Why You're Exhausted Even When Nothing Is Wrong | The Mindful Movement

[00:00:00]Do you know that feeling at the end of the day when you finally sit down and instead of feeling accomplished and complete, you just feel heavy and exhausted, like you've been holding something all day that you avoided feeling and you can't quite name what you were holding.

[00:00:21]Nothing catastrophic happened. Nobody is in crisis. By most reasonable measures, the day was fine. But you are so tired.

[00:00:33]This is not the kind of tiredness that sleep fixes because you've tried that.

[00:00:39]You've had the good nights, the long weekends, the vacations that helped for a few days and then stopped helping the moment life resumed.

[00:00:51]This tiredness is deeper. It's been there for a while and you may already suspect that it isn't going to go away on its own. Today I want to talk about what that exhaustion actually is because I think most of us have been trying to solve the wrong problem. In my work as a hypnotherapist and transformational coach, I recently sat with a client who came in describing what she called anxiety.

[00:01:24]She experienced constant worry.

[00:01:29]She felt the need to map every possible outcome of every possible scenario before anything had even happened.

[00:01:40]She had tried to manage it. She reasoned with herself, told herself that everything was fine.

[00:01:49]She was fine.

[00:01:51]She tried breathing exercises.

[00:01:53]Tried being more positive, tried being more grateful. She was exhausted by the trying as much as everything else.

[00:02:04]We slowed down together and we went looking for where this actually started.

[00:02:11]What we found was a four-year-old sitting in her house listening to her parents argue.

[00:02:19]And in that moment, in that small body, she made a decision.

[00:02:26]Not with words or logic. She didn't have those yet.

[00:02:31]But in the way that children know things before they can say them, she decided it was her job to make sure nobody got hurt. Not just herself, but everyone in the room. She took on this whole thing as her responsibility.

[00:02:51]And she had been doing it ever since.

[00:02:54]By the time she was sitting across from me, she had been playing this role for decades.

[00:03:00]She got really good at scanning every room before she entered it, managing every dynamic before it could become difficult.

[00:03:11]She got really good at adjusting herself, her tone, her entire presentation of herself.

[00:03:19]In the fraction of a second before she spoke, she made sure that whatever landed on the people around her landed softly.

[00:03:29]She thought she had an anxiety problem.

[00:03:33]What she actually had was a decadesl long response to a childhood moment that nobody had ever helped her put down.

[00:03:44]When she saw that and felt the feeling from the four-year-old moment, something in her face changed.

[00:03:53]She looked for just a moment like someone who had been told they could finally stop running.

[00:04:01]She realized she wasn't broken.

[00:04:04]She was exhausted.

[00:04:07]And there is a significant difference between those two things. I think a lot of you watching this know exactly what I'm describing.

[00:04:16]Maybe you don't have a memory like hers.

[00:04:19]Maybe it was different.

[00:04:22]Perhaps not one defining moment, but a slow accumulation of small ones.

[00:04:30]The way you became over time attuned to other people's emotional states.

[00:04:37]The way you started saying yes when something inside you was saying something else entirely because you felt you recognized.

[00:04:50]Yes. kept things smooth and smooth felt safer than whatever the alternative was.

[00:04:59]Let me know in the comments what your role defining moment was. I worked with another client who described her experience as being in constant proving mode. She had built a successful career, held genuine responsibility, and was accomplished by every external measure.

[00:05:22]And she was persistently miserable in a way she couldn't quite justify to herself because from the outside everything looked fine.

[00:05:34]What she shared when we went looking beneath the surface of it was that she had learned very early that her authentic self was too much.

[00:05:46]She was too bright, too loud, too joyful in a way that drew the wrong kind of attention.

[00:05:55]So she learned to dim herself.

[00:05:59]the way you turn down a light so slowly that nobody notices the room getting darker. And then she had spent years in proving mode because somewhere inside her was a belief installed before she had any say in the matter that who she was was both too much and not quite enough on its own.

[00:06:25]That she had to earn her place.

[00:06:28]that love and belonging were things you performed your way into rather than things you simply deserved or you were worthy of.

[00:06:39]She was constantly performing and she had been performing for so long that she genuinely forgot there was another way to be. This is what I find again and again in the work I do. The exhaustion that brings people to me is rarely what it looks like on the surface.

