• Posted August 5, 2024

Thinking Hard Really Can Make Your 'Brain Hurt'

Folks who rub their forehead and complain that a complex problem is making their brain hurt aren’t overstating things, a new review suggests.

Mental exertion appears to be associated with unpleasant feelings in many situations, researchers reported Aug. 5 in the journal Psychological Bulletin.

In fact, the greater a person’s mental effort, the more they experience feelings like frustration, irritation, stress or annoyance, results showed.

“Our findings show that mental effort feels unpleasant across a wide range of populations and tasks,” said senior researcher Erik Bijleveld, an associate professor of psychology with Radboud University in the Netherlands.

“This is important for professionals, such as engineers and educators, to keep in mind when designing tasks, tools, interfaces, apps, materials or instructions,” Bijleveld added in a university news release. “When people are required to exert substantial mental effort, you need to make sure to support or reward them for their effort.”  

For the review, researchers analyzed 170 studies published between 2019 and 2020 involving 4,670 people.

The participants included people from a wide range of backgrounds, including health care workers, military employees, amateur athletes and college students. They represented 29 countries.

The studies involved more than 350 different brain tasks that ranged from learning new technology and finding one’s way around an unfamiliar environment to practicing golf swings or playing a virtual reality game. 

The combined results show that heavy mental exertion can create unpleasant feelings, researchers said.

However, the association between mental effort and unpleasant feelings varies between regions, and it was less pronounced in Asian countries than in Europe or North America, researchers found.

This could mean that a person’s learning history may impact the way mental exertion affects them, researchers said.

High schoolers in Asia tend to spend more time on schoolwork than those in Europe or North America, and so they might have learned to withstand higher levels of mental exertion earlier in their lives, researchers suggested.

Researchers said it’s also interesting that even though mentally challenging tasks can be unpleasant, people still engage in them.

“For example, why do millions of people play chess?” Bijleveld said. “People may learn that exerting mental effort in some specific activities is likely to lead to reward. If the benefits of chess outweigh the costs, people may choose to play chess, and even self-report that they enjoy chess.”

“Yet, when people choose to pursue mentally effortful activities, this should not be taken as an indication that they enjoy mental effort, per se,” he added. “Perhaps people choose mentally effortful activities despite the effort, not because of it.”

Managers and teachers should keep this in mind when pressing others to tackle tough tasks, Bijleveld said.

“On the surface, this seems to work well: Employees and students do often opt for mentally challenging activities,” Bijleveld said. “From this, you may be tempted to conclude that employees and students tend to enjoy thinking hard. Our results suggest that this conclusion would be false: In general, people really dislike mental effort.”

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on recovering from burnout.

SOURCE: Radboud University, news release, Aug. 5, 2024