Are you tired all the time? Me too – but I think I’ve worked out why

Are you feeling tired?* I’m going to take an educated guess that the answer is yes. I think I know maybe one person who isn’t tired. One of the most devastating moments of motherhood for me has been recovering from the trauma of a year of sleep deprivation only to discover that I am still tired, and I probably will be for the next 25 years, by which point I’ll be tired because I’ll be old.

So, I have been wondering: what does it really mean to be tired? Why are we tired – and what kind of tired are we?

I think we’re all working very hard, all the time. We are working hard to survive, to look after our homes, our families and our friends; we face financial worries; we live with medical conditions. Some of this hard work contributes towards building a better life – but there is another kind of work that many of us are doing which does the opposite.

Sometimes, feeling tired feels good. It is satisfying to feel the ache in my muscles after a pilates class, a swim in the sea, a good cry and a few other things that are best read between the lines. I sometimes even used to like a tired hangover if I had nothing to do but drink coffee and watch a film during the day (the ultimate tired pastime for someone who doesn’t like naps).

But I sometimes feel a different quality of fatigue sweeping through me. I notice it most acutely – as with most things – when I am with my psychoanalyst. It’s a bone-tired, ready-to-give-up kind of slump. It is the draining of energy that comes from working very, very hard, unconsciously, to avoid certain emotions that I would rather not allow into my conscious mind. It is the exhaustion that comes from tension – grinding teeth to bite back anger, or clenching every facial muscle to hold in tears. In my experience, these are the most exhausting emotions to suppress, but all of it is draining work, and often we don’t even know we’re doing it.

This kind of tiredness doesn’t get better with sleep or rest; in fact, it seems to get worse. Unlike the kind of tiredness that follows exercise or some other enlivening activity, this fatigue comes from a deadening of our own insides. It’s the kind of tired that a plant gets when it doesn’t have enough water or light. A wilting. Wilted is how I feel when I leave my analytic session having worked so hard not to cry, and succeeded – when what I really needed was to let go and let myself feel.

So if sleeping won’t help, what will? Well, recuperating from this kind of tiredness is possible, but it is also painful. It involves developing the capacity to feel better – that is, to get better at feeling, allowing our emotional and psychological selves to truly come alive.

Human beings have spent millennia searching for some way to feel more alive. Magic mushrooms, sex, music, moving very fast, going very high, going very far down, going very far away. When you put it like that, my choice of having psychoanalysis sounds rather tame.

But that is not my experience of it. I have had moments lying on my analyst’s couch when I have felt more alive even than when I saw a killer whale burst out of the ocean. It is no doubt revealing that this is the memory that came to mind.

My psychoanalyst helps me to understand what it is in myself that I am killing off, and she is helping me to recognise and give voice to these different parts of me, little by little, little feeling by little feeling, so that all of my mind can truly come alive. And it’s working.

I used to feel empty inside. It was terrifying. I carried around this disturbing sense of feeling like an adult-looking carapace with nothing underneath: I had this vision of myself as a wizened old tortoise with a thick, weighty dark shell, with nothing but wisps of smoke inside. That’s what led me to write my book about what it means to grow up, what it means to be a person. I don’t feel like that empty tortoise any more – or very rarely. I think it’s because I wasn’t actually empty, but I was working hard to empty out all the feelings that I didn’t want to know about. All the rage, pain, shame, guilt, envy, hate, terror. All the anger and the tears.

I have discovered that it is much less tiring to feel angry than to work so hard not to know about my anger. It is a better kind of tiring to cry than to tense every muscle in my face and jaw and throat to hold in my tears. So although this too is hard work, I’m going to keep trying to understand myself and my feelings. The alternative is too exhausting to contemplate.

* If you are not tired, please do not write to me to tell me this. It was a rhetorical question and I’m envious enough already. I know you well rested, perky people are out there; please just enjoy not being tired and eat your spirulina.

• Moya Sarner is an NHS psychotherapist and the author of When I Grow Up – Conversations With Adults in Search of Adulthood