If you're tired all the time.
And you cannot work out why this video is going to change how you see it.
I have lived with chronic fatigue my whole life.
That meant I had far less energy than everyone around me.
And I still had to build a full life.
It took me 20 years to learn how.
And what I found is that being tired is almost never about how much you do.
It is about a handful of specific things that quietly drain you that nobody ever taught to see.
So in the next 20 minutes,
I'm going to give you the six most important ones.
Everyone comes with the science behind it.
And actually what to do about it.
Most people only learn this after they burn out.
You are about to get them now.
A quick word on why I can teach this.
I'm a Burnout Recovery Educator.
My course have reached more than 35,
000 people on Insight Timer,
The world's leading wellness app,
Where I publish under the name Hélène Mouton.
And I have helped more than 3,
000 people with their exhaustion.
But I did not learn any of this from a book.
I learned it because I had no choice.
When your energy is limited from the start,
You cannot fake it and you cannot push through it.
So you are forced to find what actually works.
Let's get into it.
So here is the first thing,
And it is the one that made everything else possible.
Let me take you back as a child.
I woke up exhausted every single morning.
I would cry before school because I was so tired and I could not explain why.
At school I could not keep up and my teachers had a word for that.
Lazy.
At home,
When I tried to talk about how tired I was,
I was told to be strong because in my family,
Being strong was the rule.
I could not go out with my friends the way everyone else did because one evening out would empty me for days.
On top of the fatigue,
I was introverted and I had what I now understand were the signs of inattentive ADHD,
Undiagnosed.
So I grew up feeling like I was always behind before I had even started.
Feel like simply being tired.
Most of the time I felt like a fight going on inside me and there were times it tipped into something close to despair.
Then I became an adult and started working and it got worse in a very specific way.
I could do the work but the work was all I could do.
I would work and then I would collapse into bed to recover.
Work,
Shower,
Eat,
Bed,
That was my whole life.
There was no room left for anything that actually makes a life worth living.
And one day,
I reached a point where I said,
That's enough.
Not enough in a defeated way,
Enough in a decided way.
I wanted a life that meant something,
As normal a life as I could build with the body I actually have.
So I made a decision that changed everything.
I decided to stop fighting the fact that this was my reality and to accept it so I could finally work with it instead of against it.
Now listen carefully,
Because this is exactly where people get it wrong.
I did not give up.
I gave in.
And those are not the same thing.
Giving up means you stop trying and you let it win.
Giving in means you accept what is true so you can stop wasting your strength on denying it and put that strength into doing something about it.
I was not surrendering to a smaller life.
I had decided I was going to win on terms that actually fit me.
And here is the science underneath what happened next.
Because it is real.
When you spend your days resisting something you cannot change,
Your brain treats that resistance as an ongoing threat.
You replay it,
You argue with it in your head,
You brace against it,
And every time you do,
Your body releases stress hormones and holds you in a state of low alert.
That runs in the background all day,
Quietly burning energy on top of everything else you're doing.
So the day I stopped fighting the fact of my condition,
A whole layer of exhaustion lifted before I had changed one other thing.
And for the first time,
I had energy to spare.
I put every bit of it into understanding how my own energy worked so I could manage it.
That is also where something else was born,
Something I now call reverse skills.
When one thing is far harder for you than for everyone else around you,
You are forced to get good at things other people never have to think about.
Because I could never count on having energy.
I had to become genuinely excellent at planning it,
Protecting it,
Simplifying my life,
And designing my days around it.
Those are real valuable skills,
And I only have them because I had no choice but to build them.
So the first lesson is this.
Stop pouring energy into fighting what you cannot control,
Whether this is a health condition,
A decision already made,
Or a situation you cannot change this month.
Accept what is true and spend that energy you get back on the part you can actually change.
That one shift gives you back more than almost anything else you would ever do.
That brings me to the second thing I learned,
And it is the one I most want you to hear if you are struggling right now.
You can still build a real life.
You can hold a career,
Run a business,
Do work that matters,
Even if it costs you more than it costs the people around you.
But only if you stop trying to do it their way.
Here is the shift.
Start seeing yourself as a project you have to manage on purpose instead of a person who is supposed to just run on default like everyone else.
Because you do not run on default and the moment you 3 accept that,
You can build a version of success that is designed around you,
Rather than one you keep failing to copy.
In practice,
That means a few specific things.
First,
Stop seeking validation from other people about the way you live.
Their approval costs you energy you cannot spare.
Second,
Stop trying to look normal.
Trying to appear as though you have the same capacity as everyone else is one of the most expensive things you can do because you spend real energy on the performance and have less left for your actual life.
Third,
Build your own world as much as you are able,
Where you are the one who decides how things run,
At what pace,
And in what order.
Your path doesn't have to look like anyone else's,
And honestly,
It should not,
Because it has to fit a body and a mind that are not like anyone else's.
And if some part of you hears that and thinks it means settling for less,
Look at who is actually at the top,
A striking number of the most successful founders alive.
Are neurodivergent and they did not succeed in spite of it.
They built their success around it.
