Our limit

Of course, everyone knows that all people have their own limits. However, we should work with it in a quantitative way, otherwise, management of our own life becomes very vulnerable to luck.

From the famous book by Eagleman (2015), I got to learn many things related to the brain and consequently related to us. In some points, those might be challenged by a neurologist, but in general, all the knowledge presented in that source backed with an academic background and scientific experiments, i.e. reasonably trustworthy.

For me, the most important piece of knowledge was our daily limit of motivation, in the time between two consecutive sleep. For now, let's put aside the significance of sufficient sleep and such. In between sleepings, there are many events which can increase/decrease our motivation, until reaching the limits of our physical body.

The critical point is, overall performance is not very much affected by long vacations, many happy events etc. unless they have a long-lasting effect. I, for instance, moved last year from a very bad house to a place where there is hot water for taking a shower. I always felt relieved due to this fact, but I use this water every day. Last year, I also went to Czechia and met interesting people, have many of my first-in-my-lifetime experiences, yet after that, it did not have any positive effect on my future performance at all. In short, it is wrong to assume that long breaks and holidays to the work enhance any performance.

Anxiety and other stresses, tensions reduce this limit proportional to their magnitude, as they consume some part of one's brain, less energy remains for finishing the job. They don't have any enhancing effect, one should keep up maybe for 8 hours in such a state for the same work can be finished in 2 hours with a calm mind, and people usually think that duration of working as a good sign for producing work, but wrong. In fact, besides anxiety, stress, other emotions also consume one's capacity, yet in order to use considerable energy in a day, it seems obligatory to allocate some source for pleasing activities as well.

In conclusion, it is all balance. The ideal case is a day, always having some good experiences and feelings, and producing very much, not completely allocating all day for production or for pleasures. The latter cases result in arguably many social problems.

References
Eagleman, D. (2015). The brain: The story of you: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.