Combat brain fatigue with these top expert tips

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.

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.