Why Am I So Tired?

If you feel pooped all day, the solution isn’t always more sleep

- Vanessa Milne

Carol Heffernan, a 43-year-old marketing writer from Wisconsin, Canada, regularly felt worn out from her busy life of working, shuttling her two kids to elementary school and play dates, and taking care of housework. But when COVID-19 hit last March and the kids were suddenly at home all day, learning remotely, she noticed that her run of-the-mill weariness quickly turned into full-on exhaustion.

“All the extra responsibility and the mental load—it just added up,” she says. “I felt grumpy and tired—and it wasn’t due to lack of sleep.” Heffernan didn’t have any time in the day to exercise offher stress. She was short on energy, and she started becoming short with her kids. “After I put them to bed at 8 p.m., I would just crash on the couch,” she says.

If there’s one thing many of us have in common, it’s that we’re tired. In fact, lethargy is so pervasive that it’s one of the issues people ask their doctors about the most. Doctors even have a name for it: ‘tired all the time’, or TATT for short. The solution isn’t always as simple as getting more sleep; nearly a quarter of people who get seven or more hours of rest a night report they still wake up feeling tired most days of the week.

Here are eight reasons your energy is low—and what you can do to bring it back:

BECAUSE YOU’RE SPENDING TOO MUCH TIME ON THE COUCH