Fatigue Is a Brain-Derived Emotion that Regulates to Ensure Protection (2012)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
“I first met “SEAL” at a 100-mile run in San Diego and I was running this race as part of a six-person relay team with friends and he was running the entire race by himself,” Itzler said.
“Who is this guy? I’ve never seen anything like it. And during the race, I kept an eye on him and around mile 70 — he weighed probably 260 pounds, which is quite large for an ultra runner — he had broken all the small bones in both of his feet and had kidney damage and he finished the race.”
So... yeah, this makes Me think maybe I'll try harder at listening to my body (fwiw, I've screwed up arms/hands twice in past decade by pushing through fatigue).
[1] http://thehustle.co/40-percent-rule-navy-seal-secret-mental-...
I've worked with runners who had serious injury, soccer players who came in with bruises that you'd associate with a severe beating... I'm thinking "geez, it's gonna suck when you're 62." Because when you lose some amount of basic mobility, you lose a lot of the ability to stay healthy when you're older.
Is this because of Mountain Dew commercials and 1980s GI Joe body image stuff?
I was a lacrosse goalie in high school and didn't have the sense to wear shin pads. If you run your fingers along my shin, you'll feel divots where the bone never regenerated. I too used to walk around with bruises on my legs that you'd associate with a severe beating.
> Is this because of Mountain Dew commercials and 1980s GI Joe body image stuff?
It's considerably more primal than that. Sports are the modern equivalent to tribal rites of passage. We're not allowed to kill our rivals anymore, so we settle for beating them in a physical sport in order to establish our physical dominance. It's empowering in a way that few things are, especially as a teenager and extra especially if you were bullied throughout elementary school.
I graduated high school close to 1980. Sure, there were guys finishing the big game on a broken bone but it seems like there's a lot more emphasis on this now, and it seems more dangerous and higher risk. I have nephews and kids of friends who are electing out of organized sports.
FWIW, I feel lucky - we had basically one bully and he didn't last. Expelled.
I remember in "Brian's Song" where Alex Karrass' character sold cars in the pro football off season.
I dunno; I saw "Bigger, Stronger, Faster" and it gave me pause.
I've done my share of team/contact sports in my youth. nothing horrible happened apart from few broken fingers, but stuff I do now makes those sports look super boring/borderline idiotic when looking back (ie coach yelling at you like a little girl, running you around 'to break you to unlock your potential'). What I mean - trekking, skiing, climbing, via ferratas, cycling on unpaved roads, a bit of easy ski alpinism and mountaineering.
but I agree that any activity/sport is endlessly better than none, that's for sure
I've talked to a friend of a friend who basically doesn't fear what normal people fear (e.g. talking to beautiful women, surfing, rock climbing, talking to strangers - he is really successful at sales). I asked him what his biggest fear was. He said it was to his lose health/lose control of his body (e.g. bad accident/paralysis).
We all have fears, and I think, in the end, we all fear mortality. And those who don't have the fears we most have (e.g. talking to beautiful women), fear their mortality/fragility of even the most fit body the most.
I'm happily married, I don't cheat, I don't want to cheat, I'm really not interested in the "hot woman," but if I end up talking to her under any circumstances, there's a loud chorus of voices in my head screaming "dontfuckitupdontfuckitupdontfuckitup." I push through and get over my initial nerves, because I'm a grown up, but it's awful and annoying and I wish it would go away.
Not everyone. You don't have to be afraid of death. And before someone suggests it, this is not the same thing as wanting to die or even not caring if you die.
Did you play football? The danger of permanent crippling injury has been blown way out of proportion by helicopter parents and the news. Of all the kids I played with and all the kids I coached (volunteer), only one of them ever wound up partially crippled. That kid in particular would routinely do daredevil stunts in his spare time. By the time he injured his knee, he was missing teeth, had blown his eyebrows off three times, and messed up that knee at least twice before stepping foot on the field.
Football is a safe sport, considerably safer than not playing. I hear on the news about concussions and crippling injuries, but I never see it in real life. Those things are pretty rare, especially when compared to vehicle accidents. I've seen far more lifetime permanent injuries come out of the soccer camp, to be honest.
Another anecdote: guy I know has a kid that's like a high school... sophomore and in order for this kid to continue to add value as a basketball player, he apparently can't afford to play HS varsity ball. It's a distraction. His other (older) son is approaching 7 feet tall and is totally over organized sports altogether, and is pointed at engineering.
In what way?
> It's a distraction.
From what? That's the weirdest sort of reasoning I've ever heard.
So will sitting on your chair in front of a computer 8 hours a day. Everything in moderation.
College costs more than ever, so "pushing through" means you might make the playoffs, might get noticed and get a full ride. Hell, they're told, they might be able to go pro!
Very few people tell those kids the truth: It's a fool's errand. Only 1-2% of the kids who play basketball, football or baseball in high school actually go on to play in a division I school in college. Football players have the greatest chance of actually going pro, with a 1 in 600 chance of actually getting paid to pay pro ball... for an average of 3.5 years. If baseball is your game, it's 1 in 1850.
