Going back and forth constantly can use a lot of brain energy!

The last week there has been lots of new information and I'm constantly feeling tired.  Is this related to what I call "emotional hangover"?

Plans for my husband to travel back to Europe to visit his very sick Father, a Manager leaving a role where I work part time and fundamental to my role there, and re-engaging with family members when there hadn't been much communication.  All of these experiences were 'new' to my brain and adding to the amount of every day work my brain was trying to get through. However I was still amazed at how exhausted I felt.

Our brain is a decision making organ.

1. Of all the thousands of pieces of information that I absorbed every day, my brain was having to decide what to put into long term procedural memory and what to keep in short term memory every night when I slept.
2. Disturbed sleep means my brain hasn't had a chance to do all of that good work.  What I sometimes call the 'emotional hangover' from the day before dragging into the next day due to lack of REM sleep (distinguishable by not having as many dreams).
3. Hence, the next morning, I was bringing the previous day's information into the next lot of business, meaning I was less able to stay focused for longer periods of time and was tired, quicker.
4. Multi-tasking is actually our brain moving very quickly from one focus to the next and Johann Hari says in Stolen Focus: Why you can't pay attention, that it means our ability to concentrate is rapidly reducing. He has quoted research that says, if office workers are interrupted it takes 23 minutes to get back focus, and many workers never get back to focus on a task after becoming distracted.  Additionally we touch our phones over 2000 times in 24 hours.  It's like we are getting lost in our own lives.
5. Dr James Williams is a researcher on attention, and says that we need to give attention to the right things.  That we need to deal with attention problems before achieving any other sustained goal.  Hari states in Stolen Focus that fracturing of attention is causing crises in our whole society.   When attention breaks down, problem solving breaks down. 

In terms of understanding my fatigue this past week, I take this away from Stolen Focus; it boils down to two things - either you are awake and aware, or asleep and the brain is cleaning up.  The best thing for me to do, I decide, is to not focus on all the implications from all these changes, and deliberately focus on one thing every day. Also, spend some time distracting my brain by listening to music, reading a relaxing book, or simply staring out the window to allow a re-calibration of a calm centre.