Mental Health & Wellbeing Matters: just feeling tired

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In our regular spot where we chat about mental health, wellbeing, and generally trying to feel a bit better, a few thoughts on the constant feeling of tiredness.

Hello and welcome to Mental Health & Wellbeing Matters, our little bit of the Film Stories site where – as you might have guessed! – we talk about mental health and wellbeing.

If you’ve not read one of these pieces before, it’s a place where we write about things that may be affecting you, us, or people around us. We work on simple rules: not every article we run is going to be of use to everyone, but hopefully across this series, there’s something that’s of use to you. And also, comments are very welcome, and appreciated.

This time, something we suspect is pretty common.

Have you ever had a stretch of life where you’re constantly just feeling tired, and living just behind the amount of sleep you need to properly function? Pretty much everyone has. There are some times when it’s unavoidable: if there are young children around, enthusiastic animals, or times of life of particular stress. Sometimes too there are medical reasons, which are clearly beyond the scope of a piece like this.

Outside of that though, there are things that might help. General pieces of advice that might be of use if it feels like tiredness is following you around a bit.

The first, most obvious, and probably least helpful to see written down here, is getting more sleep. You never thought of that, right?! That in itself can be testing. But things such as having a regular bedtime, cutting down on alcohol before going to bed and not having any screen time for half an hour beforehand can sometimes be helpful.

It’s also worth going for a walk. Just doing something to get a 15-20 minute burst of energy, and feel a bit more with it. You might have more particular ideas for that 15-20 minute burst of energy before sleep time, we should note, but again, they’re beyond the scope of this particular article.

Caffeine too is a sleep thief, and a contributor to tiredness. It’s worth limiting the amount you consume, particularly in the second half of the day. A caffeine boost has a bit of a habit of coming with a mini-crash the other side, and over time, can cause regular tiredness.

And then there’s mental health. The stresses, the worries, the niggles, the difficulties of life. The things that pile up and feel like they’re pushing us into the floor. Again, there’s no easy answer here, but where possible, talking and externalising problems tends to be a lot better than bottling them up.

Finally, one thing that helped me: drink water throughout the door. The downside is my journeys to the little room tend to be more frequent, but it’s proven pretty good at helping find a bit more life on my tired days.

As always, any hints or tips you have, post them in the comments below. Most importantly of all, you all take care and look after yourselves. This column will return next week.

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