The Written Podcast: Being Mentally Tired

Being mentally tired is… well… tiring. It’s vastly different from being physically tired, because your muscles aren’t drained of energy. Being physically tired is when you simply can’t move properly, where your legs can’t support you anymore, you can’t lift your arms up above your head; all you want to do is go to be and rest. Being mentally tired is where you have the energy, but you don’t have any motivation. You can wake up mentally tired, which is annoying. Your body is well rested, you know you have the capabilities to do whatever you want to do, but you simply cannot be bothered. You’re falling asleep whilst having breakfast, no conversation is sticking, simply actions seem complicated – you can’t figure how to make a bowl of cereal. These examples may be on the extreme side of the scale, but there is a clear distinction between having a bad night’s sleep or staying up to late and pushing yourself too far and burning out.

Stress is the main reason for being mentally tired. Whether it’s at work or at home, stress affects us in so many ways, but always leads to being drained of any motivation, leading to procrastination. Once procrastination strikes, you’ve entered the loop. You’re tired so you procrastinate, but you’re tired from procrastination, so you procrastinate more, subsequently growing more tired, and the loop continues. It’s a harsh loop and one I’ve been stuck in for quite some time. Procrastination has affected my writing for a long while. The leading cause for my procrastination was pushing myself, then putting pressure on myself when I didn’t do any writing that day. I wanted to write every day. X amount of words a day, and then one, I found myself particularly tired from a hard day and I mentally couldn’t bring myself to write anything, and I gave into my tiredness and went to bed. That shouldn’t have been the beginning of the loop, but I allowed it to become just that. The next day I pushed myself to make up what I had missed the previous day and then write the X amount of words the next day. Whilst I was pleased I did complete the word total, I felt drained. And then, time started flying by. The more I pushed myself to write the amount of words on consecutive days, the more time sped up. I found myself taking longer and longer to write the X amount of words, and going to bed later and later, subsequently decreasing my overall sleep time, until eventually I found myself sitting at my computer, having not written a single word, and it was nearing midnight. I was tired. Mentally tired. And I felt bad for not writing anything. I felt as if I had let myself down. I put pressure on myself to catch up the next day, but I never did, and the days started flying passed and not a single word got written.

The more days passed, the more I felt as if I was letting myself down, and the more I felt as if I was letting myself down, the more I put pressure on myself to write, and the more pressure I put on myself, the more I didn’t write as I was too stressed to process a coherent sentence. Procrastination had settled itself down inside my mind.

I’ve written about the effects procrastination has had on me a few times on this blog. I’ve even attempted to state how I’ve combatted such and detailed my plan on how I’m to take the blog in a different direction to freshen things up a bit… and then even that just stopped. I went from five blogs a week from believing that the more I do the more audience I’ll get and success, to three blogs a week. I tried out so many different ideas, none of them sticking.

There are times when it is mild and there are times when it is strong, but what needs to be acknowledged is everyone’s constant battle with procrastination is different and impacts their lives in different ways, and that’s due to there being multiple factors in people’s lives which causes procrastination to happen. There was a reason why I was particularly tired that day the loop started – there was a reason why I wanted to push myself to write as much as I could. For me, the main thing I did - and still do on occasion - is watch TV and films, all day, sometimes browsing on the Internet for no reason at all.

Procrastination is often mistaken as laziness. Don’t get me wrong, there are people who are genuinely lazy, but that’s usually for the sake of simply not actually caring at all. People who are suffering from procrastination do care, they just can’t show that they do, because they’re too mentally tired from procrastinating all day.

That’s why my blog has been all over the place, or I’ve missed days entirely where I simply haven’t uploaded anything, because I was going through another strong wave. That’s why I’ve tried so many different ideas, been versatile with how best to write what I want. During those moments when I found myself at the end of another idea that didn’t defeat my procrastination, that was when I was struck down the hardest. I was pushing myself to make that idea work, I burnt myself out, and went straight back to being mentally tired again. This has happened so many times; I have lost count.

Procrastination took hold of me in 2015. It was at its strongest in 2018, when it was affecting other aspects of my life other than just my writing. When asked why I hadn’t cleaned my room, my answer was: “I wanted to, but I just didn’t.” Talking about procrastination is difficult, because if you speak how it is affecting you, it can be misunderstood as laziness, which doesn’t help anyone who’s suffering from such a problem.

The worst part about procrastination is knowing you are doing it but unable to do anything to stop it simply because you’re too tired from the constantly building pressure inside your mind from not doing what you know you really want to do. I am not, nor have I ever been lazy, I’ve just been mentally tired.

Thanks for reading

Antony Hudson

(TonyHadNouns)