Written by WebMD Editorial Contributors
Medically Reviewed by Dan Brennan, MD on December 03, 2020
Feeling tired is a common experience. It can be caused by disrupted sleep habits, a change in routine, or the appearance of stressors in your life. No matter the reason, tiredness can push us to our limits emotionally and mentally. In some cases, extreme tiredness sets in. This is called exhaustion.
How can you tell if you’re tired or exhausted? Learn the signs of exhaustion and ways to prevent it from affecting your life and the lives of those around you.
Exhaustion, also known as fatigue, becomes a problem when it continues day to day, affecting your health and safety.
Exhaustion isn’t a mental disorder. But it can be caused by anxiety, depression, bipolar disorder, neurological and sleep disorders, anemia, electrolyte abnormalities, diabetes, obesity, and/or an infectious disease or cancer.
Common reasons for fatigue could be lifestyle choices you should address. Here are frequent reasons for fatigue:
Exhaustion isn’t normally a cause for concern. But it is when accompanied by:
If exhaustion starts affecting your daily life, it’s time to talk to a doctor to determine underlying causes.
Exhaustion can impact your daily activities, especially if you’re too tired to take care of average tasks.
The good news is that exhaustion is treatable; however, here are some signs that you or someone you may know is experiencing it:
Symptoms of Depression or Anxiety
When you or a loved one is dealing with depression and/or anxiety, it can have a draining effect.
Depression can affect your sleep cycle. It may make you unable to sleep. Or not you may not be able to sleep for long periods. A lack of energy associated with depression may keep you from completing normal activities.
Anxiety can be crippling for people who experience uncontrollable worry all day long. The symptoms include irritability and extreme fatigue.
Lack of Goal Making
Exhaustion can leave you tired and without energy to set goals and stick with them. You might be able to make goals, but you’ll set them aside and be unsure of when you’ll return to them.
Lack of Concentration
Lack of concentration happens when you’re exhausted and can’t focus on a task you had started.
You may have a big task to complete, but you can give it only five minutes before you become frustrated and give up.
Disconnecting Relationships
Exhaustion can lead to inability to nurture relationships. This could mean giving your children time-consuming activities so you don’t have to deal with them. Or perhaps your significant other is requesting attention you don’t have the emotional capability to give.
If exhaustion begins to leave you drained and unable to complete anything, you should talk to your doctor. They may run tests to find underlying health causes.
Determining the cause of your exhaustion will help you identify what you need to do to alleviate its symptoms. Common treatments include:
Sleep Habits
Getting enough sleep is extremely important. Make sure you’re sleeping enough for your body to feel rested. Keep a normal sleep schedule, and go to bed only if you’re tired.
Make sure your bedroom is prepped for deep sleep — a dark room, comfy furniture, and minimal distractions.
You might also try writing about your worries in a journal before bed, so you can let them go while sleeping.
Dietary Changes
Cut out caffeine to reset your body. It’s found in coffee, tea, soft drinks, energy drinks, and some pain killers and herbal remedies. After a month, take note of how you feel. Caffeine withdrawal can include headaches and irritability at first.
Physical Changes
Consistent physical activity can improve symptoms. Beginning to exercise can seem like a big obstacle if you feel exhausted, but moving for just 15 minutes a day can boost your energy levels.
Carrying excess weight exhausts your body. Eating healthier, exercising, and weight loss can improve your symptoms too.
Psychotherapy
Psychotherapy, or talk therapy, might include counseling to discuss the underlying causes and stressors in your life. These could include stress, anxiety, or low mood.
It indicates, "Click to perform a search". Chevron iconIt indicates an expandable section or menu, or sometimes previous / next navigation options.HOMEPAGE Health
Save Article IconA bookmarkShare iconAn curved arrow pointing right.Download the app
Sometimes being exhausted doesn't look like falling asleep standing up. Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images
We've all suffered at the hands of a sleepless night here or there, but some of us fail to get the consistent, quality sleep our bodies absolutely need to be able to function properly. Regularly getting enough sleep is crucial for a multitude of reasons, especially as our modern lives become increasingly busy and schedules jam-packed.
Whether you're suffering from a chronic issue, like insomnia, or a mental health issue like depression or anxiety ... or you're simply staying up too late to watch Netflix you could be setting yourself up for a terrible night's sleep. And, over time, that could lead to chronic exhaustion, which is not good.
So how do you know if you're truly exhausted? Ironically, feeling physically tired may not even be the top sign … though it is the most obvious. A lot of horrible things happen to your body when you don't get enough sleep, but fatigue isn't always one of them.
Holly Phillips, MD, author of The Exhaustion Breakthrough told Well + Good that "fatigue is not necessarily one of the main signs of sleep deprivation. Getting used to it doesn't mean that's all [the sleep] you need. It means you forget what it feels like to have good sleep."
