Q&A: Is Mental Overtraining A Thing?

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A common question I get: “is mental overtraining a thing?”

The answer is yes. If you mix sustained high cognitive load and inadequate recovery then you can end up with overtraining symptoms similar to an athlete. Symptoms can differ between people but basically you feel/look sick without actually being sick. Personally my eyes/nose get super watery/drippy, I get a cough, tight chest, even chills if it’s particularly severe.

This happens to me whenever I have back-to-back days less than 8 hours of sleep, and also whenever I have back-to-back days of social/environmental overstimulation (even if I get 8+ hours of sleep). It might seem surprising that such a minor sleep deficit or excess stimulation can result in such extreme symptoms, but that’s what happens when you have no slack in the line.

The challenge that I’ve faced for a while is that, by the time I notice the sickness-like symptoms, the cascade has already started. In order to recover, I need to get 10+ hours of sleep and spend a full day away from social/environmental stimulation. It takes 36h to get back to normal, and it sucks.

But at the same time, all the conventional remedies involve introducing plenty of excess slack in the line, and that just doesn’t work for me. For years I’ve assumed I would take things easier in the future once life calms down, but that never happens. Everything just gets more and more exiting and cognitively taxing.

So I’ve started looking into what endurance and strength athletes do to maximize productive training without crossing into overtraining zone. They are in a similar position of wanting to leave no slack in the line, push themselves to the limit, but not past that limit. They do all sorts of monitoring to catch early signs of overtraining, and apparently there are some really good leading indicators that can be easily monitored continuously in the background:

(effects) elevated resting heart rate, reduced heart rate variability, elevated respiratory rate, elevated body temperature, reduced blood oxygen saturation

(causes) reduced sleep efficiency, reduced absolute amount of REM/deep sleep

I’m also considering monitoring reaction time and performance on working memory loading tasks to get a more direct assessment of cognitive load, but that’s a bit more cumbersome since those tests must be actively performed instead of being tracked continuously in the background, so maybe I’ll see how far I get with the metrics above first.

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