Humor will not be tolerated!! -Portia

Question 58509, for reference.

I've seen many people struggle with this; fortunately, I've never really struggled with it. Part of the problem that I've found is that people, especially those recently out of school, see a dramatic reduction in amount of mental stimulation. They are used to stimulating their brains with schoolwork/homework, but haven't found out how to remain intellectually stimulated outside of that. They transition to full-time work, and work may or may not be intellectually stimulating, but they go home and leave all that mental work behind them at their jobs.

There's definitely an obvious connection between our mental state and our physical; when we have trained our brains to rest from higher levels of thinking after work, our bodies naturally go into a state of lethargy. Sometimes sufficient sleep, exercise, and taking care of our bodies isn't enough to prevent this; we have to re-train our bodies and minds to not view post-work time as a time when we just shut down.

Any number of hobbies can assist with this; intellectually stimulating games (board or video), keeping up on politics by reading/watching/listening to high quality news sources, study up on topics that interest you, etc. The key is to keep activities that you look forward to, and that stimulate you mentally, in the works for the evening, so that your sub-conscious doesn't think that your home time is the time to go into a state of reduced activity.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting that the answers to that question focused almost exclusively on the physical instead of the mental. School tends to be stimulating in a lot of ways that some full-time work isn't. In school you're likely to be juggling four or five different classes, plus extracurriculars, so you have a wide variety of types of activity. But a lot of jobs are monotonous, which can just put you in the doldrums after awhile.