Yikes. Here are some of the telltale signs that you're actually exhausted, even if you don't think you are.
Shutterstock/Marjan Apostolovic If you find yourself with a shorter fuse than normal or unexpectedly at the brink of tears, you might be suffering from exhaustion. As Dr. Phillips told Well + Good, "Sleep deprivation increases risk of depression, anxiety, and being particularly reactive to stress."
Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen, medical director of Take Shape for Life, told Daily Burn in 2017 that just as exhaustion can impact your emotional health, it's also directly linked to your performance in that budget meeting or as you comb through those emails.
"Among other things, your body uses sleep to stabilize chemical imbalances, to refresh areas of the brain that control mood and behavior, and to process the memories and knowledge that you gathered throughout the day," Dr. Andersen said. When sleep is regularly disturbed, "You won't retain knowledge very well, as your brain depends on sleep to re-process what you experienced during the day.
"
If you used to buy the perfect birthday gift weeks in advance and now forget until the day of (oops!), or if you're suddenly losing important items, like your wallet or keys you might just be downright exhausted.
As Dr. Phillips explained to Well + Good, "A lot of our memories are transferred from short- to long-term during sleep, especially during deep stages," so if you're not getting enough sleep, you could find yourself forgetting things that were once second nature.
A less-than-fun side effect of not getting quality z's can be a weakened immune system, which might make it harder for your body to fight off illness, whether it's an infection or the common cold.
If you've been getting sick often and can't figure out why, it could be due to a lack of sleep.
Chris Winter, MD, owner of Charlottesville Neurology and Sleep Medicine in Virginia told Health magazine in 2015, "If you're not sleeping properly there can be significant issues in terms of your body's ability to fight off infections."
We've already addressed how your brain can feel fuzzy, making it hard to focus or remember things that used to be front-of-mind, but it turns out chronic exhaustion can also make it more difficult to effectively manage your workload, both at home and at work.
If you're suddenly having trouble making decisions both big and small, fatigue may be to blame. Kelly Baron, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neurology at Northwestern University in Chicago, explained why this is to Health magazine in 2015.
She said, "Sleep deprivation can affect speed and higher-level cognitive processing," so managing your time and efficiency could become a lot harder.
Conversely, if you find yourself making snap decisions when it's out of character for you to do so, you could be flat-out exhausted.
Baron explained to Health that exhaustion lowers your inhibitions, so doing things you wouldn't normally do might start to become the norm. If you're acting on impulse in ways that aren't normal for you, like speeding in your car or hastily making decisions at work, you need to figure out how to consistently get enough sleep.
Having a big appetite isn't a bad thing, per se, but if you find that all of a sudden you're hungrier than normal, or craving rich foods, your body might be telling you something.
Michael J. Breus, Ph.D., a board-certified expert in clinical sleep disorders, told Daily Burn in 2017 that your level of hunger (and what kinds of foods you're craving) can be linked to how much rest you're getting on the regular.
"The more exhausted you are, the more you crave high-fat, high-carbohydrate foods," Breus said.
When you're exhausted, your body produces more cortisol, the stress hormone.
Its natural response is to crave the neurotransmitter serotonin, which Breus says "is a calming hormone. An easy way to access it is by ingesting comfort food full of carbs and fat."
Of course, this means you'll crave heavy, comfort foods in order to quell that cortisol spike.
Jason Lee/Reuters Scary, but true: When you're suffering from a lack of sleep, you could start bumping into things or feeling a bit clumsier than usual.
As Dr. Winter told Health magazine, it could be because your motor skills are off.
"When you're tired, there's a lapse in how you neurologically function in general. When you walk up and down the stairs, there's a lot of processing going on there," he explained. "When sleep deprived you can't process particularly well."
This might explain why you're tripping over your own two feet or walking into the coffee table you normally gracefully walk past every single day.
Skin is the body's largest organ, and it can tell you a lot about what's going on internally. So if you're not getting enough beauty sleep, you can expect it to show by way of skin woes, including dry skin or acne.
Debra Jaliman, MD, a New York City-based dermatologist explained to Health magazine what you can expect when you aren't getting the sleep you need.
"A lack of sleep upsets your hormonal balance and elevates circulating estrogen levels," Jaliman said. "If done for long periods, you will see that you have excess wrinkling probably from a decrease in collagen. The body produces it while you're sleeping."
Collagen keeps skin supple and soft, so you will start to look older in time. Plus, as we mentioned before, when levels of the stress hormone cortisol spike, you can retain water, making skin look puffy and triggering inflammation, which leads to breakouts.
