“Fatigue Is Your Enemy”
A couple of months ago, Harvard Business Review posted a good blog on the impact that fatigue has on our bodies and effectiveness. Fatigue Is Your Enemy – Harvard Business Review But making the case for self-care is relatively easy. Scientists, theologians, psychologists and leadership experts have proven its positive affects again and again. But taking action for self care is a different story. As I witness my clients wrestle with fatigue , despite knowing that they should ‘do better’ at taking care of themselves, I’ve learned how actively we collude with ourselves and each other to keep us all working to exhaustion.
To address the chronic fatigue among our leaders, staff and organizations, it’s not enough to rejigger our calendars. You’ve probably tried, and it probably didn’t work. Vanquishing the energy of fatigue requires confronting ourselves and each other at a very personal – even existential – level. Sure, you say you want to take better care of yourself, but that has some uncomfortable and potentially serious consequences. If your self-worth is built upon being indispensable to others, then self-stewardship will mess with that in a big way. You’d have to delegate more and discover that someone else can do the task and render you irrelevant, or that they will fail and make you look bad. Could you recover from either of those? Or maybe self-care will require you to take some time off and discover that the office operates just fine for a while without you. Then where will you be? Or perhaps you would have to deny help to someone. What would that mean about you?
Attending to your own renewal is not just complicated for you. It’s also complicated for those around you. Many of the leaders I work with have had others beg them to take better care of themselves. And yet… When they responded in earnest, when they drew a line or refused to pick up a task they used to accept without hesitation, others were not always pleased. Whether explicit or implied, the message they received went something like this: “Sure, I wanted you to take care of yourself, but not NOW. Not in THIS recession. Not on THIS task. Not if it affects ME.”
Fatigue, if unheeded, is an enemy. It drains your sustainability, generativity, creativity, clarity, strength and grace. But vanquishing that enemy will take a lot more than a simple resolution to take your lunch hour, leave at 5, or use your vacation time. It takes real courage to take the risk that your value does NOT depend on saying yes to every request. It takes courage to tolerate the discomfort of making others uncomfortable, disappointed or angry. It takes a willingness to step out of sync with our culture’s obsession with busy-ness, its worship of work, and its celebration of heroic effort.
It is no small feat to take this enemy on.
What about you?
How does fatigue affect you? How does it affect your mood, sense of well being? Your relationships? Your effectiveness?
What 1 – 3 self-stewardship changes would you like to make?
What internal resistance would you likely confront if you actually made those stewardship changes?
What external resistance would you likely confront if you took action to take better care of yourself?
Making sure I have enough sleep is essential if I am to function properly the next day. And I try to have a complete break from online activity every couple of months and spent the weekend doing outdoors activities. It really helps to re-energise!
Sometimes people do need to be told by Harvard in order to take action. I watched a funny TED talk by Ariana Huffington about how people brag about getting by on only 4 hrs of sleep. She was on a date and said she thought to herself, maybe if he’d gotten 7 hours he’d be more interesting!
Fatigue is an enemy for sure! Last year I was tired, stressed and didn’t take care of myself….that lead to a stroke in February and another small one in October. So, I’ve learned to take time out when I feel tired or stressed. It can be a long walk, meditation or just chilling. I’ve also taken better care of my health. It’s not done overnight but I am a lot better than I was a year ago. Thanks for this post and reminder. I am sure it will wake up some folks!
This was a very interesting post. Sleep absolutely plays a huge role in many areas of our life. Thanks for sharing this.
Learning to pace yourself is such a great achievement. There are still times when it seems next to impossible with way to much to do in way too little time. (Christmas or other holidays…..Tax time) Over Christmas there is so much going on I have learned to give up some things entirely…..such as computer time with my writing friends. I miss it and feel guilty…..but have learned that not all things can be accomplished at once.
This line is so true – “Fatigue, if unheeded, is an enemy. ” I know when I’m tired and need to just take a break. Being overtired doesn’t help anyone, and usually it catches up with you when you come down with a cold or worse. I try and get my eight hours of zzzzz’s every night and that does help me have energy. Thanks for a great reminder.
Spot On, we need to sleep more and stop multitasking so much. Great post! I am sharing 🙂
Yes.. I love this! Please cut something out of your life but not the work I NEED you to do! LOL Great Article!
I try VERY hard to fight fatigue, but lately even though I am trying to go to bed earlier – I want to stay up later to – but I pay for it later : / My 5 yr old is up at 6 am EVERY morning !!!
