Why am I always so tired?

It’s a question as old as time.

• Why am I always tired?
• Why am I tired after I _____?
• Why does work make me tired?
• Why am I so tired after I eat?
• Why am I so tired when I wake up?
• Why am I so tired lately?
• Why am I so tired all the time?

Want the simple answer? You’re out of balance. You’re doing too much of the wrong stuff.

Want to know how to fix it, and actually understand and be able to spot things before they happen and avoid it? Keep reading.

What is tiredness?

Tiredness is evidence of some kind of resistance to our natural flow. It’s not a bad thing, rather, it’s a signal. It’s the desire of the mind, body, and soul to do something different. Most of the time it’s due to our continued focus or attention to a certain thought, or continuing a certain activity.

One of the most interesting things that I have found to be true for myself is that most tiredness quickly resolves itself within a rather short amount of time not through sleep – as many often turn to – but shifting to a different train of thought, a better point of focus, or a new activity. I literally feel revived again, just by making a decision to change something.

Types of Tiredness and Fatigue

Tiredness can be categorized into three different types: physical, mental, and emotional. I find that when I look at my exhaustion in this manner, I’m able to be more clear with myself about it, identify where it’s coming from, and decide what I need to do in order to start feeling better.

1) Physical Tiredness

Feels like weakness and difficulty doing stuff, lack of desire, perceived inability to perform physical activity. Physical tiredness and fatigue manifests both primarily and secondarily: primary manifestation of physical tiredness through prolonged physical activity, secondarily through heightened mental or emotional fatigue causing a decline in willpower.

2) Mental Tiredness

Due to thinking too much, mind is going too fast without taking a break once in a while. Mood-wise I’m feeling okay, just having trouble focusing on something or winding down to be able to enjoy the moment because my mind has too many things going on all at once without a quick little rest. Tends to be short-lived and easily-recovered from but can take a toll if it becomes chronic.

3) Emotional Tiredness

This can be a byproduct of mental and physical exhaustion, especially when we exhaust ourselves doing the wrong things, ie, doing stuff out of guilt or because of a false premise we’ve created. “I need to because ____”, “If I don’t, _______ will happen”, etc. All of these “if, then” statements push us more and more toward emotional exhaustion.

Why am I tired and how can I feel better?

Feeling better starts with identifying the cause. You can fix symptoms with caffeine, alcohol, or any number of other focus-diffusers in the short term, OR, you can find the cause of the tiredness and change and reshape your life and what you do to eliminate it at the source. Yes, it takes more time, it’s not always as easy, but that’s the source of true sustainable happiness, and the energy you need to reach your fullest potential.

Identifying what makes you tired is the first step. I would wager to say that your tiredness comes in all three forms, but is probably more centered around one specifically, and I would go so far as to say that for most of us, it’s emotional tiredness. It’s because the desire to be happy is at the core of our being, and emotional tiredness is often chronic due to our attention and focus on our conditions – how they’re not what we want them to be – and then often exacerbated by the occasional physical and mental tiredness. Go at this with an open mind, and don’t discount your own answers for what I’ve said, but do keep that in mind.

Alexander den Heijer once said the following, which really resonated with me:

“You often feel tired, not because you’ve done too much, but because you’ve done too little of what sparks a light in you.”

I reached a point in my life where I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me, health-wise. Little appetite, very tired, no desire to get up and do things, lethargic all the time, no desire to really see people or do anything. I wondered if it was nutrition, maybe a vitamin deficiency, maybe an illness that produced symptoms that caused all of this. I started tracking what I ate, how much protein, fat, and carbs I got, researched vitamins, had blood tests done. I was literally so thick in my own mind and my beliefs and actions and obligations that I almost had myself convinced that something was wrong with me. After a big shift and upheaval in my life, and a chance to kind of hit reset on my daily day-in-day-out activities and obligations, I became very clear that it was none of that, but rather, a unhealthy fixation on my guilt and obligations, a lack of belief in myself that resulted in me not taking chances and dedicating myself to my interests, and a lack of balance.

We thrive on a sense of accomplishment and progress and fulfillment of our purpose, whatever we’ve decided that may be. We’re all on a journey toward something. Too much of anything is too much. Obligations, thoughts that don’t serve us, etc. We need variety. Go to work, but go play, and go rest too. Our lives are a garden, and we can’t spend all our time only watering and weeding part of it. It was this realization – that we all need balance, and that there’s a constant ebb and flow when it comes to our activities and points of focus and the resulting progress we all seek and savor, that led me to uncover and fully be able to explain my present perspective on time, balance, and the need to create, play, and rest.

Overcoming Tiredness

Justifying rest – or changes in what we’re doing – is often one of our biggest hurdles toward combatting tiredness. Most tiredness comes from a feeling of guilt of obligation which overrides our natural desire to take a break or do something different. This guilt and obligation is always telling us what we should be doing, or what we need to be doing. The reason that so many people are chronically-tired all the time is because we don’t allow ourselves time to do what we want to do instead of what we think we need or have to do. We have trouble saying no. We don’t delegate. We take on far too much.

Short-Term

There are short term fixes and long term fixes for tiredness and fatigue.

• Short term helps right here, right now, making things better in the moment.
• Long term helps to reduce the recurrence of this tiredness, and also to help make it shorter-lived, and more easily overcome.

