HealthyGamerGG - Why You Feel Exhausted All The Time No Matter What...

Episode Date: December 5, 2022

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So we have this event going on right now where we're helping our community to track their emotions. So here's all the emotions that people are feeling. What's the number one emotion that people are feeling? Turns out it's tired. Now that may sound kind of weird to you because is being tired an emotion to begin with, right? I thought like being tired was like a state of energy. Like isn't tired like a lack of sleep? So is it like physiologic?

Like is it mental? Can you feel mentally tired or is tiredness just kind of a physical perspective? What about people who, you know, are not depressed or anything like that aren't burnt out and sort of take care of themselves, exercise? But they just kind of like when they wake up in the morning, they kind of feel, they feel like life has no zest. There's no excitement. Is that depression? Like, what is that. So what I'd love to do is talk to you all today about tiredness.

And what we're going to do is approach tiredness from a couple of different angles. So we're going to start by talking about tiredness as an emotion. So is it an emotion? and what does that even mean? Like, how is tiredness and emotion? And sort of related to that, the mental aspect of being tired. Because I know it sounds kind of weird, but if you really think about it, human beings all have the shared experience of being able to be tired.

Right? So, like, we can all feel tired. And if we all can feel tired, tiredness must serve a particular function. And if we really want to understand how to overcome tiredness, what we need to do is understand why we feel tired in the first place. Not in a sense to fix it, but what is the function of feeling tired? Which I know it sounds kind of weird, but we think about tiredness, especially in today's society, is purely a negative thing to get rid of, right?

Energy is good. Tiredness is bad. But we never stop to really think about, hold on a second, like human bodies and brains and subjective experiences exist for a reason. There aren't good emotions and bad emotions. There are just emotions and emotions are just information, right? So even something like fear or anxiety is your brain's way of telling you to be worried about something. So then the question kind of becomes, okay, like, what is tiredness for?

Like, why do we feel tired? And the cool thing is once we start to understand that, we can start to see scenarios in which we feel tired, and then we'll understand why we feel tired in those scenarios and where it's really coming from. And once we discover where it's coming from, we can start to take steps to combat it, overcome it, or even sort of accept it as information. So first thing that I'm going to share with you all is a story. Okay? So I was working with a patient who hated going back home for the holidays. So really, like, was, like, enjoyed having time off from work, but really, really hated going back home for the holidays.

The holidays were just so exhausting. And it's not just being there. So this patient was telling me, she was telling me one day that, you know, she got a phone call. And on the phone, like, she picks up her phone, she looks at it and she sees, oh, it's my mom calling. And just the sight of her mom calling was enough to feel, feel exhausted. She's like, oh my God, I can't deal with this. And so let's like stop and think about that.

So first of all, you may find that that's your experience as well, that you feel tired, but you can feel so tired suddenly, which is kind of weird, right? Because if we think about tiredness, we think about it as a lack of energy. And if I've slept a full eight hours and I ate a nice, you know, keto low carb meal, I shouldn't feel tired. That's what we tell ourselves, right? I shouldn't feel tired because we think about tiredness as a physiologic state. We don't think about as an emotion. And then what we end up doing is we try doing all kinds of physical things. Let me try the supplement. Let me go get some vitamin D. Let me go do this thing. I'm going to cut out gluten from my diet because we cannot have as a gluten, right? All kinds of stuff that we do physiologically

because tiredness is a state of energy. And yet we continue feeling tired. And sometimes we even feel good about ourselves until you see the ping. Oh, it's your boss emailing you again at four o'clock on a Friday. And then how do you feel? You feel tired. So let's try to understand what tiredness is and why we feel tired. So let's go through this. So if I see a phone call from, let's say, a parent that I don't want to talk to, or someone who's looking for money or soliciting donations, I don't know if y'all have felt this way. I feel this way. Where I'm walking down the street and sometimes you see those people with the binders. You know what I'm talking about? Those people with a binders and a good cause.

