This is more than feeling lazy, bored, or dazed.
Mental fatigue can empty you out physically, mentally, and emotionally.
- It can be a headache or a snapping that has no reason.
- It can show up like a day when you feel drained to get out of your bed.
- It may be you waking up, dreading going to work, and facing the world.
You understand that something needs to change, but you can’t put a finger on it.
What’s Up With My Brain? Understanding Mental Fatigue.
Mental fatigue is when you fail to complete mental tasks that need self-motivation and inner drive, without any obvious brain or muscle problem.
A mentally fatigued brain is marked by:
- Tired mind: It’s difficult to focus, learn new stuff, or remember things.
- Low energy: You feel sluggish and unmotivated to do even routine things.
- Irritability: A state of feeling annoyed, impatient, or slightly angry at others.
- Disturbed sleep: Your brain might be too busy to “shut down” for the night.
Find out if you’re ignoring these hidden signs of mental fatigue.
6 Sneaky Signs You’re Mentally Fatigued
These seemingly unrelated symptoms can be signs of mental fatigue:
1. A Dull Headache: Hangover From Thinking Hard.
Mental fatigue can show up as an unexplained headache.
- It feels different from a normal headache — a constant and dull headache around your temples, not a throbbing one.
- It typically comes before other symptoms, like a mood change, loss of concentration, or forgetfulness.
- You may also get some unexpected muscle aches in other parts of your body.
This headache signals that your brain is overworked from long periods of demanding cognitive activities.
Here’s what makes this headache different:
- Dull ache: It’s a steady, low-grade pain, like a tension headache (one that you feel when stressed).
- No other symptoms: No dizziness, nausea, vomiting, blurry vision, or blackouts.
- Tightness: It might feel like a tight band around your head.
Important! While a dull constant headache is likely due to mental fatigue, it’s always best to see a doctor if you’re worried. They can rule out other causes like migraines, sinus headaches, or something more serious.
2. A Zombie-Like Feeling: Detachment From Daily Life.
Ever feel like you’re going through the motions, but not really present?
A sense of detachment, disinterest, or indifference is a common sign of an overworked brain.
- This feeling of detachment might start small, like losing interest in a hobby.
- Then it seems like your brain is wrapped in a fog, making it difficult to see or move forward.
- Your mental fatigue makes it hard to care about things you used to enjoy. You sense that there’s no thrill left in your life.
- Over time, it becomes increasingly demotivating — you lose interest in work, regular habits like taking a bath or brushing your teeth, and even fun activities like being with friends or playing with your kids.
Left unchecked, it can make you feel disconnected from reality, even from the people you care about. And may lead to depression.
3. Motivation On Vacation: Why You Can’t Get Started.
Mental fatigue makes you look lazy and uncaring, but it is actually an extreme lack of energy that causes you to become helplessly unmotivated.
This lack of motivation may make others label you as an ambitionless, lackadaisical, or procrastinating person.
You lose your passion for things. Even the thought of doing the things you liked to do makes you so tired that you change the thought.
You may have loved to play chess or do rollerskating or do realistic sketching. But now, even imagining yourself going through those makes you shudder.
It is such a pitiful state that even the best motivational quotes don’t inspire you to get moving and be productive.
Worse, it may leave you hopeless and prevent you from seeking help. In time, it may lead to symptoms of depression.
4. Tossing And Turning: Sleep Issues In Mental Fatigue.
Insomnia is a major sign of mental fatigue. It involves difficulty falling asleep fast, remaining asleep, trouble going back to sleep after waking up, waking up multiple times during the night, and excessive sleep.
Fatigued people snore more, sleep badly, and sleep too much.
In fact, mental exhaustion can make you sleep for 10 hours or more, and still, you may feel tired and not rested enough upon waking up.
Insomnia is not just a lack of eight hours of sleep; it is more about the quality as well as the quantity of sleep you are getting each night.
This study found that disturbed sleep is an important predictor of mental fatigue, apparently stronger than already known factors such as workload, female gender, and lack of exercise.
