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You know how it is when you’re tired: Any little thing sends your emotions from zero to 100 in seconds. Your child’s joyful playground laughter turns shrill. You’re offended by the way the cashier hands you a receipt. Your partner’s breathing makes you want to strangle them. Olive Garden ads make you cry.
Sure, you could probably use more sleep. But a recent study suggests that practicing mindfulness meditation could combat the effects of fatigue and help you better manage your emotional responses.
Meditation For Your Mood
We know mindfulness can help improve emotional regulation and mood. If you’re already relaxed and rested, it makes sense that meditation might make you feel even better. But is it effective when you’re just dog tired and your emotional resources are low?
A recent study found that mindfulness meditation can help lessen the likelihood that fatigue will cause you to spiral into negative emotions or emotional numbness.
Researchers at Shenzhen University in China say they’re the first to study the relationship between fatigue, mindfulness, and emotional processing. In their research, half of the participants completed a 15-minute mindfulness meditation. It involved a breath-based mindfulness practice–paying attention to the feeling of breath in the body—and a body scan exercise that asked them to move their awareness from one part of the body to another.
The researchers were especially interested in how this functions among people with high-stress jobs.
“Occupations such as counselors, human resources advisers, customer service staff, and nurses often suffer from fatigue due to the high emotional demands of their work tasks (also called emotional workload),” according to the study’s authors. High-touch jobs with long hours can wear you out physically and drain your emotional resources so that your ability to respond to stressors is reduced. You just don’t have the resources to manage your own emotions and someone else’s. In this case, simply resting may not be enough.
That’s where mindfulness meditation training steps in. The research found that the practice offsets the negative association between fatigue and emotion. This suggests that when you’re tired and feeling emotionally on edge, stepping away for a few minutes of meditation may be more helpful than taking a break to just rest.
Why Does Mindful Meditation Help?
If you think of fatigue as lack of sleep, you may be missing the source of your exhaustion. Lots of things can contribute to your fatigue factor. Overexertion, whether physical or mental, but also illness, a medical condition, or medication. Stress, particularly when it’s chronic or traumatic, can contribute to your sense of exhaustion. Even diet and dehydration can contribute to feeling tired.
Whatever the cause of your exhaustion, it can have an impact on your reaction time, your judgment, and your attention span, as well as your mood. When you’re tired, difficult emotions feel more intense and harder to bounce back from. Something that might ordinarily go unnoticed can cause you to have an outsized emotional response.
And being tired often creates an emotional cascade. You’re not only on edge about what’s happening around you, you feel bad about being tired. Mindfulness meditation may help here, too, because it allows you to greet your fatigue with neutral awareness. When you notice your fatigue and the accompanying emotions more objectively, you can more easily refocus your attention to whatever is happening in the present moment. Mindfulness helps you bounce back from tiring experiences and regulate your emotions more effectively.
Tamara Y. Jeffries is a Senior Editor at Yoga Journal
