You know how it is. You spend the best part of a year planning your holiday in all its minutest, what-is-the-tipping-etiquette detail, daily tweaking the itinerary with currency-conversion precision. And then when you get there, you’re so out of breath from traveller fatigue that you don’t want to do anything at all.

For the best part of two weeks, that is what I did: nothing at all. I just sat, ate and drank. The sights I had planned to see remained unseen. I read one chapter out of the six books I had packed for the journey – actually, it wasn’t a chapter but the prologue. I didn’t spend much of my daily conversation allocation and only spoke to the ice cream tub, trying to convince it to turn from vanilla to pistachio and honey because I couldn’t be bothered to get up and swap flavours.

After two weeks, I had gained five kilos and was looking like a soap opera whose producer had sacked all the writers because there was nothing else to do or say. Did the time-out massage my brain? Yes it did, to the point of turning it to sludge. In the post-holiday week, until the challenge of the daily grind caught up with me, I was too comatose to think. And my brain felt like a sponge. Not a new one that absorbs all knowledge, but an old and dirty one that squelches at the bottom of the sink, plugging the flow of water.

The moral of the story is that to function effectively and efficiently, we need to be under the right amount of stress. Things have to be difficult because the absence of a challenge dulls the brain.

In 1966, the Beatles were considering the possibility of going to the US to record their next album. The reason was that the equipment in US studios was more advanced than any UK studio could boast of. In fact, the Beatles’ greatest music rivals, the Rolling Stones, had just recorded their album Aftermath in Los Angeles, with spectacular results. However, recording an album in a US studio proved to be too expensive for the Beatles, who had to make do with the inferior equipment at Abbey Road Studios.

In the two years that followed, the Beatles recorded some of their best music, despite the equipment they had at their disposal. They managed to counterbalance technical inferiority with superior human effort.

Obstacles make us more productive and creative. A study conducted by Virginia Berninger, a University of Washington professor of educational psychology, showed how children are more productive and creative when they use pen and paper instead of the easier keyboard option. And in 2014, scientists from the University of Amsterdam observed how people who are forced to cope with obstacles react by taking the proverbial step back and seeing the bigger picture.

Difficulty pays dividends. I’m not saying that you should make things difficult for yourself. However, the disappearance of obstacles and the availability of everything at the click of a button makes things too easy and dulls the brain. Remind yourself that obstacles can be good. Every once in a while, do some research at the library, write with a pen, and choose the path of more resistance.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com