And they look at you and they like try to make eye contact. And then they like wave, right? And then you're like, oh my God. And then you feel tired. I don't want to talk to this person. I don't want to be rude with this person. I know if I talk to them, they're going to ask me questions that are going to make me feel guilty. So now I have a choice between losing some money or feeling bad about myself because I'm not making the world a better place.

And all this kind of stuff goes on in your head. in the span of like three seconds and you feel exhausted. So what's going on there? How does that work? So tiredness is actually an adaptive mechanism created by your brain to help you avoid kind of useless work. Okay? I know it sounds kind of weird.

But here's what happens. So like let's talk about something like paying your taxes. So here's where I am right now. And I got to pay my taxes. And the workload from paying my taxes is so high that my brain looks at that and says there's no way we're going to be able to pay our taxes today. We can't do it. The estimate of the workload is very, very, very high. And then what it does is it makes us feel tired. So tiredness is our brain's response to a perception of a high workload. So when we see a super high workload,

what we naturally feel is tired. And you may say to yourself, but hold on, Dr. Kay, isn't that when you should have a burst of energy? Shouldn't we, if the task is really big, shouldn't I need a ton of energy so that I can complete the task? And I want to work on my taxes for 24 hours. And then tomorrow I will be done with my taxes. It'll be great. It'll be liberating. But instead, what you do is you feel tired.

So let's think about the situation in which our brain evolved. When there are things that have a ton of work, our brain sort of calculates, okay, this is going to be a ton of work and it may not even succeed. So generally speaking, the more work that something requires, the chances of success are going to be lower. So if I wake up today and I say, okay, like, I'm going to become president of the United States or Secretary General of the UN. That takes a ton of work. The likelihood of that succeeding is going to be low. I'm going to start a billion dollar company. I'm going to start a company that's

going to use teleportation technology and invent time travel technology. The amount of effort required for that is going to be very high. And generally speaking, if we look at what the greater effort is required for something, the lower the chances are for success. And so then how does our brain prevent us from wasting energy on low success probability things that require a high amount of energy investment. It makes us feel tired because what is tired? Tired is don't do it. Don't bother. Don't try. Stop. I'm not going to give you the energy. I'm not willing to invest this amount of energy for such a rare, difficult thing. Now, this brain evolved prior to the development of taxes. Right? So now what we're sort of seeing is that this fundamental mechanism, which is like our brains evolved and they're like, oh, let's go climb to the top of that mountain. And you look to the top of the mountain and you're like, oh my God, that's like so much climbing. No way, dude, I'm tired. So if you really think about it, what does tiredness do? It discourages you from investing energy in like really, really long term questionable kind of things. And now the problem is that we live in a society where we've got stuff like paying taxes, which absolutely have to be done. But our brain doesn't know how to calculate.

paying taxes. It doesn't know how to say, okay, we're going to have to put in four hours a day for the next 10 days and then we'll be done. It's not actually how long it takes to pay your taxes. Right? But if you think about how long does it feel like, it feels like it's going to take a really, really, really long time. And then even at the end of four hours of paying your taxes today, are you going to be done with it? Is it going to be finished? Other examples of this include writing a dissertation. I got to write my dissertation today. You can't write your dissertation. It takes a year. Oh my God. That's so much. work. I'm so exhausted. I can't even do anything today. So when our brain estimates that there's a very, very high workload with unclear chance of success or progress that's visible, it protects us from wasting energy into that thing. There's no point if we're going to try to climb to the top of Mount Everest, there's no point in climbing the first 5,000 feet if we're not going to make it to the top, you know, because it's like, okay, like let's say Everest is what, 26,000 feet or 29,000 feet or something like that, right? What's the point of going up 25,000 feet turning around and coming back? There's no point. You didn't climb Everest. I went to go climb Mount Everest. Everyone asks you, what was it like at the top?

And you're like, I don't know, I turned back. Right? You might as well not have gone. And so that's how our brain operates. It looks at this really far goal in the future and it's like, hey, let's not waste our time in this. Boom, let's flick the tired switch. And so feeling tired is actually an energy conservation strategy. It's a way to shape our behavior. It's a way that our brain is making calculates. and then using emotions to keep us from making mistakes. The same way that it uses anxiety to keep us from making mistakes. The same way that it uses anger to help us lay our boundaries and not get taken advantage out by other people.

