Okay, so you’re keeping dedicated notes and you’ve kind of figured out that there are three basic flavours of Being Stuck In Bed that have nothing to do with lazy or sick: fatigue, mental health, or neurodivergent symptoms (including for people who aren’t typically neurodivergent).
Today we’re going to tackle the fatigue one, and hooboy am I annoyed at this, because it’s eating my life right now. I have a pretty clear history of responding to all and any medication long term with *FATIGUE, ALL THE TIRED, WE MUST DO THE SLEEPS*, including things as supposedly innocuous as asthma preventers and the pill. I’m on just a few more things than that at the moment, thanks cancer, and as a result I have, like, four hours of brain power/physical energy per day tops. That’s for doing literally everything that requires more exertion than sitting on my comfy armchair watching YouTube or reading a lighthearted, non-brainy book. Le sigh.
However! It DOES mean that I am starting to get more experience with differentiating between needing to stay in bed because I’m tired, and all the other reasons. Historically, I have been excellent at ignoring my body, as I think many of us in modern capitalism are (or maybe we just always have been?); our tendency is to push, then push some more, and then when we feel the need to rest we don’t, we just go do something different. Here, my post from last year on inertia vs rest says it brilliantly:
We’re badly primed to understand [rest] in modern western capitalist society, which demands we give account (usually in monetary terms) for every second of our days.
We know we’re SUPPOSED to rest, but most of us are, let’s face it, really BAD at that. We rest, but by doing other things. We rest, but by ticking the optional things off our to-do list. We rest, but by doom-scrolling.
Actually, we don’t rest at all: we merely take a break from Things We Usually Do.
And so we have, most of us, spent our lives gaslighting ourselves out of our need to rest. No, I’m not really THAT tired, surely I can do one more. No, I don’t really need to go to bed NOW, surely I can do one more. Etc etc and so on.
So how do you know if your resistance to getting out of bed is driven by a need for rest? Usually for me this is more of a hindsight thing. When I’m stuck in bed because I’m exhausted (even if I can’t sense that on a conscious level), getting up and doing things makes me feel specifically, measurably worse (even if only a little). Lying in bed, although it might drive anxiety if I’m supposed to be out of bed because of real or perceived expectations, won’t make me feel physically worse – or, usually, even mentally. It might make me feel impatient, but it doesn’t increase the feeling of bedrot. And there’s a natural end to it, which might be a few hours or sometimes a few days (weeks, months *stabs my current fatigue*), but it does, fundamentally, end without you having done anything extra other than indulge in it.
It also doesn’t tend to drastically impact my night time sleep, although I know people can find this one varies wildly, so if it does impact your night time sleep, try to see if it’s mood- or brain-related first, but it doesn’t necessarily mean by default that it’s not fatigue.
With this one, again, if I push myself to get out of bed and go do things, I find my capacity and pace gradually slow until I find myself doing numbing and distracting things (like scrolling social media or doing mindless, repetitive admin tasks) because my brain is tired but I’m refusing to let it rest. If this is the case, I need to go back to bed, regardless of the time of day. (Even ten minutes lying flat on my back on the floor in a booked meeting room with calming music on can help if this happens while I’m at work!)
Of course, that doesn’t help you get out of bed, but that’s kind of the point: if it’s fatigue, you’re not supposed to get out of bed. You’re supposed to keep resting until getting out of bed naturally feels easier.
And of course of course, that’s easier said than done, because most of us have these pesky things called ‘responsibilities’ that mean we can’t just randomly decide to take four days to spend in bed so our body can get the rest it needs. I say this with all the love in my heart, though, having been through hell and back with burnout myself in the last few years and now having a Very Broken Body, if you’re finding yourself with this kind of Can’t Get Out Of Bed and you don’t currently have time to give your body the rest it needs, you better bleeping well schedule some in asap, because if you don’t, you WILL eventually hit a wall and break.
Ask me how I know.
(And yes, I absolutely KNOW that if you are the kind of person to whom this applies then you are going to be reading this going NUH UH, NOT ME, I *LEGIT* DON’T HAVE TIME TO REST AND I *LEGIT* HAVE TO KEEP PUSHING AND I *LEGIT* CAN and, like, literally nothing I say can dissuade you from clinging to that mentality, which I know, because BEEN THERE, but omg again with all the love in my heart I am smacking you on the head right now because I don’t care who you are and how strong and busy you are and neither does burnout: IT. WILL. COME. FOR. YOU.)
And if you can’t schedule an epic session of ‘time off’, you need to do the exceptionally hard work of streamlining your life: you’re living at 100% capacity 100% of the time right now, which means you don’t have slack when things go wrong or your body needs a break, and you need to be utterly ruthless about clearing stuff out of your life until you’re living it at no more than 75%, max.
That’s hard.
It’s hard and it suck and you will fight it tooth and nail screaming blue murder, throwing the most epic tantrum of tantrums, crying BUT I CAN’T, THERE’S NOTHING I CAN CUT.
Yeah, well, congratulations, you’re choosing to cut out your health. Sorry, but that’s just how it is. The energy bill must be paid eventually, and you can do 100% for five years (or ten, or fifteen) and then collapse in a heap and do nothing for the equivalent amount of time you should have rested for, only now you’ll have health issues to go with it, or you can ruthlessly cut to 75% and actually have a life that’s sustainable.
If I sound cranky and mean about this, I am. I broke my body/brain. I do not want you to break yours. But I know full well that if you are the person who most needs to hear this from me, you are the person who is most likely to refuse to listen. This makes me cranky. I am cranky about this.
So, in summary, the easiest and simplest reason you might be stuck in bed is simply that your body needs it. Tough luck. You’re just gonna have to deal with it and enjoy binging TV or books or engaging in some good ol’ fashioned wall staring until your brain/body recover. Do the best you can around your obligate responsibilities and have patience. You’ll be okay again soon.
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