Functioning with Fatigue

Today I suffered. With fatigue.

I was fine when I woke up; I made the boys their breakfasts, I cooked and ate my own breakfast. But somewhere around 9am, and my second cup of tea, I started to feel unaccountably weary. I just wanted to go back to bed and sleep. And sleep.

But I couldn’t. The two boys were looking at me to provide some kind of activity for them. It was a beautiful day; sunny, warm and very little wind. How could they miss out on that because I wanted to sleep? So I told them that I’d take them to the beach for a swim before lunch.

Somehow (after a strong coffee) we managed to get out of the house by around 10.30am. We walked to the beach. We found a spot that wasn’t too crowded and I dragged the buggy across the sand, near to the water’s edge. We put our towels out. The boys put their trunks on. And I did all this with my brain functioning like a zombie's (except instead of wanting to eat brains I wanted to get the boys to the beach).

Then we went for a swim – and the water was amazing.

And then, miraculously, I started to wake up. The fog started to leave my head and I was able to think about things other than sleeping or closing my eyes.

Whether it was the walk that did it, the sea or the joy of watching the boys playing in the sand and splashing in the water – I don’t know. But I woke up. And since then, the rest of the day has been fine. I managed to get two loads of washing washed and dried, ironed and put away. I made dinner for the boys (although one of them had a tantrum and went to bed early). I went for a short run, made dinner for Andy and me, washed up and then made Andy’s lunch for tomorrow. And now I’m writing this blog.

There were two notable factors about today’s weariness:

1) I wasn’t hungry, not at all, all day, and

2) Not at one single point ever did the thought of eating biscuits occur to me – a few weeks ago if I woke up feeling tired I would eat biscuits at the earliest opportunity.

So when fatigue strikes, my advice would be to just power on through. Don’t reach for easy way out and eat sugar. Maybe even have a cold shower. It might not seem like it while your brain is foggy, but you might just achieve quite a lot if you fight the urge to get back into bed and eat biscuits.

photo credit: dreaming in milan via photopin (license)