Kategori: Stress mgmt & mental strength

At least not if you use the common meaning of the term rest. Most people mean ‘getting out of work’ or ‘relief from effort’ when they say they need to rest. But if it’s real recovery you’re after, it’s not enough to ‘take time off’. Nor is it enough to lie down and close your eyes. If you cannot switch off your thoughts and put yourself in a peaceful state of mind, there will still be no quality in your recovery, even if it looks like you’re resting. This is because recovery is a complex process controlled by a psychophysiological system of nerves and hormones, which in turn are controlled by higher cognitive and emotional functions in the brain. This whole anabolical system is constructed in such a way that recovery processes cannot ‘kick in’ and become effective until you are in a calm state of mind. Mental relaxation, i.e. the ability to enter a calm mental state, is crucial for quality recovery.

Another common misconception about resting is that burnout/lasting fatigue is due to overwork and that it is relief that will solve the problem. But however relieved you are in an external sense, it is not certain that worried thoughts will cease. If your head is spinning with thoughts like: ‘I should…’, ‘I have to…’, ‘how long will I feel like this?’, ‘I’m afraid the tablets will cause side effects’, ‘what will my colleagues think of me for letting them down like this’, ‘I have to get a good night’s sleep tonight’… it is of course impossible to get some peace of mind and mental relaxation. And then there will be no good recovery, no matter how much time off or sick leave you take.

Qualitative recovery means replenishing several different energy systems. In addition to a good ability to relax, you need to top up with inspiration, enjoyable and meaningful activities, socialising with people who give you energy. Sleep is a separate chapter in this context. And more, and more. If you want to learn more about the components of recovery and get a more in-depth explanation of how to improve it, you can send an email to clas.m@clasmalmstrom.se and you will receive (for free!) a pdf describing a basic programme for enhanced recovery.

Sorry, one should not express oneself so categorically about something so complicated, so let me immediately moderate the statement:  Mental fatigue is not always due to overwork. Certainly, it can sometimes be the case that overexertion is behind a fatigue reaction, but 8-9 times out of 10 we find the cause at the other end of the scale in the form of under-recovery. Yes, I know, you can’t find the word under-recovery in the dictionary. But agree that it should exist, and should be used much more often than the word overexertion, because it gives a good clue to where to look for measures that can have an effect. For the person affected, as well as for friends and relatives, managers and colleagues, the concept of under-recovery is a useful guide and a reliable indicator of how best to help the exhausted person.
     Indeed, this is also true for carers, doctors and psychotherapists, who too often focus on the exertion aspect and exaggerate the importance of relief from all kinds of effort. The problem with this is that it risks misleading the patient into missing the purpose of respite from work, which is to free up time, attention and energy to prioritise recovery. Getting rid of all responsibilities and getting rid of everything that consumes energy – i.e. the relief itself – does not solve the problem.

     Stopping doing the wrong thing is not the same as doing the right thing!

Even though it is clearly wrong to perpetuate an incorrect prioritisation and continue to try to perform even when your energy is depleted, it is not enough to just stop trying. You need to switch to qualitative ‘battery recharging’. Recovery is a skill that many people need to train. Pseudo-rest is increasingly common nowadays. This is when tired people take a break and say they are going to rest, and perhaps do so physically, but are unable to bring their brain into rest mode. Resting with a screen is one common cause, but there are several others.

Want to learn more about this and get a more in-depth explanation of how to train mentally to improve the quality of your recovery? Send an email to clas.m@clasmalmstrom.se and you will receive (for free!) a pdf describing a basic programme for enhanced recovery.

About emotional controle in learning and study skills

A good example of how Kahnemann’s theses work in practice (see previous post) is study technique, and learning in general. When you are sitting with a book, a lecture or web course or the like and really want to try to learn something (and remember it), it is easy to slip into the quick thinking track and do what feels best and at first glance seems easiest. But the easiest way is not the most effective!
       Research¹⁾ has clearly shown that people learn better and remember much more if they choose the slow train of thought instead, but in order to do so, they need to recognise and be prepared for the fact that it feels worse because it is more difficult and more work in the short term.
      The fast track could be, for example, reading the text several times and both underlining and using coloured highlighters. Or sitting in a lecture and taking notes so that the pen glows, writing down as much as possible. Sure, these methods can also be exhausting, but it still feels more comfortable and familiar to use them. They don’t challenge the brain as much as the slow track does. In which case you choose to read the text only twice, first to get an overall insight into the topic and then an intensive second read-through where you actively look for the important things while often stopping, summarising the paragraph you just read, retelling the content to yourself (without cheating = put the text away so you can’t look in it!). One important step is to write questions for yourself to answer a few hours later. That’s right, several hours later, not immediately. For this second reading to work, you have to tell yourself not to read the text again. One of the reasons why multiple read-throughs with underlining and highlighting do not work very well is that you trick yourself with the pleasant idea that “next time I read this, it will sink in…” I myself remember a course in study techniques I took at the beginning of medical school. We had to try to cross out the text with a black marker after the second reading! So that we could never read it again. It’s a bit nerve-wracking until you learn to trust your memory, but extremely effective. (That method is best suited to compendiums and cheap books, and is not suitable for expensive textbooks and reference books where you may need to look up facts for a long time.)   
     Retrieving new knowledge from memory is an important step in activating learning and making it ‘stick’. Other types of active rehearsal can also be used. A powerful example is to sit for a while with a fellow student the next day and recount different passages to each other, ask each other about important points, etc.  

1. A good summary can be found in the book “Outsmart your brain” by Daniel Willingham, professor at the University of Virginia. It also contains many good practical tips and descriptions of methods you can practice to become better at learning new skills.

In memory of Daniel Kahneman   —   died on 27 March, 2025, aged 90.

Daniel Kahneman, economist and psychologist, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for his pioneering research on human judgement and decision-making.
In a popularised form, he explained his findings in the book “Thinking, Fast and slow” which I highly recommend (published in 2011 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux). In it, he provides new insights into how our lives can be very positively affected if we have a good balance between two types of thinking: 1. Fast, intuitive, emotional, impulsive, 2. Slow, reasoning, analysing, consequence calculating.
    And vice versa: how the quality of life can be negatively affected for those who are too weak in either of them. We need to develop both of these cognitive functions to cope with our daily lives. And there are mental training methods to become more proficient in each of them, and to become better at recognising what kind of thinking you are currently doing, so that you can consciously switch when you have got it wrong.
    For most of us, it is type 2 that fails. You can get a real boost in life by getting better at recognising in time when you have slipped into the fast, emotion-driven, impulsive train of thought in situations where you should stop for a few seconds, consider the options and think about the consequences. Our human brain has a built-in simulator that we can train and use more effectively so that we can visualise both what we can do, how we should do it and how the outcome occurs. In a grossly simplified form, this is sometimes referred to as goal image training in the mental training literature, but this concept is easily misunderstood and misused.       If you think this sounds interesting and want to learn more, please send an email to clas.m@clasmalmstrom.se and I will send you in-depth information in the form of a compendium with practical tips on how to get started with this branch of mental strength training.