Cognitive Deloading

My energy was crashing 3 weeks before my mid-year vacation and I wasn’t sure why.

I’m typically very productive. Write or exercise in the morning. Work hard and focused on my job. Meet mentees and friends on Zoom. BJJ study prep. BJJ sparring or lift heavy. Study AI. Read a book. Sleep.

Repeat.

But now I felt tired: writing wouldn’t take in the morning. Work felt diffuse. Skipped training again. Study was unproductive.

But nothing had changed... right? Why was I nailing it a few weeks ago and suddenly everything felt like pushing a boulder uphill?

So I did what only I could do.. I dumped my year-to-date timelog into AI and told it to analyze it for me.

Conclusion: earlier in the year, I had accidentally taken a break every 6 weeks or so. This time, I pushed 6 days a week for 8 weeks straight.

Accidental breaks had paced me before: a work trip after a hard push, family activities over the weekend, or an evening dinner after a busy day. This time, nothing interrupted 8 straight weeks of working and studying 6 days a week, morning to night.

Over my vacation, I decided to structure my breaks.

Stop before you stop

There’s a reason our minds feel better after a rejuvenating vacation: fatigue accumulates.

Nobody is immune to it. You can build endurance over time, but only through cycles of exertion and recovery.

In strength training, a deload is a short, deliberate period of easier training. In my routine, after 4–8 weeks of pushing the weights up, I cut both the weights and the sets in half for a week.

I still go to the gym. I still do the lifts. I just make them easy.

The idea seems paradoxical: if I want to get stronger, why would I deliberately lift less? Well, because training doesn’t make me stronger on its own. Training creates stress; recovering from that stress makes me stronger.

Keep adding stress faster than you can recover from it and fatigue eventually hides your progress. Your body may have adapted, but it is too tired to demonstrate it.

A deload is not what you do after your body can’t take any more. It’s what lets you keep training before you reach that point.

This need is easier to notice with a barbell. Skip your deload and suddenly you can’t add weight. You can’t match last week’s reps. Multiple lifts stall at once. The numbers tell you something is wrong.

But our minds don’t give us numbers that clean. There’s no failed rep that clearly tells you it’s time to deload, so the break has to be planned before our performance is obviously degraded.

Here’s how I define it:

Cognitive deloading is a planned period of reduced mental workload that allows accumulated fatigue to dissipate before it degrades your work.

For me, that means doing the cognitive equivalent of lifting half the weight for half the sets. At work, I do good work, but postpone anything proactive — particularly new initiatives — until the following week.

In the evenings, I read something light or listen to music. Outside of work, I avoid AI altogether; if I use it, I cap it at 30 minutes a day, with no serious study or project work. On weekends, I play video games, guitar, or chess for fun, and not to improve.

The activities don’t disappear; they get lighter. It’s a breath before the next push.

Put recovery on the calendar

Deloading before the fatigue forces you to stop only works if the deload exists on the calendar. Otherwise, “I’ll rest when I need it” turns into “I’ll rest when I can’t keep going.”

My rule is simple: every calendar week numbered a multiple of 5 is a deload. Week 25, week 30, week 35, and so on.

The calendar is the floor, and fatigue is the override. If I feel depleted or start getting sick before a scheduled deload, I take another one. An extra deload doesn’t move the calendar; the next multiple-of-5 week stays in place.

Within each week, I use a smaller version of the same principle. If fatigue starts pulling me down, I take an evening off — typically Wednesday. And if I work four evenings straight from Monday through Thursday, Friday evening is off, period.

That caps serious evening work at four days without asking the tired version of me to decide whether it has done enough.

Of course, putting recovery on the calendar only works if you follow the calendar.

The deload I had to repeat

Last week was week 30. It was supposed to be a deload.

But I was deep into Pilecat, and I didn’t stop. Instead of cutting the weight and the sets in half, I packed what felt like three weeks of work into one.

By Wednesday, I crashed. I skipped training, read a book for two hours, went to sleep at 8:30pm, and slept until the next morning.

Then I got sick over the weekend. Pushing too hard probably didn’t cause it — I likely ate something bad — but the cause doesn’t change what the system should do. Both override signals had fired: I was depleted, and I was getting sick.

Skipping the deload didn’t remove the need for recovery. It only delayed it.

So this week, week 31, I’m deloading again: required work, one light AI activity — evaluating the new Opus model, mostly led by my agents — and little else.

I’m not moving the schedule. Week 35 will still be a deload, as planned. Recovering late doesn’t buy me five fresh weeks of pushing.

Honestly, I still feel like I’m going slower. Every evening off and every fifth week at half load is time I could spend writing, studying, or building.

But cognitive deloading gives me a pace I can sustain all year. It’s not about going slow; it’s about going at MY speed. Deliberately.

It’s not about sprinting through this week. It’s about having enough left for whatever comes next. As the saying goes:

Slow is smooth.

And smooth is fast.