You think you're tired because you work hard?
You're not.
I spent years believing the same thing, and it was the most expensive mistake I ever made because it sent me looking for rest when needing rest was never really the problem.
Here's what's true.
Exhaustion isn't the cost of the work.
Let me show you what I mean.
Imagine it's 2 am.
There she is, staring at the ceiling.
Nothing she's tried has worked, and she's already tried for hours.
Not counting sheep.
Not drinking warm milk.
Nothing.
Her mind keeps racing, jumping to:
The call she didn't have time to return.
The report that's still not finished.
The client who's waiting on that thing she promised last week, which still hasn't gotten done.
Her breath becomes shallow the more she thinks about it.
It never ends. One thing gets crossed off, and two other things are put on.
But that's not what keeps her up.
What's keeping her up is quieter, and only comes out when the room is dark, and everyone in the house is asleep.
"What happens if I can't keep up? What if they finally see I can't handle this? What if they conclude that I've never been able to handle this? It was just a matter of time before they found out."
That's it.
Deep down.
At the core.
And she runs and keeps herself busy all day so that she won't have to hear it.
The 7 am start,
The packed calendar,
The not-stopping.
As long as she's moving, those kinds of thoughts don't have enough space to catch her.
That's the reason.
It's not just ambition.
It's a way of keeping the door closed on those thoughts.
But at 2 am.
When there's nothing she can use to distract herself.
No call to take.
No fire to put out.
When it's just her, staring at the ceiling, surrounded by the dark and the quiet.
While she feels wrecked and exhausted and reads it as I work too hard, but knows that that's not the real reason.
That the real reason is that she's running from those thoughts.
Look, doing that is hard, harder than any job.
And the thing is, those thoughts are always there.
In the background:
Of every meeting,
Every call,
Every decision,
All day,
Every day,
Even on weekends,
Whether she notices them or not.
That's why rest doesn't fix it. It can't fix it.
The weekend,
The vacation,
The early night,
They treat the tiredness.
That's why you can sleep for ten hours and wake up still feeling braced. I know that hour.
I know what it costs, because I paid for it for years. That is, before I finally understood what I was paying for.
If you want to understand why nothing you've tried has quieted your mind, why counting sheep or drinking that warm milk or simply pushing through don't touch it, the problem isn't your night routine. It's what's been running all day.
If you've tried to fix the nights with more sleep and a better bedtime routine, I wrote a free guide about why the tools you've tried don't fit the moments you need them. It's called Why You Never Have Time for the Things That Actually Help. It explains why the usual advice is so hard to use in the middle of a workday.
If you want to identify your own stress pattern afterward, the $27 Fast Desk Decoder is a separate, optional next step. It identifies your pattern and includes an audio reset for that pattern.
Written by Karen Bromberg | Fast Desk Reset™