I work night shifts. Have done for a while now. And there’s this specific version of tired that people who haven’t done it don’t really get.
It’s not sleepy tired. It’s not “I need an early night” tired. It’s the kind where your body has completely lost track of when it’s supposed to be awake and when it’s supposed to be resting, and eventually it just stops asking. You exist in this grey zone where you’re never fully alert and never fully switched off. Your brain hums at 60% all the time. Even on your days off.
And the thing is, everyone around you thinks you’re fine. Because you are fine. You show up. You manage things. You answer the messages and deal with the problems and hold it together for the people who need you to hold it together. From the outside, there is nothing wrong.
But privately, you’re running on something that isn’t energy. It’s just… habit. Routine. The muscle memory of being a person who copes.
I used to think the fix was sleep. More sleep. Better sleep. A proper routine. And yeah, sleep helps. Obviously. But the tired I’m talking about isn’t a sleep debt. It’s a nervous system that’s been in go-mode for so long it’s forgotten how to stop.
You know when you finish a night shift and your brain is still buzzing at 7am and you’re lying in bed with your eyes closed but your thoughts are absolutely racing? That’s not insomnia. That’s your body stuck in a stress response it can’t switch off because it doesn’t know where the threat ends and normal life begins.
That’s the kind of tired I mean.
And the hardest part isn’t the tiredness itself. It’s the guilt that comes with it. Because when you’re this kind of tired, you don’t look tired. You look capable. You look like someone who’s got it together. So when you cancel something, or you don’t reply, or you spend your entire day off on the sofa playing a game and eating toast — you feel like you’re failing at something everyone else seems to manage.
You’re not failing. You’re depleted. There’s a difference.
I don’t have a neat ending for this. I’m not going to tell you what fixed it for me because I’m still in it. But I can tell you that the moment I stopped calling it laziness and started calling it what it actually was — burnout, nervous system depletion, whatever name fits — something shifted. Not the tiredness. But the way I spoke to myself about it.
And that turned out to matter more than I expected.
If this sounds like you, you’re not the only one. I talk about this stuff every week — the bit that usually goes unnamed.