It uses tiredness to keep us from wasting our energy. Now, the problem is that oftentimes we need to invest that energy, right? Like, it's actually worthwhile. So if you all want to understand tiredness, what I encourage you to do is start by noticing in your mind, what is the scenario in which I'm tired? Because it's sudden, right? It's like, you see that like, oh my God, I don't want to go home for the holidays. My parents are divorced. I hate Christmas with divorced parents because no matter what I do, neither of my parents is going to be happy, right? One of them gets me on Christmas Eve and one of them gets me on Christmas

day. And at 11.59 p.m. on Christmas day, I know I'm going to hear the car come up. parent is going to come and they're going to want me for the rest of the day. And so I've spent one night with one parent and that was like sort of fun. But I knew that this was going to happen the next day so I can't really relax. And then as I walk out the door, one parent is going to be tearing up. And the other parent is going to be like resentful and needy. Like, come on, let's go. We're going to have so much fun today.

We got to make up for all the fun that we didn't have yesterday. Let's go. Have fun. Let's do it. And the thought of going home for the holidays. Just the thought of it, of being your, in that situation is exhausted. The thought of going home for the holidays and telling everyone, everyone's like,

oh, little alok, how are you doing today, my love? What are you up to nowadays? Oh, nothing, Auntie. I'm still applying to medical school. I'm 26 years old. I have no money. I have no prospects. Failed a lot of classes.

And I'm not really doing much. How are you? Mm. Your son just got a job at Google. Fantastic. You must be so proud. So tiredness is actually an emotion. And that may sound kind of weird, but remember that emotions are not psychological things.

They're physiologic things too. Our body and our brain are connected. Our mind and body are connected. So the experience of emotion lumps in the throat, butterflies in the stomach, tightness in our chest, erection of the penis is an emotion. Arousal, lust. You bet your ass that lust has physiologic correlations, right? That's an emotion. And so similarly, if emotions are both physiologic and psychological, and we experience a lot of

tiredness in our body, why do we assume that that's physiologic, exclusively physiologic in nature? Why can't it be psychological too? Because tiredness is an emotion. We even use the right language. You say, I feel tired. It's a feeling. And it's our body's natural or minds natural response to tasks that we feel are very, very difficult to accomplish. And so we say, don't even bother. Like don't do the taxes today. You can do them tomorrow. Start the dissertation tomorrow. You don't answer the phone call today, right? And then what happens when you don't answer the phone call, by the way? What's going to happen 10 minutes from now? What's going to happen tomorrow? What's going to happen a week from now? What's going to happen a month from now? The phone calls keep coming,

and they keep coming, and they keep coming. And eventually, maybe they'll stop. But even if they stop, you still feel exhausted. And that doesn't make any sense from an energy perspective because you didn't even do anything. You didn't even talk to anyone. You just hit the phone on silent and continued, unpaused your video game and kept playing. How is that? exhausting. There's no amount of energy. Like, it's, I click buttons all the time. It doesn't tire me out. So, of course, tiredness is an emotion. Of course, it's mental in nature. So the next time you feel tired, think a little bit about like, okay, what about this is exhausting? Because it ain't the energy, it's not the caloric burning that my body has to do in order to turn the phone on silent, right?

It's not the calories I have to burn to listen to my aunt tell me about how their kid is so amazing. Like, I'm just sitting there. I can listen to crap all the time. It doesn't exhaust me. In fact, sometimes I rather enjoy it. Have you heard of an audiobook? So it's not energetic. It's all emotional. And so then the question becomes, okay, like, like, how do we understand this? So like, ask yourself, right, pause and notice, oh, wow, I'm feeling incredibly exhausted. What is my body telling me not to do? Then the question becomes, why is my body telling me not to do it? And that's where the answer lies. To notice, first of all, there's nothing wrong with you, right? You may be totally fine physiologically, but that this is a signal just like all other emotions. Emotions are

