A while back, we wrote about feeling tired all the time. This afflicts many people. Myself included. As a result, we regularly seek out information on this topic. Thankfully, we discovered important new research on fatigue.
Predictive Factors: Important New Research on Fatigue
For current insights on fatigue research, we turn to ClearerThinking.org. With insights from Hannah M. Le and Holly Muir:
To help our readers, we ran several studies to learn what predicts fatigue and how it can be reduced. This article summarizes the results of these studies. And draws some conclusions about what might cause tiredness. Our most interesting finding was that reducing anxiety (when a person is anxious) tends to reduce tiredness. For a more details, click here.
Le and Muir describe two of the studies they conducted. Study one focuses on these hypotheses: “(1) Higher tiredness levels cause people to feel more anxious. For example, perhaps tiredness reduces resilience to stress. (2) Higher present-moment anxiety levels cause people to feel more tired. (3) Anxiety over several hours could lead to a “burn out” effect which increases tiredness. And the correlation between in-the-moment anxiety and tiredness simply reflects this burn out. (4) Anxiety levels come from a higher baseline anxiety. Which leads to poorer sleep quality or quantity, which leads to higher tiredness. Therefore, sleep really contributes to tiredness.” The top two variables that stood out in both of our analyses were typical tiredness and current anxiety.
To probe more in-depth, the authors conducted study two to “use a randomized controlled trial to establish whether present-moment anxiety causes tiredness.” They found that present-moment anxiety has a modest but real causal effect on present-moment tiredness! If you feel anxious, that anxiety is what actually should be addressed. For example, by using an app like Mind Ease. Or by taking some relaxing breath. Once you feel less anxious, the tiredness will lift too!
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