Below are common symptoms of Mental-Exhaustion and how your performance, mood and behaviour will change. The more of these symptoms you tick the more you are at risk of making mistakes, and bad decisions that will negatively impact on your future.

• You will feel overwhelmed. – Because you are exhausted you will mentally slow and this will lead to a build up of work that is left undone, or partly done. It will feel like you will never get on top of this workload and you will want to escape, literally, or for a period of time by using substances, or unhealthy activities.
• Your PERFORMANCE in all aspects of your intellectual and physical life will be ‘inconsistent’ and impaired. – Because of this impaired-performance you will lose confidence in your decisions and ability to perform a task. You will learn to doubt yourself,  which will ‘create’ low self-esteem. 
• Your ability to process and take in new information will be slower. – You learn, and memorise, and ‘make’ thousands of decisions every day; imagine the cumulative negative impact on your daily performance and how you feel about that performance.
• Your motivation will suffer because life has become a lot of effort with little pleasure (reward) for that effort. – It is not through lack of exposure to the things that bring or create pleasure, it is just that you lack the energy to process the sensory and mental experiences of pleasure. The food you eat will not taste as good, so you will either not eat or been drawn toward stronger tasting foods (sweet; fatty). You will not enjoy being touched as much, and even experiencing an orgasm may not be as enjoyable; so why put in the effort required for sex or intimacy? EVERYTHING in life uses mental-energy and without it you suffer a pleasure-deprived existence that will sap your motivation.
• Your Mind will become deregulated and disorganised. – You lack the energy to concentrate for prolonged periods and maintain a focus of attention. Your mind will wander and be less effective at filtering, selecting, and processing relevant information, which will interfere with your ability to do your job and move forward.
• You will to spend more ‘time’ each day in a negative emotional state. – Sadness, impatience, anger, anxiety, jealousy, guilt, resentment, (etc.) will become a bigger part of your day.
• You will have significantly reduced control over your emotions and these emotions will control your behaviour. – You will do and say things that you would never ‘normally’ do and say. Your emotions will be labile, unstable, and the ride on this roller coaster is exhausting for everyone around you.
• Your relationships (work/friends/partner) will suffer. Socialising ‘takes’ a lot of mental energy, when your reserves are low you won’t enjoy engaging with others, you will endure it. The most important people in your life will get what’s left over from your day and the battery is flat. 
• You will find it difficult to ‘stop.’ – Like running downhill you cannot stop yourself from engaging in work when you need to have a break. You cannot stop yourself from making bad decisions or engaging in spontaneous irrational/unhealthy behaviours.  The clients who were most reluctant to seek help were always the most mentally-exhausted.
• Your reaction time will be slowed and as a consequence you will be clumsy, and more accident-prone. – This might be as simple as knocking over a cup or as serious as a car accident.
• It will be difficult for you to relax and you will suffer impaired sleep. – Because your body will produce stress hormones and your adrenal gland is more active.
• You will progressively lose the ‘ability’ to think rationally and to ‘make’ good decisions.

Recovery does not take long

As you recover you will notice that all of the above symptoms ‘reverse.’ Who you truly are will reappear through the mire and thick mental fog of exhaustion. You will have more energy, improved performance, and increased ability to live the life you want. 

The recovery program will help you to prevent mental-exhaustion and burnout from ever occurring again. Do this now, do not accept half a life as normal.

When you don’t know what to do, do something that will make you stronger.