People often push through tiredness to meet everyday mental demands, but this ability may have limits. Across six studies involving 1,088 people, participants who felt more fatigued than usual performed slightly worse on a test of mental speed. Greater fatigue and unusually fast performance also predicted a reduced ability to maintain performance when tired in the following hours. These findings suggest that both heightened fatigue and bursts of high mental effort may be early signs that a person will have more difficulty overcoming fatigue later on.
What Affects Our Ability to Keep Performing When Tired?
Fatigue is something we all contend with daily, which for us made the paper very interesting to work on. A takeaway message for me was that some ignoring of fatigue was fine, but ignoring it for too long may make its effect on processing speed less and less ignorable.