Mental Fatigue. What to do about it?
What is mental fatigue?
You may feel tired and drained after intense physical activity and long periods of intense mental activity can wear you out, too. To put it simply, mental exhaustion can happen when your brain receives too much stimulation or must maintain an intense level of activity without rest.
What causes mental fatigue?
- You often work or study for long hours with few or no breaks.
- You spend a lot of time each day dealing with overwhelming responsibilities.
- You live with mental health symptoms.
- You devote a lot of mental energy thinking through problems, worries, or other sources of stress.
What are symptoms of mental fatigue?
Mental and Emotional: Lingering mental fatigue can affect your ability to think, solve problems, or process and regulate emotions. Eventually, it can even lead to challenges in your daily life and in relationships. You feel far less alert than usual and find it challenging to focus, even when it comes to everyday or routine tasks. Other symptoms include feelings of depression, persistent sad, low, or hopeless moods, lingering feelings of anxiety, difficulty caring about anything, a sense of detachment, cynicism, or pessimism, anger or irritability, a sense of dread, a decline in motivation or productivity and feeling lethargic or slowed down in movements or responses.
Physical signs: Mental exhaustion can extend to your physical health. You might notice head and body aches, upset stomach, sleep issues, including chronic fatigue, drowsiness, and insomnia, changes in appetite and weight, frequent illnesses, such as colds and flu and a general sense of unwellness.
Behavioral signs: Ongoing mental exhaustion can begin to affect your everyday activities and behavior. You might find yourself constantly putting off tasks at school, work, or around the house, notice a decline in your performance at work or school, drink alcohol or use other substances to help manage symptoms, start to avoid people you’d usually enjoy spending time with, have trouble paying attention during interactions, have trouble managing responsibilities or keeping personal or work commitments and find yourself calling out of work or school more often.
What can I do about Mental Fatigue?
There are activities that help to reduce mental fatigue. These are called restorative experiences.
What is a restorative experience?
A restorative experience is an activity that helps rest your mind and bring back your mental energy. A restorative experience often involves spending time in nature. For example, you could walk or sit outdoors (backyard, garden, park, waterfront), look at nature, do some gardening, sit by water (sea, fountains), watch wildlife (birds or other animals). It is helpful that you do something that interests you, as well as being a change from daily routines and concerns and is fun for you. Try doing restorative activities for 20 to 30 minutes each day, 3 days a week. Restorative activities can give you a chance to relax, let you be away from everyday life, help you forget worries and help you reflect on personal matters. Doing a restorative activity can also help you improve or maintain your attention.
What else can I do to improve metal fatigue?
- Physical exercise that slowly increases in intensity. This can help with mental fatigue as well as physical fatigue in people with different health conditions, including cancer.
- Nutrition intake. What and when you eat can impact fatigue. To help maintain mental energy have small meals or snack frequently, get enough protein (including foods high in omega 3 fatty acids), eat more fibre and whole grains. Balance your meals with fruits and vegetables and stay hydrated.
- Take regular breaks from hard activities, this will improve mental and physical wellbeing.
- Reduce stress to help manage your fatigue and increase your mental energy.
- Reduce noise since it is more tiring to think and focus on what you are doing with noisy distractions (for example, reading with the TV turned on)
References
Mental Exhaustion: Definition, Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment (healthline.com)
Mentally exhausted? Symptoms and tips to overcome mental exhaustion (medicalnewstoday.com)