When people ask me how I am, I always reply with “I’m fine, just tired.” And that’s it.
Tiredness is a common thing when you are suffering from depression. But why?
Most of all it’s because our brain is stuck in overdrive and it’s hard to unwind it at night. It takes 7 minutes for the average person to fall asleep. Now imagine taking an hour every night to fall asleep. Plus: if you go to the toilet the whole process starts over.
Also, our sleep is frequently disturbed. Sometimes we dream vividly, sometimes our brain is just really noisy, so we wake up easily. We spend our nights tossing and turning. Getting woken up by noises, pain, inability to keep body parts still and so on.
So is it really that odd, that we are tired all the time?
During the day, we use a lot of energy to fulfill the tasks we were given. Sometimes we can’t concentrate enough and need more time and energy to do it.
We are at war with our minds. Battling thoughts and fears. All day we keep hearing that we are not good enough, strong enough, skinny enough. And we believe those lies.
And we can’t just snap out of it. It’s not possible.
We experience a sensory overload during the day. We see, hear, notice a lot. And often we already know what’s going on around us without anyone telling us. We “feel” a lot around us. And it’s mentally draining.
I also have to mention that we get tired as a side effect of our medication. That medication we need to be “happy”.
We struggle with our brains to differentiate what’s real and what’s not. Because our mind presents everything to us as reality.
Our muscles ache all the time from all the tensing up.
That’s why we are tired all the time. And it’s not always because of the lack of sleep.