The alarm goes off, you open one eye, look at the time, and begin negotiations. Five more minutes, maybe ten, and you finally get up, already looking forward to going back to bed tonight. The day has not even started, and you are already running on empty.
I may be willing to start the day, but my body has other plans. It seems more interested in finding a sofa. Still, coffee helps, or at least we have agreed to believe that it does. You drive to work, take the lift, and sit down, and by mid-morning, another coffee seems reasonable.
I have hardly done anything physically demanding, yet I already feel as if my battery is down to 40 per cent.
If this sounds familiar, you have plenty of company. In 2023, researchers from Daejeon University in South Korea published a review bringing together 91 studies involving more than 623,000 people.
They estimated that around one in five adults experiences general fatigue, while about one in ten experiences chronic fatigue lasting more than six months. The figures suggest that tiredness is far more than an occasional complaint.
No rest for the weary, and we have been weary for quite some time. Tiredness comes in different forms, so sometimes the body is tired, sometimes the brain, and sometimes we lack energy or motivation. We know a change is as good as a rest, although I would still like to see the research comparing it with an actual rest.
Unfortunately for my argument, a 2008 experiment by Puetz and colleagues at the University of Georgia found that even low-intensity exercise could improve energy in tired, inactive people. When it comes to physical tiredness, doing nothing to save energy might leave us feeling more tired.
We have made inactivity convenient as we drive, take lifts, and order things online, while a missing television remote can now become a minor household emergency. Food, meanwhile, arrives at the front door without requiring us to leave the sofa.
Work smarter, not harder, we were told, but by afternoon, emails, meetings, calls, and notifications are competing for attention, and one task interrupts another before the first one has finished. Researchers call the stress caused by constantly dealing with technology 'technostress'.
Poor Jack never had Teams, and although “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” as the old warning goes, work today has become much better at following us around. It no longer needs an office and can find us at home, at dinner, or on holiday. We may have left the office, but work follows us home through our phones.
By evening, you are ready to rest, the television goes on, and because one screen does not seem to provide enough relaxation, the phone comes out too.
A study published in Social Science & Medicine in 2016 examined 844 adults and found that bedtime phone use was associated with poorer sleep, higher insomnia scores, and increased fatigue.
Benjamin Franklin famously advised us to go “early to bed and early to rise,” but nobody was sending Franklin WhatsApp messages at 11.47 pm. We get into bed, pick up the phone for 'five minutes', and then find messages, headlines, and videos demanding attention. Five minutes becomes twenty, and before you know it, you have lost another hour of sleep. Tomorrow morning’s alarm will still ring at the same time, whether you are ready or not.
Not every tired person needs to put away the phone and go for a walk, because fatigue can be caused by illness. Long Covid, anaemia, sleep disorders, and other health problems can leave people exhausted. You cannot pour from an empty cup, and sometimes that cup needs proper medical attention rather than another coffee or some well-meaning advice.
Life now leaves very little empty space. Waiting has a screen, walking has headphones, and meals have messages. Although technology has saved us enormous amounts of time and effort, we seem determined to fill every free moment.
Give us ten free minutes, and we will find twelve minutes of things to do. I believe the challenge of resting is not finding the time, but allowing ourselves to do nothing with it.
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