Exhaustion

Feel like you’re dragging yourself around? No longer excited about life? Fantasising about getting more time to yourself in order to rest? Run down? Prey to cold after cold? If you recognise any of this, you might be exhausted. Sometimes, we have to work a little harder to keep all the plates spinning and, in the short term, we can manage; ensuring we get as much sleep as we can, eating well and perhaps sharing responsibilities with others can relieve the pressure. But if that exhausted feeling persists, maybe we need to take a closer look.

It could be that you’re expending a lot of energy psychologically on keeping something at bay – is there some unacknowledged pain within you? It’s easy to underestimate how tiring it can be keeping that pain under control. Equally exhausting can be failing to express your feelings to someone else – do you need to say something important but feel unable to? It may feel terribly risky to look at such issues but, if they are ignored, they don’t just vanish; they grow. And then they become even more difficult to suppress, take more energy and exhaust you further.

What to do? Well, if it was easily tackled, you’d have done it by now! Some people turn to writing if they can’t express or even identify what’s going on for them. You could try the same. It’s not for anyone else to read – just to help you begin to unravel the problem. Making sense isn’t immediately important – just try putting down on paper what you feel or what your questions are. Trust that something useful will emerge. Or, if you feel that talking it through might help, find someone who will listen. It might be a therapist, but it could equally be a friend or colleague you trust not to judge and not to tell you what to do. Getting the words out there, in whatever form, can really start to clarify what you feel and what you need to do to resolve things. And when you do, you may well find your energy levels rising again.