's when you might reach into the cupboard and snuff a couple of biscuits or make yourself a toast or something. And if I like, you know, lunch is usually fairly light sandwich or something. And then hour after that, go for a cycle. I that somehow bypasses that whole biscuit eating period of the day for me. I've come back feeling physically tired, but ready to do more thinking time. Yeah. And biscuits are the last thing on your mind. And biscuits are the last thing on my mind. So that for me is a

really useful hack. Yeah, I think that I mean, the challenge isn't it is is getting out in the first place, get managing to say, right, it's time for that bit of exercise. And I think it feels like habits are quite important there. Like if you are always doing that at two o'clock or something. Yeah. Or what you know, as soon as you've finished lunch, then that that Yeah, that feels like a way of doing that. But I know, personally, that's always the, you know, I know, I should go for a two hour walk. I just cannot face it. That's the that's the problem, you know. But But yeah, I mean, I think if this was easy, we wouldn't need to be having this podcast. Yeah, best to rest, you know,

isn't easy. So just to mirror your another hack, just to mirror your, your health kick that you're going on at the moment. So I haven't had any caffeine for about two months now. Okay. And I do feel significantly better. Non caffeine at all. Not even a not even a single cup of tea in the morning. I've been weaning it off for the last few months. Down to like a cup of tea in the morning for caffeinated tea. But I kicked that and I don't notice any downside. But my sleep is so much better effect, my sleep is so much more effective. So I still sleep for the same amount, but I wake up feeling much better. And I flag less. So I'd say, you know, the chemicals we put in our body pretty significant, right? Yeah, not done is so well, what Okay, to make this even better, what stimulants can I take? Yeah. In addition, or what's up even on a sort of softer and better commerce level? What supplements could I take? Vitamin B, vitamin D, amphetamines are

presumably depressants is what you want if you want to get to sleep. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm thinking like,

not to make the sleep better, but to make the waking hours more effective. Yeah. Or to decrease my requirement for sleep. So eat into that eight hour requirement, maybe get it down to six. So

you've got to work out your quadruple your productivity with a load of uppers and brain drugs, and then scoff a load of downers to fall asleep. Yeah, yeah, this is definitely a healthy,

healthy sounding life. So I'm just wondering if there might be something, a level at which that

is sustainable, and not damaging. Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't know if this is the time to talk about it. But it feels to me like this is a problem we've created for ourselves. I mean, of course, the modern world is, I mean, why is any any of this a problem? Like, why can't you just go and have a rest? Or sit down? Or just go for a walk? The problem is that there are so many obligations we have that are forced on us, or if you like that we've chosen to force upon ourselves. And, and I think, you know, so we then are forced to try and optimise. Whereas I sort of think do, do birds worry about whether a change is as good as a rest? Do lions worry about that? No, they just get on with it. They just do what feels right. And I feel I think the problem is that what feels right for us, actually, you know, from a health point of view, is pretty incapable of being highly productive. So I think we've got the we've created this problem, as a kind almost like to solve the problem of how do we be productive. And that's created this other problem of how do we how do we rest as effectively as possible? Because unlike, you know, our hunter gatherer ancestors who might have worked for a couple of hours a day, we now work for eight, 10 hours a day. And so we're in a, you know, we're in a completely different, different state of fatigue to anything that would

have existed in the past. Yeah. You sort of almost sort of unintentionally, I think, gave a quote there of Brian from the life of Brian, when he's on the verge of being proclaimed as a messiah. But actually, just when he is proclaimed as being like, not a messiah, which is when he said, what about the birds? You know, they're quite happy, aren't they? You know, what are you having a go at the birds for? But I don't think there's much more to say on this. However, I do want to ask a question. Yeah, go on. Yeah. I want to ask this, which is what is the reason I ask is, by the way, I had a great example of this recently, myself, what's the best most and recent bit of either rest or change that you have had? So I had a really good rest recently. Brilliant. Which is that I decided, so I really like sauna, spa complex type things. And I was recently cheated of that experience when I was traveling through Europe, because on the way out, we stopped in Cologne on the way to Poland. And I went to this wonderful spa, which I'd been to years ago, had a lovely time. And then on the way back through Cologne, wasn't able to stop there. And I was like, no, I really wanted to have that again. And so I thought, you know what, why don't I just fly to Germany for the day and just hang out at this spa for a day and fly back in the evening. You

decadent scumbag. And I did exactly that. So it turns out you're also a member of this jet set.

Absolutely. Why don't you go the whole hog and go to Baden-Baden? Yeah, well, I'd like maybe, yeah. And one of the lovely things about it was two things. I felt like I was convalescing. That was the first thing. And famously, you know, convalescence is no longer a thing, you know, whereas it definitely should be. Used to be in the olden days. Right, yeah. Yeah,

they recognized how important it was to go into, to be wheeled around an institution in a wheelchair by a nurse. Yeah. Yeah. So this is what it felt like to me. With a blanket. Yeah. Yeah. I definitely need that. I would love, yeah. Get wheeled out of the garden. Yeah, exactly. And

actually, because in the sauna, understandably, you're not allowed to wander around with your mobile phones and stuff. It has to stay in the locker room. So therefore, you've got very limited information flowing into you. And I really liked that. It was a bit like going back in time 30 years from that respect. Yeah. I had a lovely rest. Flew back in the evening. You know, it was great. It was really nice. Didn't cost much either. So that's my example. Think of the carbon footprint.

Wow. Yeah. But I got rest. So, yeah. Well, I, this, I suppose I'm re-raising this as I suppose it reinforces the kind of Peter's model, really, of these kind of different reserves of energy. But I had a board game weekend a few weeks ago, maybe three weeks ago. And what this entails is a bunch of people coming around my house. In this case, I think about about 12 people came around from sort of Friday, Friday afternoon through to Sunday afternoon. And intense, nonstop board gaming, board gaming, eating, drinking, being merry. Yeah. So essentially you're constantly thinking about whatever game I'm playing. Right. Which is, you know, intense mental activity of a kind. But it's nothing like the kind of mental activity I have to do at work, which is kind of constantly sort of unstructuredly creative. It's constantly having to answer the question, how do I deal with this difficult thing and having to think through options and all of them. With quite serious, potentially serious consequences or real consequences. Whereas suddenly here we are, one minute I'm a Formula One driver. Next minute I'm a Cuban Mafia member. You know, then an hour or two later, I'm converting Irish pagans to Christianity. And then I'm a reaver in 16th century Scotland. And the point is that it feels at the end of it that I haven't just had one change. I've had about 20. I've done loads and loads of different things and I've experienced lots of different things. And it's like having loads of holidays all at once. And at the end of it, I feel absolutely great. I'm flipping love Weekend of Game. Yeah. But a lot of people might think that sounds completely exhausting. And in one sense it is. But I definitely feel totally energised. And all through the magic that

can be afforded by moving tiny, tiny little bits of cardboard bits around.

But those with the imaginations to understand that, it's not doing that, is it? It's moving your it's moving your forces up the front for a climactic confrontation with the baddies. Peter?

I'll tell you what is the opposite of a good rest, is having a three-year-old in the house. Although that does provide another sort of relief from work. Because sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, answering emails, reading things, thinking about things. It's really nice just to go and play Lego or play little sort of vignettes about social interactions with soft toys that Ada seems to be really into.

So there is a change and or a rest in there as well. Okay. All right. Let's stop there. And thank you very much for joining us on the Cognitive Engineering Podcast. I'm Fraser McGruer. I've been here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph. Until next time. Goodbye.