Why Am I So Tired
Why Am I So Tired
Jana told me a lot of people have been typing "why am I so tired" into Google lately, and my first reaction was that I felt left out.
Not worried about them. Left out. Like there was a thing everybody was doing and I'd missed the sign-up sheet.
Then we talked about it for a while and I stopped feeling left out.
The tired I want to talk about is the kind where you're holding it together and getting it done and you might even be living the life you used to pray for, and you wake up already wanting to go back to bed. Sleep doesn't touch it. You can get eight hours, open your eyes, and think, well, that didn't work.
The pressure isn't coming from the work
We were talking about this the morning we recorded, and partway through I had to stop and say out loud that I could feel pressure in my arms and legs. From talking. Nobody had called. Nothing had happened. Two people at a table discussing a subject, and my body decided we were in some kind of trouble.
We build our own prison, and we do it on purpose with good intentions. You buy a house. You buy a car. You have a family. Every one of those comes with a list attached, and none of the items on the list are unreasonable. And nobody goes to a lender and asks to be put in a mediocre house. You get the best one you can afford, and then you keep it.
So the pile grows, and behind the pile is the feeling that if you stop moving, it lands on you.
The human race
Somewhere in that conversation I said, out of nowhere, isn't it funny we call it the human race.
I'd never thought about it before. It just came out. Jana looked at me like I'd done something clever and I had to sit there and take credit for a thing that showed up on its own.
But words matter, and we've been calling ordinary life a race this whole time. Jana's fallen for it hard. She'll tell you about being sure she has to be better, stronger, smarter, skinnier, and the whole time her foot is on the gas.
Nobody's ever told her where the finish line is. She's never asked.
The comfort zone got a bad name and we helped
Jana's in a group chat with some very sharp people. Somebody dropped a meme in there that morning asking how much growth you really get in your comfort zone.
She'd been sick that week. Not bad, just under it. And what she wanted right then was to lie on the couch. She read the meme and felt guilty about the couch.
Then somebody else in the chat clapped back. Her word. Apparently that's what it's called when you disagree with a person in a group chat, and I've decided I don't have any follow-up questions about it.
What the second person said was that the comfort zone is where a lot of people find safety, security, peace, and contentment.
That got both of us, partly because we've spent years in this industry helping build the idea being argued against. The comfort zone as a bad place. Somewhere you shouldn't get caught. I've said versions of it from a stage.
A comfort zone can be a couch. It can also be right now, this minute, where you get to count your blessings.
Here's the part I keep having to relearn. There's no pressure in the present moment. Nothing is attacking you at 2:15 on a Tuesday. The worry is all out ahead of you, in a place that doesn't exist yet, and you're the one putting it there.
Now is also the only place anything gets made. You can't start something last week. Every decision you'll ever make happens in the same little window you're standing in right now.
Rest is necessary. I know this partly because of a mattress commercial.
There's a company that spells its name with two A's, Saatva, and I've never once said it right the first time. Tara Lipinski is in the ad. It says made in America and I'm still fairly sure something about it is Swedish. Anyway, somewhere between the two A's and the ice skating, a commercial told us rest is necessary and we both nodded at the television.
Some of it is actually on you
Of course, if you take that too far you end up resting under a blanket forever, and I'm told that produces bedsores and eventually death. Which is a lot to risk for a nap.
So there's a limit.
The mortgage is real. The yard is real. The pool needs whatever the pool needs, and the pool doesn't care about my mindset. Your body's the same way. Stop using it and you'll lose it, and no amount of thinking about it differently will change that.
Maintenance is real. What's optional is the worry you staple to it.
Mowing the lawn takes forty minutes. Thinking about mowing the lawn takes four days. The forty minutes is the job. The four days is something you made up, and the four days is why you're tired at nine in the morning.
Living Lucky® Practice
What Am I Carrying?
Write down everything sitting on you right now. Then sort it. Maintenance is what the thing actually takes. Manufactured is what you've attached to it.
01 Everything I'm carrying.
All of it. The mortgage, the text you haven't answered, the thing you said you'd do in March. Don't sort yet.
02 Now sort it.
Maintenance
The actual task. About how long does it take?
Manufactured
The worry attached to it. How long has that been running?
03 One thing I'm putting down today.
From the right column. You can pick it back up tomorrow if you want it.
Micro-resting
Jana read about something called micro-resting, where you take a five-second break. That's the whole thing. You stop, you breathe, you go back.
I said I'd try it, and then admitted my brain already does this without asking me, usually in the middle of a sentence. Jana confirmed. She's watched it happen while we're recording. She'll be talking and something in my face goes somewhere else, and she says my name, and I come back and ask what she just said.
We do jigsaw puzzles. Not as an example of anything, we just do them. And the thing about a jigsaw puzzle is you can stare at it for twenty minutes and find nothing, get up, go do something else, come back, and see three pieces right away. You didn't get smarter in the kitchen. Something kept working while you weren't looking at it.
Your subconscious will figure things out if you get out of the way for five seconds. It seems to like working alone.
The question
At the end of the episode Jana asked one question, and it's the whole point:
What am I carrying right now?
Not what do I have to do. What am I carrying, at this moment, that isn't happening and might never happen, that my body is braced for anyway.
Then the second half, which is mine. How do I put it down.
You'll probably pick it back up. I picked mine up again about an hour after we stopped recording. But there was an hour in there.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: run the audit above. Two columns, ten minutes, don't edit yourself.
Reflection question: what am I carrying right now that isn't actually happening?
Journal prompt: where did I learn that rest has to be earned?
Action: take one five-second break today on purpose, eyes closed. Then see whether anything fell apart.
Frequently asked questions
Why am I exhausted when I'm sleeping enough?
Sleep handles physical tiredness. It doesn't do much for a nervous system that spent the day braced against a list of things that haven't happened. If you're sleeping fine and still waking up wiped out, and it keeps up, take it to a doctor. Plenty of medical conditions look exactly like this and no amount of reframing touches them.
Is the comfort zone bad for you?
The personal development world, us included, has been pretty absolute about this for years. Safety, peace, and contentment are the conditions most people need to recover and to think clearly. You leave the comfort zone to grow. You also need somewhere to come back to.
What is micro-resting?
Short deliberate breaks, as brief as five seconds, where you step out of whatever you're focused on. You stop, breathe, and go back. The pause gives your nervous system a second to settle and lets your subconscious keep working on whatever you were stuck on.
How do I tell real responsibility from pressure I'm making up?
Ask how long the task actually takes, then compare that to how much room it's taking up in your head. The mortgage payment takes four minutes. Worrying about the mortgage takes considerably longer, and only one of those pays anything down.
What does "the human race" have to do with being tired?
It's a phrase that treats regular life like a competition with a finish line, and once you've absorbed it, falling behind becomes a permanent background worry. Nobody can tell you where the finish line is. Worth asking who you think you're racing.
One more thing
The pressure Jana's been carrying, she's been carrying about two years. She said that out loud on the recording in the same voice you'd use to mention a subscription you forgot to cancel.
Two years is a long time to hold something that isn't happening.
What am I carrying right now. Ask it, and then, if you can swing it, go lie on the couch a while and see what your subconscious comes up with.
We Create Our Luck®.
We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 24.
