I have always needed more sleep than the average person. On the weekends, I sleep in until noon, unbothered by the fact that I have quite literally slept my day away. I’m a bit of an insomniac, always waking up in the middle of the night to contemplate existential dilemmas or admire the paint strokes on my ceiling. So trust me, I know tired. I’ve lived tired. My middle name is tired.

So why am I now feeling so exhausted?

Am I just getting old? Maybe, but it’s more likely that I’m living through a global pandemic. And frankly, that will suck every ounce of energy right out of you.

There’s a difference between tired and fatigued. Tired is having a bad night’s sleep. Fatigue is having a bad night’s sleep every night for a year (I’m speaking only of mental fatigue, not physical). Clinically, tiredness is the body’s response to doing a demanding task, meaning it’s short term. The term tiredness is pretty interchangeable with fatigue, but I’m differentiating both of those with chronic fatigue, which is much more drawn out. Chronic fatigue is a state of tiredness that continues long after we’ve separated from the demanding task, so we might not be able to make the connection between the cause and effect of our sleepiness. This is what a lot of us are experiencing in the wake of quarantine.

My favorite part of my yoga class is the savasana, or corpse pose (Yes, that is the only part of the class that isn’t physically demanding — I am aware of that, and like it for just that reason). It’s a time to self-reflect and wind-down, even if only for a minute or two. In one particular class, my instructor took the savasana time to talk about fatigue. She asked us to think about what our bodies tell us when we’re hungry, angry, stressed, or tired. If our stomach growls, we know to eat. If we’re sweating, we know to cool down. But if we’re fatigued, it feels like the natural reaction is to fall deeper into a state of sleepiness, self-deprecation and shame. I thought about how tired I feel after a workout class; I immediately think that I need to work out more, that I’m not in shape enough, that I don’t take care of my body. But I did just take care of my body. So what I’m feeling is the opposite of what my body is telling me.

My instructor continued on to say that we aren’t correctly interpreting our body’s signals. Fatigue isn’t telling us to get more sleep, or to start working out more, or that we’re doing something wrong. It’s a sign that we’ve done difficult work. It’s the mental equivalent of sweat, and we’re looking at it all wrong. We’re judging ourselves for feeling the appropriate, innate reaction.

So I decided to stop belittling myself for feeling this way. I set out to find a concrete answer to this fogginess that will seemingly be looming over me for all of eternity. And what I found was actually understandable and reassuring.

We all know about the fight or flight response: when we are faced with a threat, our body makes a decision to confront that threat or retreat from it. This has happened since the cavemen battled insanely large mammals or whatever used to happen in the Flintstones era: we see the threat, our body floods us with extra hormones such as adrenaline and ramps up our heart rate so we’re ready to do what’s necessary to survive. We then use that surge of energy to defeat said threat, and there ya have it, the human race lives to see another day. But what happens if we can’t see the threat? What happens to all those hormones and physiological responses if the threat is, say, an invisible virus that has spread across the world and can mutate into variants?

Ah, so here we have our explanation. We as humans have been in our automatic fight-or-flight response since 2020, and we don’t even realize it. Our bodies are under mental and emotional stress because we are preparing to fight a threat and, because this response is so natural to us, we don’t even comprehend that we’re doing it. We get worried about COVID, our body goes into arousal mode, and then we never have the chance to conquer our threat, so our bodies are left to deal with all these excess mechanisms that should’ve been released. This kind of stress is meant to dissipate after just a short period of time, but we’ve been experiencing it subliminally for years now. And where does this surplus of hormonal responses go? It begins to weigh on us physically, hence fatigue. We’re so wired from the perceived threat response that our bodies are telling us to shut everything down.

Maybe it’s time to listen to ourselves. Not just our thoughts, but our bodies. If our legs are tired, we don’t keep running. So, if our minds are so tired, we shouldn’t push them. We need to stop, breathe, give ourselves a second. I think, as a culture, we properly accommodated to people’s needs right after quarantine. I remember hearing that I could take all of my classes pass/fail and feeling the weight of the world off my shoulders. We enacted so many last minute actions in order for people to feel like they could properly take on the demands of everyday life. So even as we transition into a new normal, why should that stop?

I say, if you’re feeling the same fatigue that I am, stop running. Let yourself sleep for thirty more minutes. Order dinner if you can’t get to the grocery store. Text your friend instead of calling them. Read a book. Or don’t (reading’s exhausting)! Drink more water, skip class, chug a coffee, stay in on a Saturday night. Sit with yourself for just two minutes, listen to what you need (without judgment) and do exactly what you hear. You’ll thank yourself for it.