[00:07:01]It looks like anxiety or people pleasing or overwork or the inability to say no or the feeling of being slightly disconnected from your own life even while you're living it.

[00:07:19]But underneath all of those things, when you go looking with enough patience and compassion, you will find the same thing. A person who learned at a very young age that it was safer to be a slightly edited version of themselves.

[00:07:40]This same person who has been maintaining that edit automatically every single day since.

[00:07:49]Children are extraordinary observers.

[00:07:52]They don't have the luxury of not paying attention.

[00:07:57]And when a child figures out through repetition, through reaction, through the slow accumulation of small moments that their full self is sometimes too much or inconvenient or makes the wrong people uncomfortable.

[00:08:18]They adapt.

[00:08:20]Of course, they adapt. That is what children do.

[00:08:24]They find the version of themselves that works, that keeps love available, that prevents the particular kind of aloneeness that is the most frightening thing a small person can feel. And they get very, very good at it. so good that by the time they are adults, the whole process runs automatically below awareness like a program that was installed long ago. You are already three adjustments into a conversation before you had consciously decided anything.

[00:09:04]You have already scanned the room, read the energy, calibrated your presence, and you experience all of this as just being a considerate person, a self-aware person, someone who is good at reading situations, which to be fair, you are good at those things. The consideration is real, the attunement is genuine. The problem is that the consideration became constant and the part of you doing all that considering got very very tired.

[00:09:43]Things change when you can understand this. The pattern that has been causing the most suffering is the one that was an attempt to protect something precious.

[00:09:57]The four-year-old who decided to take care of everyone in the room wasn't doing something wrong.

[00:10:05]She was doing the most loving, intelligent, protective thing she could think of in a moment that genuinely frightened her. When the four-year-old grew into the woman who dimmed her light, she wasn't failing. She was surviving.

[00:10:25]She was reading her environment accurately and responding in the most adaptive way available to her at that time. The pattern made sense then. It was created for real reasons.

[00:10:41]That's why it stuck.

[00:10:43]But it was created by a version of you that was doing the best they could at that time and it just never got updated.

[00:10:54]And so it kept running through school, through relationships, through careers, marriages, parenthood, and all of the various landscapes of an adult life that look nothing like the original situation that created it. The software stayed the same, but the world changed entirely.

[00:11:17]And somewhere in the gap between those two things, an exhaustion took up residence because it takes a lot of effort to wear the masks to cover up your true self.

[00:11:33]The shift that becomes possible when you finally understand this in your body is not just your mind being quieter than you might expect.

[00:11:44]It may feel like something is loosening, a grip you didn't know you were holding, finally softening.

[00:11:53]My client, who had been carrying the worry since she was four, didn't leave our session with her anxiety permanently resolved.

[00:12:03]What she left with was something perhaps more valuable.

[00:12:07]She could see the pattern clearly now.

[00:12:11]And when you can see something clearly, you are no longer entirely inside it.

[00:12:18]You have a relationship with it rather than being run by it. And that is where the choice begins to live.

[00:12:27]This is where you begin to live. The work is not about fixing yourself because there is genuinely nothing to fix.

[00:12:37]It is about understanding yourself at the level where the pattern actually lives which is not in your thoughts where you have probably already spent considerable time. The pattern is somewhere in the body of the child who figured all of this out before they had the words for it, before they had the logic for it.

[00:13:04]and they have been waiting with remarkable patience for someone to finally come back for them. And each time this pattern reemerges is an opportunity to reparent that inner child to take care of yourself in a way that you weren't taking care of when you were a child.

[00:13:29]I've spent years doing this work with clients and inside my own life, and I can tell you that the exhaustion you're carrying is the cost of a performance, a pattern that began a long time ago for very good reasons. and that you simply haven't yet been given the right conditions to set down that pattern and stop performing, stop wearing those masks.

[00:14:00]If what I've shared today resonates with you and you want to begin exploring it at your own pace with real support, I've created a free 7-day guided journey called Returning to Yourself.

[00:14:15]Each day includes a short teaching video and a journaling prompt to consider how each of these lessons applies to you.

[00:14:26]It is a quiet supported space to begin understanding what has been happening inside you and what becomes possible when you stop leaving yourself behind.

[00:14:38]The link is below whenever you're ready.

[00:14:41]Until next time, take good care of yourself and keep looking inward.