information from the body and the mind to you. And then as you start to ask, okay, this is a signal. Like this is my body telling me not to do this. I feel so tired. Oh my God, this person wants to go out on a date again. This is the fifth date. I'm just kind of tired tonight. That's your body kind of telling you, hey, we're not that into them, right? It's a waste of energy. That's what tiredness is. Tiredness is a signal that there's a part of you that feels like this is a waste of energy. Since it's a waste of energy, we're not going to waste it. We're going to help you feel that way we don't have to expend anything. And as you ask yourself, okay, what am I, why is this, does this feel like a waste of energy to me? What does this encounter? What will this encounter actually do?

How will I feel if I were to do the tired thing or the thing that makes me feel tired? How would I feel at the end of it? And now here's where something magical happens. You get to really get underneath the tiredness because your mind will tell you one of two things. If I spent two hours working on my taxes today, how would I feel at the end of that? If you stop and you actually ask you, you'd say, actually I'd feel pretty good. Or your mind may say, oh, we'd still feel terribly because we have so much left to do. Even if you do two hours of work, there's so much left to do. Therefore, logically, don't start at all.

Right? Because that's what our mind tells us. Just ask yourself, if I started on my dissertation today, if I read one chapter of one thing, how would I respond? And my mind would be like, oh, you read like one chapter of like 100. You have so much left to do. So let's not even start because we have 100 chapters to read. Don't even bother reading the first one.

And it's like, what? And if your mind is telling you that, how the hell are you ever going to do anything? So that's when you start to really realize, okay, hold on a second. How is my mind making this calculation? And as you start to really understand, oh, actually, if I went, like, give you all another example, I'm going to exercising. So if I exercise, how am I going to feel at the end of it? Am I going to feel good or am I not going to feel good?

Because a lot of times, the things that we feel tired doing, we actually feel really good when we're done doing them. It's like, hey, I made some progress today. Awesome. I exercise today. Awesome. And if our brain is telling us, hey, like, you're going to feel worse after making progress, then that's the problem. That's when we need to start to think a little bit about, wait, wait, hold on a second.

How am I arriving at the conclusion that I'm going to feel worse after I do something that I should be doing and that I need to be doing? How am I feeling worse? And then you tunnel down into that. And as you tunnel down into that, you can make a discovery, holy crap. My brain is actually disincentivizing me to making progress in life. No wonder I'm stuck. And if you do a good job, what something magical will happen, which is that, remember, we said that the tiredness is a feeling that the brain evokes when it estimates the amount of work that you have to do.

And it estimates that since we're not going to get there, there's no point in trying. It's an energy conservation strategy. But as you start to really understand, okay, if I do this, I'm actually going to feel good, as you start to take that endpoint and you start to like really be more critical of it, what you'll start to realize is that your brain actually realizes, oh, Okay, hold on a second. Maybe this isn't such a waste of energy. And now we also see why certain productivity techniques work, which is taking a large, abstract task and chunking it into pieces. Because if I have 100 chapters to read, that's a lot of chapters,

but if my target today is one, I have completed my target. Then it's not a waste of energy. Reading one chapter lets me finish one chapter. That's actually a pretty good trade. And then suddenly we feel less tired. In terms of like relationship stuff, it's also really, really, really important to understand this kind of thing, right? So when it comes back to visiting family for the holidays, for example, why do I feel so tired when I see this phone? And the reason I feel tired is because I know that this person is relying on me for their emotional needs. And I cannot fulfill their emotional needs. So what they're going to do is suck me dry, trying to feel fulfilled emotionally. And I'm going to feel drained at the end of it and it's never going to be enough, right? Because next year will come around and they'll still be emotionally needy. That's why you feel so exhausted because at the end of this conversation,

I'm going to feel exhausted and it's not like the calls are going to stop. In fact, they're going to start leaning on me more. So tunnel down, ask yourself, what about this makes me feel tired? If I were to do this, how would I feel afterward? And that's really, the answer to that question is going to be how you overcome tiredness.