Most of you practice some kind of weekly exercise routine or are at least familiar with the concept.

This manifests itself in morning lap swimming, weight lifting, speed walking…I don’t know your niche, maybe you are strongly devoted to the practice of reading backwards. Whatever it is, you are most likely familiar with the necessity of recovery in exercise improvement.

Let’s take running, for example. If you run 7 days a week and never take a day off from your hardcore marathon training, it is likely that you will not actually improve as a runner. Your body simply does not have enough time between workouts to repair itself; instead of building your body up with repeated bouts of sprints and hill workouts, you are tearing more holes in your already worn system.

The purpose of recovery or rest days in exercise is not to satisfy your fundamental laziness. It’s not entirely to give yourself, you know, “some time to truly appreciate exercise”. The brunt of the benefit of a rest day is to allow your body to build itself back up and embody the work you recently put into it.

You need one day, one time to do the opposite of what you had been doing in order to do what you had been doing better the next time.

This idea of recovery extends to intellectual improvement. To mental improvement. To social improvement.

One semester of college typically lasts 15 weeks. Therefore one four-year degree encompasses 120 weeks. If you extracted all weekends, all holidays, all forms of breaks it would only take 85 weeks straight to graduate with the equivalent of a four-year degree. That translates to 1.6 years for the same degree that typically takes 4 years.

How absurdly efficient! one might exclaim to oneself.

Take a second for thought. Some of you have done intensive courses; when you jam your mind full every single day without break, what actually happens? …Not actual learning. Some strange mutation of memorization and panic and exhaustion from the mass overexposure to material.

We need weekends. We need breaks and holidays. Not just so we can have at least one night to justify a massive rager, but so that we can have time to let our brains heal and build itself up and embody the work you recently stuffed into it.

Exactly the same kind of recovery manifests itself into social intelligence. Do you want to improve your social capacity? Do you want to transform yourself into a fitter version of your inner party animal? You need some form of a recovery day.

The rest day when it comes to social exercise embodies itself in the word space.

In order for one to fully recuperate and utilize the work put into the mental effort of being social, space must be allowed to exist in one’s life.

The manifestation of space is relative; for some closer to the “introvert” side of the scale, space looks like a daily practice with long intervals of uninterrupted individualism. For those who lean more toward extreme “extrovert”, perhaps space only needs to present itself 2-3 times per week.

Space for some is complete solitude.

For others, it is the absence of talking but the presence of others or the ability to process verbally through complex thoughts and issues. Nevertheless, don’t undervalue the necessity of some well earned space in order to invest in a fitter social intelligence.