Mental Recovery
I read certain myths about physical exercise that sounded familiar to me. One major and common misunderstanding that we have about fitness and exercise is that we build muscles by doing exercise, when this article explains that it is quite the opposite: we do not build muscles during physical exercise; we actually do damage to our muscles during strenuous exercise when we put strain on our body, and it is during subsequent rest and recovery that we re-build our muscles that emerge stronger and more toned than before. Rest and recovery, therefore, are every bit as important as exercise and pain, since we seem to only build strength and gain fitness after doing exercise, and without some proper rest where we can recover from our physical strain and let our muscular tissues heal we can never (re)build our bodily strength.
It is easy to understand why we might think that physical exercise directly leads to physical strength, since exercise is the regular way of gaining fitness that everyone in the world practises, but the subtle distinction between exercise and recovery shows that correlation is not necessarily (direct) causation, even though there is definitely positive correlation between physical exercise and bodily strength (i.e. the more we exercise, the stronger we become, all things being equal), since there is an indirect link between the two that is mediated by the all-important (and probably underestimated) recovery process. All this makes sense to me, not only on a physiological level but also on a mental-cognitive dimension, since it resonates with my experiences in studying and doing research. It was once explained to me that our brain was a muscle which functioned in similar ways to our other muscles that consisted of tissue, and just as we exercise our muscles by doing physical exercise, we similarly exercise our brain muscles by engaging in cognitive and intellectual activities. It is hence important not to overwork our brain or we risk doing damage to its tissues, like how we can tear our muscles by over-exercising or doing physical exercise in the wrong way. The consequences of such injury are potentially far-reaching and we would not want to do permanent damage to our brain and end up losing certain cognitive abilities, just as we would not want to walk with a limp or have a deformed limb for the rest of our lives. Strenuous cognitive activity, therefore, also destroys the tissues in our brain, and it also requires mental rest for it to recover and rebuild itself so that it can become stronger and give us mental strength. If we apply the analogy of physical exercise and recovery, mental and intellectual strength may also come from mental recovery, not strain, since although it is during intense work that we train our brain by doing all the hard work such as collecting all the data/evidence and putting it all together, it may require occasional and systematic mental breaks to give our brain a chance to rest and recover so that it can come back stronger. There are many ways of taking mental rest that may be idiosyncratic (i.e. different people may have different ways of resting their brain/mind), but the point is that if one does not take such breaks and ends up putting one’s cerebral muscle under constant pressure and strain, one’s mental workout becomes unidirectional as one in effect damages the brain without letting it heal itself, which is suicidal. It is hence not only important but essential that one takes breaks, since our true strength (both physical and mental) is derived from rest, not work. Paradoxical.
I am a professional linguist and I do research in theoretical linguistics, mainly formal syntax and historical/comparative linguistics. I am also a simultaneous translator/interpreter and a language teacher, and my language specialisations include Indo-European, Latin, Greek, Romance (especially Spanish) and East Asian, namely Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese). I am also interested in history and politics, especially the development of western political philosophy, which is the result of my education in the humanities (literature, history, philosophy, philology) at the University of Oxford (Balliol College). My favourite sport is football (soccer) and I am a long-term die-hard supporter of ACFiorentina in Italy: Batistuta, Baggio, Rui Costa, Toldo from the 1990s/2000s will always be in my heart, as they were my childhood heroes. For more information about me, please visit my website: https://www.keithtselinguist.com. 組合與位置，構造和意思 Numbers and words. #keithtselinguist #humanlinguist 檢視「keithtselinguist」的全部文章
Originally published at http://keithtselinguist.wordpress.com on May 11, 2023.
