When ‘I’m Fine’ Starts to Feel Like a Full-Time Job

There is a particular kind of tiredness that sleep doesn’t seem to touch. You can go to bed early. Cancel something at the weekend. Promise yourself that next week will be quieter. And still wake on Monday morning with the peculiar feeling that somebody has been using your body overnight.

You get up anyway. Of course you do. There are lunches to make, emails to answer, people waiting for things, appointments, washing, deadlines, parents, children, colleagues, dogs standing hopefully beside the back door. So you carry on. From the outside, you might even look rather good at it.

This is one of the strange things about burnout. We tend to imagine it as collapse. Someone crying at their desk. Someone unable to get out of bed. A dramatic moment when the machinery finally stops. Sometimes it is like that. But sometimes the machinery keeps going. It just begins making noises.

Perhaps you notice you have less patience. The smallest request feels disproportionately irritating. Somebody asks a perfectly reasonable question and a part of you thinks, Could everybody please stop needing things from me for approximately six months?

Perhaps you stop looking forward to things. You still arrange them. You still attend them. You may even enjoy yourself once you’re there. But beforehand, everything feels like another item on a list. Even the nice things. Especially the nice things, sometimes, because now apparently you have to enjoy yourself as well.

You might find yourself sitting in the car for a few minutes after arriving home. Not doing anything. Not scrolling. Not listening to the radio. Just sitting. A tiny room with four doors where, briefly, nobody can ask you a question. And if somebody asked how you were, you would probably say:

“Fine. Just tired.”

Because fine is useful. Fine gets you through conversations. Fine doesn't worry anyone. Fine doesn't require an explanation you may not yet know how to give. But sometimes “I’m fine” becomes another job we are doing.

When coping becomes the problem

Many of us become extremely good at coping. We learn to push through. Be useful. Be reliable. Keep everybody happy. Get on with it. Don’t make a fuss. These qualities can take us a long way in life. Until they take us too far.

Because the ability to tolerate pressure does not mean the pressure is harmless.

And being able to function does not necessarily mean you are well. Sometimes the first sign that something needs attention isn't that your life falls apart. It's that you no longer feel particularly present inside it. You are completing your life rather than inhabiting it.

What counselling can offer

Counselling isn't necessarily about arriving with a crisis or knowing exactly what is wrong. Sometimes people come because they know only this: I don't feel like myself.

Or: Nothing terrible has happened. I just can't keep doing this. That is enough.

Therapy can offer something increasingly rare: a place where you don't have to perform being okay. A place to notice what you have been carrying, what you have become accustomed to, and why your own needs may have ended up permanently at the bottom of the list.

We can begin to untangle the difference between what genuinely has to be done and what you have learned to believe you must do. And perhaps listen to the part of you that has been trying, rather inconveniently, to get your attention.

You don't have to wait until you stop functioning. Sometimes the quieter thought; I don't want to feel like this anymore, is reason enough to begin.