Sleep

Sleep is often thought of as the end-all, be-all for fatigue and tiredness. It does work well as a reset in most all cases, however it’s important that we do what we can while we’re in our waking state to shift a bit, and fix as much of our tiredness as possible. While I’d say that sleep is a better choice than caffeine, alcohol, or other uppers and downers, it’s typically only fixing the symptom, and not the cause.

When we “give up”, frustrated, exhausted, sad, or otherwise and just go take a nap or call it a night, the chance of us waking up in a bad mood, or still tired, has historically been higher for me. This is because when we wake up, we establish a reference point for this new “chunk” of consciousness – the blank slate of a day ahead of us – based upon what we remember of the last day or two, the last week, or the stage of life we’re in. Doing what we can to balance the remainder of our days out with positive activities, or a better mood in general can be helpful when the future us is establishing that reference point and remembering where we’re picking back up from in the story that is our lives.

Meditation / Mindfulness / Grounding

We don’t always have time for sleep, or a nap. Meditation, mindfulness, and grounding are really great strategies that help right here, right now. I group these three together because they are all very similar. Our minds can only focus on one thing at a time, and these three strategies take advantage of that, especially as it pertains to mental and emotional fatigue and tiredness.

• Meditation is a broad term that really just includes any type of deliberate focus on something.
• Mindfulness is the act of bringing one’s attention to the present moment, effectively withdrawing the mind’s focus from chronic repetitive thoughts, things that have happened, worries or other concerns. It can include sitting in solitude, listening to music and focusing on the music, drawing attention to one’s breath and deep breathing
• Grounding is an even more focused and participatory version of mindfulness, where you’re not simply just focusing on something, but shifting your attention, doing something, and paying attention to every single aspect of it you can with as many senses engaged as possible. I tend to think of it as an activity where you’re grounding yourself, bringing yourself back down to earth, and out of the clouds and the mess of thoughts that we all get tangled up in to participate more fully in your reality.

Substances

I’m including this only because it’s an opportunity to make a point, and certainly not one that I advise. Many people turn to substances, whether it be caffeine, alcohol, or any number of other uppers and downers. The problem with these is that they don’t prevent you from making the decisions that got you into this in the future, they don’t erase the thoughts and beliefs that become mental and emotional points of fixation and elicit actions that cause all of this, or anything positive. All they do is diffuse focus, and literally draw your attention away from reality.

These are only fixing a symptom, and don’t actually fix the cause. As a result of that, they’re not an effective means of combatting this, not one that I condone – even though many will still use them. It’s one thing to do something occasionally, or purely for the enjoyment of it, but to rely on these in our down times is a very risky and dangerous thing to do, as it can cause dependence on them, and lessen our willpower to tackle the causes and source of our tiredness head-on.

Long-Term

Some of the more lasting fixes for tiredness – the ones that tend to help with the recurring episodes of fatigue, as well as the severity of them – are less about fixing things in the short term, and more about identifying commonalities among your moments of tiredness and fatigue – common triggers that cause them – and making commitments in the form of changes to your schedule and how you do things, as well as filling your mind with better ideas and changing beliefs that can trigger future actions that result in fatigue.

In short (and yes, I know that was a very long sentence), fixing tiredness and fatigue long term involves:

1. identifying patterns in your episodes,
2. creating new habits, and
3. changing beliefs that aren’t helpful to you.

Modern psychologists and therapists refer to this as cognitive behavioral therapy. The Mayo Clinic defines it as the following:

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a common type of talk therapy (psychotherapy). You work with a mental health counselor (psychotherapist or therapist) in a structured way, attending a limited number of sessions. CBT helps you become aware of inaccurate or negative thinking so you can view challenging situations more clearly and respond to them in a more effective way.

This sounds complicated, but it’s not really. In fact, I believe that in my own case, and also in the observed experiences of many others, we’re able to talk through a lot of this on our own. If you have a problem you’re struggling with, or feel that you’re in the way of harm, I definitely advise speaking with a therapist or other medical professional. But, if you’re in the same boat that so many of us are, just wanting to improve our habits and beliefs, being cognizant of this as the primary leading force behind lasting change in our lives is at the core of all happiness.

Fixing tiredness and fatigue long-term is a matter of changing how we work. I’m not talking about your job. What I mean is literally how we work; the beliefs we have that influence our perception of the world and summon us to take actions. In an effort to understand it more fully, I sat down and analyzed my own thoughts at length one day. I realized that there’s a mechanism at play, not only specific to me, but to many of us. I have since written an article about it, and explained how when we short-circuit this mechanism, we get into a state of complacency and just start spinning our wheels. Read more about that in the TEREABA Mechanism.

Identifying The Cause

Ultimately, the best long-term fix is going to be to identify the cause, and changing things in the future. Some things you might ask yourself are questions like:

• Am I doing / thinking about this out of a sense of obligation or commitment?
• If not, am I tired because I haven’t taken a break recently enough?

The Science Behind Tiredness

A lot of people have asked me over time – where’s the science for this, for what you’re saying? Where’s the research that proves all of this? It’s not entirely there yet. Science is a widely agreed upon understanding of the world, based on what we all agree on and have uncovered significant evidence to support. All scientific thought begins as hypotheses, ideas, and perspectives that we then seek to prove or disprove as true or false. I see the non-scientific validity in what I’ve written here in the “me too’s” of people everywhere, as I’ve observed my own tiredness, their tiredness, and discussed the subject with them, and how we all effectively overcome it.

Photo Credit: Photo by Luis Villasmil on Unsplash