Well, hello there, and welcome to this episode of the Terry Coles show that I want to start with a question.

Are you feeling mentally exhausted?

Do you ever feel foggy-brained or forgetful or sort of like your day-to-day tasks feels like you're trudging through sludge, trying to get stuff done?

And yet somehow you're not getting that much done anybody?

Well, if you're not in your head then you are not alone and this episode is for you because in today's episode, I'm breaking down what cognitive fatigue is, how you get it, and some steps that you can take to get on a healing path to restoration.

So if you're new here, my name is Terry Coles. I'm the author of Boundary Boss, which you can get at BoundaryBossBook.com.

I want to take a moment as I always do at the top to just say thank you.

You could be doing anything right now, but the fact that you're listening to me hanging out with me, maybe you're taking a walk, maybe you're driving a work. I don't know what you're doing, but I'm really, really happy that you're doing it with me. So thank you, thank you, thank you.

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I love to highlight our views and say thank you. So thank you to Haley ZH for the five star review. Haley says wonderful. Terry is wonderful. Her deliverance and voice makes me think she has empathic and energy gifts about her book a year ago, as someone who has a huge lack of boundaries, her topics and advice, feel like a gift from heaven.

Well, thank you so much, Haley ZH. I appreciate you being here and all of you, because you guys being here, you're, you're it for me. You're all the things for me and the more you share about the podcast, the more people we can reach, hopefully, to lessen suffering in the world and elevate joy, because that really is my trip. All right, let's move into today's episode.

This is the Terry Cole show and as you might have guessed, I'm your host, Terry Cole, where over two and a half decades, I've been a licensed psychotherapist and relationship expert. And I'm also the author of Boundary Boss, the essential guide to talk true, be seen and finally live free on this show. I'll bring you simple strategies based on practical psychology.

Inspiring expert interviews and my own insights and observations for my time on the front lines in the fascinating worlds of entertainment, impairment and mental health. Now let's get going with today's episode.

So what causes that feeling of fatigue, what causes the feeling of doing a basic task, but like you just can't get it done or you're highly distractable in a way that you aren't normally.

This is called or can be called cognitive fatigue. So it's just tiredness, right? Sometimes we are mentally exhausted. So it's not a physical tiredness. So not to be confused with being sleepy, because really when you are cognitively exhausted, many times after you've done a full day of like heavy lifting psychologically, emotionally, mentally.

That at night people report feeling wired. I have this experience where I know I'm tired, but I don't feel tired because the mental fatigue has almost created an electrical feeling in my body that I can't actually rest.

So what creates this and for clarity, this cognitive fatigue can also sometimes be related to brain injuries, but in this episode, I'm, I'm focusing basically on how we get cognitive fatigue from over functioning, overdoing, overthinking, basically, and what we can do about it.

So when we work with our minds for a prolonged period of time, whether no matter what it is that you're doing something that requires you to think, you could be writing something out, you could be figuring out a schedule because you're going to be traveling, you could be reading even reading like dense material like dense books or maybe doing research for something.

Any time that your brain is working, you're sort of building up towards having cognitive fatigue.

So what ends up happening is that when we hit a tipping point, meaning we didn't stop to rest, we didn't have ample sleep, we didn't give ourselves a mental break.

When we needed it, we started to have the symptoms of cognitive fatigue. And one of those symptoms is that even basic things that you normally could do with your eyes closed, feels like a heavy lift, feels like, wow, I don't even think I can do it.

Like I'm so, it almost feels overwhelming to think about. Another thing that happens is that we're really distractable. When we are, when we have cognitive fatigue, when we're mentally exhausted, it's easy to just get caught up in distractions where when you are well rested cognitively, let's say, you have an ability to stay focused.

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