Richard Branson has dyslexia and ADHD,
And he openly credits them for the way he thinks and builds companies.
Elon Musk has said publicly that he has Asperger's.
Bill Gates has said that if he were a child today,
He would very likely be diagnosed on the autism spectrum.
These are not people who force themselves to be normal.
They found a way of working that fit their brain and they went all in on it.
That is the whole point.
You are not trying to become someone with more energy.
You are learning to get the very most out of the energy and the mind you actually have at your own pace.
And when you do that,
The constant exhaustion of pretending falls away.
And what is left is yours to build with.
The third thing I learned follows straight from that,
And it is backed by decades of research.
So let me give you the research first.
There is a very well-known model in workplace psychology called the demand control model,
First laid out by a researcher named Robert Karasek.
What he found is that the thing that breaks people is not simply how much work they have.
It is high demand combined with low control.
When a lot is being asked of you and you have little say over how and when you do it,
That exact combination is what produces burnout.
And the research is clear that the control matters more than the sheer size of the workload.
And I felt this on my own body long before I read the science.
When I started out,
I worked for someone else's timetable.
Someone else decided which hours I worked and what I did inside them.
For me because my energy is not the same at every hour.
There are hours where my mind is clear and sharp and hours where there is almost nothing there.
Being told to do demanding work in my empty hours and to sit at a desk during my good hours,
Doing things that did not need them,
Wasted the little energy I had.
So in the end,
I built my own work so I could line my day up with my energy instead of against it.
But here is the part that matters for you because most people cannot simply live and work for themselves and you do not have to.
You almost always have far more control than you are using.
Let me be specific about what that looks like inside a normal job.
You can change your start time.
If your mind is sharpest between 8 and 11 in the morning and you do not start your real work until 10,
You have given away your two best hours before you sat down.
Asking to start earlier or to protect that early window is often the highest value change you can make.
Easiest for an employer to say yes to.
You can protect blocks of time,
As for one or two 90-minute windows in your week with no meetings blocked out in your calendar for the work that surely needs a clear head.
Treat them like real appointments that cannot be moved.
You can batch your meetings if your meetings are scattered across every single morning.
They are cutting your best hours into fragments too small to think in.
Ask to group them into set afternoons and keep your mornings whole.
You can move the recurring ones.
That standing weekly meeting sitting right in your sharpest window is costing your employer your best thinking.
Ask to move it to the afternoon when your brain is naturally lower anyway.
And you can set expectations on your replies.
You do not owe an instant answer to every message.
Tell people the times you check and the times you respond and you win back long unbroken stretches of focus without anyone actually losing anything.
None of these need a new job or a difficult confrontation.
They usually need one honest conversation,
And every one of them hands you back the thing the research says protects you most,
Which is control over when and how you spend your energy.
The fourth thing I learned is that tiredness is not one thing.
This is the one that changed the most for me.
Because for years I would be exhausted,
I would sleep more and nothing would improve and I could not work out why.
Here is why you do not run on one kind of energy,
You run on six different kinds and each one drains from different things and refills in a completely different way.
Let me take you through all six because you cannot fix what you cannot name.
So the first is physical energy.
This is your body.
It drains from effort,
From being on your feet,
From poor sleep.
And this is the one,
The only one that sleep genuinely refills.
In the deep stage,
Late in the night,
When your body repairs tissue,
Releases most of its growth hormone for the day and services your human system.
The second is mental energy.
This is your focus and your decision.
Every single choice pulls from it.
From the big strategic ones down to what to reply to and what to have for lunch and after a morning full of decisions.
Most people are already running low.
Sleep does not refill this one.
What refills it is fewer decisions and a break from taking in new information.
The third is sensory energy and this is the one almost nobody knows about and the one draining most people,
The most.
And it is the energy your brain spends processing everything you see and hear.
Screens,
Notifications,
Noise,
Bright light,
Every one of those is input your brain has to handle.
This is exactly why you can sit at the desk all day,
Do nothing physical at all,
And still feel wrecked by the evening.
And you cannot feel this thing going down the way you feel tired legs.
So it empties without you ever noticing.
It refills with less input,
Not different input.
The fourth is emotional energy.
This drains from feeling things and from managing how you feel,
Staying calm when you are not.
Holding it together,
Carrying other people's mood all day.
If you are the strong one that everyone leans on,
This tank empties faster and quietly.
It refills through honesty with one safe person,
Not through pushing it all down.
The fifth is creative energy.
This is where your ideas and your problem-solving live.
It drains when you are always producing and never taking anything new in,
And it drops hard under stress.
It fills with input,
Not output.
A work,
Art,
Being in nature,
Something with no goal attached to it.
And the sixth is social energy.
For some people,
This drains from too much contact,
From being on for people all day long.
For others,
It drains from too little.
From walking alone with no real connection.
It refills with the opposite of whichever way yours run.
Now here is why this matters so much in real life.
A full night of sleep only refills the first one,
The physical.
It leaves the other five exactly where they are.
That is why you can sleep a solid eight hours and still wake up tired because the tank that was actually empty was never touched by sleep in the first place.
