Mental exhaustion is a danger to your health/life

Driver's Ed for your brain

We spend most of our awake time thinking and ruminating about stuff. Our inner voice is chatting away about matters large and trivial, happy and scary. It’s how we navigate our days, thinking and planning and worrying and figuring. And that’s largely a good thing. But there are a couple of aspects of our big thinking brains that can get us into real trouble if we’re not careful.

The first thing to remember is that thinking consumes a fair amount of energy which is always a finite resource. So just like physical exercise, it is possible to carry mental work to a point of exhaustion. While most organisms deal with threats that are largely brief and external, humans can engage with mental concerns for hours and days and years at a time. When we think or “obsess” about real-life challenges for days and weeks and months (even during vacations and while we sleep!), our mind/brain can never calm down and relax. Chronic mental strain will eventually cause emotional and physical damage such as mood disorders, sleep problems, substance abuse, heart disease, physical pain and immune-related illness.

I have had the privilege of consulting with a number of highly talented committed successful professionals who were struggling with severe work stress/strain (aka burnout) due to long hours at work plus long hours thinking about work outside of the workplace. In addition to analyzing whether or not to stay in these demanding jobs, these clients wanted some short-term relief from the stress they were experiencing and the related sleeplessness that was wearing them out. They all admitted that they had repeatedly tried to work less and think less about work, but without success. So we went in search of solutions.

Let’s Go for a Ride

Think of your brain as a car with three modes of operation:

YOUR CAR

• Mode 1: Engine Off

• Mode 2: Neutral

• Mode 3: Driving

YOUR BRAIN

• Mode 1: Sleeping

• Mode 2: Sensing, experiencing, being

• Mode 3: Thinking, planning, doing

Your car has forward Driving gears, a Neutral position, and an engine Off position. The most energy is consumed while Driving, less in Neutral, and least with the engine Off. When we are using our brains to think, plan and execute/follow-through, we consume the most energy. Most of my exhausted clients are hard-working knowledge workers and use their brains continuously at work. Problem was that even when they walked out of their office/building at the “end of the day” (which was sometimes pretty late to begin with), they brought their executive brains with them and continued to do mental work on the drive home, during dinner, in the evening over their computers and e-mail, and even in bed.

They noticed at a certain point that their brains stayed engaged with work tasks without their even trying to do so. Thinking about work (Driving) became their default mode, and they experienced difficulty down-shifting into Neutral (sensing/experiencing the NOW). Thinking about work had become an “obsession”, i.e. it did not feel voluntary to them and they did not feel in control of it. They found that their chronic thinking about work interfered with. being fully present and able to enjoy their non-work relationships and activities.

Being unable to shift at will out of Driving/Thinking also blocked them from being able to turn their mental engine Off at night, such that they were unable to quiet their minds enough to fall asleep. Once they finally fell asleep, they would often awaken after a few hours with work-related thoughts flowing through their brains. Many described themselves as feeling like a mouse running on a wheel, unable to ever stop and get off. They were exhausted and desperate for relief. And so we strategized about how they could build a bigger better more reliable Neutral gear and Engine Off switch.

Minding Your Mind

When people start to meditate, they learn some concrete techniques for quieting the thinking mind and centering on their present sensory experience. The core practice consists of sitting and paying attention to your breathing. Sounds simple until you try it for a while, and then what you will notice is that you haven’t been aware of your breathing for a while because you were distracted by some thoughts (Driving) that popped into your mind. The main lesson from this exercise is that your mind has a mind of its own (!) which comes as a bit of a surprise to people who think that THEY are in control of their mind and its thoughts.

So they go back to focusing on their breathing (Neutral/sensing-experiencing), and then again they get pulled off that focus by random thoughts (Driving/thinking). The purpose of the exercise is not to stop those thoughts, but rather to simply be AWARE (mindful) of the thoughts as they happen, and then to let go of them (non-attachment) and focus back on the breathing.

Over time, people get better/faster at noticing their distracting thoughts and letting go of them by shifting into Sensing/Experiencing mode. They are able to stay focused on their here-and-now sense experiencing of their breath going in and out for longer periods of time. When you are sensing/experiencing (Neutral), you are giving your thinking/doing (Driving) mind a rest. Having a reliable Neutral space in your mental gear box is incredibly important for your health and happiness.

Driving Away from Work

My overworking exhausted clients had all tried multiple times to stop “obsessing” about work without success. They had tried to set boundaries in their schedule between their work and personal lives, but were unable to “make” themselves stop working and start living the rest of their life.

They were literally like a car with no windshield, no steering wheel and no brakes! They either didn’t see the STOP WORKING sign up ahead in their schedule because they were so focused on their work thinking, or they were unable to tap the brakes and take the highway off-ramp to the life activity they had planned. So they kept zooming along the work highway until their gas tank was empty or they crashed.

