The Energy Audit

Why you are so tired

Category: The Body

You wake up tired. You go to bed tired. The tired isn’t in your muscles, though they ache too. It’s deeper. Bone-deep. Soul-deep. The kind of tired that sleep doesn’t fix because sleep isn’t the problem.

The Invisible Load

You’re not just living your life. You’re managing your life. There’s a difference. You’re managing your anxiety about the future while pretending to be present. You’re managing other people’s emotions while regulating your own. The management is invisible. No one sees it. No one credits it. But it never, ever stops.

The Performance Tax

You’re performing stability while feeling unstable. Performing confidence while doubting everything. Every interaction requires a performance. You’re editing yourself in real-time. Filtering. Curating. The performance is exhausting. You can’t just be. You have to be strategically.

The Audit

The tiredness isn’t from what you’re doing. It’s from what you’re carrying. And you’re carrying so much more than anyone can see. You’re the CEO of keeping it together. The board meeting never adjourns. The work never ends. And you’re so tired of being the only employee.

Good Company

Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle — Emily Nagoski & Amelia Nagoski, 2019
Twin sisters, one a health educator, one a musician, wrote the book that finally explained why “just relax” doesn’t work. They separate the stressor from the stress, the thing that’s happening from what it does to your body, and gently point out that most people deal with the first and completely ignore the second. It’s the science behind the exhaustion you can’t explain, written by people who’ve clearly lived it.
Tully — Jason Reitman, 2018
Charlize Theron plays a mother of three who is so tired she’s dissolving. Not dramatically. Just slowly, invisibly, in the kitchen, in the car, in the gap between what she’s carrying and what anyone can see. Reitman and writer Diablo Cody made a film about the exact tiredness that doesn’t show up on medical tests, the kind that comes from being everyone’s infrastructure. It’s funny until a certain point, and then it’s something else entirely.
Melodrama — Lorde, 2017
Lorde was twenty when she made this album about performing yourself until you can’t remember which version is real. Every song runs on the fumes of emotional labour, the monitoring, the calculating, the trying to be the right amount of everything for everyone. It’s a pop album that sounds like it was made by someone who desperately needs to lie down but can’t stop dancing. The most glamorous depiction of burnout ever recorded.