#185: đ«© The Exhaustion No One Is Diagnosing Correctly
Youâre Not Tired, Youâve Lost Your Autonomy
Hey friends,
Last week I curated a stage of 30 speakers covering longevity topics ranging from sleep, breathwork, and womenâs health to consciousness and cryopreservation.
It was my first full day event that Iâve curated and it was a huge success, overcapacity with standing room only. Barely anyone left because they didnât want to give up their seats. Highly engaged audience!
Some feedback that just melted my heart:
âReally brilliant day Nina! You put together such a great event and I loved alllll the talks.â
âIncredible event. I wish I could have stayed the whole day. All of the speakers were so good.â
âLongevity day was the place to be in Lisbon last week.â
âPart of me wishes we could turn back time and do it all over again today, tomorrow, and the day after. Thank you once again for creating such a special experience.â
Cheers,
Nina
đŹ In this note:
đ«© The Exhaustion No One Is Diagnosing Correctly
đ Yellowface
âĄïž Fart Sensor
#185: The Root Cause of Exhaustion No One is Diagnosing Correctly
I have one colleague that I meet with multiple times a week and every time we open the video chat, the conversation starts with a âthis week is AHHHHHâ followed by the breakdown of why the days have been insane, the meetings back-to-back, and the impossible volume of work.
This isnât one bad week or a deadline that got away from him.
This is every week.
This is normal.
Another friend of mine only had time to have a catch-up call with me on her way to the airport because she is flying from Boston to SF multiple times a month now for work.
Another texted me at 9pm telling me she is wrecked.
Meanwhile, my calendar is also full. Podcast interviews, events, writing, ceramics, padel, dance, calls I said yes to. I worry about fitting things in. But Iâm not exhausted the way they are.
My calendar has the same density, but something is different.
A packed calendar can lead to exhaustion or it can be fulfilling.
Something is wrong with how we are talking about what occupies our time, and how we feel after that time is spent.
When we look at the calendar, we think we have too many meetings, too much screen time, too much stimulation.
The story we tell ourselves is weâre doing too much. So the answer is subtractive.
The advice is cancel the meetings that donât need to exist. Do a digital detox. Try a dopamine fast. Block your calendar. Say no more often. Take the vacation youâve been putting off.
Some of this is good advice. Some of it works for a week.
But none of it solves the thing.
Most of us experience the Sunday Scaries.
The day youâre supposed to be recovering. You rest, you do the slow morning, you take the walk, you donât check your email. And by Sunday night the dread is there anyway. Monday looms ahead of you. Youâre so anxious about the week ahead that you start making the to-do list on Sunday night, just to âget ahead.â
You trade your last hours of the weekend for the illusion of control over the next day coming.
Or you try having an early night mid-week.
You finally have an evening with nothing on it, no work dinner, no call, nothing you said yes to three weeks ago and now regret. You think okay, this is it.
Iâll go to bed at ten. Iâll get the full eight hours. Iâll wake up actually rested for once. The alarm goes off and youâre just as wrecked as every other morning. Because one good night doesnât undo the twenty before it. Youâre exhausted from the last six months, and a single early bedtime canât pay down that kind of debt.
And vacation doesnât even seem to fix it. My colleague went to Morocco for his birthday and he didnât bring the laptop.
He did it right, the actual disconnection. But then the first call we had after he got back, the conversation opened the same way it always does. âThis week is AHHHH.â
A week back at his desk and the vacation was already gone. Whatever it refilled, it wasnât what was actually empty.
So if itâs not too many meetings, and itâs not too little sleep, and itâs not the missing vacation, what is it?
Self-Determination Theory
When I really started to dive into it, I realized that the reason for the exhaustion is not from doing too much. Itâs from doing too little of your own choosing.
Thereâs a framework from psychology called self-determination theory (SDT). It says humans have three basic psychological needs we have to meet to function, and autonomy is one of them. Not autonomy in the grand sense of running your own life. Autonomy in the granular sense: being the one who decided what youâre doing right now.
Chronic low-autonomy environments produce a specific kind of depletion that looks like tiredness but does not respond to rest. You canât nap your way out of it.
This is also why Iâd be just as exhausted as my colleagues if I spent a week doing things I didnât pick.
The shape of the week matters less than the ownership of what fills your time.
There is an obvious objection hereâŠâBut I chose my job. I chose to have kids. I chose this life. So why am I exhausted?â
All true, but choosing the container isnât the same as choosing what fills it day to day.
You picked the job, but you didnât pick the 6am meeting.
You picked parenthood, but you didnât pick that you need to bring homemade muffins to school tomorrow morning.
Macro-autonomy doesnât substitute for micro-autonomy.
The depletion happens in the small moments. The meeting you didnât schedule, the muffins you didnât volunteer for, the Slack message that pulls you off the thing you were actually choosing to do.
Each one is too small to protest but the accumulation is the whole game.
If youâve been wondering why you canât seem to rest your way out of this, itâs because the problem was never how much you were doing. It was how little of it was yours.
So, What Actually Refills The Tank?
Side quests, hobbies, and weird small projects that nobody asked you to do. The thing you are doing because you want to, not because itâs on your to do list.
These replenish, because they are self-directed.
This is why the couch fails at being rest. Sitting there scrolling isnât lazy, your body genuinely needs something, and something with a low cognitive load. The couch/scrolling is a reasonable guess at that.
But the deficit was never inactivity, itâs again the ownership of the tasks.
And unfortunately, scrolling doesnât supply that ownership. It just supplies cheap dopamine.
