Brain food. How much is too much?

How often do you do anything to stimulate your brain, nourish your soul or feed your knowledge?

For me, I'm beginning to think I've become slightly obsessed with mental stimulation, a habit I picked up over the past year during my final year at university. As I was growing my intelligence academically and beginning to get comfortable with discovering the new level I had reached I also realised with it came greater insights, frequent analysing and more commitments/projects. It was like I became more engrossed in pushing myself that much further until I was unable to function efficiently unless I was constantly doing so.

We feed our brains with knowledge - yes but then by growing our mental stimulation do our brains come to expect it, need it? Constant refuelling (whether by reading, learning a new skill or completing a challenge) seems to make us feel adequately satisfied - when you stop/break or set the bar lower on occasion it seems to feel like we should be doing more and leaves reminisces of inadequacy...(please tell me if this sounds familiar to you at all).  I acknowledge that people vary, characters vary. Some are happy to live in suspension by rather shallow surroundings and live lives which demand a lower level of provoked thought. I suppose this character of people won't be spending their time reading this blog :-).

I also know that through this beneficial habit comes a need for absolute isolated blocks of time for mind numbing shallow nothingness to relax your brain and shut it off.  For me, my dirty little secret was watching TV "dramas"/"Soaps" on occasion which were absolute garbage to the intellect world but allowed me to focus on fantasy/unrealistic drama - things I could never relate to in order to then be able to go back mentally to the intensity of criminology and researching plus all the writing, mentoring and starting up and running a society - not to mention real life adversities, day to day challenges. Of course this wasn't the only thing, I always had my music to turn to for tranquility. 

I wonder if it was a learning curve because when chaos has calmed slightly I still create it. Unable to do nothing for long enough. I'm trying to learn how to switch off. I guess I've had to in rather drastic ways now because of this habit. The weird thing is, once it was all over and my time was becoming my own again, I was happy to bargain it off filling it with things. The trouble is to me those things are necessary as I felt I had years of catching up to do. Now I have the time and mental capacity to take on reading books/articles I WANT to read. What would my book collection consist of? To learn skills I've always wanted to rather then needed to, to write more on the things I'm passionate about. More brain food, my brain screams, now some of the achievements have been sought. It's not over. I'm more hungry than ever. 

Have you always been hungry or has your hunger led to your constant need to eat brain food? What do you do to relax your brain momentarily? Comment and share your thoughts so we can all benefit :)