Ask HN: Feels like my brain doesn't want to work anymore

That'll be the 100% capacity that you did for a while and it burnt you out, right?

No one can work at "100% capacity" forever. You need to rest, to relax, and to do things that aren't work and aren't "productive". That downtime is recuperative and informative. As counterproductive as it might sound, taking time away from your computer to do other things makes you a better developer.

Working at what feels like 90% all the time is better than working at 100% for 6 months and then working at 40% for the following 6 months when you're burnt out.

In the last couple of months I've been recovering from mild-to-moderate burnout symptoms myself, and a lot of how I've been doing that is playing The Witcher 3. It works. (It probably helps if the game you're playing is one of the most astonishing artistic creations of the last couple of years, to be fair.)

The big thing is this: you can't force it. One plausible explanation for burnout is that it's a defense mechanism from your subconscious against excessive delayed gratification: if you're very self-disciplined and work very hard on something that you think will give you rewards in the end, but doesn't whilst you're doing it, then don't get those rewards, after a while you start building up subconscious resistance to doing that again.

It sounds like you're not too long away from the death-march project. If so, just give it some more time of not trying to do things (counter-intuitive and often scary for highly motivated people, I know), and see how you're doing in a month or two.

For someone who isn't a regular gamer, it isn't a relaxing thing to do. It's frustrating to have to master new controls, and every new game mechanic requires some kind of mental gymnastics, not to mention the hand-eye co-ordination to master.

For people who have, or do play games with some regularity, it is a great way to relax. New control schemes have a very shallow learning curve, and it's rare that a regular gamer encounters an entirely new game mechanic.

For example, my father in law was playing a COD game after not having played video games for many, many years, and was stuck at a certain point. After watching him sit through a brief cut scene, and then furiously mash the buttons on the controller, I intuitively realized what he was doing wrong. He was trying to "play the game" as he normally did, but didn't notice the little button icon at the bottom of the screen to signify a quick time event, and had never seen one before either. As a result, he was hitting the wrong button, only to watch the cut scene finish with his character dieing (he admitted to having sat through this 20+ times).

I myself, will often play games for a few hours after my wife has gone to bed, and on more than one occassion, I've complained about not having the energy to do anything prodcutive after the evening meal, and she likes to say something to the tune of "but you play video games for hours?". For her, playing video games is a tense, mind racing activity that requires lots of thought and manual dexterity. For me, it's little more than an interactive story with the occassional challenge (and they're usually bested after a second attempt, even at harder skill levels) and allows me to tune out for a bit before bed.