What could be happening during the night is that your sleep is getting broken many times due to physical and mental pain, but the wakings are for so little time that you do not remember. A sleep scientist may record your sleep and reveal if it is the real reason behind your troubled sleep.
5. Feeling Overwhelmed: Your Brain Is On High Alert!
Mental fatigue puts you in a state of alert but overwhelmed. You’re always on guard for something going wrong, but you also know you can no longer cope with a new challenge.
- Japanese researchers found that mental fatigue can throw your body’s nervous system off balance.
- Normally, the parasympathetic nervous system helps you relax, and the sympathetic nervous system prepares you for action.
- With mental fatigue, the relaxing part (parasympathetic) slows down, and the action part (sympathetic) speeds up.
- This creates a state called autonomic hypervigilance, meaning you are on high alert and stress, making it hard to relax and feel calm.
“The present results provide evidence that decreased parasympathetic activity and increased relative sympathetic activity are associated with mental fatigue induced by prolonged cognitive load in healthy adults. … Therefore, it is possible that mental fatigue can be induced by daily events in healthy people and may eventually progress to chronic fatigue.”
— Kei Mizuno & MasaakiTanaka, 2011
Even the thought of doing a thing that requires the least of your concentration and mental effort snaps you.
This is when you’re languishing — your brain doing the bare minimum to survive, preserving its resources.
6. Grumpy Gremlins: When Mental Fatigue Makes You Irritable.
When your brain is overworked, it can be harder to control your emotions.
You might feel impatient, short-tempered, or just want to be left alone. You often react with irritation or apathy, unnecessarily.
Here’s why:
- Brain Overload: Mental fatigue is like having too many tabs open on your computer. Your brain is overloaded with unproductivity, apathy, lethargy, indecision, poor sleep, and fear of being judged.
- Stress Connection: Mental fatigue keeps the engine of anxiety humming all the time. When you’re mentally tired, your underlying stress can’t relax. This can lead to major issues like panic attacks, inflammatory bowel syndrome (IBS), nausea, palpitations, and irritation.
By showing irritation, fatigued people push others away, so they can take some rest, and avoid other people’s demands and expectations.
So, we frequently see a mentally fatigued person withdraw within oneself, away from social circles.
3 Stages of Mental Fatigue: From Foggy to Frazzled
Most cases of mental fatigue start languidly before becoming severe:
Stage 1. Loss of focus: Can’t focus for the Life of me!
The first stage of mental exhaustion occurs when a person, who has been concentrating on something for an extended period of time, begins to feel tired and distracted.
They may struggle to concentrate and make the right decisions, but this may be easily fixed with some time off work, a nap, or a few days of vacation.
Stage 2. Mood Swings: From happy to grumpy in seconds.
The second stage is when the person begins to feel depressed and irritable, which can lead to feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and self-doubt.
This is also when a person keeps feeling perpetually sluggish, confused, and weary, both in the mind and body.
Stage 3. Extreme Exhaustion: When small tasks become big mountains.
The third stage happens when the person is utterly exhausted as a result of the constant mental effort required to perform at their best.
This is when they typically experience feelings of worthlessness and hopelessness that can lead to other mental health issues, including depression, anxiety, or even thoughts of self-harm.
Beating The Brain Drain: How To Fight Mental Fatigue?
Here are three simple ways to overcome mental fatigue:
1. Catch Those Early Signs!
We already discussed the signs of mental fatigue above. Here are a few quick pointers:
- Have you been feeling that getting out of your bed in the morning is a tough task?
- Do you feel crushing tiredness coming over within hours of starting your work?
- Do you find your focus and ability to take quick decisions going haywire?
If yes to any of them, then you could be suffering from mental fatigue.
2. Work-Life Balance: Make Time For You.
If you can’t help but think about work while you’re on a break, you may be inching closer toward mental fatigue. Stop doing that.
Even if you work from home, leave work at work. When you meet people outside your work circle, try not to bring up business.
Let yourself truly relax when you are on a holiday.
