Some have tried sleep trackers, magnesium supplements, no screens after nine. They're doing everything right on paper, and they're still exhausted.That kind of tiredness is a particular experience. It's not about sleep debt. It sits somewhere else.

When sleep stops being the answer

There's a difference between being tired because you haven't slept enough and being tired in a way that sleep doesn't seem to touch. The second one tends to confuse people, because sleep is what we're told to fix first. If you're still waking up exhausted after eight hours, it's easy to conclude something is wrong with your sleep, and start troubleshooting from there.

But sometimes the issue isn't the sleep itself. Sometimes the body is carrying something it doesn't get to put down at night.

This shows up in a few different ways. People describe waking up and feeling like they haven't been away. Or feeling okay first thing, then hitting a wall by mid-morning. Or getting through the day on what feels like fumes, then lying awake when they finally have the chance to rest. The details vary but there's often a shared quality to it - a flatness, a heaviness, a sense of operating slightly below full capacity for a long time.

What the body is doing when it can't restore

Without going too far into the physiology, rest only restores when the nervous system is able to shift into a genuinely low-alert state. That shift happens less readily when someone has been under sustained pressure - not necessarily crisis-level stress, but the kind that accumulates quietly. Ongoing demands, unresolved situations, a background hum of worry or vigilance.

The body doesn't always know the difference between a practical stressor and an emotional one. It responds to both.

So if someone is managing something difficult - a relationship under strain, a job that asks too much, grief that hasn't had space to move through, a long period of feeling unsettled - the system stays partially activated even in rest. Sleep happens, but full recovery doesn't, because the body is still, in some sense, on duty.

This isn't a flaw. It's the system doing what it's designed to do. It just becomes a problem when that state persists without relief.

The things people don't always connect

Chronic tiredness often doesn't arrive in isolation. In practice, it tends to appear alongside other things that people don't always connect to it.

• A low appetite, or the opposite - eating more than usual without feeling satisfied
• Reduced tolerance for noise, for company, for anything that requires input
• Difficulty concentrating, or a sense that tasks are taking longer than they should
• Emotional flatness, or emotions that feel closer to the surface than normal
• A loss of interest in things that usually provide some pleasure or relief
• Physical tension that doesn't shift - particularly in the jaw, shoulders, or chest

None of these are necessarily dramatic. Individually, they're easy to dismiss. But together they can point towards a system that's been running on a kind of reserve for a while.

People sometimes describe it as feeling like they're going through the motions. Not depressed exactly - they can function, they're showing up - but not quite present either.

The difference between rest and recovery

Rest, in the passive sense, is the absence of activity. Recovery is something more specific - it requires the body and nervous system to actually downregulate. That process needs conditions.

It needs safety, broadly understood. Not just physical safety, but a felt sense that things are okay, or okay enough. It needs some margin - not having to immediately gear up for the next thing. And for a lot of people, it needs some form of processing: a way for the emotional and psychological load to move, rather than sitting in the body accumulating.

This is part of why holidays sometimes don't work the way people hope. The first few days can feel worse before they feel better - the body finally lets go of its alertness and exhaustion surfaces properly. And sometimes a week isn't long enough to genuinely come down from months of accumulated pressure.

It's also why doing more restful activities - lying on the sofa, watching something low-effort - doesn't always produce the relief people expect. Rest in that sense is passive. Recovery is something the body has to be able to access.

What tends to help

This isn't a list of fixes, because there isn't a universal one. But there are things I see make a difference in practice.

Having somewhere to put things. Whether that's therapy, a consistent and honest conversation with someone you trust, or something like EFT - having a route for the emotional content tends to matter. When things are being held without anywhere to go, the body holds them too.

Working with the body directly. Acupuncture and reflexology can support the nervous system in settling in a way that's not really replicable through will alone. Some people are sceptical about this, which is understandable, but the experience of it tends to be fairly clear. The body has its own routes into regulation that don't go through thinking.

Reducing the load where possible. This sounds obvious, but it's often not where people start. They try to find ways to cope better with the same amount, rather than asking whether the amount itself is the problem.

Taking seriously what's unresolved. This is the harder one. Chronic tiredness sometimes has a fairly clear emotional source - something that hasn't been spoken about, worked through, or grieved. The tiredness is, in part, the cost of carrying it.

When it's worth getting support

If this has been going on for a while - months rather than weeks - and the usual approaches haven't shifted it, it's worth taking seriously. Not because something is necessarily wrong medically, though ruling that out with your GP is sensible, but because the longer these patterns persist, the more ingrained they can become.

A lot of the people I work with come in thinking they just need to sleep better, or manage their stress better, or push through a difficult period. Often there's more to unpick than that. The tiredness turns out to be signalling something the rest of life has been too busy to address.

That conversation is available here if it's useful. Therapy, acupuncture, and the other approaches I offer can all be starting points - there's no one route in, and they can work well alongside each other.

You can get in touch to ask questions or arrange an initial session at a pace that suits you.