tiredness… it isn’t just something we feel on a physical level. it’s not just linked to our body and our energy; it’s linked to our brains. however, somewhere along the line we tend to forget that, and then it can catch up to us all and we find ourselves in what is commonly known as ‘burnout’.
there’s a lot of different areas where we can feel emotional or mental fatigue, and I mean regardless of the area it affects… it’s exhausting. whether it be about dating, friendships, work, health, social life, or even just your overall growth as a person, we can reach points where we are exhausted with trying, working on it, or generally just get tired of it. fullstop.
if we bring some facts into the conversation, we would understand why sometimes we feel tired about things, and the initial and most prominent factor is 100% decision fatigue. well, what is decision fatigue you ask? let me tell you…
decision fatigue (noun): difficulty in making a good decision experienced as a result of the number of decisions.
I mean, it’s to a degree a simple concept because look at it: we need milk and immediately we are presented with so many decisions we need to make. with this specific example, let’s see what decisions present themselves:
- what shop should I go to?
- do I need anything else from the shop?
- what do I need to wear to the shop?
- what kind of milk do I need/want?
in the current climate, we are being faced with thousands (approx. 35,000) of micro-decisions a day. this not only affects our motivation to make the decisions, but means the quality of the decisions will have decreased over that period. as a result, when we are tired, our brains will look for shortcuts. think about it like having takeout at the end of the day instead of cooking, or driving somewhere you might have walked, because the idea of expending more energy to our brain is just that… draining.
what’s even more funny and conveniently linked to decision fatigue to a degree is the fact that we are processing so much information on a daily basis in the current climate that we are receiving cognitive overload. I mean, the average person consumes more information in a day than someone in the 15th century consumed in their lifetime. what the f***.
I (personally) cannot believe how much we’ve evolved to the point where we regularly reach our biological limit. we essentially stay in a place of ‘always on,’ which is no wonder we get exhausted mentally. it might not be our fault, but the fact that the world is geared towards tiring us out? or is it our resilience to stepping away from the constant information overload?
alongside decision fatigue and cognitive overload, we also experience something called compassion fatigue, which is usually recognized as a state of emotional exhaustion. oh look, another thing tiring us out? yeah, another one, I know. I feel the same way you do… exhausted.
compassion fatigue typically occurs when we are exposed to so much ‘heavy’ information or suffering that our capacity or availability for empathy turns from empathy to self-defence. we simply can’t take on so much emotional intensity; we aren’t designed for it, so our brain tries to find a way to turn off, hence the numbness reaction from some or many.
I guess the point that I’m getting at is the fact that being tired and feeling emotionally exhausted is something I feel like is becoming so much more accepted in society and is something I’m constantly seeing in friends and in people I meet. if you aren’t exhausted from the rest of life and the other aspects that play a part in this game, then all the things around us feel like they are setting us up for failure.
my point? I guess it’s that you shouldn’t feel bad for feeling tired or bad for letting it get to you because… put simply… your brain is functioning as it should and needs to in order to protect yourself. with all the noise and static going on in the background, your brain is simply sounding the alarm that the ‘input’ is outweighing the ‘output’. and I mean…maybe we shoud listen to it?
we could think of the areas of our lives as rooms in a house with a limited supply of energy. if you have limited energy, you don’t have the ability to keep all rooms well lit at all times; sometimes you might need to switch those lights off. you can’t be on all the time… so why should you try? allow yourself to focus the energy you have left on the things that matter. there may be a time where you have enough energy to light the whole house, but that might not be now… then again, it will come.
psa: on a very appropriate note… althought I have been posting very regularly recently (once a day for the past week) and have been loving it I am finding it a little tiring, so please bear with me while I move to a less frequent however still regular cadence. ❤
peaceful chaos 
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