Guys, my brain feels like it’s filled with rice pudding. By that I don’t mean it’s sweet and delicious, I mean it’s a blobby mush.
I am exhausted, though I have no reason to be. I slept eight hours last night and had a chunky nap yesterday. I am not home-schooling, nor am I a key worker. Far from it. But here I am. Brain dead. Rice pudding.
This has been happening quite a lot over the last few months.
Some days I’m fairly alert, and then other days it’s like I’ve been hit over the head and I cannot stay awake. I was quite perky and productive on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday morning and got lots of writing done. I was delighted. Then, on Wednesday afternoon, a crushing tiredness descended. I fell into a deep black sleep for two and a half hours, got up, had dinner, pottered and went right back to sleep at 8.30pm. Yesterday, I woke up at 6am, did a couple of hours of writing before I had to go back to sleep for another two hours.
I love sleep and naps, but going back to bed at 9am to sleep is not normal for me.
I have been reading a lot about tiredness this week. Seems there is a lot of it going around and just knowing that makes me feel better.
Apparently, in the early days of the crisis, we could respond with something called a ‘surge capacity’ - which is a collection of adaptive systems that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations. However the emergency situation has now become chronic and we have exhausted our surge capacity, which is when fatigue sets in.
I read a piece in The Guardian where Emma Kavanagh, psychologist and author, said:
“We are tired and have been doing this for a long time and we had this initial array of coping capacity and it’s simply burnt out. When you look at burnout by definition you’re talking about being too stressed for too long. There is this experience where your brain reaches capacity and goes: ‘I cannot give the same mental attention to this any more.”
Kavanagh has been researching extreme environments in psychology, and said: “So what you find in these extreme environments, which is a nice analogy for where we are now in terms of unpredictability and uncontrollability … is that they find something called psychological hibernation which is the same as burnout. You see things like your concentration getting sluggish, you find it harder to pay attention and you have sleep and memory issues.”
I read another piece in The Mail which described how stress can affect our hormones, our gut and our immune system in a way that causes exhaustion. It gave helpful tips about diet change, which all seemed pretty do-able. It was based on a book called: I’m So Effing Tired by Dr Amy Shah.
Also, research from Stanford University has proven that ‘Zoom fatigue’ is real. A combination of factors make this kind of meeting more exhausting than meeting in real life. First, humans are not designed to be looking at their own image as much as we do on Zoom. It can bring out crippling self-consciousness in even the most confident of us. Second, the eye contact demanded is much more intense than we are used to. In normal meetings, our eyes would wander around the room, but on screen they can’t. It’s tiring. It’s also tiring for us to try and decipher people’s moods and meanings without being able to read body language. The advice is to turn off the camera as much as you can, hide the ‘selfie’ view and also to minimise the screen so that people’s faces look smaller.
A friend mentioned it might be peri-menopause and another mentioned thyroid and iron deficiency, so I’m getting tests just to check. I would also put it down to depression - tiredness is one of my symptoms - but I’m on medication for that and feel quite happy at the moment. And some days I’m alert and normal, while on others I literally can’t keep my eyes open. Depression, for me, isn’t like this. It’s a sludgy descent, not an up and down.
Thing is, I like being productive and doing my work. I like it when my brain is bouncing and alert. I don’t like it when it feels like this. It makes me feel lazy.
And even though there are valid reasons for this exhaustion, I feel quite ashamed of it. I have it so easy compared to friends who have been home-schooling while trying to hold down a full-time job and people working on the front line. But there you go. It’s what’s going on for me right now.
What about you? Anyone else knackered?
WHAT I’M LISTENING TO
This chat between Tim Ferriss and writer Steven Pressfield is great. Pressfield wrote a book called The War of Art which is all about the creative process and why we find ways to sabotage ourselves and do what he calls ‘shadow careers’ - which are jobs that are close to the thing you want to do but not actually the thing. He also talks about ‘small wins’ and how he sits down to write after he’s gone to the gym and had a healthy breakfast and brushed his teeth. These are small wins that mean that by the time he sits down to write is feeling accomplished and confident. I liked that idea.
WHAT I’M WATCHING
The Billie Eilish documentary on Apple TV is so good. What an exceptional person she is and her family too. Her story contrasts starkly to Britney Spears’.
And this incredible image in the Irish Times of the murmuration (a new word for me!) over Lough Ennell, in Co Westmeath.
WHAT I’M READING
This article by Monica Heisey, a Canadian living in England about the British obsession with ‘going for a walk’ was very funny. This bit made me laugh out loud: ‘The other day, on one such trudge, I saw a woman finish a lap of the park, then turn to her friend and suggest, audibly bored, “What do you think, should we have a go round the cemetery?” That is how destination-free walking feels to me: going around a cemetery for no reason.’
This piece, again in The Guardian, introduced me to Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. I’d never seen her work before and it’s stunning. During her lifetime she was called a ‘crazy witch’ but now people are asking if, in fact, she invented abstract art. The German film-maker, Halina Dyrschka, who studied her says: “It’s easier to make a woman into a crazy witch than change art history to accommodate her. We still see a woman who is spiritual as a witch, while we celebrate spiritual male artists as geniuses.”
Finally, novelist Ann Pachett has written about getting rid of possessions in The New Yorker. I haven’t read it yet but I will this weekend. Her novel The Dutch House was one of my favourites this year.
You can view my reading list here:
WHAT I’M BUYING
Soya yogurt and tofu. Yup. It’s all glamour here!! Both contain soy which contain isoflavones, a type of phytoestrogen which are believed to work similarly to estrogen, which drops in perimenopause and can cause fatigue. I haven’t cooked the tofu yet.
‘You might not like it,’ said the guy in the organic shop when I told him it was my first time. Good sales pitch, I said. I then picked up some Ambrosia Rice Pudding from the Co-Op - just because it seemed fitting. It was LUSH.
Ok, bye for now, I’m off for a joyless trudge around the cemetery to see if it will kick-start some energy! Just realised that this newsletter was neither short nor particularly sweet!
Love to you all. Xx
Why Am I So Effing Tired?