Fatigue

The feeling of ‘being tired’ has to be one of the strangest experiences ever encountered by humans. Solving it is easy of course – find a flat surface, preferably with some sort of comfy headrest, close your eyes and switch off for eight hours.

But it’s what happens before you get the chance to do this that really interests me. Tiredness plays with your physical ability to get things done, it affects your mental ability to think and act on those thoughts, and most of all it affects your emotions, magnifying many and subduing several all at once. In short, at its worst it can transform you from your normal self into some sort of hollow, unrecognisable shell.

I experienced all three of these effects yesterday evening. It wasn’t the most tired I’ve ever been – that was after a brutal week of 18 hour days in Slough, by the end of which all senses, thoughts and actions had just sort of merged into a blurry mess (bizarrely though, it’s one of the highlights of my working life to date). But I was definitely on the verge of putting up the white flag at one stage last night, emotions everywhere and nowhere, mind scrambled by the weight of personal and professional tasks that I had to accomplish and body screaming out to just give up and ditch everything.

And it’s amazing that when you are that tired, everything just seems so much harder to do. Every little target or task like climbing a mountain, every piece of bad news no matter how trivial a brutal blow, and every emotion balancing on tip toes waiting to be triggered.

Television programmes that profile extreme physical, mental and endurance feats often provide an insight into this tiredness – the sight of grown men weeping as they arrive at the South Pole after a mammoth trek, contestants locked in a reality TV house emotionally cracking in front of millions of people, marathon runners somehow dragging something primeval out of their bodies to complete those last, agonising few miles.

And yet the amazing thing about tiredness, and its effects on you, is that they can be so easily treated and cured. And that’s why, less than 15 hours after feeling utterly broken and staring down a long, dark tunnel, I’m sat on a train to Bristol for a friend’s wedding and feeling reinvigorated. The list of problems is still exactly the same as last night, the solutions to them still not entirely clear, and the finishing line still as distant as before.

And yet all it took to lift the mood, banish the demons, and come storming out the other side was eight hours of sleep. Simply brilliant.