I learnt a lot from how a buddy who is/was a world class 24 hour mountain bike racer trains. His view is long term, building up fitness slowly over years. I do admit I find it much harder to maintain routine now that I have pulled back the training load.
Some people enjoy testing personal limits, physical and mental.
My "hobby" is a means for me to challenge myself, to push myself to my limits, to see what I am capable of and take my measure as a human being. It is a means for me to learn how to overcome fear, pain and doubt. It provides an objective haven when the subjective world is upside down.
I use things other than athletic performance for that, but I've come to realize that I was nudged that way a lot by adults when I was younger.
And even if that story is true - how much glory is running until one gets kidney failure?
The 40% rule is useful if you're in combat and your life is on the line. But then again, in such a situation the adrenaline would make you ignore any pain or fatigue anyway. In normal life this 40% rule seems just stupid.
That separation of the different senses of fatigue is the core of the article. Fatigue is both a feeling and a state, which we confuse because they are connected. But you can give someone drugs, like diphenhydramine or caffeine, which change the feeling of fatigue without changing the underlying state which that feeling normally reflects.
I find myself consistently productive over long spans without a burnout effect when I am sleeping at consistent hours, and working for consistent hours a day. When I overwork my productivity becomes inconsistent so I stopped doing that. I learnt it the hard way that late night coding is a short-term investment with negative return in the long run.
My personal theory is that our brains like consistency and adapt/tune to it over time. Just like when you jog every day, if you run for too long one day and too short the other day it cannot adapt/tune itself to a semi-random pattern.
- our muscles need to support our body while sitting. - most mental work includes some dose of stress, which is a real reason of fatigue.
Buy yourself best chair you can find plus do stress-free, enjoyable work and you can go 16 hours straight, without fatigue. At least that's how I felt about all-weekend-long Quake matches back then when I was living in dormitory.
A good theory should explain why watching a television serial, a very complex task involving long term memory retrieval, short term memory of details, inferring various motivations, theory of mind (on a meta level too via genre savviness), agent modeling and prediction, language, visual, audio is less taxing than solving 1000 simple arithmetic problems. The resource management and attention based theories have better explanations for why that may be.
And I don't mean emotions like anger, but less visible ones like disgust, which seem to be triggered during procrastinating.
For example, only very recently we found that the brain literally cleans itself (by flushing) during sleep (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3880190/). You can bet your Tesla (if you have one) there are lots of mechanisms for physically cleaning up and regeneration that we have no idea yet that they even exist. It's also recent that we find that the various glial cell types in the brain actually help in computation and are not just "helpers" you can leave out when considering brain activity.
I know for myself that when I lie down even when I am not tired (and I rarely am during the day) my brain after a while starts doing some really weird stuff. It's literally like day-dreaming. I have no conscious control, I just let it flow - but I'm not asleep, not one bit. That lasts for 5 to 20 minutes. Afterwards I feel incredibly refreshed. Again, there is no sleep involved, not even half-sleep, so it's a very different mechanism.
All processes are physical in the brain in the end: Even electrical activity is performed by ions, not by electrons, after all. So even electricity is physical movement of atoms, unlike in human-made electrical equipment where it's just electrons for the most part (you see the effect when it's ions in batteries, if you open them when they are old, while a copper wire doesn't change even after years of current flow).
In addition, part of electrical activity performed with ions is the transmission to another cell (within the brain mostly other neurons, of course), which is purely chemical through various transmitters. When I first heard about that I thought "couldn't this be optimized in a human-made system to stick to using only electrical signals, it would be sooo much faster". However, I quickly abandoned that thought, those transmission being 100% chemical is a major part of the information processing. Human-made computers show you can do make something "purely electrical" - but then it works following completely different principles. The chemical vector adds a huge flexible component to the system, it enables the majority of what the brain is and can do. But it means that a huge chemical factory has to be maintained: A gigantic amount of molecules needs to be synthesized and broken up continuously, and vast amounts of it. And while you don't need to do much cleanup except for dust in a computer because it's all just electrons, the brain is less electrical than a chemical factory.
Even the electrical activity which uses just simple ions, so they are always there and don't have to be manufactured, uses a lot of energy, because the gradient has to be maintained by physically moving ions back out of the cells to establish the resting membrane potential. That energy comes from ATP, which first has to be produced. In a human-made system we simply provide the electrical field to the entire system from the outside, and the dirty chemical processes have been outsourced to power plants somewhere far away. In the brain you have all that waste-producing activity right in each cell!
Add to that that there is so much activity in the brain, much more than in most other tissue in the body, and you can see a lot of "house-keeping" has to be performed. And that is an area that we still know precious little about. So it seems plausible that occasionally heavily used parts of the brain may want a little rest - during which they don't really rest, they just do cleanup and maintenance.
