It'll burn some people out. I can't just read/learn or create things and see it as some kind of stress relief.
You'll feel accomplish and all great things but that's ain't relaxing at all for me.
Playing magic the gathering, just turn off my brain and watching a good tv show either comedy or scifi is my way to blow off steam. Video games can make me angry sometime or frustrated. Mtg can be challenging in term of stress and require thinking skill but I've learned to not over think it and play with my gut. My buddy who I play against over thinks and stress out often in mtg, it's enjoyable for the guy but after several rounds at his cube his brain is mentally exhausted, this rarely happens to me. He often chastize me for not reading the card carefully... though, I just kinda remember them if I play often with the cube a lot. Hell I thought one card had flying cause the creature seems to be hovering in the art once. Bad play mistake. While our style are different I we're pretty much tie in term of deck building skill set and winning rate.
Games can be enjoyed in their own right as well. If we play for pure enjoyment and can otherwise balance our lives then they are certainly a means to unwind.
Sorry, that's just not true. There are lots of interesting, rewarding hobbies that do feel like work, in the sense that they require a fresh mind capable of bearing a high cognitive load to engage in them. When my mind is fresh you're right, those hobbies are very satisfying to spend time on, but my "fresh" timeslots are mostly devoted to my actual job (phd) these days, which doesn't feel like work either much of the time.
Be careful, your attitude is a road straight to burnout.
What makes you believe that what reedlaw described is not to be considered mental downtime? I have made quite the opposite experience: when consciously reflecting and deciding about my mental downtime in advance, it turns out to be the most recreative. It's worth noting that I made bad experiences with: tomorrow from 7-730 I will be reading/running/cooking/medidate/watching an educational video for recreational purposes. The way to go for me is to predefine a set of activities which I support based on a principle. When in the situation for donwtime, I then choose from this set.
Edit: typo
Many mentally challenging activities I'll start spontaneously, but it's typically small ones with direct, achievable goals, like write a little scraper in a new language or reverse engineer a single mechanism of an application.
I only have a few times a week when I have downtime that I feel like I can pick something off a list. The rest of my downtime I want something to do - and that's where games come in - and I'm quite glad for them, because without them I'd spend much more time watching TV, reading junk political threads on reddit, etc.
Those principles ought to be chosen as to align with my convictions and expectations from life. So you could say that I know that this list is the intersection of things I consider worthy doing (and immediately have a well-formed reason for their worthiness at the back of my mind) and recreation.
When a moment for recreation has come, there is nothing that makes me question whether I should do something from the list or not because I am reassured that I have thought of this sufficiently in advance to determine the best for me.