Meerkat Prompts: When do you feel the most drained?
This is a good question, and a slightly tough one for me to answer. There are various points where I might feel physically tired, but there’s also psychological exhaustion too. Sometimes the two meet in the middle, for added fatigue.
At the moment, I am at my most tired in the mornings. Early starts, combined with darker mornings, with the prospect of long days, leaves me feeling particularly drained. I am rudely awoken by the alarm, and from there I need a lot of wake-up time. The weird thing is, I am sleeping better of late, having at one stage found it difficult to nod off. I believe I could use another hour in bed, but my life is not presently geared up for that. To evade these early starts I would need a different job, though even then it’s an early alarm for my daughter’s sake.
It’s not always mornings. Sometimes I’ll reach the middle of the working day and suffer an energy crash. The effects of my early coffee wear off, and I’ll be staring a lengthy afternoon of crap, or prolonged periods of boredom. Needless to say, this provides a sense of dread, which in turn steers me toward feeling drained. In general terms, it’s work that leaves me tired, though after several long days I can feel quite drained even on days off. What doesn’t help is that at the time of writing this post, I’d only recently recovered from a cold, and when one has a cold, everything is draining.
The general malaise I have toward my current job doesn’t help with the mornings. If I were getting up to go to a job I loved, I might feel differently. When it’s a job where everything can feel like a chore, the mornings can be a drag. I imagine that makes me a lot like everyone else; we’re more enthusiastic about something we enjoy, so we have more energy for it. It’s not particularly easy for me to find that with work right now.
Some of it may also be age. I don’t consider myself old, but I am certainly not a youthful, spritely twenty-something meerkat anymore. I am in my early forties (soon to be mid-forties), and therefore I have to face reality: I am not in my prime. I can’t burn the candle at both ends anymore (not that I was especially capable of that in the first place!).
Sometimes I can start the day with a buzz, and then I’ll feel more tired as the day wears on (which you’d think is normal). However, on most occasions I tend to have more energy toward the middle of the day now, and take some time to wake up.
