Nothing heavy happened and you are wrecked. The tiredness is real, and it is usually not about the tasks.
You get to the end of the day and you are finished. Not pleasantly tired. Hollowed out. And when you look back at the day, you cannot find the reason. Some calls. Some messages. Nothing went wrong. Nothing was hard in any way you could describe to someone else without sounding precious about it. This is one of the most common things people bring me, and one of the most commonly dismissed, usually by the person experiencing it.
Let me say that first, because most people arrive having already decided they have no right to it. They compare themselves to someone with a harder job, or to their parents, and conclude that the exhaustion is a character defect. Then they add guilt to the tiredness, which does not help the tiredness.
Not the tasks. The management around the tasks. Deciding what to do next, and next after that, all day. Reading the room in every conversation. Adjusting your register between four different people in an hour. Holding the awareness of the things you are not doing while you do the thing you are doing. Being slightly available at all times to anyone who might need something. None of that appears on a list of what you did. All of it costs.
There is a version of this that comes up often enough that it deserves naming. Some people are, in every room they are in, the one who manages the temperature. The one who notices someone is upset. The one who smooths the thing over, who takes the difficult call, who does not make a fuss because making a fuss would create work for someone else. If that is you, then a great deal of your day is unpaid labour that nobody can see, including you. And the exhaustion at the end of it is not mysterious at all. It is a bill.
The advice is usually rest, or boundaries. Rest helps and does not resolve it, because you cannot rest your way out of a pattern that resumes the moment you get up. Boundaries is decent advice delivered uselessly. Nobody who does this does it because they have not heard of boundaries. They do it because at some point it became how they secure their place in a room, and the prospect of stopping feels less like relief and more like risk. Until that part is looked at, the advice is just one more thing to feel bad about not managing.
Where you learned it. Usually there was a family, and in that family a role, and the role worked well enough that you kept it. And what you think would happen if you did less of it. People are often quite specific here once they let themselves answer, and the answer is rarely what they expected. That is the part that shifts things. Not the schedule.
Written by Satlaj Sachan, a counsellor in Bengaluru working Book a first conversation.