Fatigue is a commonly occurring symptom. It can be a symptom that occurs in stress, depression, and burnout. Even in anxiety you can feel fatigued. The daily stress adds up and we feel more and more tired. It can be so that you have issues with sleeping through the night, or that you cannot fall asleep,... Fatigue in turn can then cause other symptoms, or worsen them. Read more about it here!
Fatigue: physical recovery
Sleep has different functions and one of these functions is the recovery of your body. This mainly happens in the 4th phase of sleep, the deep sleep. If you have had enough deep sleep, you will feel refreshed when you get up, ready to get started with your day. Stress affects the sleeping cycle. It cannot only interfere with the amount of sleep which we get, but also with the quality of the sleep. Stress can have the consequence that we get less sleep and thereby less deep sleep. This will cause fatigue.
Fatigue: psychological recovery
Not only is our physical state recovered during sleep, but our psychological state, as well. During the day a lot is namely coming toward us, and sleep has the task of organizing and processing all the information. The psychological recovery occurs mainly during the REM sleep. In this phase, connections will be made between the things which have happened that day, and your thoughts are organized. That is why people often say: "Sleep on it for a night". Because new connections are made, it can be so that you find it easier to come up with solutions. You can guess it already, but stress makes it so that we not only sleep less, but that the quality of our sleep is poorer, too. That is why we will feel less psychologically refreshed, and the start of worrying thoughts is made. By worrying, the solution phase is namely skipped. Because we get less REM sleep, or none at all, it thus becomes very difficult to come up with solutions.
Fatigue: consequences
Fatigue can, except for detrimental effects on psychological and physical recovery, also have other consequences. For example, your fatigue may lead to memory problems, or that you have issues with paying attention for extended periods of time. Furthermore, as described, it can be so that you start to worry, which will lead to stress in itself. Fatigue can also affect your physical and psychological immune system. For example, you might fall ill more easily, but you cannot take as much negativity anymore, either, and experience more frequent sad moods.
Fatigue: treatment
There is little to not treatment available which solely focuses on fatigue. What some treatments do, however, is treating this fatigue in the context of a larger whole. Fatigue namely hardly ever comes on its own. Stress can have a large influence on it, for example. In such a case, it is useful to also treat your stress. 15 Minutes 4 Me is an online self-help program which can help you to minimize your fatigue, or to even get rid of it, so that you wake up every morning feeling refreshed. It namely gives you questions and videos, which can help you to discover what it is that works for you in order to be able to break out of the vicious cycle of fatigue.
Fatigue: the free self-test
Except for the online program, 15 Minutes 4 Me also offers a free stress test, which measures y our stress, anxiety, and depression.
