Why Am I So Tired All the Time?

I remember standing in the parking lot after my summer class, staring at my car, leaning on it, unable to actually get in...and wondering if I was awake enough to drive home.

It was not finals week. It wasn't the middle of winter when everyone feels a little slower. It wasn't even a full course load.

Just a couple of summer classes.

The kind of schedule that was supposed to feel easy.

The sun was warm against the blacktop. Students were laughing as they walked to their cars, talking about lunch plans and summer jobs. Someone tossed a backpack into the bed of a pickup truck. Someone else was already pulling out of the parking lot with the windows down and the music up.

Life looked...normal.

Everyone else seemed to be able to go about life and be awake for it, even enjoy it.

I remember blinking hard, trying to clear the haze from my eyes.

Not because I hadn't slept. I'd slept. Plenty.

Not because I'd been out all night.

I hadn't.

I was just so unbelievably tired that it felt like my body weighed twice as much as it should. Like even my bones were tired. The kind of tired where your eyelids keep closing for a second longer than you intended.

The kind where your thoughts feel slow, like they're trying to move through mud and you lose your direction before you even find it.

The kind where you wonder if you should sit in your car for a while before driving because you're honestly not sure you can keep your eyes open the whole way home.

I remember thinking, This doesn't make any sense.

I'm young.

I'm healthy? (I was)

It's summer.

I'm doing everything I'm supposed to be doing.

So why am I this tired?

I looked around the parking lot again.

Everyone else seemed fine. No one else looked like they were fighting to stay awake. No one else looked like they wanted to crawl into the backseat of their car and disappear for the next twelve hours. I just didn't get it.

And because I couldn't understand it, I came to the conclusion so many of us do.

It must be me.

Maybe I actually wasn't trying hard enough.

Maybe I was doing something wrong.

Maybe everyone else was just better at life than I was.

I didn't tell anyone how tired I felt. Mostly because I wasn't even sure how to explain it and it likely would have been waved off like everything else. Just get over it. But it didn't feel like It wasn't just sleepiness.

Everything took more effort than it seemed like it should.

Getting out of bed. Paying attention in class. Making decisions. Holding conversations. Even the things I wanted to do felt strangely heavy.

So I did what I imagine you've done too. I kept going.

Because what else was I supposed to do?

I had to keep up. Like everyone else could.

Maybe your story doesn't start in a college parking lot.

Maybe you find yourself in a different sort of parking lot. You sit there for five more minutes because walking in feels harder than it should.

Maybe it's standing in the shower, leaning your forehead against the tile because lifting your arms to wash your hair feels exhausting.

Maybe it's sleeping nine hours and waking up wondering if you somehow slept wrong, because you still feel so tired.

Maybe it's realizing you've stopped making plans after work because all you want is to go home and lie down.

Or maybe there isn't one moment you can point to. Maybe you've been tired for so long that you don't even remember what it felt like not to be.

You just know something has changed.

Things that used to feel manageable now feel heavy. You can still do them. Most days, you do.

You go to work.

You answer the texts.

You make dinner.

You show up for people.

From the outside, your life probably looks much the same.

But inside, something feels different.

Everything takes more effort than it used to.

And if you're like me, you may even find yourself thinking...

Will life always feel this hard?

That question has a way of sticking in your brain.

It shows up in little moments.

You're unloading the dishwasher and have to stop halfway through because you suddenly feel like you've run out of steam.

You stare at a simple email for ten minutes before you can convince yourself to answer it or even understand what it said.

You cancel plans—not because you don't want to go, but because you honestly don't know where the energy would come from.

You wake up already counting the hours until you can go back to bed.

You tell yourself you'll catch up this weekend. Then the weekend comes, and somehow you're still tired.

So you start looking for reasons why. There has to be a reason why.

And you maybe you start to wonder if you're sleeping enough, drinking enough water, needing to exercise more or less, change my diet, go to the Dr., drink more caffeine, less caffeine. Maybe this is just what getting older feels like, maybe it's my hormones, adulthood, normal?

Maybe other people are just better at handling it.

And then maybe, the questions begin to change.

They stop being about your body. And they start being about who you are.

Maybe I'm just lazy.

Maybe I don't have enough motivation.

Maybe I'm weak.

Maybe I just need to push myself a little harder.

That was certainly the story I told myself.

When I finally went to my doctor, I wasn't looking for answers as much as I was looking for a way to stop feeling so incredibly exhausted.

He prescribed an antidepressant.

He didn't tell me he'd diagnosed me with depression.

He didn't explain why he thought it would help.

He simply said it should help with the fatigue.

So I took it.

It didn't help.

If anything, I felt even farther away from myself. Numb. Disconnected.

So I stopped taking it.

And then I changed up the strategy. It obviously wasn't a medical issue. Fine.

I tried to outwork the problem.

I built better systems. Better calendars. More color coding. Better routines.

