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You had a long day and your batteries are drained. You would like to improve your chess though. How to do this in an appropriate or maybe even restorative way? Should you practice at all or do something else instead?

I found myself blundering away in games or tactical puzzles and moved away from it to look for better ways. How or what do you guys practice if your mentally exhausted?

Edit: Thank you for your answers!

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    If you're mentally exhausted, sleep, rest, or do a not-intellectual activity that will help you feel better (e.g. sport). You can come back to the chessboard later. Don't expect your tired brain to make any progress before it has had some rest !
    – Evargalo
    Nov 14, 2017 at 15:48

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Yoga.

Failing that watch your favourite TV programme.

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    so i had to come to stackexchange for someone to remind me of my yoga practice. :-D
    – Ostkontentitan
    Nov 21, 2017 at 8:24
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When you are tired but want to study it is probably a good time to watch chess videos. You don't have to be sharp to absorb someone explaining some positional ideas, or get some exposure to theory.
Also, playing through recent GM games just to flag ones you want to look at when you are not tired can be a helpful way of keeping up on things.

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  • I think you can really benefit from chess videos if you can concentrate on the content, tried to guess moves by yourself, try to remember important patterns or ideas, apply epistemological doubt to the author's claim, etc. If your brain is tired, well, maybe you will still enjoy watching a commented high-level game, for instance, but you should count that as leisure, not training...
    – Evargalo
    Nov 15, 2017 at 8:16

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