It's only in the past decade that scientists have been able to dig deeper into these other facets of fatigue, thanks to advances in imaging technology and biochemical assays that allow us to study real-time changes in the brain, says Whittemore. "It's easy to understand and people have been studying muscle fatigue for a long time."īut fatigue can also encompass a cognitive and emotional aspect – which explains why when we're tired, we might experience brain fog, find it a slog to get things done, or snap at those around us. "That's normal physiological fatigue," explains Vicky Whittemore, a program director at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, who studies the biology of fatigue. There's physical fatigue, for instance, the kind you might feel after a long hike or a particularly strenuous session in the gym. "And there's lots of ways that we can feel tired." "It's sort of a catch-all concept of feeling tired," says Christopher Barnes, professor of organisational behaviour and management at the University of Washington in Seattle, who studies how sleep deprivation affects the workplace. "The two are interrelated, of course, but fatigue is much more multidimensional," she says. Tiredness is different from sleepiness, which is "more a propensity to fall asleep", explains Adam. Even pinning down a definition has been tricky. The condition is so frequent that the National Health Service even has its own acronym for it: TATT (Tired All The Time).īut for all this ubiquity, scientists' understanding of fatigue – what causes it, how it changes our bodies and brains, as well as how best to treat it – is incredibly limited. Tiredness is "a very, very common" complaint among the patients, says Rosalind Adam, a family physician who has been practising in Aberdeen, Scotland, for more than a decade. Women were more likely to be fatigued than men, regardless of whether they had children or not - a finding that was echoed across multiple studies. While a 2022 YouGov poll of nearly 1,700 people found that one in eight UK adults were tired "all the time", with another quarter knackered "most of the time". In the US, 44% of the more than 1,000 adults surveyed by the National Sleep Foundation in 2019 said they felt sleepy between two to four days every week. According to a 2023 meta-analysis that examined 91 studies across three continents, one in every five adults worldwide experienced general fatigue lasting up to six months, despite having no underlying medical conditions. Why, then, does being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed elude me most mornings, despite sufficient sleep? I am early mid-life, exercise regularly, and am, as far as I know, healthy (knock on wood). A half-hour of fiction reading follows, before turning the lights out at roughly 11pm.Įight-and-a-half hours later, my alarm rings and I wake up feeling…tired. I leave my phone in the dining room where it stays overnight, then retire to my bedroom – one that's quiet, dimly-lit, and of perfect Goldilocks temperature – to scribble briefly in my gratitude journal. I get ready for bed well before I begin to feel tired: changing into my pyjamas, cleaning my teeth, and doing an overly elaborate skin care routine. On most days, I'm a stickler for routine, especially when it comes to sleep.
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