“The first signs of mental overload pass easily unnoticed”.
Behind a simple distraction or passenger forgetting can hide a more serious reality: your brain is at the end. Too much information to process, too much injunctions, not enough respite. “The first signs of mental overload are often cognitive, but they easily pass unnoticed”warns Dr. Nicolas Neveux, psychiatrist in Paris, author of the e-psychiatrie.fr site and the book “Hypersensitivity in adults” (Ed. Mardaga). Learning to spot them helps prevent mental exhaustion … and to regain control before it is too late.
1. Your concentration lets you go: you reread three times the same sentence without understanding it? Are you going from one email to another without ending a single one? These concentration difficulties may seem harmless. They are not. “We observe jumps of attention, a significant demotivation and a real difficulty in staying on a task or going to the end of what we start”explains Dr. Neveux. The brain, saturated, can no longer prioritize priorities. “We then take refuge in the tasks which will make it possible to relieve part of the load as quickly as possible, even if they are not urgent.” The illusion of efficiency masks a slow loss of control.
2. Your emotions overflow without warning: the slightest setback irritates you? Do you find yourself crying for nothing? Mental overload does not affect thoughts, it also reaches emotions. “As soon as a behavior starts to harm our personal or professional relationships, we must be alarmed”insists the psychiatrist. By dint of collecting, body and mind crack. It is no longer a simple fatigue: it is an emotional alert.
3. Your body cashes… and ends up talking: insomnia, tensions in the neck, back pain, ball in the belly or in the throat: so many physical manifestations of poorly managed stress. “The body activates a mode of protection inherited from our ancestors: stretched muscles, increased vigilance, leakage or combat reaction”details Dr. Neveux. But when this alert continues, it exhausts the body. What was a punctual response becomes a permanent alert state.
“As soon as we feel that we no longer master the situation and that it disrupts everyday life, we must consult”advises Dr. Neveux. The good reflex: talk to your general practitioner or a psychiatrist, the only one empowered to assess the extent of the problem and make a diagnosis. If a pathology is detected (burn-out, depression), suitable treatment will be offered. In any case, “You have to understand why the mental load has become unmanageable. Interpersonal therapies (TIP) or cognitive behavioral (TCC) are particularly effective in learning to set limits, regulating injunctions and lightening this invisible weight”concludes Dr. Neveux.