I agree that fatigue is the enemy. I have heard that driving tired is almost as bad as driving after a few drinks. Today, I decided to take care of myself and have a nap! I have been a night owl for a long time and have just recently decided to go to bed at 10 instead of at my usual midnight. Its made a big difference!
I am learning to “manage my overwhelm.” I am sleeping more and exercising more – it can really be a mood enhancer – and just not sweating it if something doesn’t get done. I don’t necessarily do well with eight straight hours of sleep because of the aches and pains I have when I lie there that long – but if I sleep five or six hours at night and have a nap at some point, that works well for me and is more refreshing.
Not just sleep, though. Time for ME just to do things i want to do, or do nothing at all. I need a certain amount of alone time or i get very cranky.
This has been my journey since moving to the farm. Old habits surely do die hard, and many of the habitual habits of over-extending exist in the peripheral vision of my awareness. This is a very good reminder to keep at it if I want to be available to friends, family, and clients’customers over the long haul, and especially if I want to enjoy the fleeting moments of my life as fully as possible.
thank you SOOOOOOO much for the recognition that it isn’t just taking a few things off our calendars or the like. It also takes really understanding what we need and how to change oft-times lifetime habits of ignoring the signals that we need something different.
Excellent article! It has become so important to me to ensure that I have enough good quality sleep – it’s a lesson that I’ve had to learn the hard way… I have experienced a serious burn out which happened as a result of my not taking the time to listen to (or understand) what my own self care requirements were.
Just this morning i was attempting a discussion with my MIL….she had asked what was wrong and the simple asnwer was that I am tired. She pressed for more, though I did not want to go there….I did…the bottom line is that I wear many hats that include taking care of them and I just ask for more equal participation to distribute the load, rather than being the one running around from one task to the next while they sleep…this conversation never bodes well and I seem always on the losing end and still right where i was before, doing the majority of the work….I am a doer by nature, they are not….how to balance this and not fall over from exhaustion is escaping me…as you mention soon as I retreat from a task everyone is tweaked or everything just piles up in neglect which makes me evenmore nuts…lol.sorry for the rant….you hit a sore spot…lol
Carl, thank you so much for your reply. I hear you! I think you, many of my clients and I share the same sort spot. The curse of the ‘doer’ is that it’s a self-fulfilling, self-increasing trap. You get satisfaction out of being useful, so you do stuff. As you’re doing all of it, you unwitting teach people that that’s what they can expect from you. I find that it’s not so much that I’m a doer and others aren’t, but that my high level of responsiveness has unwittingly encouraged others to be less responsive. A vicious cycle… one which takes quite a while turn around.
From what I’ve experienced and observed, the first job is internal… to start to notice how linked your own sense of value is to being the doer. Second, to challenge that sense of value by getting really clear what tasks are rightly ‘yours’ to do, and which should be being picked up by others. Third, by managing the gradual transition to moving the work from them to you. As you do this, you’ll likely meet with resistance – not only from others (‘Hey, why do I have to do this, when you’ve always done it in the past?’) but also from yourself (‘What the heck, it’s just easier to do it myself.’). It’s a slow process – like turning a barge around – and rarely happens without some discomfort on everyone’s part.
Thanks again for your so-called ‘rant!’ Such a great illustration of the dilemma that this blog is about.
Keeping on a routine really helps my fatigue. Getting enough sleep, eating right and drinking enough water really helps. Thanks for such a great post!
What I’ve come to see over the years is that fatigue usually happens when I’ve spent a lot of my day, or a lot of a bunch of days, doing things that I don’t actually want to do, out of a sense of obligation. Acting from obligation actually tires me out, whereas acting from a place of what I actually want doesn’t leave me drained. And getting enough sleep is good too. 🙂
I love this – “It takes a willingness to step out of sync with our culture’s obsession with busy-ness, its worship of work, and its celebration of heroic effort.” Wonderful post and oh so important for our health and quality of life.
I remember when we used to be able to get away from work, colleagues, etc. But now we’re all reachable 24/7 … through texts and email … and those same people think that means we’re fair game no matter what the hour. What price progress …
I am a prime example of what happens when you let fatigue run rampant. Two heart attacks before the age of 45 gave me a real sense of why I need to stop and recharge on a regular basis. For me that means getting enough sleep, and taking at least one day a week to disconnect from the world.