Stop Fighting Yourself
You made dinner and the busiest parts of your day are over. You get ready to settle down. From the outside, everything looks calm and relaxed, but you feel restless in a way that does not quite make sense. You pick up your phone and start scrolling to relax. Yet, you don't feel better.
At some point, a familiar thought appears: I did not really do that much today. Why do I feel so exhausted?
If you have had that experience, you are not alone. And the answer has less to do with your effort and more to do with your internal load.
A Day of Invisible Shifts
Think about an ordinary day. You wake up and glance at your phone. A message. A headline. A reminder. Nothing dramatic—just information entering your awareness before your feet even hit the floor.
As the day unfolds, your attention keeps shifting:
- Work tasks.
- Emails and messages.
- The background noise of social feeds.
- And constant micro-decisions of what to ignore.
None of this feels overwhelming on its own. But together, these shifts ask your body and mind to re-orient thousands of times. Every shift in attention has a metabolic price. You do not feel the strain in the moment, but you notice the exhaustion later, when the bill finally comes due.
Your attention has been pulled in too many directions. It does not instantly return to a calm center. Picking up your phone to distract yourself can feel a solution, but it actually introduces new information to a system that is already overdrawn. It is like trying to pay off a debt by taking out another loan.
Moving from Force to Willingness
When you find yourself struggling to focus, your first instinct is usually to push harder. But you cannot get more power out of a battery that is already drained.
Instead of forcing your way through, try a different approach.
Stop Fighting Yourself
When your mind starts to drift or you feel a sudden itch to check your phone, that is your brain’s way of saying it is tired.
If you fight that feeling with frustration, you are just adding more work to an already exhausted system. Now, your brain has to manage the original task plus the stress of being angry at itself.
Willingness is about dropping that internal argument. It is about being honest about how much energy you actually have left.
Make an Agreement with Yourself
Instead of trying to feel differently, try to simply notice where you are. Make a small internal agreement with yourself:
- I am willing to feel tired. You are stopping the fight. You are acknowledging that your energy is low, and you are going to work with what you have left instead of pretending you are at full strength.
- I am willing to feel the urge to check my phone without actually doing it. When that restless feeling hits, don’t try to bury it. Just notice it. It is like a temporary itch. You can feel it without letting it pull you away from what you are doing.
Reclaiming your Energy
When you stop fighting your own fatigue, a surprising thing happens. The energy you were spending on being frustrated suddenly becomes available again. You are no longer divided. Even if you only have a little bit of fuel left in the tank, all of it is now moving in the same direction.
A. Karacay
The Takeaway
Mental exhaustion hits when your brain's been grinding hard for too long while getting slammed with way too much information, notifications, and stimulation all at once. Your attention isn't infinite — think of it like a phone battery with a real, limited charge.
Stay curious!
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