Side Effects of Exhaustion

[Listen to an audio version of this blog here.]

Lately I’ve been tired. Like, really fucking tired. I’ve been napping in the afternoons and clocking 8 hour nights. I’m not sure why I’m so tired, but here we are.

Holly Phillips, MD, author of The Exhaustion Breakthrough writes that “fatigue is not necessarily one of the main signs of sleep deprivation. Getting used to it doesn’t mean that’s all [the sleep] you need. It means you forget what it feels like to have good sleep.” Well that doesn’t sound good. You might not know how tired you are because you’re always tired. Similarly, you might not know how unhealthy you are because you’ve always felt the way you currently feel, or you might not know how unhappy you area because you’ve always kind of just been okay.

Anyway, here are a few ways your body might be telling you it needs a break:

1. Your emotions are all over the place.

When people get very hungry, they often refer to themselves as “hangry.” You might have the same, highly irritable attitude if you’re exhausted. That, or you might find yourself on the brink of tears, overly anxious, or depressed. Sleep deprivation can cause increased impatience because of a part of our brain that deals with instinctive and primal emotions: the limbic system. Within the limbic…