Being exhausted all the time — why and how to fix it

Something I’ve been experiencing for a very big part of my life regardless of what I’ve been doing was a feeling of “tiredness” of constant exhaustion whenever I was faced with something that I didn’t want to do.

It was always difficult for me to explain this to other people, so I constantly had to kind of “bottle up” my feelings and find other excuses for my lack of desire to do anything, because I couldn’t just tell people “mentioning this to me made me feel so exhausted, both mentally and physically, that now I don’t feel like doing anything any more, and you’ve basically ruined a big part of my day because now I’ll overthink this exhausting situation and get myself stuck in this unpleasant state”.

That’s not a fun way to make or keep friends, especially not when immediately after that they could see you playing League of Legends or any other game and think “just a few minutes ago you were exhausted both physically and mentally but now you’re playing a game, what a bunch of B.S.”

Luckily, the internet is full of amazing, competent and intelligent people who have experience in different areas and they are willing to share their knowledge with the rest of us, at times for free.

In this case the person in question is Dr. Alok Kanojia, a psychiatrist specializing in new mental health issues who has a great YouTube channel called HealthyGamerGG where he shares so many amazing things about mental health, how to deal with different feelings and how to understand ourselves better.

I stumbled upon a few of his videos today, one about why it’s quite difficult for people to do anything productive after spending hours and hours on YouTube or similar websites (and the reason behind “wasting” so much time), and the other about why we feel tired all the time, in which he explains why this feeling of “exhaustion” is, quite often, an emotional response to something that we simply don’t want to do.

To give a very short explanation, in my own words, from what I understood from the video, this feeling of exhaustion you feel when you are faced with something that you don’t really want to do, such as answering a phone call or having to do a tedious but important task, having to go out with friends and so on, is a reaction that our brain has when estimating that the amount of energy required to do any of those things isn’t really worth spending, because either the end result is not that great, or just hardly achievable.

It’s why we immediately feel exhausted when thinking about starting to work on a difficult problem. Our brain looks at the task, estimates that the amount of energy required to complete it will be high, while the chances of success will be low, and it automatically makes us feel tired as a way to (ironically) conserve energy, so that you don’t spend it on something that might be nothing but a waste of time.

This is one example out of many that I could give, but as someone who has recently learned about this and is still trying to properly understand it, I fear that I might not be able to make you understand this idea just as well as if you’d simply watch the actual video made by Dr. Alok Kanojia.

So, HERE is the link to the video. I highly recommend you watch it since it can not only offer you the answer to the question “why am I always so damn tired?” but also a solution that might help you deal with this problem when you experience it in the future.