I had it wrong for twenty years.
There's a kind of tired no amount of sleep can fix.
For years, I called it burnout.
I'd wake up tired. Work all day. Feel like I had nothing left by evening.
I'd convinced myself it was middle age. The job. The schedule. The years adding up.
It wasn't until I started writing on X that I realised it wasn't that straightforward.
Then I noticed something I couldn't explain.
I started writing every morning before work. I was sleeping less, not more. And somehow I felt more alive. Sharper during the day. More left in the evening.
That didn't match the burnout story I'd been telling myself for two decades.
What I figured out slowly, is that I wasn't tired from doing too much. I was tired from doing too much of the wrong thing.
The kind of tired you can't fix by just sleeping more. Because the problem isn't the amount. It's the direction.
Took me a long time to see it for what it was. I didn't hate the work. I hated being reactive. Always responding to other people's priorities. Never sitting down with my own.
Real burnout, the kind doctors diagnose, is what happens when you've worked yourself into the ground. That's not what most of us are dealing with.
Most of us are just tired in that other way. From spending years inside someone else's idea of a day.
That's a different kind of tired. And rest doesn't really touch it.
I don't have a perfectly tidy way to wrap this up. Just one thing I'd say.
The year I started writing every morning was the year I stopped feeling tired all the time.
Not because I was working less. Because for the first time in twenty years, an hour of my day actually belonged to me.
If you've been tired the way I was, the kind of tired that doesn't respond to sleep, try this.
Take a weekend with nothing on it. No to-dos. No work. Just rest. See how you feel by Sunday night.
If you wake up Monday still flat, you're not ‘burned out’. You're misdirected.
Real burnout improves with rest. This kind doesn't.
The fix isn't more time off. It's giving yourself a small piece of the day that no one else gets to touch. Even just an hour. Even just a few times a week.
That's where I'd start.
Speak soon