Coping with Exhaustion
We've all just been going through the motions lately
A brief note from Annabella:
You may have noticed that the subheader for the title of my blog includes “Semi-Regular”… which is unfortunately quite accurate. I have drafted three separate blog posts since my last publishing (almost 20 days ago) and none of them were right for the moment or genuine to how I’ve been feeling lately. They are all good pieces, just not for now.
I am SO tired! This feeling feels SO universal!
It’s senior fall at St.Paul’s and boy does local day school look appealing right about now. Between my extracurriculars— theatre company rehearsals six days a week, EcoFest approaching, the school newspaper, work for imminent EA and ED deadlines, etc.— and my actual required schoolwork, I’ve been resembling a walking, talking, doc-marten-clad corpse for the past week.
I’ve been working on writing a potential chapel talk since I’ve been back at school. “Working on” might be a generous phrase— in reality, I wrote about 400 words on a GoogleDoc two weeks ago and now I just think about what I could add to that Doc approximately four times a day. The chapel talk (note for non-SPS students: a chapel talk is essentially a speech given to our 750-person community at 8:30 a.m. nearly daily) revolves around the importance of writing and details the true value of articulating your feelings and beliefs through any form of writing.
In the speech, or in the mildly depressing GoogleDoc the idea currently lives in, I’ve written about procrastination and how as I become more swamped with work I become more creative with how I can avoid the work altogether. Right now, as I write this post, it’s 12:24 a.m. on a Wednesday morning (technically). Do I have more pressing matters to attend to? Duh.
This week I’ve been procrastinating my blog with college essays, but last week I was procrastinating college essays with the potential chapel talk, and the week prior I was avoiding all forms of required or graded writing with my blog post. I like to think that avoiding writing with more writing is still productive, and I might just be making this up to justify my procrastination problem, but I don’t think it counts as “slacking off.” That being said, this post is about the “slacking off” part of my life right now.
Exhaustion affects every single part of my life. I am not getting enough sleep, no one is, and I don’t have time to do the physical rest and relaxation during the day to compensate for the quantity of time asleep at night. Days don’t feel like single entities, life recently has felt like a continuous march of just going through the motions. How am I coping, you may ask? The answer: not very well.
Between unashamedly chugging caffeine like I need it to survive (I probably do at this point) and filling all idle time (there is little to none of this to begin with) with busy work or unnecessary chores, I am running on empty. I’ve been trying not to allow myself time to sit and let my head empty out— needless to say, none of this is sustainable.
This exhaustion is brutal and everpresent. I’d estimate that I’ve been living with about 30 hours of sleep debt for the past two weeks and there is no reprieve in sight. The worst part about this exhaustion, the exhaustion that causes me to be irritable, impatient, and short-tempered, is that it’s plaguing a massive proportion of the St. Paul’s community nowadays. This creates an environment that some might consider hostile, or maybe worse. I am a naturally impatient person, and I am also self-aware enough to know that I can be a pain in the ass sometimes, especially when I’m exhausted. But now that the vast majority of my peers are in the same boat that I can find myself in naturally, the campus has been feeling quite tense.
If I had foolproof advice on how to combat the curtness, irritability, and real delirium that comes along with true, senior-year exhaustion, I might be less curt, irritable, and delirius right about now! That being said, I have found a few ways to cope and to make the most of a brutal, yet somewhat unavoidable, predicament:
Sleep!
Currently unrealistic, but sleeping is obviously the best way to nurse yourself back to a more normal or healthy-seeming zombie. This one isn’t happening any time soon though.
Self-awareness of the exhaustion, of the negative effects the exhaustion causes, and of the expanse of how many people around you feel the same way.
The High School Musical idea that “We’re All in this Together” is great and genuinely affects how you treat others around you. Unfortunately, yet truthfully, practicing kindness and consideration can be difficult in exhaustion, it’s much easier to recognize relatability and unite towards the common goal: get out of the exhaustion whilst avoiding as many uncomfortable confrontations as possible.
Recognize that many of your friends and peers are also exhausted, and chances are, they don’t want problems with you just as much as you don’t want problems with them.
Nourishing your body.
Sleep, water, food, and some amount of physical activity are required to survive. If you’re missing one of them, it’s typically a safe bet to really drill the others more than usual. When you aren’t sleeping, you have to be eating nourishing meals and drinking a healthy quantity of water. Food isn’t just something you eat to stop yourself from being hungry, food is actually fuel and will give you energy! Additionally, I know nothing sounds worse than moving your body more than is absolutely necessary when you are in a state of exhaustion. However, moving your body will do two great things for you in this state:
a) It will force you to realize how slumped you are and you might even come to your senses and get some sleep.
b) Moving your body will tire you out in the long run. If you’re like me, it’s not the time you get to bed that’s the problem, it’s the actual falling asleep part that is the most treacherous and difficult. Physical activity during the day will push you over the line and it is likely that you fall asleep a bit faster.
All in all, we should all shut our laptops, take our shoes off, and pass out. But while that isn’t working, you have to put in the extra effort to make your exhaustion a bit more sustainable and pleasant (if that’s possible). Stay healthy everyone, I’ll be back with regularly scheduled societal analyses after I get a few Zzz’s in.
