Mental defrag

I can ride out a wave of stress to meet a deadline or finish an emotionally intense activity, but as soon as it’s over and I let myself relax, I hit a wall and become functionally useless, woozy almost. Zombified. It’s not a blood sugar crash, though feels similar. At that point I basically just need to lay down and do nothing for an hour or two. I usually can’t sleep — it’s a different kind of fatigue. I think of it as mental defragging. (If you’re younger than me you might not have ever defragged your computer — basically back in the day computers weren’t very good at allocating disk space and so when you noticed your computer was bogging down you’d run a defragmentation utility that consolidated information. You couldn’t do anything else on the computer while it was running, and it would show you a representation of all your jumbled shit slowly becoming tidier. Depending how much junk was on your hard drive, this could take quite a while — you might even start it before bed to run…