What's a relatively recent write-up of this stuff for a non-specialist that doesn't skimp on the details? I'm not asking for Cognitive Neuroscience for Dummies but I'm not asking for "think of the brain like a CPU" either. If there isn't a decent write-up, could you write it? I'd buy a copy ;-)
I've seen the "brain flushing" research, but this was the most in depth I've heard it explained.
Of course, this goes back to the "1000 page introduction" he mentioned.
When I go running, it's some kind of aerobic sensation, but eventually my thoughts shift when it's time to stop.
If I lift heavy things for an hour, I can also be quite winded but there's usually some gas left in the tank I just know it's better to get some rest and allow muscle to repair.
Some kind of crossfit style workout, yet another sensation.
Sometimes I can take a nap as soon as I get home after the above, especially a vigorous run in the Arizona desert during summer.
Knowledge work has its own fatigue for me. If I go deep into flow state while working on something, eventually I reach a generalized mental haziness, where I want to relax and let my mind wander or be passively entertained.
Usually I have trouble sleeping after intense thinking, mind still firing but not effectively. I just want to "chill" and watch TV or do something simple and rewarding like clean the house to try and bring it fully out of gear.
Most elite endurance athletes do not hit the lactic threshold during their actual races. That is why they train so much - to build their endurance. Once you hit the lactic threshold, your body starts to break down.
I race MTB. Both quick races and long, 100 miles or even 24h solo events. In a quick <3h race, I just go all-out and stay above threshold most of the time. But I try to time my above-threshold usage in long races. In one of the 24h races, the course had a single climb. I was riding everything but that climb bellow threshold. It would have been very hard to stay bellow threshold on it. While it was just a couple minutes effort above threshold.
http://www.humankinetics.com/products/all-products/lore-of-r...
I wonder why Rhabdo[1] isn't more prevalent in basic than it is.
Another approach is to set a goal, but keep moving the goal posts.
"Tricking yourself" that way can be surprisingly easy - I first consciously tried that (though I'm sure we've all done it without thinking about it) after thinking about how easily we trick ourselves into continuing pleasurable activities that way, or procrastinating ("only 10 more minutes, then I'll start working"); it works quite well for me as a means to continuing exercise or work too.
What'd be incredibly intimidating as a goal at the outset suddenly seems a lot more achievable if you set a more modest goal to start with.
Cowardice of the individual might be a huge survival advantage for the species as a whole!
Without it the species might end up loosing or injuring the fittest of the individuals in stupid competitions. The would be quite detrimental for the species.
(Also going even further from physical performance: If you extend this a bit from "athletic race" to "nuclear arms race" you'd see a similar thing ...but yeah, as an individual player you might "loose" by being coward (although I would not call "staying alive" loosing...).
And an interesting philosophical question would be about the cases where an individual gains courage by loosing "the feeling of being the same species as the others" - we know that psychopaths ca be quite fearless, and we also know from history that if you train your soldiers to think they are "a superior master race separate from the others" they tend to get quite better at winning battles.)
In college, I took a weightlifting class with a bunch of athletes in it. One day, we did lunges (no weight) around and around, in a line like ants. Nearing the end, my brain thought I was totally fine. I cannot stress that enough. Bam, like a light switch, my legs went from 60% strength to 2% three quarters of the way through the last lap. Had the instructor not caught me, I would have fallen right over.
"These sensations of fatigue are unique to each individual and are illusionary since their generation is largely independent of the real biological state of the athlete at the time they develop."
But you're correct in that there is more to it. Adrenaline masks fatigue. It allows you to temporarily exceed what your brain would normally allow you to do in order to save your life. You pay for it later, though.
No, the article isn't claiming that at all. It is saying there is an extra system in the brain which generates the sensation of fatigue. This usually happens before the muscles reach their limit (and this has been demonstrated).
As others have noted, it may not have been your muscles. Why would your muscles suddenly go from 60% strength to 2%? I suspect either it was central fatigue (which can also manifest as muscle weakness), or perhaps your form was wrong on the last lap.
A favoutite quote of mine: "You have to make a sustained 'conscious effort', to win."
Regardless of the speaker, the overlap with the headline is remarkable.
(I.E.: Have an overarching "intense activity" timer or measuring device signal that the system is likely to suffer breakdown... just because it probably will.)
The key intelligence here comes from the fact that the human fatigue system evolved alongside the human organism, and thus has millions of years of results built in. As a result it's fairly accurate.
There were moments where I felt I couldn't proceed and was exhausted. When telling that to my trainer he, correctly, said: well your muscles aren't shaking under load, so you can't be out of energy yet. After a pause of 10 seconds I was able to go on.
In my experience most physical fatigue can be countered by proper, regular and deep breathing during movement. It seems to be an oxygen-distribution problem.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Maarten_Boksem/publicat...
It seems to involve the same brain regions that Noakes identified as being involved in physical fatigue. However rather than protecting against damage, its function appears to be to protect against unnecessary expenditure of energy.