How to Give Your Exhausted Prefrontal Cortex a Break

On"frontal fatigue" and its links to burnout and depression.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

I DO ALMOST all my work on a computer.

After a typical day of reading research papers, Zooming with sources, replying to emails, and writing articles like this one, I can feel the toll all this has taken on my brain. My thinking takes on a sluggish, gauzy quality, and even simple cognitive chores can feel effortful. I’ll zombie around the supermarket for thirty minutes, unable to decide what to buy for dinner. The cereal aisle overwhelms me.

This kind of mental fatigue is commonplace and arises for different reasons. Most of them have to do with an area of the brain called the prefrontal cortex.

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) lies just behind the forehead. It’s one of the most recently evolved parts of the human brain, and it’s heavily involved in the so-called “executive functions,” which include higher-order processes like decision making, attention, emotion regulation, meta-cognition (thinking about what you’re thinking about), and the manipulation of abstract ideas. Both your notion of yourself and the complex models that form your unique version of consciousness are believed to be generated in the PFC.

In addition to all these jobs, the prefrontal cortex also plays a central role in working memory.

Working memory is the brain system where all newly acquired information is temporarily held and assessed before its either discarded or integrated into your mental models or banks of long-term memory.

According to Mark Rego, MD, a psychiatrist at the Yale School of Medicine and author of the book Frontal Fatigue, the PFC is acutely vulnerable to the stresses of modern life. The pummeling the PFC now routinely takes helps explain why the rates of so many mental illnesses are on the rise.

“We are now putting demands on our prefrontal cortex that are really new to humanity,” Rego told me.

He highlighted the latest digital technologies—technologies that often require us to navigate a shifting array of virtual, abstract, busy, and highly complex spaces—as a major driver of PFC fatigue. “The prefrontal cortex does not function well under stress, but it is now continually under stress,” he said.

In line with this view, research I highlight in my own forthcoming book, The Habit Trap, reveals how the cadence, the addictiveness, and the sheer volume of digital media we now consume may be overpowering the working memory and prefrontal cortex in ways that contribute to insomnia, to burnout, and to other forms of mental dysfunction.

But in Rego’s estimation, the PFC’s problems go beyond the latest tech.

“In America today, we’re forced to make decisions about a lot of things that used to be decided for us by tradition and culture,” he said.

How to think, how to act, what to believe, how to live according to your ideals—these and countless other parts of life now have to be worked out independently and from scratch, he said. We’re also forced to continually reassess and reconfigure our choices as we’re confronted by an ever-expanding and unstable landscape of information and ethics.

We’re all walking around nowadays with these sorts of burdens piled on top of us, and it’s the prefrontal cortex that bears most of that weight. The result, Rego says, is the historically high incidence of mental illness that we see today. “If you have any vulnerability to mental disorder, heaping stress on the prefrontal cortex is going to draw it out.”

Seek out activities or hobbies that are centered around “primary sensory experiences.” That means stuff you can touch, taste, smell, see, and hear right now, in the real world.

I asked him how I could tell if my PFC was overtaxed—not in normal and temporary ways, but in ways that could indicate more serious mental strife. He gave me three potential red flags:

1. Your attention span is pathetic. “It becomes harder to control your focus or shift your focus appropriately when your PFC is fatigued,” he said.

2. You can’t seem to find the right words. “The ‘tip of the tongue’ phenomenon, where you’re thinking of a word but can’t find it, is a form of prefrontal cortex dysfunction,” he said. (Other types of forgetfulness — losing track of your keys, for example, or forgetting what you were about to do — are also related to PFC failures.)

3. Poorly controlled emotions. “You may notice you’re surprisingly irritable,” he said. “So you feel normal, but then you’re suddenly yelling at your kids.”

We all experience these signs of frontal fatigue now and then (and especially at the end of a tiring day). But if you notice these PFC failures more than you used to, or if they seem to be present all the time, it’s time to pump the brakes—because you may be heading toward a cliff. “You need to get out of your prefrontal cortex,” Rego said.

To do that, he advised seeking out activities or hobbies that are centered around “primary sensory experiences.” That means stuff you can touch, taste, smell, see, and hear right now, in the real world.

Almost any analog, hands-on activity is likely to do the trick. Playing an instrument, sewing, painting, gardening, baking, woodworking, puzzle-ing, and ball sports are all examples.

“It could also be going to art museums, or listening to music, or reading a book deeply and slowly,” he said. Spending time in nature, spending time with good friends, and mindfulness meditation are also science-approved ways to give your PFC a break.

“You know, life has become so fast and so complex,” he said. “Even if someone isn’t consumed by their smartphone, these pressures of technology and of inventing your life are still there putting the prefrontal cortex under stress.”

We are resilient, adaptable creatures. Our brains can take a lot of abuse. But everything has its limits, and modern life may be pushing the PFC beyond what it can reasonably bear.