A new study by researchers in China shows that mindfulness meditation may assist in lessening the negative effects of fatigue on the processing of emotions.
Meditation
Fatigue is a term that describes a feeling of constant tiredness, lack of energy, or burnout. It is a common symptom that practically every person will experience at some point in their life. Stress, poor lifestyle habits, environmental factors, and medical conditions are among the common causes.
Researchers at Shenzhen University found in this study that mindfulness meditation could mitigate the negative effects of fatigue on emotional processing to some degree. Their findings were reported in the journal Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.
Fatigue and negative emotions
Research has shown an association between fatigue and negative emotions. Past studies show that fatigue, regardless of its cause, can deepen negative emotions.
This explains why you can easily become irritable and feel more overwhelmed when you are fatigued. The feeling of tiredness can ruin your day by messing up your ability to process your emotions effectively during the day.
Researchers previously found that mindfulness meditation can lessen the intensity of negative feelings, thereby possibly aiding healthy emotional processing.
Mindfulness meditation is about being fully present in the moment while paying attention to your breath, feelings, and bodily sensations. It entails focusing on the present moment and shutting out other, racing thoughts.
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“However, if individuals continue to be affected by negative emotions when they are fatigued, it is unclear whether mindfulness can buffer the negative association between fatigue and emotions,” wrote the study authors.
Therefore, these Chinese researchers wanted to better find out whether mindfulness may help reduce the bad effects that fatigue has on emotional processing.
Studying mindfulness, fatigue, and emotions
Study authors Jialin Fan, Wenjing Li, and their fellow researchers relied on event-related potentials (ERPs) for this work. ERPs are very small voltages that are produced in the brain in response to stimuli or specific events, such as seeing or hearing something.
Researchers make use of ERPs to build their knowledge of people’s responses (emotional and psychological) to diverse daily experiences.
The team in this study assigned 145 participants randomly to two groups. Subjects in one group had a 15-minute guided mindfulness meditation. Those in the second group merely rested with their eyes shut for a similar duration.
All participants also did an image processing task, during which their ERPs were recorded. These subjects were asked to rate their fatigue level and emotional state before and after the experiment.
Participants who reported being fatigued at the start of the research failed to report a notable emotional boost after having mindfulness meditation.
Researchers, however, observed that the recorded signals hinted that meditation impacted the processing of emotional stimuli by the brain. This improved the reaction of subjects who had it to emotional stimuli, compared to the rested group.
“Our study demonstrates that mindfulness meditation, to some extent, offsets the negative association of fatigue with the neural activation of emotions,” the study authors wrote.
References
Fan, J., Li, W., Lin, M., Li, X., & Deng, X. (2023). Effects of mindfulness and fatigue on emotional processing: an event-related potentials study. Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2023.1175067
