Fatigue Fiasco

Beloveds,

Fatigue shows up in our bodies in different ways.

Someone acquainted with weight training knows that they will feel sore the following day if they did the necessary overload to their body to cause change. The delayed onset of muscle soreness (commonly referred to as DOMS) that emerges comes as the body seeks to adapt to the stressed put on it.

Someone familiar with the experience of exercise seeks out this response and sees it as a positive occurrence. It can even evoke pride and the excitement that their body will soon be stronger. This middle season of discomfort, they know, is only temporary on their path to their goals.

Someone unacquainted with exercise can find this fatigue and soreness to be concerning, worrisome, and even painful. They find it unpleasant and a sign that they did something wrong. These individuals do well with education that DOMS is expected AND desirable.

Our bodies are always communicating to us whether it was a good strength training session, a long hike in the mountains, a day moving furniture, or an afternoon in the garden.

Most of us don't pay attention to our bodies. We don't know the tightness and soreness in our back as fatigue - afterall maybe we just sat all day. We didn't know sitting is work and we need breaks and movement and variety.

Physical strain is one type of fatigue and as described we don't all notice and interpret it the same.

We also get fatigue from mental focus and strain and our Western productivity-minded society doesn't teach us to pay attention to it. It tells us to hide it with numbing and disguising - Caffeine doesn't give us more energy, rather it blocks the receptors that allow our body to sense our fatigue and so we push even harder. Social media, TV, and movies distract us from our fatigue with vivid, rapidly changing images; loud music; and often outrageous dialogue and actions.

I taught for years in a graduate school setting and most of these students struggled because they didn't believe they could ever rest. They felt that pushing through would be more profitable.

You could see the fatigue show up in their bodies over the months and years of the program - weight gain, sloppier apperance, difficulty focusing and integrating new information, withdrawal from people.

They didn't know how tiring learning was and how necessary rest was to continue learning. Furthermore, most didn't know how to genuinely rest.

But I think probably the biggest overlooked type of fatigue is emotional fatigue. This fatigue that comes with things like relational tension, grief, loss, transitional periods, and any intense experience - whether we find that experience positive or negative.

This fatigue gives a deep cellular fatigue across the body - not limited to muscles, or mentation. This is a fatigue that impacts mood, outlook on the world. In our productivity-driven society, we have been taught that our personal value is determined by what we make and do. So naturally (in our society, but wholly unnatural to our human state) we press on. We try harder. We pull harder on our boot straps - those tattered straps hanging on by a thread from years and decades of tugging.

But fatigue is a sign we need rest. DOMS should last for 24-48 max and no more load should be placed on those muscles experiencing the fatigue. If it lasts longer, you have pushed your body too hard, you need not too push harder, but additional reprieve from the action that caused the fatigue - the squats, the biceps curls, the heel raises.

To appropriately weighttrain, you have to pay attention to the fatigue and allow for recovery. This is why no external program will fully suffice for you. You need to connect to YOUR body and what YOUR body is saying now as well as what it's been saying over time.

If you learning a great deal, you have to take sufficiently large break to allow your brain to integrate what you've learned to allow more to be layered on and synthesized.

If you've been going through stressful transitions, there are emotions tied to this. To be healthy, you need to pause and notice what feelings are present, allow them, and learn from them. The more intense and interwoven or back-logged they are the more time and intent they require.

Helpful antidotes to emotional load and fatigue are activities that stimulate your senses, so you can access where this energy is stored and needs to be released. To optimize your capacity to LYHL, the more resources you can have for processing this, the better, because they will have different impacts and you won't always have them all available.

In my physical therapy practice, commonly people used exercise as their sole outlet AND it is a fantastic outlet. Yet commonly, people were NOT resourced with other means. So when knee pain kept them from running, shoulder pain kept them from climbing, or back pain kept them from lifting, their well-being teetered over an abyss that terrified them.

Here are some practices for rest. (I suggest being comfortable with as many as possible, but I recommend utilizing a minimum of five different strategies in your regular life routine). Go through this list and see if you have five in regular rotation (doing all five nearly daily) and let me know the results with a quick email.

These are activities that when done with intention restore your energy and body and you immediately notice this afterward, if not during. They slow you down. The intention with these practices is to be fully there when doing them. You are trying to do them to achieve anything; you are doing them for their own sake.

1. What are your fatigue levels these days from 0-10?

2. How do you interact with your fatigue?

3. How does productivity relate to your sense of self and your sense of worth?

4. What is a new practice would you like to experiment with?

May you always see the blessing,

-esb

P.S. - Thanks for being here. I’d love to hear how you’re doing!

P.P.S. - The art and information in these emails is my copyright, unless otherwise indicated/credited.

P.P.P.S. - Some mindful merchandise is now available. More info to come, but in the meantime, you can get a headstart here.