I organized everything I could think to organize.

I planned my days more carefully.

I worked on my sleep schedule.

I read the books.

I tried the habits.

I looked for the one thing or many things that would finally make me feel like everyone else seemed to feel.

And you know what? It worked.

Well sort of.

For a little while.

Long enough to make me think,

"This is it."

"I figured it out."

But eventually the exhaustion came back, again and again. For years. In fact, it was more there than it wasn't.

I just kept thinking...

I must not be trying hard enough.

Looking back, I realize I spent years believing the problem was my effort. Or something about me that was wrong.

Because it seemed like the only explanation that made sense.

If life feels manageable for everyone else...

and life feels hard for me...

then I must be what's wrong.

Maybe you've had that thought too.

Not once.

A hundred times.

You wonder how other people work all day, come home, make dinner, exercise, keep the house clean, answer texts, remember birthdays, volunteer at school, and still seem to have something left over.

Meanwhile, you're trying to figure out why folding one basket of laundry feels like it requires a motivational speech.

You start comparing what people do. You rarely compare what it costs them.

You see the finished meal. Not the nervous system it took to cook it.

You see the clean house. Not the recovery day someone needed afterward.

You see the smiling family photo. Not the tears that happened five minutes before it was taken.

And because we can only feel our own effort, it's easy to assume everyone else is doing life better than us and feeling better because of it.

Maybe they are. Maybe they aren't. The truth is, we almost never know.

What we do know is our own experience.

And if your experience has been one of waking up tired...living tired...going to bed tired...wondering why everything seems to take so much out of you...

I want you to know something.

Not an answer.

Just a possibility.

What if you've been asking the wrong question?

What if the first question isn't,

"Why can't I keep up?"

What if it's simply,

"Why does this feel so hard?"

Those sound almost the same. But they aren't. Because they take you to different placed.

For years, I thought the question I needed to answer was,

"Why can't I keep up?"

I spent so much energy trying to become the version of myself I thought I was supposed to be. The version I wanted to be.

The one who woke up energized.

The one who didn't always need a nap.

The one who could work all day, come home, make dinner, answer every text, keep the house clean, remember birthdays, exercise, stay on top of life, and still have something left to give.

Every time I fell short of that version, I blamed myself.

I thought I needed more discipline.

More motivation.

A better planner.

A stricter routine.

More willpower.

It never occurred to me that I might simply be asking the wrong question.

The answers, when they finally came, arrived in pieces.

They unfolded over years.

Multiple conversations.

A few appointments.

A number of realizations. Some the same ones over and over.

Eventually, I learned that there wasn't any one explanation for my exhaustion.

There were several.

Depression was one piece. Years later, ADHD was another. Hydration is a constant effort.

Learning my own limits instead of living by everyone else's expectations and even my own became another.

Learning to rest when my body needed rest—not when I thought I should need it—is one I'm still practicing.

Looking back now, none of those discoveries feel nearly as important as something else.

The moment I stopped assuming I was failing.

Because once I stopped trying to prove I wasn't lazy...

I finally had enough room to become curious.

Curious about my own mind. About my body. About the possibility that maybe my experience wasn't a character flaw after all.

I wonder if that's where you are today.

It would probably be nice to have someone to tell you exactly what's wrong and how to fix it.

Or maybe you've convinced yourself this is just adulthood.

Maybe you've decided you're simply not as capable as everyone else.

Maybe you've spent years trying to push through something actually wants to be understood instead.

I don't know why you're tired.

And I won't pretend that one blog could answer a question as important as that.

Fatigue can have many different stories underneath it. And sometimes a quick answer can feel satisfying in the moment...but the moment quickly passes and you're left with the same questions all over.

What if the answer isn't to try harder?

What if your fatigue is trying to tell your something else?

What if your body isn't betraying you?

What if it's trying to tell you something you've been too busy—or too afraid—to hear?

You don't have to figure all of that out today. Even though you probably want to. I would want to anyway.

You don't have to convince yourself that something is wrong. AND You also don't have to keep convincing yourself that nothing is.

But can there be curiosity?

Because curiosity leaves room for possibilities that shame never will.

If this felt uncomfortably familiar...

If you've found yourself wondering why everything feels harder than it used to...

If you've asked yourself, "Will life always feel this hard?" or "Why am I so tired all the time?"

I'd love to invite you to take my free What's the Real Problem? Quiz.

It's not a diagnosis.

It won't tell you who you are.

It's here to help you begin asking a different kind of question. And maybe to give you words to put to your experience. To start with a word. Not as an ending, but as a beginning. To see your experience from a different angle, maybe one you've never allowed yourself to consider because you never thought that could be you.

Sometimes relief comes from being able to understand yourself.

And that maybe...

just maybe...

you've been dealing with more than anyone could see.

Including you.

—

Warmly,

Julia