“Why am I so tired?”

You’re Not Eating Enough

When you’re restricting food in any way (read: famine state) the body conserves energy by lowering your metabolism in case you continue to not feed it enough. This state has you running on adrenaline instead of food -running on adrenaline is extra-depleting. Answer? Eat!

You’re Exercising Too Much

The same thing happens when you exercise too much. The body considers that a crisis time, and will do the same thing metabolically to conserve energy and fuel. You’ll also be running on adrenaline and stress hormones here. Answer? Rest!

You’re Not Sleeping Enough

Sleep more. Duh. I’m not elaborating on this one.

You’re Not Resting Enough

We need to chill out more. If you are constantly stressed out, pushing yourself, and living on adrenaline, you’re going to become depleted, fast. And thanks to #America, and puritan ideals, and minimum wages, and our beliefs about worth and productivity, most of us are living this way. Rebel. Rest.

You’re a Workaholic

Lots of people use constant work to basically ignore their bodies and desires and emotions and needs, and we use constant busy-ness to try and convince ourselves that we are extremely responsible and worthy of adoration or praise or future rest – which never comes. Workaholism is like dieting, it’s a way of feeling control, and feeling temporarily calm and worthy. We think it’s all energy well spent, until we wake up one day and wonder where all the years have gone. Answer? Rebel. Rest.

(Obviously working isn’t inherently bad, but workaholism is.)

You’re worrying too much

I know, I know, easier said than done. But control issues, perfectionism, and worry, will sap the life force right out of you. The truth is, things will work out the way they should whether you worry or not. Trusting that is your best bet, and figuring out what extra and unnecessary stress and worry your limiting beliefs are causing.

You’re Spending All Your Energy Not Feeling Your Emotions

You have some stuff: some old emotions, some pent up energy, some trauma, that you’re afraid to feel. Feeling it is scary and not fun, so you spend all your energy working or dieting or whatever else, to try and avoid slowing down and actually feel your body and your emotions and old traumas. And that will get you nowhere, fast.

You may have some chronic health stuff going on

You may also be tired because of some “health interferences,” as I’ve started calling them. I used to be obsessed with health and food purity – that was one of the ways I obsessed over food – which is not gonna help you because: worry. After leaving all of that behind, I have re-entered the health world with a totally new lens and understanding of purity and perfectionism. If you think that you have some chronic health “stuff”, potentially manifesting as chronic fatigue, check out these lessons: Healing Without Diets or Dogma.

You have a million shoulds

We grow up learning from society and families and belief systems, what we should be doing, or thinking, or wanting, or striving for. We subconsciously carry these shoulds around and let them shape our experiences, desires, choices, and our feelings about ourselves. We believe we need to work, and play, and eat, and look, and love, and … whatever else, in a certain way, or else we aren’t doing it right. We aren’t doing what we should. This will cause constant low-grade anxiety no matter what you do, and most people won’t even know where the anxiety is coming from. And the antidote to this, in my opinion, is some deep, existential rest. I teach tools for this in the Rebel’s Survival Guide / Fuckiteer Academy.

You are living someone else’s life 

If you make all of your choices based on other people’s expectations and desires, or your community’s ideals that don’t match your own, you are going to wake up one day realizing you are living someone else’s life. Or maybe you won’t realize it and will just walk around every day for the rest of your life wondering why you are so tired and miserable.

I also coach people on creating and maintaining hardcore boundaries, which is the best way to make sure you aren’t living someone else’s life, or getting depleted by other people’s shoulds.

Life is a lot easier when it’s aligned with what you really want to be doing. When you are spending all your energy on things you don’t even care about, that’s a way to get depleted, fast.

Rebel.