It’s 6 am. Your alarm goes off. You immediately reach for your phone to catch up on overnight notifications because nothing starts a morning off on a better foot than opening an unnecessary 4 am message from your boss. Roll your eyes. Reply. Roll your eyes again and groan, brain foggy and body creaking as you peel yourself out of bed.
It’s 6:30 am. Maybe you slam an energy drink. Maybe a coffee. Maybe a focus supplement. For many of us, it might be all three. Jam a pre-workout in there, too; you’ve still gotta get gym time in before heading to the office.
It’s 8:30 am. Fresh out of the locker room shower. And you’re already tired.
Sounds like a you problem.
Welcome to the productivity industrial complex, where there’s an app to help you focus, a productivity system to help you feel less overwhelmed, a supplement to optimize your sleep, an ephemeral “better” morning routine to not feel sh*tty by the time the sun’s fully up – we’ve gotten remarkably good at doing more, but it’s not really helping, just heaping.
Maybe we should do less.
How Fatigue Became a Personal Failure
Being tired used to be seen as, like… a straightforward biological signal. Because it is. You worked, got tired, rested, and recovered. But in today’s productivity-optimization-drive-yourself-insane society, fatigue can feel like a personal shortcoming.
If you can’t concentrate, maybe you need more discipline. If you’re dragging through the afternoon, maybe you’re not managing your time correctly. If you’re exhausted at the end of the week, maybe your morning routine needs work. We’ve been gaslit into this dynamic where, if you can’t keep up, something must be wrong with you.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be productive; checking things off a list feels great and accomplishing goals builds a resilient sense of self. The problem is that we’ve made every normal human limitation into an inefficiency that can be optimized away. Because feeling tired is no longer a simple biological signal to our society; it’s an obstacle between you and all the things you have to do.
So add another supplement, fix another habit, buy another viral sleep-health product. Optimize, optimize, optimize. And now even your self-care routine feels like another project to manage.
Awesome.
Why Burnout is Having a Moment
There’s a reason the word “burnout” is everywhere right now. From work, social media, parenting, politics, dating, family, news – we’re straight up burnt out from feeling burnt out. And because the experience is so ubiquitous, it’s easy to reduce “burnout” to another synonym for “tired”.
But burnout isn’t something a night of extra sleep can fix. It’s sort of a lot worse than that.
Burnout is associated with prolonged or chronic stress and can involve deep exhaustion, increased cynicism or detachment, and a reduced sense of self-efficacy. It isn’t about being tired; it’s more like, “I have nothing left; how am I supposed to keep going?”
But think about how we respond to that feeling. We don’t reduce the load; we just try to optimize our ability to carry it. Which is kind of insane, if you think about it. If your car runs out of gas you’re not going to try to learn how to drive faster. So if you’ve run out of fuel, why are you trying to learn how to function better on mere fumes?
This is the burnout trap.
Capacity is Different Than Sustainability
You have too much to do, too little time to do it, and almost no time to recover. The productivity solution says, “Let’s make you better at doing everything everywhere all the time.” You start waking up at 5 am to get a bit of extra work done, color-block your calendar, put your phone on silent, and listen to a podcast about self-discipline.
And maybe some of it works, but that’s what makes the cycle so convincing – turns out you can squeeze water from a rock. The problem is that just because you can push through something doesn’t mean your body is recovering from it.
A crazy work week or sleepless night should be the exception, not the baseline. Your nervous system couldn’t care less about your to-do list; it’s just responding to demands. Stress exists for a reason, and it’s unquestionably a useful tool – it makes you more awake, alert, and motivated. The problem is when the demands keep coming and recovery time keeps dwindling. Your body needs periods of recovery in between those fast-paced days.
And it’s not just work that keeps us activated. It’s the 24/7/365 emails, social media, news cycles. Anyone else feel a tiny moment of dread each time they hear Outlook’s notification ping on their phone?
How We Become Overwhelmed & Overstimulated
Our brains aren’t supposed to deal with 19 open tabs. Think about a typical workday –
You’re writing an email. A notification appears, and you check it. You get a Teams message and answer it. Your phone buzzes, and you check to see why. Return to the email you’re writing. But wait – there was a spreadsheet you were supposed to finish yesterday. Another email arrives. You realize you’ve been staring at the same sentence for three minutes.