In the Case Study below, the big idea/solution is that rather than just trying to stop doing something that is hurting us, we will be more successful if we start doing something active and different that is good for us (and blocks the old behavior). This is because our mental engine (DO something) is bigger and more powerful than our brakes (STOP something).

Case Study: A talented physician leader had huge mental capacity for diligent work, limitless (she thought!) energy and deep commitment to her professional calling and mission. She spoke tearfully of becoming a workaholic, losing her connection with her husband and children, losing her health and happiness, and ultimately being unable to do her work successfully. She consulted with me to improve her “work/personal balance” and to reduce her high level of stress and related sleep deprivation (only 3 hrs/night).

I recommended that she engage in a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program in order to learn how to shift her brain at will from Driving (thinking, planning, doing), which for her was an over-developed skill, to Neutral (sensing, experiencing, being) which was a mental state with which she was largely unfamiliar (except while playing tennis and doing pottery which were her “flow” activities).

Once she had developed those skills to a high level (4–6 weeks practice time), we built the following sleep support plan so her exhausted brain could first recover and then take on the big challenge of work/life re-balancing:

• One hour before desired sleep time, enter bedroom, reduce illumination levels, turn on white noise app

• Practice mindful breathing for 5–10 minutes to quiet the thinking/driving mind

• Mindfully practice a series of muscle fatiguing non-aerobic exercises to reduce chronic muscle tension (a major obstacle to sleep) and create tiredness

• Mindfully practice a series of stretching exercises to reduce chronic muscle tension

• Lie down in bed, turn off all lights, maintain white noise app, and conduct a full “body scan” (a MBSR technique that combines body mindfulness and relaxation)

• Practice mindful breathing with eyes open; allow eyes to close naturally when lids become heavy

Within two weeks of instituting this program, she was able to fall asleep within 30–45 minutes of lights out, and to sleep between 5–6 hours. She set a long-term goal of consistent 7–8 hrs/night of sleep with a shorter (<10 minute) sleep latency

Next we built her schedule’s work and life priorities by employing the principle of “Put Your Big Rocks In First”. She began to use a digital calendar/schedule for the first time, and set attention-grabbing alert signals to capture her attention when she came to the exits off the highway of work to the back roads of her personal life. She practiced shifting her brain from Driving into Neutral (using her mindful breathing skills) whenever she got a digital alert that she was coming up on a work-to-life transition point. Previously she would ignore those alerts and Drive on with her work tasks.

With a strong shift into Neutral (sensing/experiencing), she created a space/pause where her brain could fully recognize the enormity of the boundary decision facing her (“This is it! It’s really about whether I want to keep my marriage and the children I love, let alone whether I can keep on working or living at all”). This resulted in much more successful compliance with her new boundaries and less “procrastinating” about her work-to-life transitions.

Initially she complained of feeling “bored” during her non-work time as she started to withdraw from the endorphin high of extreme work and associated status/prestige. As she allowed herself to fully experience the boredom by remaining in sensing-experiencing mode (after relapsing a few times back into extreme work patterns), she found that over time the boredom was replaced by a fuller feeling of being present and engaged in whatever she was doing. Staying in her now stronger Neutral gear (sensing, experiencing) also enabled her to savor/enjoy her everyday experiences more and to also form more vivid sense memories for later replay and enjoyment. Her sleep continued to improve.

Beyond “stress management” to life planning

As effective as these mental self-management strategies are, they are not the full answer to the epidemic of extreme work and “burnout” infecting many organizations and workplaces. There is a point at which work demands become dangerous to human health (what I call Hyper-work) and individual coping strategies will not suffice.

Once we entered all of my client’s non-work big rocks (health, marriage, parenting, recreation etc.) into her schedule, she could see clearly that her current job was simply unrealistic within the time left available for her work/career. So she decided to transition from her current high-demand leadership job into a portfolio of roles and projects that enabled her to have more control of her time/schedule and to right-size her career within the limits/boundaries she had established. This restructuring of her work schedule, paired with spending more of her non-work time mentally in Neutral rather than Drive, enabled her to rebound to the earlier baseline of health and well-being she had experienced before her episode of leadership-driven work strain.

Our great capacity to think, plan and follow-through on our plans enables us to do great things. But if we drive our mental engine too long and too hard without the necessary rest stops and lubrication and refueling/recharging, we will burn out the special brains that make us both wondrous and vulnerable.

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RESOURCE

Most Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction programs require an on-site multi-session commitment, and may be unavailable where you live or beyond your personal development budget. If you would like to gain some of the benefits of this approach to strengthening your Neutral gear as described above, you can access this solid no-cost online learning program as a first step.

[NOTE: the author has no financial interest in the program above]

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