I got this insight from Gemini while trying to get it to help me learn C effectively (I was struggling with pointers for those of you who care)

I was asking it to explain concepts to me as I normally do, and eventually I realised I had pretty quickly reached a point where nothing was really going into my mind. It felt like I was trying to hold new information in my working memory when it was already tired out and overloaded. I informed Gemini of this out of curiosity, and it told me it was time to go into ‘Diffused mode’ thinking to give my ‘focused mode thinking’ time to process and digest everything. (Shoutout to Barbara Oakley, and my fellow LHtL enjoyers btw).

Great advice. I had actually forgotten about that whole paradigm. So I went and lay on my mattress to let my mind wander, and that’s when it hit me. I realised that when I go into diffused mode thinking and my mind wanders, it’s no longer the passive, fun daydreaming I used to do when I was younger. It was now more like a relentless background audit of all my past behaviour. I pull out old memories and measure myself against my ideals, or compare myself to the people I respect. When I’m not doing that, I’m interrogating my philosophies for inconsistencies or spiralling into questions about what I should be doing with my life. That is anything but relaxing and fun.

This process was no longer passive relaxation with a little fun here and there. It not only carried real psychological weight and was no longer giving my mind any space to rest, but I think this may have been one of the reasons for my constant feeling of exhaustion and depletion for the last few years.

My diffuse mode wasn’t resting anymore. It was just a perpetual analysis process that kept hogging CPU.

At first, I wanted to just shut it down completely, so I looked into that, and the answer to how to do that was pretty obvious: it was what wise asian dudes had been preaching for ages: “If you want to shut down the mind, engage the body”, or something like that. The principle being that if you do something that requires just enough attention to not give rumination any space, but not so much attention that it becomes draining, it will allow you to keep the rumination at bay.

Everyone has their own sweet spot here, depending on how their mind works, but some pretty universal activities that let you do this are the cliche ones, such as:

  • Sports that aren’t too intense, but also engaging enough to get your mind to stfu
  • Playing instruments (that you’re actually comfortable with, and don’t make you want to throw them at the nearest toddler after the 17th failed attempt at your song of choice)
  • Cleaning the biohazard that you politely call your room
  • Listening to good music to melt into it instead of treating it as background noise

BUT, (and this is a big but, like Kim K type big), this is actually not the way forward. Why?

Because all of these mental processes that keep on draining your RAM and CPU aren’t bugs at all, they’re actually features. More importantly, they’re mandatory automatic updates.

All of this rumination and all of the heavy emotions that come with it are our brain’s mechanism for helping us grow. Our brain attempts to solve or reconcile something, and it will keep running in the background like a large software update until the new patch is installed. And that patch could be something like a concrete solution to the problem at hand, or, equally importantly, the acceptance that the problem can’t be solved and is outside of our control, meaning we can stop thinking about it. Sometimes what needs processing isn’t even an idea, but an emotion. In the book “Letting Go”, Hawkins makes a really interesting point, and it is as follows:

The thoughts associated with even one feeling may literally run into the thousands. The understanding of the underlying emotion and its correct handling is, therefore, more rewarding and less time-consuming than dealing with one’s thoughts.

If we take my situation as an example, all of these thoughts may be boiled down to one feeling of fear, one that I am unwilling to sit down with and face as is, raw. If I were to sit with my own fear, and either address it by letting it run its course or logically address all of the thoughts associated with it, I would feel much lighter and free up a lot of mental resources.

But in today’s age, it is harder than ever to mindfully do this, since we are constantly surrounded by effortless distraction (Endless reels, messages, TV, YouTube, video games, and all the other hollow shit we numb ourselves with and call ‘relaxation’). We numb all of the flashing warnings by just opening new tabs on top of them.

So what do we do?

The way forward is surrender.

Instead of running from your emotions and worries, instead of trying to shut down the updates, you have to let them run their course. Surrender. Schedule time to face whatever it is that you’ve been avoiding.

I don’t know what this means for you specifically, but there’s a lot of good stuff out there on this. I’d particularly recommend David R Hawkin’s book “Letting Go”. When I first went through it, I was super sceptical and it brought my defences up immediately when it started making promises of great healing and shit in the first chapter, but as I went on with it, it actually ended up giving me a lot of great insights, and helped me understand my own body and mind better.

But if you don’t have time for allat, here’s the TLDR: If you notice yourself being exhausted cause your mind never really rests and worries all the time, Just simply take note of all the things you keep ruminating about, and actually get them down on paper, then schedule a block of time, maybe an hour or two to just sit with them and boil them down to the emotion they arise from, and dissolve that emotion. Or, if you think that’s all bogus, just give your brain a plan for it so it can relax, which is like giving a return value to a function that doesn’t wanna stop. But for the love of god stop numbing yourself from it and actually sit with it.

Here’s a triage framework that might help (courtesy of GPT 5):

Solve: Is there a concrete, controllable next action? Define it and calendar it.

Accept: If uncontrollable/unknowable, explicitly declare acceptance (write it; say it). No more background polling.

Park: If important but not now, schedule a review block. The brain relaxes once a time is guaranteed.

Once you let the updates finish, or you let these endless functions have a return value, you will feel much lighter.

More will probably arise, c’est la vie, but now you have a paradigm for dealing with them effectively.