When your skin is stressed, it can also be dry and flaky, possibly leading to dry lips, eyelids, and your overall complexion.
structuresxx/Shutterstock If you've ever woken from a sleepless night feeling uneasy in your stomach, you know just how awful it can be. Chronic exhaustion does a number on your digestive system, and your gut bacteria are inextricably linked with the quality of your slumber.
Basically, losing sleep on the regular messes with your body's natural digestive processes, sending your gut bacteria (which sounds bad, but is totally normal) out of whack. What does this mean for you? Bouts of diarrhea, constipation, bloating, or overall discomfort… which no one wants.
It's a vicious cycle. Shutterstock/Marcos Mesa Sam Wordley In a cruel twist of irony, you might actually find it harder to fall asleep the more chronically exhausted you are. Yes, really.
As Dr. Phillips shared with Well + Good, it stems back to those hormones putting your body under constant added stress.
"When you're chronically sleep-deprived, certain hormone levels like cortisol become elevated.
It's almost as though when sleep-deprived, your body is in a constant state of extreme arousal," she said.
If you're perpetually exhausted and manage to even make it to the gym, you might be giving yourself a gold star. But when you do get there, you're likely not hitting your peak, and it's all because of how tired your body is.
"Exercising requires mental focus as well as physical activity," Dr. Andersen told Daily Burn. "If your brain is falling behind because you are not well-rested, your ability to properly challenge your body will be limited — and that's in addition to the many performance consequences that come with poor sleep."
Your muscles can't properly heal and repair themselves post-workout when you're not giving them the rest they desperately need, so you could suffer injuries during or after your workout that you might not otherwise.
When your body is running on empty, there's a good chance your stress levels are at their highest, which won't do you any favors.
According to the American Psychological Association, stress and sleep are inextricably linked. "When they do not get enough sleep, 21% of adults report feeling more stressed. Adults with higher reported stress levels fare even worse — 45% feel even more stressed if they do not get enough sleep."
It's a vicious cycle — you're stressed because you're not getting enough sleep, and you're not getting enough sleep because you're stressed. One or two late nights likely won't have any detrimental long-term effects, but when restless nights become the norm, it's your body that pays the price.
It sounds bizarre but true: If you've been noticing your vision is spotty or unfocused lately, you could be exhausted.
"When fatigued, you're not able to control the muscles of the eye as well," Steven Shanbom, MD, an ophthalmologist in Berkley, Michigan, explained to Health magazine.
And when your eye muscles tire out, too, you might notice it in your ability to read up close, see from a distance, or just to remain focused. Swear you're seeing double? You might seriously need some z's.
Sign up here to get INSIDER's favorite stories straight to your inbox.
Read next
LoadingSomething is loading.Thanks for signing up!
Access your favorite topics in a personalized feed while you're on the go.
More...
Alena Lepilina
Sometimes life is so exhausting that one wants to say: “Burn everything with fire! Life has failed, and I leave the effort. Someone gives up and closes in on himself, and someone comes to self-destructive behavior: addictions, aggressive and risky behavior, sleep disturbances, inability to relax - everyone has their own problems.
People were not created to immediately live in the conditions of the 21st century.
However, we adapted perfectly, but it came at a high price. In the past, people lived in small villages and knew each other well - even the appearance of a casual traveler or a fair was a big event. Any person knew who he would become when he grew up, since, as a rule, everyone continued the work of their fathers and mothers. They went to bed at nightfall and got up at dawn. Life was predictable.
Source
Thousands of years of living like this has shaped our brains, our beliefs and our response to stress. As long as we are young, everything is fine. But as we get older, things get worse. The fact is that before people did not experience 35 years, which means that the human body did not have time to adapt to the effects of prolonged stress.
All organs and tissues of our body suffer from stress. Ultimately, serious damage is done to the brain. If you look at a CT scan of the brains of people suffering from chronic stress, you will see large white gaps where brain tissue would normally be.
Now humanity is in a state of permanent stress due to fundamental changes.
Now we really don't know why to live a righteous life, if we can't even understand what it means. Source
Modern life is basically unsuitable for us, but we are so hypnotized by advertising, acquisitiveness and mass media that we fail to see this crucial fact. Now that we have faced the threat of a real economic collapse and seen how merciless and indomitable capitalism can be, many have had to give up their illusions.
Perhaps the best antidote and prevention of burnout can be building strong relationships with loved ones. When we can share our experiences with family and friends, despair subsides and we are able to see new horizons.
Retrieved
You may not know it yet, but science has proven that human relationships have proven to be the single most important source of life satisfaction, regardless of age or culture. People who feel connected to others live longer and have fewer health problems than those who isolate themselves from society.
Those who care about others are happier than the selfish ones who pursue only their own interests.
If we go back in time and remember the happiest times in our lives, we will surely see that most of our memories are connected with people.
It's okay, you won't be a millionaire until you're forty. It turned out that the fairytale prince has a boyfriend. You set the bar too high and worked hard to get where you wanted to be, and now it looks like you won't succeed.