So the whole shift,
The thing that changed my life is this.
Stop asking,
Why am I tired?
Start asking which of these six tanks is actually low.
A day of screens empties your sensory tank and the fix for that is quiet,
Not a nap.
A day of hard decisions empties your mental tank and the fix is fewer decisions,
Not another coffee.
Name the right tank and for the first time you can actually refill it.
The fifth thing I learned is that when you do your work matters more than how hard you push at it.
Your brain does not run at the same level all day.
It runs on a clock and that clock is real and has been measured.
About 35 minutes after you wake,
Your body releases a surge of the hormone cortisol up to 75% above its normal level.
People think of cortisol as a stress hormone,
But first thing in the morning,
It has a different job entirely.
It is your brain being switched on for the day and it sharpens the front of your brain,
The part you use to concentrate,
To plan and to make good decisions.
For most people,
That means your sharpest thinking sits somewhere in the late morning.
Then in the early afternoon,
Roughly between 1 and 3,
Your body clock runs an inbuilt dip.
And this matters because most people blame that dip on lunch.
It is not necessarily lunch.
This dip has been measured in people who skip lunch completely,
And it still shows up right on time.
It is scheduled into the very same body clock that runs your sleep.
This means for your actual day,
There is a window,
Usually in the late morning,
Where your brain is genuinely at its best,
And most people spend that exact window on email,
Admin and small tasks,
Then try to do their hardest thinking in the afternoon when the tank is naturally at its lowest.
They have it precisely upside down.
What I learned to do because I had no energy to waste is to ground my peak window for the one or two things that truly need my brain,
The deep work,
The important writing,
The real decisions,
And to push the shallow easy jobs into the afternoon deep when they cost me almost nothing.
Let me give you the number that makes this real.
A task that takes you 40 minutes in your peak window can take you two full hours in your deep.
Samuel,
The only difference is the hours you choose to do it.
So finding yours is simple.
For the next few days,
Just notice when your mind feels clear and when it feels heavy.
That is your peak and your dip.
Yours will not be identical to mine.
Some people peak early in the day and some later on.
But once you know your window,
You protect it from what matters most and you stop handing your best hours to things that never needed them.
The sixth and final thing I learned is that rest only works when it matches the kind of energy that is actually drained.
For years,
When I was exhausted,
I would flop in front of a screen to relax,
And I would get up feeling worse than when I sat down,
And I could never understand it.
Here is the reason.
A screen is more input,
Not less.
If the tank that was empty was my sensory one,
My capacity to take things in,
Then handling it,
A screen was pouring more into the tank that was already overflowing.
I was trying to charge my phone with the wrong cable.
The effort was there,
Nothing went in.
So the rule is to match the rest to your tank.
If your mind is fried from decisions,
The rest is quiet and one single task,
Not a louder distraction.
If your senses are overloaded from a day of screens,
The rest is the opposite of a screen,
Less coming in.
Close your eyes for 10 minutes,
Or look at something far in the distance.
And here is exactly why that helps.
When you stare at a screen up close,
Two things happen.
The small muscles that focus your eyes stay tensed the whole time,
And you blink about three times less than normal.
Blinking is what keeps your eyes moist and fresh,
So blinking that little leaves them dry,
Strained and tired,
And that tired feeling adds strength to your eyes.
To how drained you feel by the evening.
The moment you look into the distance,
Out of a window,
Down the street.
Those focusing muscles relax and your blinking goes back to normal,
Which refreshes your eyes.
A few minutes of that rests that exact part of you a screen has been grinding all day.
If you are emotionally spent,
One honest conversation with someone you trust does more than a whole evening on your own.
And if it truly is your body that is wrecked,
Then yes,
Lying down and real sleep is the answer.
Match the rest to what is actually drained,
And 20 minutes of the right kind will do more than a whole weekend on your own.
The wrong kind.
Because underneath They are really one idea.
Stop fighting what you cannot change and put that energy to work.
See yourself as a project to manage and build success on your own terms.
Take back control of when and how you work.
Learn which of your six tanks is actually empty.
Do your hardest work in your sharpest hour.
And rest the exact thing that is drained.
Here is what all of it comes down to.
You are not short of discipline,
And this was never about willpower.
You have a limited amount of energy,
The same as everyone does,
And almost nobody's ever taught how to work with it.
When you learn how,
You stop having to choose between the work you care about and your health.
You get to keep building for years at your own pace without running yourself into the ground to do it.
I know because I had to learn every one of these just to live a normal life.
And in the end,
They gave me a life I did not think I was allowed to have.
Now if any of this hit home,
If you have been tired for reasons you can never quite name,
The first move is to find out which of your tanks is actually leaking.
Because it is different for every person and you cannot fix the wrong one.
So do not try to do all six at once.
Pick one this week.
The easiest place to start is your timing.
Put your single most important task into your sharpest hour tomorrow and watch how much less it takes out of you.
Learn to work with your energy instead of against it and you get to keep building your life your way without burning out to do it.
I will see you in the next one.
