Combat brain fatigue with these top expert tips

It's common to consider mental challenges as difficult, experts say. (Vadym Pastukh/iStockphoto/Getty Images via CNN Newsource)

Put your thinking cap on, people often hear — after all, that's what our brain is for and what many are paid to do.

But a new study finds that people see a downside to such mental expenditures: Thinking can be a pain.

"Based on prior work in the field, I did expect mental effort to be unpleasant for most people, but I also expected that it would be seen as less negative for some tasks," said senior study author Erik Bijleveld, an associate professor at the Behavioural Science Institute at Radboud University in Nijmegen, Netherlands.

"But we didn't find that to be so," Bijleveld said. "Even though people enjoy the rewards associated with mental tasks, these same people also do not enjoy the mental effort that's involved. Instead, they feel annoyed, irritated, frustrated and stressed."

Such work isn't actual pain, of course. Your brain has no nerve endings, so a pain in the brain is not like having a pain in the neck. But the mental effort it takes to think hard can be so upsetting that some people will choose physical pain instead.

A 2020 study asked people if they would prefer to do a difficult memory task — remembering if a card reappeared after a distraction — or experience searing pain from a heat device held against the skin. When the pain was minor, more people chose the heat, but that number dropped as the pain increased. However, 28 per cent of the participants still chose physical pain over mental strain, even when the pain was most intense.

"Put simply, people preferred to experience highly painful heat rather than do something mentally demanding," the study authors wrote.

How can this be? After all, many do puzzles, play chess or challenge their brains in all sorts of ways during their spare time. Yet even in those scenarios, studies in the review found people complained about the mental effort.

"Thinking hard is exhausting, and fatigue can set in," Bijleveld said. "Concentrating also means it's impossible to do other things because the brain really can't multitask. Because that's the case, people must forgo other opportunities that might be more interesting and enjoyable."

Avoidance of even fun tasks

The new study, published Monday in the journal Psychological Bulletin, conducted a meta-analysis of 170 studies from 2019 to 2020 that included more than 4,500 people from 29 countries. Amateur athletes, college students and health care and military employees were among the participants who performed one or more of 358 cognitive tasks.

The study explored many of the ways in which thinking tasks are thought to be more rewarding and satisfying, Bijleveld said.

"If you have control or autonomy over the task, if you are skilled at it, if you get feedback on it, if it has real-life significance to you and has a clear beginning and end, you should be more motivated and the effort more satisfying," he said. "We expected the mental effort in these situations to be less negative, but again, we didn't find it."

Even having fun didn't seem to matter. In one study, amateur golfers practiced their golf swings, while in another one, people played an engaging virtual reality game, Bijleveld said. "They found their way through a virtual reality version of the St.-Michel Notre Dame train station in Paris," he said.

Even for those tasks, the greater the mental effort, the more unpleasant the experience, according to participants, Bijleveld added. "Even if you have a really good task, this association between mental effort and negative feelings doesn't go away," he said.

Thinking hard isn't a total bummer. Even though it might be frustrating and exhausting, people can see value in mental adversity — after it's over.

"We can justify our efforts. It's sometimes called the Ikea effect, after the furniture that is notoriously difficult to put together due to a lack of instructions," Bijleveld said. "The idea is that if people have been exerting mental or physical effort into something, they have more appreciation for what they created.

"Because effort is so aversive, it's also a signal to people: 'OK, this must have been valuable.' So in the long run, I think mental effort does play an important role in giving meaning to life."

How managers can help your brain

Much of the responsibility for redesigning how to make thinking more delightful falls on the shoulders of employers, teachers and others who require people to exert themselves mentally, Bijleveld said.

"We know now that you cannot just assume that by making people practice, they will learn to enjoy the effortful aspects of that task," he said. "When people are required to exert substantial mental effort, managers need to support and reward them for their effort."

Research on employee burnout shows those rewards don't have to be huge or time-consuming to create benefit, according to Kira Schabram, an assistant professor of management in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington.

"Even really small gestures had an effect the next day," Schabram told CNN in an earlier interview. "Giving someone a compliment, taking them out for a five-minute walk to get a coffee, we see that that pushes the dial on next-day burnout."

How you can help your brain

In a society that typically expects top-notch mental performance at all times, such gestures from management may be hard to find, at least consistently, experts say. Fortunately, there are steps to take to make mental effort more enjoyable.

Schedule regular breaks: It may seem like you are interrupting your mental flow by getting up in the middle of a task, but a break — especially a physical one such as a walk outside — refreshes and boosts brain power, experts say. Unfortunately, people don't often choose that option.

"The literature shows that when you give people the opportunity to determine their own breaks, people tend to take too few breaks, or they tend to wait too long," Bijleveld said.

What type of break is best? Researchers have found there's no "perfect break that works for everyone," he said.

"Some people recover very well from taking a little walk; other people might recover from watching TV," Bijleveld said. "You want to choose something that helps you detach from the work you're doing and makes you feel good."

Take time off when it's necessary: Mental challenges can be so exhausting that physical health is affected. Then it's time to give yourself more grace, experts say.

"If it's exhaustion, give yourself permission to engage in self-care, right? Take a nap. Take a day off. Call in sick," Schabram said.

Choose healthy self-care options: Beer, wine and comfort foods are frequent choices for kicking back, but they are not the healthiest for boosting your brain, experts say.

"Alcohol is what people often reach for to relieve the stress, but it actually makes you feel worse the next day … and the same thing with benzodiazepines like Valium," said Amy Arnsten, the Albert E. Kent professor of neuroscience and professor of psychology at Yale School of Medicine.

Arnsten, who studies the neural mechanisms of burnout, was not involved in the new study.

"But the healthier physiological activities (like) exercising and meditation that give perspective can be really helpful," Arnsten told CNN in an earlier interview.

If the mental strain is making you feel more alienated and unhappy in your job, here's an option — practice gratitude and compassion.

"What we find is having compassion towards others helps restore that sense of belonging," Schabram said. "Become someone's mentor. Start volunteering. What we find is that those acts of doing something kind for someone else really pulls you out of that sense of alienation."

Don't forget to be compassionate to yourself, Schabram added: "We found both other-compassion and self-compassion help with burnout."

Finally, cut your brain some slack: Rather than beating yourself up because you're irritated or flustered by a complicated mental task, recognize that those feelings are part of being human.

"Humans evolved to conserve energy — it's key to our survival," Bijleveld said. "People are known to shun physical effort, or to at least conserve it, very strictly. It only makes sense that we'd do the same mentally."