Dunno how else to call it. Got me a job. It’s not a bad job. I like the work I do, I tolerate the people there, the hours are not long, it’s unionised so they can’t harrass me when I’m off the clock, it pays the bills I got.
… But god damn. Once I’m home I lack the drive to do literally anything.
I’ve stopped going to gym, I often eat junk cuz I just don’t wanna cook, even my hobbies are being left to gather dust. After working my 9-to-5 I just wanna lie down and rot until it’s work time again.
So the question is, how do the better-adjusted adults handle this?
Everyone sharing their own coping mechanisms in the comments makes me want to question the whole thing itself. Why are we living like this? And why do we need to force ourselves to go through all this? What is the end goal? Are there no better ways to live? Why, why, whyyyy…
Idk about better adjusted but it helps to have a checklist and somebody to lean on so you can both push each other to get more done. When you get home go for a 30 min walk each day. Its low energy but its a more natural activity that will help level out your brain.
I have the opposite issue where it takes me like 4-6 hours to fully wake up most days.
I work at a home office in a fairly active industry so while I do get to wear sweats or pajama bottoms much of the day, it’s still draining as FUCK to be “on” all day. Even at rest the human brain burns enough energy to power a 30-watt incandescent light bulb, which doesn’t sound very bright but I would challenge anyone to keep a bulb lit for 8 hours or more purely by peddling a bike or something. When you’re thinking and stressed and working out problems and focused on tasks, the power consumption of your meat-calculator goes way up, so the exhaustion is real and tied to physiology.
So here’s how I’m trying to tackle having this same problem:
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Higher protein, lower fat and lower carb snacks. A little sugar boost here and there can help but if you’re destroying a box of cookies to get through the day you’re making yourself more exhausted.
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Drink a LOT more water. It’s so easy to forget to hydrate while working, and this doesn’t just fatigue you, it wrecks your teeth when your mouth dries out.
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Walks… walks, walks walks. Take a walk at lunch, even if it’s around the street, even if it’s in circles in the house, you HAVE to keep moving. Sitting for any period of time can be bad for you but it can also make your body want to lay down and go sleepy sleep. Also, no matter how lazy you feel, a short walk after working will always make you feel better physically and emotionally. It creates a mental separation for you to now look at your home life as distinctly different from your work life. Your survival-oriented brain needs this.
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Go to bed early. If your body is screaming to sleep, just go sleep. You’re probably not getting enough. I have a lot of sleep issues so lately I just go to bed at 8:00 PM like an old man, and even though I wake up absurdly early now, it helps me physically and mentally prepare for the day. So maybe it’s as much about shifting your schedule as it is how much time you spend sleeping versus living.
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Sunlight. A giant nuclear furnace spewing radiation doesn’t sound very healthy to stand in front of, but your body is a product of basking in the shockwave of this hydrogen bomb for millions of years, it needs a little heat and warmth on your skin. (One of the nicer feelings is napping with curtains open and sunlight streaming in on your skin on a cold day - holy shit that’s the best feeling in the world. Bonus points if you have a warm pet to sleep on your legs.)
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Less caffeine. I could autistically talk for hours about how adenosine and brain receptors work as I have a neurology fixation, but the short version is the more caffeine you drink during the day, the more wrecked you will feel at the end of the day. There are no work-arounds to this, it’s inherent in how the brain chemistry works. Try to limit caffeinated drinks to a couple a day and spaced apart.
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Healthier dinners. More fiber, more low-fat protein, less processed carbs. Eat early and not late and you will feel less heavy when you get up.
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Talk to yourself. Keep a narration going, and talking out loud actually helps your non-verbal layers of your consciousness to align to what you want. (I told you, I have a neurology fixation.) You are legion, you have a multitude of thoughts inside you, but they don’t have a voice, each vying for attention and reporting things to your “main” controller. It can be amazingly effective to literally talk to these brain layers. If you want proof that I’m not talking out my ass, learn about split-brain syndrome and the eerie effects of a hemispherectomy.
Again, I don’t have much to add — but god damnit I try to go to bed early and end up staying awake staring at the ceiling all night anyway.
I could probably get more sunlight but this is a post on how to be less sleepy, not more sleepy.
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You develop coping patterns to adjust to the bullshit of having to work 40 hours a week for shelter and food and whatever other necessities capitalism has captured while advances is technology and increased populations should have brought hours down to <20 decades ago without a wealth class leaching off the working class & pushing propaganda to divide us.
