People talk about tiredness as if it’s one thing.
Get more sleep, they say, as though that’s a switch I’ve somehow forgotten to flip.
The trouble is, mine has had several different causes over the years, and it took me most of my adult life to realise I wasn’t dealing with one problem. I was dealing with a handful of them, all piling on top of each other.
For most of my forties, I had an answer ready whenever anyone asked why I was so tired. My thyroid. It had come back off on a test at some point, so that became the explanation, the whole explanation, filed and closed. It made sense, and once something makes sense you stop digging any further. I didn’t think to ask what else might be going on underneath it. Why would I? I already had my answer.
Then at 48, I was diagnosed with cancer.
Somewhere among the appointments and conversations that followed, it emerged, almost as an afterthought, that I’d already been through the menopause. Nobody had told me. I hadn’t clocked it myself — I’d been so busy assigning every symptom to my thyroid that an entire hormonal upheaval had apparently happened underneath me without so much as a formal announcement.
So there I was: thyroid still doing whatever it was doing, menopause already come and gone in the background, and now cancer treatment about to add itself to the pile.
I want to be careful here, because I don’t say this lightly: cancer treatment fatigue is not the tiredness I’d been living with for years, and putting them in the same sentence feels almost dishonest.
Ordinary tired is wanting an early night. Treatment fatigue was something else — it felt like someone had quietly gone round the back and switched off the power source. My body went heavy. My brain went slow. Rest didn’t fix it, which was the most disorientating part, because rest is meant to be the whole point of being tired in the first place. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t had it. I’m not sure I’ve ever managed to.
I thought recovery would be the finish line. In some ways it was. In others, it introduced me to something I never saw coming.
My eyes went dry and sore — properly sore, the kind where keeping them open felt like a task in itself. Reading became work. The television became work. Even just sitting in a room, looking at it, started to feel like an effort I hadn’t budgeted for.
The strange part was that the rest of me sometimes still had energy to spare. My mind would want to get on with the day, genuinely want to. I’d make plans in the morning and mean every one of them. My eyes had other ideas, and when your eyes are sore every waking minute, they bring along a completely different kind of tired that has nothing to do with willpower.
If I had a pound for every time someone told me to “just get more sleep,” I could have funded my own research trial into what was actually wrong with me.
Here’s the part people don’t factor in: I’ve had insomnia for most of my adult life. This isn’t a new habit brought on by stress or too much scrolling. Sleep has never been something I could simply decide to do. So when someone cheerfully suggests an earlier night, there’s a part of me that wants to ask if they’d also recommend I grow a few inches while I’m at it.
I wasn’t up watching box sets until 2am out of choice. I was lying there in the dark, exhausted, waiting for sleep to turn up. Those are not the same thing, and no amount of well-meant advice closes that gap.
So I tried nearly everything else instead. Sleeping tablets — for far longer than I should have been on them, if I’m honest. Supplements. Vitamins. Energy shots that promised the earth and delivered a headache. CBD oil. Magnesium. I kept the bed for sleep and nothing but sleep, screens banished well before bedtime, all the sensible advice followed to the letter. Somewhere along the way I could probably have funded a small holiday with what I spent chasing a proper night’s sleep that never quite arrived in full.
None of it was a miracle. Some of it helped a little. Nothing fixed the whole thing, because there wasn’t one thing to fix.
"Nobody tells you that exhaustion can become a timeline of your life. I can almost mark the years by the different kinds of tiredness I've carried."
The hardest lesson wasn’t finding an answer, because I’m not sure I fully have one, even now. It was learning that my body wasn’t the enemy in all this.
For years I treated my own exhaustion like a discipline problem — push through it, keep going, sort it out later. Now I think of it differently. Exhaustion is information. It’s my body telling me it’s fighting something, or recovering from something, or simply asking for a bit of what I hand out to everyone else without a second thought.
I’ve always been much better at looking after other people than looking after myself. Taking, taking, taking from your own reserves works for a while. Eventually the bill turns up, and your body collects, whether you’ve got the time for it or not.
So if you’re tired and you don’t fully know why — it might not be one thing either. Mine was never one thing. It was years of different things, layered on top of each other, each one arriving before the last had properly left. Looking back, I’m honestly amazed I wasn’t more tired than I was.
The honest ending is that I still don’t have all the answers.
I’m still tired more often than I’d like to be. I’m still trying to work out what helps and what doesn’t. Some days are better than others.
But after all these years, I’ve made peace with one thing: not every problem can be solved by trying harder.
For now, that’s enough.
And if science, medicine or blind luck ever delivers a miracle cure to my doorstep, I’ll write about it immediately. You’ll be the first to know.
2 thoughts on “Designing for the Modern Era”
This modern aesthetic is absolutely stunning! The subtle cream backgrounds paired with bold navy headings bring such a refined, professional vibe. Looking forward to implementing some of these spacing guidelines in my next layout.
Agreed, Sarah! The 'Midlife Modern' tokens strike the perfect balance between organic warmth and structured typography. The 8px border-radius makes interactive elements feel friendly but still highly premium.
