It's Time to RESET: How Therapy Helps Tiredness or Low Energy
Welcome to the second to last blog in the "It's time to RESET," blog series, where I unpack the RESET acronym and talk about when it's time for you or someone you love to see a therapist. For this blog, I am going to unpack what it feels like to be Tired or have low energy, and show how therapy can help. If you missed the opening blog and you're interested in what RESET means, check out my opening blog to find out.
What does it feel like to be Tired?
Imagine driving down the road. In the middle of running errands and trying to get to the last few locations before finally heading home, the car’s check engine light turns on. Knowing that there is a long week of driving to work and school ahead, a choice is made to ignore the warning and drive on.
The car doesn’t have a flat tire and it’s not going up in flames. In fact, it’s still moving forward even despite that weird clinking noise. Most people think it’s only a temporary decision and that they’ll address the issue when they have time. For some, that time comes. For others, they wait until the car breaks down and can’t drive anymore before they pursue a solution.
When suffering from tiredness, there are usually some warning signs that act as our check engine light. What does that warning look like?
Exhaustion at every moment and struggling to fulfill your needs because it would take too much energy.
Starting to isolate, avoiding going to an event you usually would enjoy and dodging interactions with others, even with the people you love.
Struggling to sleep because your body is too over-tired to go about daily life in a normal and healthy way.
Sometimes, this is a short-term problem. After two or three days of pushing hard, you take time to recharge your mind and body, so the check engine light goes off. Other times, after pushing for weeks or months, even recharging doesn’t feel like it’s working anymore. The cycle of tiredness gets worse as you try to sustain an unsustainable pace for too long and your body starts begging you for a break.
Why would someone who feels Tired not be in therapy yet?
We have a cultural issue of treating tiredness as a badge of honor. “I only got 5 hours of sleep and I’m still getting shit done,” someone will say to their classmates or co-workers while they “Oooooh” and “Ahhhh.” Quickly, others chime in with, “I only slept 4 hours!” or “I pulled an all-nighter studying for finals” to compete. Dismissing our body’s need for recovery is the norm because our society hasn’t deemed tiredness as problematic, but instead sees it as a simple symptom of being alive.
Without being able to see it as a problem, those suffering from tiredness don’t reach out for help. Sure, lack of energy plays its part, too, but it’s more than that. It’s the belief that we aren’t suffering enough to warrant change.
Remember: You’re suffering. That’s enough. A badge of honor that hurts your body is not worth it, and you don’t have to try to fix it on your own.
How can therapy help?
In a car, if one part is broken, other parts of the engine need to overcompensate to continue to drive forward, spreading damage throughout more of the car. When you finally take it into a mechanic, they usually say, “You should have brought it in sooner, there would have been less damage.”
This is like that.
After allowing tiredness to go on for too long, you become accustomed to an unbalanced lifestyle that hurts you in the long run. A therapist acts as your mechanic, helping you diagnose what is creating your unsustainable lifestyle and helping you cut back so the check engine light turns off. Over time, your therapist will teach you what doing too much looks like and help you create a sustainable lifestyle.
Life doesn’t always go to plan, so odds are there will be times in life that push us to some amount of tiredness again. With the help of a therapist, you’ll have the understanding and strategies you need to recover quickly so you can keep living a healthy, fulfilling life.
If you feel that you’ve been suffering from tiredness, I’d like to offer my help. Click the button below to reach out so we can help you find balance together.
