Do you come home from work really really tired? Have you been tired all week, tired when you wake up, dragging when you get to work, comatose by midday?
And maybe, just maybe, you don’t come home to a clean house and a zen-like environment. Maybe despite your fatigue you had to run to the pharmacy and food store after work only to come home to “woohoo! daytime playoff games” and a living room full of boys.
Ok, so that was my week, and I’m writing this on a Wednesday. It’s not even a full moon.
But fatigue like this can mess with your head. You shouldn’t be THIS tired, right?
Something must be wrong.
You should have enough energy at the end of the day to not just want to go to sleep.
I mean, some people actually go OUT after work…on a WEEKDAY!
Maybe that used to be you.
And so, on top of physical and mental fatigue, we add suffering. Maybe we don’t have what it takes to keep up this kind of work. What if it never gets better?
If we start down that path of thinking, things can go south very quickly. We go from tired to despair without even detouring for possible solutions.
If the job is making us exhausted, and exhaustion is ruining our lives, it would make sense that despair would set in.
However, there is a flaw in that logic. It is not the exhaustion that is ruining our lives, it’s the suffering caused by the thoughts ABOUT our exhaustion.
Now before I go further, a quick disclaimer. This is NOT to say that the fatigue is not real. The fatigue is certainly real. In addition to the work that we do, there can be many contributing factors to fatigue: medical issues, dehydration, diet, medication side effects, lack of sleep due to kids, stress, hormones, caffeine, sugar, or plain old insomnia. We should, of course, address these as best we can and follow up with our own healthcare providers. But in the meantime, redefining tiredness can help us feel better right away, and when we feel better, we are more proactive with everything in our lives.
When we suffer less, we enjoy more.
Perfect. So, how do we redefine tired?
Let’s start with an example and then the process will make more sense.
Have you ever done anything incredibly difficult that was totally worth the effort? This could be a big DIY project that was physically exhausting but so satisfying. It could be cleaning out the garage and collapsing into bed with a sore back, twinges in muscles you didn’t know you had, and a fantastic sense of productivity. It could be studying for your boards, day after day and then passing 🙂. It could be helping a loved one through an illness and end of life, late nights in a hospital room, struggling to hold it together but in the end having no regrets.
All of these circumstances come with significant fatigue and yet that fatigue doesn’t cause us the same mental suffering. Why? Because we attach meaning and purpose to the struggle. We expect the fatigue and don’t let it mean something negative about us.
This is the secret to “redefining tired”. What if we came home tired with the satisfaction of a job well done, with the expectation of some fatigue after doing demanding physical work? What if we planned on being tired after doing hard work and could acknowledge that showing up as the person who does that work is a big accomplishment? What if we could look at the impact we had and allowed the purpose of that to negate any regrets?
What if the knowledge of a job well done redefined the experience of being so tired?
This can hold true even when the job is only kind of well done, when you are having a bad day, when you haven’t slept and when your well-rounded diet looks like 5 different kinds of processed carbs. Just showing up with a willingness to continue helping people is sometimes the biggest accomplishment.
So when you get home tonight and potentially feel VERY tired, take a minute to appreciate the work you did today, all the people you did your best to help with the tools you had available to you. It won’t come naturally to think this way at first but with some intentional practice it can become your default way of thinking. Try the routine of talk-texting yourself on your ride home. Tell yourself all the things you did that were hard but meaningful. List the ways your work was important. It only has to take a minute or two but this is what “intentional practice” looks like.
When intentional practice changes your default thinking, your fatigue will cause less and less suffering.
It’s ok to be tired, it can even be a good thing.
Try that thought on and see how it feels.
P.S. Are you a Type A personality? Do you hear about mindfulness and have a visceral response that it's not for you? Do you tell yourself that you can't turn your brain off...and maybe don't want to? Then you do NOT want to miss my next free workshop, Debunking Mindfulness for Type-A Personalities, happening on Wednesday, October 30th at 7pm EST. You can register here
Not a nurse but still intrigued? You can come too :)
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