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Reason #1
: Downtime Aids Insights
Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal
Science
:
The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious
deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question
addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not.
Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the
Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left
to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through
these decisions will lead to a 
worse
outcome than loading up the relevant information
and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your
mind mull things over.
Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed
for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think
through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted
by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a
decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group

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ended up performing better.
Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his
collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to
understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision
making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the
application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you
need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise
arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve
large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting,
constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT
hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more
neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and
sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your
conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can
run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems,
whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical
algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising
useful solutions to difficult questions.
The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time
to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most
complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily
reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead
diversifying the type of work you deploy.