Source
So, does disappointment and failure really mean that life is over? Please imagine that it was our efforts to cope with stress and frustration, and not just stress and frustration in and of itself, that became the main cause of our state of intense depression.
And now we will consciously pull ourselves together and start from scratch, in a new way. We will learn to consciously control stress and make intelligent decisions. We will be able to change our ideas so that life acquires a new meaning.
And it's not that hard at all, it just takes time and effort.
We set ourselves unattainable goals or were in too much of a hurry. The circle is closed. But no matter what way we choose to deal with the vicious cycle of stress, there is always a chance to break it.
Source
Meditation, exercise, change of mind, new goals, openness to the world - any positive change can set in motion a spiral of adaptation, where each subsequent change strengthens what has been achieved. Our reaction to a positive event makes another more likely, and so on.
If we smile at people more often, they smile back more often, and we get a dose of endorphins. If you continue in the same spirit, you can change your life.
Non-stop stress enters our body and we try to live with too much adrenaline. The result is exhaustion, apathy, loss of strength. But, fortunately, this can be dealt with.
1.
Be prepared for stress
Learn relaxation exercises, meditation, breathing practices. And try to become aware of your emotions. As soon as you realize that everything is about to go to hell, turn to the life-saving techniques that you have learned.
2. Do not give in to momentary desires
There is a great temptation to take medicine or drop into a bar around the corner, burst into shouting and say hurtful words when the mood is at zero. Take your time! Analyze your judgments and desires. If the situation calls for your intervention, wait until you can control yourself
3. Don't forget the essentials
Remember fundamental values and act accordingly. What is more important - blow off steam or maintain a relationship with a loved one?
4. Get a pet
The presence of a pet in the house will help you cope with stress better, and walking with a dog will open up new opportunities for communicating with people.
5. Pay attention to the state of your body
If you are too anxious, angry or frightened, first calm down, and for this, do relaxation exercises. Go for a walk to change your mood. Go to the gym and do aerobics - this will help relieve stress.
6. Deal with it
If you have a really serious problem, something needs to be done about it. Hard work? Look for a new one. Relationship with a partner reached an impasse? Maybe you should break up (but just think it over carefully). Sometimes we need an escape plan. Even if you can't change things right away, the mere fact that you have a plan can ease the stress.
Remember that every time you deal with such storms, you make life easier for yourself. Practice even if it doesn't always work out well. Regular “mental training” is protection against slipping back into stress.
Based on the book "The Psychology of Bad Habits" (available for purchase in electronic form).
Post cover: pixabay.
Photo pixabay.com
The question that millions of people (and you, yes, you) ask themselves every day is “Why am I so tired?”. Just as often there is another one adjacent to it, especially when you fall asleep at the table in the middle of the day or prefer to sleep five times instead of walking - this is the eternal "Am I really tired or am I just lazy?".
Here's how to know if you're really worn out or just not motivated enough, and what to do about it.
Those who are really physically tired almost always either overtrain or sleep little.
« Most people think of "overtraining" as something that only professional athletes can affect, but it's not ,” Shape relays the words of Sheri Traxler, Ph.
D., certified trainer and physiologist. Each beginner can also overtrain, and everyone has a different limit - for someone, ten squats are enough for this.
Overtraining symptoms include resting heart palpitations, muscle pain that does not dissipate within 48-72 hours after exercise, headaches, and decreased appetite. If you notice any of these signs in yourself, take a couple of days off to rest and recover.
Other major causes of physical fatigue are lack of and/or poor sleep quality which is much more common than overtraining .
Do you still feel tired even after being in bed for eight or more hours? This is a sign that you are not sleeping well - that is, the quality of sleep suffers, while its quantity is normal. Another bad sign: You wake up feeling rested after a "good" night's sleep, but then at 2 or 3 o'clock you feel completely exhausted. To clarify: so tired that you really can't sit down and your eyes are stuck together.
The causes of poor sleep can range from stress and hormones to problems with the thyroid, adrenals, or other organs. If you sleep badly and feel the way we described above, the next step is to see a doctor, for example, an endocrinologist. You will need to deeply examine the work of the blood and some organs, the nervous system and the level of stress in order to find out what is happening to you.
Mental exhaustion is also, of course, an absolutely real thing. A busy day at work or intense work on some project can deplete your mental fuel for the day, leaving you exhausted. In turn, this can affect sleep as our minds cannot “turn off” by continuing this harmful cycle of bad sleep.
But let's be honest: sometimes we just feel under-motivated or just lazy. If you're wondering if that's the case, take and pass a very simple "test" from Sheri Traxler : ask yourself if you would feel energized if you were invited to do your favorite thing right now - be it shopping or traveling.
