Occasionally I spend an entire day inside, without leaving my apartment except maybe for 5 minutes to collect the post or drop my girlfriend off at the bus stop. For the most part, these days are not total disasters. However, while I have conducted no experiments or collected any data on the matter, it is my experience that these days are often marked by increased feelings of distractedness — I am more likely to swipe on social media, focus less on work, feel less in ‘control’ of my will, and engage in relaxation activities that do not re-energise me. I am still taking regular breaks during these days, but they do not involve a significant change of environment.
This is in contrast to days where I work at home, but leave the apartment for a reasonable chunk of time; say I go out in the middle of the day, or walk to the bakery in the morning for a pastry and a coffee. On these days, I typically notice that the feelings of distractedness are lessened.
I believe it is very important to not stay in the same place all day. Being in a single environment for hours on end, I conjecture makes it easier for our brains to slip into a “comfortable” mode where our defaults are not re-energising, and our minds are more clouded by the lack of a sense of time passing. I think this “comfortable” mode is really a form of what we might naively call “boredom”, where we feel less motivation to do things that usually excite us, despite those activities being very much available (e.g. think of times when we know that we would probably have more fun reading a book or writing a nice story than swiping on instagram for hours on end, but we just can’t bring ourselves to switch it up). In some sense, I think it makes sense that our brains fall into this mode, because they are bored, and know that they haven’t been taken anywhere new — after all, it's not great for our health to stay inside and not get any vitamin D or do any exercise, so our brains might reasonably rebel against this imposition. I don't claim any physiological knowhow however, this is vibe-based.
So, what can we do about it? Well, if this is our brains signalling their malcontent, it is only important that we notice this, speak our acknowledgement of the situation out loud, and remember that the likely cause of this feeling is our static environment. Identify that feeling of “boredom”, a certain grey grogginess or frustration paired with a little emptiness, and simply see it for what it is. Since we know the cause, we can allow ourselves to get excited about what is a very easy fix to our problem. We need only change our environment, and then we can be sure that we’ll feel better and be motivated to get on with something that excites us and brings us joy. This is, in fact, what I have done just now: after such a day, I noticed the symptoms, said them aloud, and picked myself up to go out for a walk to buy some milk at the supermarket, and crack on with some tasks that excite me, such as writing this ad-hoc note. It’s as simple as that! Isn’t that exciting, we love a very easy fix to a seemingly-hard problem.
I think the same value in changing environments can also be found on the scale of days and weeks, not just within a day. I frequently note that if I work too many days from home, or in the office (so not just about going outside this time!), in a row, then my productivity goes down and my fatigue levels can increase. I believe this is related to those feelings of “boredom” we get during a day locked inside. Now I don’t know if the same justifications hold for why we get these feelings, and they may be more personal to me in this situation, or to people who do certain kinds of work. However, I find that just changing my work environment every few days does a lot to refresh my perspective, and keep me excited about my work, and plush with new ideas. This timescale is also the one which surprises me more - it seems less obvious to me why this should be the case as compared to the fatigue from staying in one spot all day.
What about longer timescales? We do typically change our environment more on longer timescales anyway, but I wonder if there’s value in changing the city we live in, or the apartment, or the workplace, particularly with respect to creative output.