3. Escape the Drain: Reduce Your Stressors.
Sometimes, overexposure to any major event can lead to mental exhaustion, like “pandemic fatigue.”
It is mostly a milder form that can be easily treated by cutting back exposure to the situation, like limiting your access to news about the Covid-19 pandemic.
A related one is “quarantine fatigue.” If you’ve felt any of these, you’re likely to be going through quarantine fatigue: irritable, stressed, anxious, eating more or eating less, insomnia, unmotivated or unproductive, have racing thoughts, and generally tense.
4. Unwind: Meditate For Your Mind.
Meditation improves mental function and teaches the mind to be still and calm.
- Mindful techniques can postpone or eliminate fatigue milestones, and even the experience of fatigue itself (Camparo & Maymin, 2022).
- Normally, our mind’s focus wanders for about half a second after we focus. However, after three months of meditation training, “attentional blink” was greatly reduced in the meditators (Slagter et al., 2007).
- Researchers from Harvard, Yale, and MIT found evidence that meditation thickens the cerebral cortex, which is associated with improved cognitive abilities like memory.
Meditation enhances your ability to handle stress better (as shown in Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs), and this can help you stop your exhaustion from worsening.
Here is a Beginner’s Guide To Start Mindfulness Meditation (with a free infographic and PDF).
A Lowdown On Mental Fatigue: Causes, Tests, More
Causes of mental fatigue
- Long-term stress: Long periods of high mental concentration, unresolved emotional issues, unable to stop thinking about work during leisure time, and relationship conflicts may also trigger mental fatigue.
- Lack of social support: Social loneliness and having no one to have meaningful conversations with can lead to mental fatigue.
- Not getting enough sleep: Sleep problems, like less sleep, broken sleep, early awakenings, long time to fall asleep, or muscle pains during sleep, can cause mental fatigue.
- Lack of exercise: Exercise helps our brain stay healthy and focused, and has been proven to improve our mood and raise our happiness levels. (Read Exercise And Happiness: The Brain Science)
- Unresolved issues: Worrying or overthinking about unresolved issues at home or work can drain our mental energy.
- Too much screen time: Long periods of scrolling on blue screens can make it hard for our brains to relax.
Mental fatigue tests
- Mental Fatigue Scale (MFS): A helpful tool for assessing the current condition of mental fatigue and tracking improvement or worsening.
- Stanford Sleepiness Scale: A self-rating scale used to measure general experiences of sleepiness over an entire day.
- Karolinska Sleepiness Scale: It measures the level of sleepiness at a particular time during the day.
- Odd-Even Oddball Task: A test used to measure reaction times.
Knowledge byte on brain fatigue
Our brains have two main parts: the thinking mind (conscious mind) and the automatic mind (non-conscious mind).
- Thinking Mind (Conscious Mind): This part relies heavily on executive functions, such as working memory, attention, and decision-making. It is more vulnerable to fatigue. When fatigued, it makes it harder to focus, remember things fast, or make good decisions.
- Automatic Mind (Non-Conscious Mind): This part works 24/7, even when we’re sleeping. It handles information beyond our conscious awareness. When it gets tired, it loses its efficiency and speed to perform automatic tasks, like motor skills or habits. Research suggests that mental fatigue reduces parasympathetic activity and increases sympathetic activity.
Further Reading:
- Symptoms that may be stress-related and lead to exhaustion disorder, 2018.
- Fatigue symptoms in relation to neuroticism, anxiety-depression, and musculoskeletal pain, 2018.
- Sustained Attention is Associated with Error Processing Impairment: Evidence from Mental Fatigue Study, 2015.
- Mental fatigue caused by prolonged cognitive load associated with sympathetic hyperactivity, 2011.
Final Words
If identified early, mental fatigue is usually not very damaging and can be easily treated with professional help.
If neglected for long, mental fatigue can lead to depression or worsen an underlying anxiety condition.
Get help from an expert. Consult your doctor or mental health professional.
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√ Also Read: What Is Self-Kindness? How To Have More of It?
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