Brain fatigue or mind fatigue is a feeling of mental tiredness.
More specifically, brain fatigue can result in these types of brain fatigue symptoms that are identified in different circumstances.
Mind Fatigue/Brain Fatigue/ Symptoms
Here’s a short list of some of the brain fatigue symptoms:
▸ You can’t seem to make decisions. Your head is spinning with too much information and your brain can’t clear out the important details from the non-important details.
▸ You’re sleepy, due to no real reason. Or on the other hand, you’re sleepy due to the alcohol you just drank. Alcohol causes brain fatigue by increasing oxidation.
▸ You find it difficult to read or ponder difficult topics.
▸ You feel that you are just spinning your wheels in life.
Brain Fog Is Not The Same Thing As Brain Fatigue
Brain fog is a little different. Brain fog is a feeling of cloudiness over the brain that makes one slow down the thinking processes.
You have to hear someone repeat what they’re saying four or five times to “get it.” You have to write down things so that you won’t forget them.
Brain fog can be due to food allergies, or mold exposure.
When the food allergies are gone, or the mold counts drop substantially, a person with brain fog due to these reasons can feel focused and have the ability to concentrate on any subject. It’s a life-transforming event.
Brain Scientists Learn About Brain Fatigue
Your brain is quite complicated, and can handle both simple and complicated activities. Simple activities would include things such as recognizing things.
For example, recognizing that a car is coming toward you at a high speed is a simple activity whereas getting out of the way of the car is considered a decision-making activity that involves a higher functioning of activity level.
When you have brain fatigue, the speed at which you do the simple activities slows down and the higher order thinking of more complicated activities can come to a halt.
You feel paralyzed to move on toward making a decision or move toward taking steps to achieve a goal.
In one University of Minnesota study reported in Scientific American, researchers found that the brain actually uses energy to make a mental decision.
What’s Behind This Brain Fatigue?
To answer this question, one has to go back to the basic brain anatomy and physiology. There are three ways you can overcome brain fatigue.
1. Consider Feeding Your Brain Right
What’s the number 1 fuel of the brain? Glucose.
Thus if you’re suffering from blood glucose fluctuations all day long by eating junk foods or incomplete meals, you can expect a lot of brain fatigue to occur.
Actually, you wouldn’t even be able to make the decision that this is happening to you since you have brain fatigue! Someone else would have to make the decision for you.
2. Dehydration Is Your Brain’s Enemy
What else does the brain need? Water.
Without water, hundreds of reactions in the body come to a standstill. The easy solution is to drink water and do it all day long. But how are you going to decide that if you have brain fatigue right now?
How can you sit down and map out a plan of what you’re going to accomplish and how you can get a few quarts of water into your body each day if you have brain fatigue?
Just in case you do have brain fatigue, here’s the easiest way to do that:
When you get up in the morning, drink 3 glasses water immediately.
This will reset your thirst mechanism for the entire day.
3. We All Need Rewards
What else does the brain need? Rewards.
Surprisingly, in one study, researchers in England found that cyclists who rinsed their mouth with carbohydrate drinks during cycling, they cycled faster and had greater cardiovascular efficiency than those who drank water.
However, their feelings about the effort they were expending were about the same as those who drank water.
The cyclists’ MRI scans found that they were perceiving the carbohydrate drink as a reward. And this allowed their muscles to do twice as much work.
Now this one finding makes a lot of sense. Why do we drag ourselves out of bed in the morning? It could be that we dread the day’s activities.
There’s no reward associated with another day of getting pummeled with new work projects, screaming kids, or problems at work.
On the other hand, what do we do if we know that at 5 p.m. our favorite show is coming on television? We suddenly start racing around the home at 4 p.m. to get our work done.
What caused the switch in fatigue levels? It was the hope of a reward.
It’s the same thing with mental fatigue. If you can give yourself rewards for doing things, you can beat mental fatigue.
Hate doing housework? Work in some type of reward for it and you’ll soon see how housework won’t be contributing to your mental or physical fatigue anymore.
Now that you have three examples of how to overcome brain fatigue, which one will you initiate first? Whichever one makes the most sense to you about your mind fatigue is the one to go with.