Every day at around 3PM, my brain gets weary. I’ve tried numerous techniques to counter this challenge:

Coffee (especially when McDonald’s was giving away free smalls)

Splashing cold water on my face

Wandering around online

Snacking

Yet I’ve found one technique to be the most effective: going for a walk. The longest stroll I’ve taken is around 10 minutes, and I just wander around the block. I pass by the open hotel lobby that’s air-conditioned in the summer and heated in the winter. By the students on their way to and from art school. By storeowners, by late lunchers, by buildings under construction and their builders, by many things. I’ve even run into friends around the block.

I look forward to this break every day. Not because I don’t like what I’m doing, but because my brain is just fried and I’m hitting the afternoon hump. On days I don’t take it, I feel like I’m doing my employer or client an injustice — because I can’t give them my brain’s full output that they deserve.

Even recently, when the temperature dropped down to -30 Celsius, I bundled up and wandered outside — and into Toronto’s underground tunnel system.

I recently read Neal Gabler’s biography of Walt Disney. When Disney was emotionally broken down by the business of entertainment, upon insistence by his brother and colleagues, he reluctantly went on vacation despite all his problems at the studio:

Walt said that he and Lillian had the “time of our life” because he had reached the point where “I didn’t give a darn.” He felt he had been liberated from the burden of his own perfectionism. — Walt Disney, Neal Gabler

Because Disney’s job — storytelling and managing a company — involved constantly refocusing the brain, and because he was something of a perfectionist, being aimless for a period of time meant he happily stopped caring about work — and gained the power to continue forging onward.