"Tendinitis" of the brain

I spent my late teens and early twenties in jobs that would literally wear on you. While I loved being a bread-slicer at the Wild Oats bakery - afforded the luxury of listening to NPR to get my Prairie Home Companion, BBC World Service, All Things Considered and other mainstay programming - I grew physically tired of the same repetitive action that led to occupational stress. There were usually three slicers at the bakery - one solely to bag the focaccia (a greasy endeavor bound to give you acne); another to mindlessly pluck bread from the rack, feed the weight-driven slicing machine, bag when sliced and put on bagging table; the third, my typical job, to do the data entry to find out who ordered what for the day, squeeze air out of bread-bags without compromising the integrity of the loaf, feed bread into twisty-tie machine, make boxes, label boxes, pack bread in boxes. If you look at frequency of action for my job, the most common action was the twisty-tying. Squeeze, twist, feed twisty-tie. repeat. 100s-1000s of times per day. I started to develop tendinitis (or what people might call carpal tunnel these days). The only thing that would give me relief was to try and mix it up. Sometimes be the slicer, not the packer. Sometimes just do focaccia. Reading the paper this morning and moving from topic to topic, I acknowledged (I had always realized...) that I had been spending too many cycles on the same mental challenges day-in/day-out. When those challenges are intractable/insurmountable, "Brain tendinitis" set in that much quicker. I'll likely be a much more engaging dinner companion now that I'm able to spend some time on other cycles and I am very grateful for that...