Wellness coaches often frame this as a novelty problem. It makes hobbies sound like a brain hack, pull the lever and get the reward.
Essentially saying, âdo new things because dopamine.â
But it actually is âdo chosen things because your nervous system is starving for evidence that your life is yours.â
Doing side quests is a way to reclaim your autonomy.
Therefore, your hobby, your padel game, the side project youâve been pushing away for months, they all have a deeper purpose. These arenât novelty-seeking or dopamine-chasing or productivity-coded self-improvement. They are evidence-gathering for your nervous system.
Your nervous system needs proof that your life belongs to you.
And the only thing that supplies proof is actions that you chose to do actively.
The chosen action is the only thing that shows your nervous system that you are in charge.
Thatâs why a nap you chose to take can refill the tank, but a vacation your boss prescribed to you doesnât.
The Biggest Villain is both Work Culture and Wellness Culture
Work culture is the obvious villain in this story and wellness culture is its sidekick.
Both are about optimization, and both promise that if you tune your schedule correctly, youâll feel better.
Some of this has real science behind it. Meeting timing, morning routines, sleep windows, these things do affect how you feel. The wellness industry didnât invent the underlying research.
But it took the research and wrapped it in a prescription, and the prescription asks you to perform optimization inside a structure you didnât design.
Sleep needs are individually determined. Some people are wired to wake at 5am and some at 9am, but the underlying biology is well-established and itâs called your chronotype.
Nonetheless, wellness culture has decided that 4:30am is virtuous and 9:00am is lazy, causing some people to spend years trying to force themselves into a schedule their biology was never going to accept.
But you didnât choose any of it. You inherited that structure from a wellness influencer, whose body, schedule and life happen to work that way, and now youâre trying to fit yourself into their container.
The core of this problem is actually due to a demanding work culture. Most people donât have enough autonomy in their schedules to discover what their body actually needs in the first place.
So they fail, and theyâll conclude they lack discipline. Discipline was never the problem. The prescription was wrong for them, and the prescription was never theirs to begin with.
Even worse, many people now again have to force themselves into a schedule that doesnât fit their biology with the return to office mandates.
After years of working from home, and being more productive by nearly every available metric, millions of people are now back at desks, commuting, sitting through meetings that could have been emails, available in a way thatâs mostly about being seen as available.
With the return to office, what changed is the granularity of choice.
When working from home, you decided when to make coffee. When to take a walk. When to step away to think. When to answer Slack and when to leave it.
In the office, those micro-decisions get absorbed by the environment. You donât choose when youâre interrupted. You donât choose when to be reachable. You canât even choose to be in a quiet place in some offices.
Each loss is too small to protest. But each loss of choice wears you down, and the accumulation leads to exhaustion.
Performative availability is more important to companies now than ever. However no one is realizing that this is what causes exhaustion.
The expectation that youâre reachable at all times means your attention is never fully yours, even when no oneâs contacting you. Youâre holding a slot open. The waiting leads to the feeling of depletion.
Both cultures use the same trick. They give you the appearance of choice inside a structure you didnât choose. The morning routine looks like authorship. So does the open-plan office with the unlimited PTO. The wrapping is autonomy. The contents are someone elseâs blueprint.
The next time you feel the exhaustion that rest doesnât touch, the question to ask yourself is how much of this week did you actually choose.
Not the job, not the city, not the life, the container is already chosen. Reflect on the hours. The meetings. The morning. Tuesday afternoon between 2 and 4. The thing youâre doing right now.
If the honest answer is âI did not choose much of this,â you donât need a vacation. You need a side quest. Something small, chosen, slightly pointless and entirely yours.
Your nervous system needs proof that your life still belongs to you.
Thatâs the antidote to exhaustion. Not less of your time, but more of it spent the way you decided it should be.
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đ Book of the Week
Yellowface by R. F. Kuang
Rating: â â â â â
Iâve seen this book over and over as a bestseller and definitely waited too long to pick it up.
I didnât know what to expect, from the title I assumed a white woman impersonating an Asian woman...and while there is some of this going on, itâs more subtle than I originally thought.
The story is about a famous Asian writer Athena, and her supposed best friend and struggling writer June Hayward, the cutthroat publishing industry, cancel culture, and how far a woman will go to obtain the fame and fortune she thought she wanted.
What surprised me most about this book is that I hated all of the main characters. Itâs rare to read a book and not relate to a character in some way, empathize with them, or at least find them somewhat endearing.
But this batch of characters, they are all terrible people! June is the worst of them all, but Athena is not innocent either. At moments you really want to jump into the book, grab June and tell her to do the right thing, which does make for an entertaining read.
The novel is fast paced, exhilarating, and I found many evenings when I couldnât put it down because I really needed to read my characters out of bad situations, only to be surprised when the next situation was worse than the one before.
Great beach read or one for a long plane ride.
âĄïž Check This Out
Scientists have invented underwear that measures your farts.
Researchers at the University of Maryland built a tiny wearable sensor that attaches to underwear and tracks gas production around the clock, measuring hydrogen, methane, and hydrogen sulphide released by gut microbes as they break down your food.
As lead researcher Professor Brantley Hall put it, we donât actually know what normal fart production looks like, and without that baseline itâs hard to know when someoneâs gas output is truly excessive.
Apparently, the team has found that healthy adults fart an average of 32 times per day - around double the previous estimate.
However their findings also show that daily farts can range from as few as 4 to as many as 59.
This data could help unlock new insights into food intolerances, IBS, and other digestive conditions.
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