You might find yourself unable to concentrate on anything during your free private time after a full day of work: difficulty performing during social situations, maintaining your personal relationships at healthy levels. Household chores could feel overwhelming. Or you may feel helpless trying to get working on some important task, trying to concentrate on learning. Those are two distinct types of problems of the mind, and approaches to treating and preventing them would differ.
The first example of a person, whose brain is fried from work every day is a case of mental exhaustion. The consequences of it may be as severe as loss of appetite, chronic headaches, insomnia, chronic fatigue. Treating it involves changing your dietary habits, introducing the physical activity, receiving adequate recovery, as well as managing the workload you put yourself under, and stress you put up with daily.
The inability to get started on important work is a sign of procrastination, I’ve written an article, dedicated to this question specifically.
Developing a good lifestyle, which keeps burnout at bay
There are several main directions you’ll need to work on methodically to develop the kind of health and energy levels, which are needed by the high cognitive demand of the modern-day. Those things need to be incorporated into your lifestyle and practiced regularly (and some – daily) to really make a difference. Remember this.
Firstly, take care of your physical needs. Your mind and body aren’t disconnected entities, living in parallel universes. What’s good for one is bound to help the other. Your physical health will boost your energy levels, while a healthy body will feed your brain much better and perform it’s daily recovery faster and more effectively.
Those needs involve sleep. Receiving adequate amounts of rest is important from a biological standpoint – your brain gets rid of toxins, which have built up from working throughout the day. Individual sleep requirements might differ somewhat, but getting at least 7-8 hours of uninterrupted sleep is important.
Another physical need is diet. While you might enjoy a good snack or a tasty meal and even do that regularly, that does not mean, that such binge eating is benefiting you. Any food is better than no food, according to some people, but that isn’t strictly true. Unless you’re under conditions of famine. Otherwise, you should cut fast carbs out of your diet. That means sweet snacks should stack on store shelves, safely distant from your home.
Keeping track of your calories might be a good idea, as well, but don’t eat every meal alongside a calculator and nutritional reference table (unless you’re a bodybuilder).
Your meals should generally consist of a variety of things which are: a) rich in fiber and complex carbs (buckwheat, other whole grains, beans, nuts), b) high in protein (lean meats, eggs, fatty fish), c) vitamin-abundant vegetables and fruits (bananas, carrots, and celery are my go-to choice, contrary to popular obsession with apples and broccoli, I find that they cause too much intestinal bloat from gases).
You might feel too busy, time-pressured to eat properly, but truth is, you need to stay the healthiest you could be, in order to be able to work or study. If you are following an unsustainable lifestyle, you either need to find ways to make healthy food easily available and convenient in your daily life, or rethink your path in life altogether.
The next on the list of physical needs is exercise. Sometimes a tired brain can benefit from a quick refreshing physical activity, like taking a 15-minute walk. Doing that frequently will have long-term health benefits. But that isn’t enough. Take a step further, and make strength training your regular routine. Having 4 hours a week dedicated to a gym will make you stronger, more athletic, and improve your aesthetics.
The last but not least among physical needs is physical affection. Intimate contact with close people will improve your mood and increase your stress-resilience. And that doesn’t only mean sex (although that’s good too) – a hug from a friend or a family member will boost your morale well enough.
Secondly, take a birds-eye view of your current life circumstances. Set aside a time for yourself to reflect on your career, study, personal relationships and the direction your life is going. This time is better spent by yourself – you have to spend time alone and confront yourself, in order to get all the truthful answers. But that also means, that you genuinely desire to hear answers, without lying to yourself. For me, this is best done while having a walk around my city – getting more mindful about my environment, paying attention to traffic, passers-by, feeling the soothing effect of a simple mechanical task of walking on my mind and emotional state, and some minutes later diverting my somewhat cleansed attention to import questions in life.
Learn to say ‘no‘. While it might be difficult to reject the request for help from someone you know, you have to remember – you are just one person. You can’t help everybody. Being considerate and empathetic toward others and trying to help those who need it is a virtue, but you don’t have to do it when you physically can’t without compromising your life and health repeatedly.
