It's absolutely crazy that intellectual labor can wipe you out. It seems like it shouldn't be a thing, like your stores of brain juice shouldn't be able to be depleted in that way.
I feel like a wizard that's out of spell slots, and to me that's a hackish mechanical limitation put in place to try to balance the classes.
#it's fucked and it's bad design #i should be able to write and edit for 20 hours a day #i'm just sitting there how are we even using energy #feels made up (via @softest-punk, emphasis mine)
Your brain is an incredibly energy-intensive organ. It makes up approximately 2% of your total body mass, but at rest it's using 22% of your total energy intake. The only thing that uses the same percentage of energy is all of your skeletal muscle (which is about 40% of your total body mass), with the liver (about 2.6% of your total mass) close behind at 21% (Aragon et al, 2017).
And that's how much energy it's using at rest.
That's the baseline.
So if you're doing lots of intellectual labour, your brain - which already has disproportionately huge energy demand - is going to use even more energy to keep up with the work. That's why you feel so wiped/drained/like you're out of spell slots after high intellectual demand - because your brain is an organ, and you've just done a lot of high-energy work with a high-energy organ.
Feed your brain.
Honestly, I often feel more wiped out by a full day of mental activity than a full day of physical activity. Physical activity is also demanding, but the tiredness you feel afterwards is different in quality. As in, I feel like I'm still fundamentally a functional human being? But when I'm mentally tired, I sometimes forget who I even am and how I'm supposed to function. Literally a whithered husk of myself. I can force myself to do stuff when I'm physically tired, but when I'm mentally tired? The closest horizontal surface it is.
