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Planning Fatigue Is Real and Here's Why You're Feeling It
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When Planning Fatigue Settles In
Planning Fatigue appears because having to plan everything we have to do goes against how the unconscious brain has evolved.
Our minds have evolved to simplify our existence by automatizing processes and using shortcuts, to allow us to complete different actions in the same time, unconsciously. This way, it's easier for our conscious minds to focus on more pressing matters like learning new information or communicating with others, etc.
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Unconscious Actions Make Life Easier
Unconscious actions serve an evolutionary purpose. And they make our lives easier in many ways.
*When you're reading something for example, your mind is also filtering a huge amount of sensory information, scanning the environment for relevant stimuli (food starting to burn on the stove or someone screaming), and even processing internal stimuli like thoughts and emotions related to previous meetings and discussions. All of these processes occur simultaneously, some more automatically and with less conscious awareness than others. If we were to give all of them the same amount of focus and attention, they would overwhelm us.
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Automaticity
William James described in the the late 19th century how mental processes that are abundantly practiced and rehearsed escape our awareness and begin operating autonomously and without conscious intentionality.
This post-conscious automaticity that James studies ensures that with practice, we can master new skills to a degree that we can eventually execute them with efficiency without having to overthink their every aspect.
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Dealing With Planning Fatigue
It's normal to experience planning fatigue, especially during a crisis: your brain is struggling to adjust not only to a new environment, but also to a slower, much more laborious way of functioning in that environment, with less help from automaticity.
Thus, the fatigue you are experiencing reflect your mind’s efforts to adapt. But it will get easier, once you'll get used to your new setting.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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About Consciousness
Consciousness is everything you experience - taste, pain, love, feeling. Where these experiences come from is a mystery.
Many modern analytic philosophers of mind either d...
Searching For Physical Footprints
What is it about brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? In particular, the neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) - the minimal neuronal mechanisms jointly sufficient for any conscious experience.
Consider this question: What must happen in your brain for you to experience a toothache?
Neuronal Correlates of Consciousness (NCC)
The whole brain can be considered an NCC because it generates experience continually.
- When parts of the cerebellum, the "little brain" underneath the back of the brain, are lost to a stroke or otherwise, patients may lose the ability to play the piano, for example. But they never lose any aspect of their consciousness. This is because the cerebellum is almost wholly a feed-forward circuit. There are no complex feedback loops.
- The spinal cord and the cerebellum are not enough to create consciousness. Available evidence suggests neocortical tissue in generating feelings.
- The next stages of processing are the broad set of cortical regions, collectively known as the posterior hot zone, that gives rise to conscious perception. In clinical sources of causal evidence, stimulating the posterior hot zone can trigger a diversity of distinct sensations and feelings.
- It appears that almost all conscious experiences have their origin in the posterior cortex. But it does not explain the crucial difference between the posterior regions and much of the prefrontal cortex, which does not directly contribute to subjective content.
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We Need Breaks
Take A Break Every 52 Minutes
After analyzing 5.5 million daily records of how office workers are using their computer (based on what the user self-identified as “productive” work), they found that the top 10% of productive workers all worked an average of 52 minutes before taking a 17 minute break.
Distract Yourself To Recharge Your Focus
Intense focus actually makes us less focused in the long run. Instead of thinking about the problem without stop, we need to create distractions that take our attention away from the task at hand so we can come back at it with a fresh mind.
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The olfactory sense at work
Our sense of smell works in wondrous ways since the chemical composition of our surrounding change instantly and constantly. Our noses pick up volatile airborne compounds that interact with...
Facts about our olfactory sense
- It is different from other sensory cortices in a way that it has a multidimensional stimulus.
- Some things can smell different not just between different people but also for the same person.
- Can measure an array of an uncertain variety of chemicals that can trace changes that detects pleasure, pain, or danger.
- It does not require a map mirroring because its chemical stimulus is constantly changing. It relies on the brain to recognize the pattern or memory associated with the smell.
Contributors to the study of the olfactory sense
- Santiago Ramón y Cajal: A founding father of neuroscience, he drew attention to the sense of smell as an exemplary model to learn how the brain makes sense of the world. He also believed that understanding smell would grant us better insight into other sensory systems
- Linda Buck & Richard Axel: They discovered the olfactory receptors which happened to be the most structurally diverse and sizable member of the largest multi-gene family of protein receptors. They received the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.