Learn to take the time off. In strength training, there’s a concept of de=load week (or a month). Your regular training week generally will have you train primary exercises like squat and deadlift for 3-4 sets of 3-5 repetitions, and you use the weight, which you could only move for 3-5 repetitions at a time – the exercise has to be challenging physically. On you de-load week you reduce the training volume – you will still lift the weight 3 times, which is very difficult to lift 3 consecutive times without rest, but you will have only one set of this, to 3 or 4. And that’s if for your training session for this lift for today. And that is how the entire de-loading month will play out. This concept of reduced volume of load might apply in your work and study if circumstances allow.
Learn to ask for help. It may be really hard, but this is a really big one. Reach out to your colleague, friend or a family member, explain your situation to them and ask how could they help you out, how could they lighten your daily burden, so that you could perform better (which will undoubtedly benefit both of you). And chances are, if you’re a burnt-out person – you’ve been helping too often while saying ‘no’ too rarely. Time to make your altruism reciprocal.
Helping the fried brain to get back on track
If your work is frying your brain, match your mental state and energy level to activity. For that, you might need to have flexibility in your work schedule, and that one while may not be available right now, you should definitely strive to gain. Because when you can decide at what time can you do the things you need – you will feel more in control of your life, and as a result more energetic and enthusiastic. Once the flexible schedule is achieved, organize your workday based on energy levels, not just on job priority, for example, most writers tend to create either early in the morning or late at night. Other times of the day might suit better for more mindless chores. Your perfect time to work will be your own, and that is why the flexibility of the schedule is so important.
If your brain is fried from studying, several things can help.
- Take good notes, pay attention maybe professors will hint, which questions are especially common during exams.
- Make flashcards for key concepts.
- Start early, don’t put things off for the last minute – the frantic last night efforts to prepare for an exam will take their toll.
- Break up your study periods, reward yourself with small doses of entertainment of your liking and get back to studying again.
- Explain material to someone else – even that someone is just an empty room.
- Consider a new study spot – maybe a different room, or maybe you’d do better outside.
- Adjust your studying schedule to fit the perfect time of the day when your brain is working, experiment with it to find it.
Practical exercises for an exhausted mind
Mind fasting. It is designed to starve your dopamine system and feed your focus. This exercise involves taking a day off from all pleasure and distractions. From morning until you go to bed your day will be heavily restricted. The things you cannot do on this day: eat, play games, talk to friends, read books, any other fun and pleasurable distractions. Things you can do on that day: drink water (this one you should, actually), meditate, practice mindfulness, particularly of your body and how you are feeling, writing.
For writing prompt my suggestion would be to ask yourself a series of question:
- Am I feeling any physical or emotional discomfort or pain?
- What have I been doing in my life, that could have caused/worsened it?
- What are 1-3 small steps I could take to reduce that discomfort? Are there any more?
- How would I feel daily, if I start doing these things regularly?
- How could my life improve in other areas in a year, if I practice those things regularly?
If you answer those by the end of the day, you might find more than one disturbances in your life and plenty more ways of reducing them. And you’ll feel more energetic, when you wake up the next day, maybe having found a purpose and direction in life you were seeking all this time.
Clear up your environment from distractions and keep healthy things easily available. pack your exercise bag with fresh gym clothes next to the door. Boil carrots according to your favorite recipe to make them tasty and put them in a fruit basket in plain sight, snack with them instead of a pack of Cheetos. Put your phone in a separate room, but make your ringtone loud enough, so that you’d someone’s call (which might be important). Things like that, which reduce distractions and bring healthy choices closer in your environment, help to clean up your mind as well.
Explore your town or neighborhood. I cannot overstate the benefits of simple walks, and how they always help me to think clearly. It’s almost like a form of meditation. And paying attention to some details of your neighborhood you tend to ignore in your daily life, could prove to be rejuvenating.
Practice mindfulness and/or meditation. Countless accounts of benefits from those practices speak for themselves. From improved attention span to better stress resilience. But they have to be practiced daily.
Set aside a time to do just one thing. Take from 30 minutes to 3 hours to complete only on task, forget about multitasking. Don’t entangle yourself in the messy web of things that are nice to do over the course of the day. Do just one thing this time and do it right.
When to seek medical help
Mental fatigue could also be a sign of medical conditions, ranging from eating disorders to bipolar disorder.
If your symptoms are physical like fevers, waking up in cold sweat, if your mood changes rapidly without a seeming cause, if you have a history of head injury, if you feel worried or even frightened without a cause, if you have chronically bad mood and are thinking of suicide – you need to seek a healthcare provider.
Take responsibility to help yourself, like you would someone you were taking care of.
