Managing Stress & Fatigue

What to do When you Burn Out, and How to Avoid it

Hello Friends,

Merriam Webster defines fatigue as “weariness or exhaustion from labor, exertion, or stress”. I’m sure this rings a bell with you, and most of us become fatigued from time to time. In fact, fatigue can be of various types – exhaustion from work, exercise, stress, and even spiritual. That’s right – we can become spiritually or philosophically fatigued, even from Stoicism. How do we best manage fatigue in a world that is constantly stressing us out it different ways?

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The audio version of this episode is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and wherever else you listen to your podcasts.

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What is Fatigue?

We defined it simply earlier, but what is it in layman’s terms? Fatigue is when you are just worn out from whatever it is you’re doing. For example, if you go through a hard training regime, you may find that over the months you become tired.

It feels like the piss and vinegar that usually pumps through your veins has went straight down the toilet. Your motivation is gone. You get sloppy. It’s common in the gym to become injured when one is fatigued.

Photo by David Martin on Unsplash

Fatigue is actually an engineering term, so let me get a little nerdy here with you.

It occurs when a structure has had too many cyclical stresses to the point where it eventually snaps. Consider a steel bridge, connecting two different parts of a city. The bridge experiences different stresses regularly – the vehicles moving over it, the wind pushing it left, right, and center, perhaps some micro or macro shifts in the earth’s supports.