The issue is the accumulation of things. You can’t divide your attention infinitely; task switching requires your brain to repeatedly re-orient itself. The result is this weird vibe where you’re always available but never fully present.
And then there’s caffeine. Feeling tired? Grab an energy drink and bully your nervous system into blocking it out. Later, you’ll feel irritable, and tonight you won’t sleep well. But hey – you got a lot done today. And that’s all that matters, right?
Why you so stressed out, Queen? 🫠
Even Rest Has Become a Productivity Hack
This is where things get a little psychotic. We’re so obsessed with optimization we’ve started trying to optimize recovery. Cold plunges, saunas, breathwork, “dopamine detoxes”, meditation, sleep tracking and recovery scores.
Wtf is a recovery score, like what does that even mean?
None of these things are inherently insane. What’s insane is that relaxing is now another thing you need to be good at. But sometimes you just need to lie on the couch and stare at the ceiling. Take a walk without earbuds in. Sit outside on the porch, no screens.
And we’ve made it worse than that, because all this overstimulation, over-availability and overwhelm have also really messed up our ability to just sit and be. Try to remember the last time you had even a few moments of free time and didn’t immediately fill them. Your brain doesn’t necessarily need TikTok instead of work, or journaling instead of emails. Sometimes it needs absolutely nothing.
Productivity is NOT a metric of worthiness, nor is it an indicator of quality of life.
Recentering Ourselves in How We Do Life
We can’t change when or where we live. But we can choose to recenter ourselves in our quest to experience days that are actually fun and nights that we actually sleep. A life where you have the energy to see your friends, exercise because you like to and not to close the ring on your Garmin watch, or read something that has nothing to do with work – without relying on caffeine to pretend you’re having a good time doing it.
TLDR: sustainable output > maximum output
A More Sustainable Way to Think About Energy
We need a new approach to energy. Because energy isn’t just one thing; it’s a reflection of how your physical health and life circumstances function and interact:
- Sleep and circadian rhythms
- Nutrition and adequate energy intake
- Physical activity
- Stress and recovery
- Attention and cognitive load
- Stimulant use
- Environment and daily demands
You can’t just pick one and feel better if the rest of the system is still running on empty. And that doesn’t mean supplements are useless, but they need to be reframed as a tool that supports energy production, not replacement parts for a system that’s too tired to function.
How to Do Less in Order to Do More
Obviously, we have to be productive. But we don’t have to keep treating ourselves like machines:
- Stop treating every energy dip like an emergency.
- Sometimes you’re tired; it doesn’t mean you’ve failed or are falling short.
- Look upstream.
- Instead of asking yourself what you can take to add energy, ask yourself why you’re so exhausted in the first place.
- Protect your recovery time.
- Sleep isn’t what happens after you’ve finished everything else; it is a huge part of what allows you to do everything else.
- Use stimulation intentionally.
- Caffeine can be useful in small doses. Constant stimulation, though? Not useful. Functional caffeine-free wellness drinks are a healthy way to replace the caffeine cycle with something supportive and intentional.
- Give your mind a chance to settle.
- Not every break needs to involve another screen. You do it for the dopamine, but if you were sleeping better, you’d probably have more native dopamine in the first place.
- Stop optimizing the life out of your life.
- Some things don’t need to be efficient or productive. Walking doesn’t need to be viewed through the metric of muscles and calories. Hobbies don’t need to be side hustles. And doing nothing doesn’t have to have a measurable benefit for you to not feel horrible about it.
How to Get More Than Energy Each Day
We live in a culture that has become incredibly good at helping us do more, but that isn’t the same thing as having more.
- More output ≠ more energy
- More productivity ≠ more worth
- More optimization ≠ more health
- More stimulation ≠ more focus
Importantly, pushing through exhaustion ≠ sustainable resilience. Sometimes, the smartest thing you can do for your productivity is to give your body what productivity culture punishes you for needing: time to recover.
You can’t work forever without getting tired, and it’s frankly abusive to be expected to. There’s a reason countries that adopt 4-day work weeks see increased productivity and workplace satisfaction.
There’s more to life than stress and coffee. Natural energy boosters that replace caffeine with functional adaptogens and nootropics can add sustainable scaffolding that helps you have enough energy to feel like a living human again.
Set that Pet Sematary version of yourself back where it belongs and unlock a new kind of energy that supports your best life instead of stealing it.
