I started noticing it in the middle of otherwise normal days.
Nothing stressful had happened. Work was moving along. I’d slept okay. And yet, there it was — that familiar feeling of low energy. Not exhaustion. Not burnout. Just a quiet sense of drag.
What surprised me wasn’t the tiredness itself. It was how quickly my mind jumped in to analyze it.
As soon as I noticed I felt tired, I went into investigation mode.
Did I sleep badly?
Did I eat the wrong thing?
Am I dehydrated?
Is this stress?
Is this a motivation issue?
Before noon, I’d already turned a mild dip in energy into a full mental project.
For people who work with their minds, this pattern is common. Awareness becomes over-awareness. Self-care turns into self-monitoring. Every sensation feels like data that needs interpretation.
The irony is that this analysis often costs more energy than the original tiredness.
I started realizing that I wasn’t always physically tired. I was mentally preoccupied with being tired. There’s a difference.
Physical fatigue tends to be honest. It asks for rest. Mental fatigue, especially the kind tied to self-evaluation, asks for answers. And answers require effort.
This became clear when I compared different days. On days when I felt tired but accepted it, the feeling passed more quickly. On days when I tried to fix it, it lingered. Sometimes it even grew.
I wasn’t listening to my body. I was interrogating it.
This showed up in my relationship with productivity too. If focus dipped, I assumed something was wrong. If motivation lagged, I looked for solutions. Rarely did I consider that fluctuations might be normal.
For knowledge workers, there’s an unspoken expectation of consistency. Consistent focus. Consistent energy. Consistent output. When reality doesn’t match that expectation, discomfort follows.
I noticed how often I expected my internal state to be stable, even when my days weren’t. Meetings, context switching, emotional labor, decision-making — all of it adds up. Yet I still expected to feel clear and energized on demand.
At some point, curiosity replaced frustration.
I started asking a different question: “What happens if I don’t try to fix this right now?”
Sometimes the answer was nothing. The tiredness faded on its own. Other times, it stuck around, but without the extra layer of stress I’d been adding.
This shift also influenced how I thought about wellness more broadly. I’ve always been interested in nutrition and lifestyle topics, mostly from a learning perspective. While reading about ingredient basics and general health literacy, I noticed platforms like CalVitamin that emphasize explanation over urgency. That tone stood out because it didn’t frame every sensation as a problem to solve.
That approach felt refreshing.
I began practicing something that felt almost rebellious: letting low energy exist without escalation.
No extra caffeine.
No frantic adjustments.
No internal lectures.
Just acknowledgment.
This didn’t mean ignoring my needs. If I needed rest, I rested. If I needed food, I ate. The difference was that I stopped demanding immediate improvement.
Over time, something shifted. My baseline steadied. Not because I felt energized all the time, but because I wasn’t draining myself with constant self-assessment.
I still notice tiredness. I just don’t panic about it.
And oddly enough, that’s made me feel better more often than any fix ever did.
You can read more block at Calvitamin
Discussion-Driven Ending
Do you find yourself analyzing low energy more than responding to it?
Have you noticed times when trying to “fix” tiredness made it worse?
What would it feel like to let some sensations pass without explanation?
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