The best preliminary condition for good resting — active or passive — is a huge amount of completed working tasks. No fresh atmosphere of new place, no way of relaxation can't give more pleasure to an active brain if it had no way to spread its enclosed intention out into life. In the same way no action can be performed in a heavily constrained situation or mind state: strength of self-persuasion has its limits.
The more intellectual and improvised activity is, the higher output needed. And overall peaks of occupation should correlate with overall relaxation quality. The latter measured subjectively, of course.