Coffee didn’t touch it
I used to wake up tired. Not occasionally — every day.
Coffee didn’t touch it. Rest didn’t fix it. Weekends of catching up never caught anything: I could sleep until eleven on a Saturday and get up feeling like I’d worked a night shift. Whatever sleep was doing for everyone else, it wasn’t doing it for me.
For years I blamed the obvious suspects. My schedule. My bedtimes. Not enough exercise, then too much exercise. I needed a holiday — then I took the holiday and was tired on the holiday, which killed that theory too.
The clue came from the rare stretches when my life went properly quiet — when the pressure came off, not for a weekend but for weeks. The clearest was when I travelled. Within a couple of weeks of leaving, I felt like a different person. Same body. Same sleep. Same coffee. I was more active than I’d been in years — walking further in a day than I normally managed in a week — and the tiredness had stayed at home.
That made no sense under my old theory. If tiredness came from doing too much, why did it lift when I was doing more? And why did it come back, so reliably, when I returned to certain rooms, certain routines, certain versions of my life?
It took me a long time to accept the answer: my tiredness was never about how much I was doing. It was about how much of me was being spent without me noticing. I went through my days braced — held together, presentable, ready. Around some people more than others. In some places more than others. Managing how I came across, staying one step ahead of every conversation, never letting my shoulders down. Not the workload — the guardedness underneath the workload. A second shift, running from the first alarm to the last thought at night, that nobody saw. Least of all me. It had run so long it didn’t feel like something I was doing. It felt like being me.
And a body that’s braced all day is spending all day. No amount of sleep refills that, because sleep doesn’t put the guard down. The guard just sleeps standing up.
Once I understood that, the question changed. I stopped asking how much sleep I was getting and started asking where my days actually drained. The answers came slowly and they weren’t glamorous: this room costs me; this kind of conversation costs me; this way of holding myself costs me most of all. Then, bit by bit, less bracing where none was needed. Simpler things than you’d believe: eating when I was hungry. Resting when I was tired — actually resting, not sitting down while still planning. Letting my shoulders drop when nothing was wrong, and noticing how rarely anything was.
The energy came back the way feeling comes back into a numb hand. Slowly. Then unmistakably.
If you wake up tired no matter what you do, I want to say this clearly: you’re not lazy, you’re not broken, and the answer probably isn’t another supplement. It’s not your fault you couldn’t find the leak — this kind of spending is invisible, and nobody ever showed you where to look. Your energy is almost certainly going somewhere, quietly, all day long.
It’s still yours. It’s just leaking. And leaks can be found.
— Adam