Find something that does motivate you if old hobbies no longer do. Political or union activity, music, exercise and take a more active role in your wellness, maintaining friendships, whatever can help keep you from becoming cynical or compliant to authority.
Goal setting also has helped keep me active when I start to feel that way. A to-do list for short term goals to keep accomplishing little things, and a long term goal like a vacation next summer, or an event you need to prepare for, etc. If you’re feeling a lack of meaning or purpose helping other people or having a life long goal that’s good to strive for but unobtainable can provide fulfilling purpose for many.
By forcing yourself to do stuff.
It sucks at first, and you feel exhausted and like you’re not that effective and your brain will keep coming up with excuses and rationalizations as to why you should just rest, but you ignore them and force yourself to do the stuff you don’t feel like doing.
Do that for a while and you’ll suddenly have a higher energy level and it won’t seem like a big deal.
You’re basically at the point where you just took up a new exercise every day, and that’s just tapping you out. But if you keep doing just that exercise and nothing else, your fitness / energy will only ever rise to the point of being able to handle it and nothing else. If you force yourself to do more, then eventually your fitness / energy level will rise to working + after work stuff being the baseline.
Give yourself time and give yourself rest days, but most people online will advocate for too much self care and don’t realize that the only way to actually change and improve is to continually push yourself a little past your comfort zone.
Great analogy.
Any chance you have sleep apnea?
Pure fucking willpower, don’t let yourself sit down when you get home right away.
It’s quite insidious, and tbh there’s only so much you can do to control how you feel after work. Instead of hoping to feel good every day, I try and set myself up for success on random days where I do leave work with energy.
In my case this means I have 1 or 2 braindead-easy dinners waiting in the wings. Good leftovers I can reheat in the oven, or a meal that takes 2 steps to prepare. If I don’t have to worry about cooking dinner, then I have that much more time to dedicate to a hobby when the fancy strikes me.
9am to 5pm is all day, and you have to be on.
That shit is hard.
Everybody is silently trying to make you feel bad about a regular reaction to a big thing, because they feel the same, which they should all be embarrassed not to realize is fine.
Most of those “better adjusted adults” are probably just better showmen.
I’m curious about the few who aren’t, and it’s tricky to know when that’s who’s talking.
Probably not helpful but when I was roofing and at work for 11-12 hours a day, getting home and going for a short run really helped out (~4 miles). Something about that cardio gave me more energy and would guarantee I’d at least take a shower after. I think I was only running 3-4 days a week then.
It’s also a great time to decompress, just being alone with your thoughts a little. Then for a while after your heart rate is elevated and you’ve got some extra energy.
My back just stopped me from walking down one stair (and I barely made it back from trying) and here you are calling ~4 miles a “short run.”
I don’t begrudge you that, it’s good that your body is capable, but jeez it’s hard not to be envious.
If you force yourself to run a little bit one day, then a little bit more each day after that, then eventually 4 miles will feel like a short run.
I respect that, but I broke my ankle and it never healed properly. Apparently I subsequently injured my back (I have a severely bulging disk; not sure whether this is the result of my body or something I did). I’m not saying I’m not lazy - I am - but in this case my complaint is not the result of laziness.
That said, you basically paraphrased BoJack Horseman, and I approve of that.
I mean, I broke my hand and it never healed properly, I have pretty bad tendon damage in one ankle, I got shin splints like crazy when I started running, and I have previously herniated a disk, though not that major.
I’m not saying every single major injury is recoverable from, but look at the history of most athletes and you’ll see a lot of major injuries that they were able to recover from.
Again, not saying this is the case necessarily for your back, but I know people who have gotten relatively minor injuries, gotten terrified of them and/or used that as an excuse not to do any more exercise on that body part ever, and then got severely injured again because now the muscles and muscle control for that body part is severely undeveloped, putting more strain back on the tendons / ligaments.
The general recommended approach for most injuries is not to avoid them forever, but to do physio; i.e. reducing your exercises back down to zero weight, but still doing them, and continuously adding weight to re-build and strengthen those muscles and joints.
That’s a fair assessment.
My ortho has recently requested that I have some imaging done on my back, but anticipates a surgery to fuse my vertebrae will be needed. After that, from what I’ve been told, I’ll primarily have to conquer psychological barriers.
try to do some beginner back excercises for a bit, it helped me
edit: oh i just saw you got injured, but still give it a go imo, unless it’s painful
It’s funny that this is about work life balance because I’m trying to catch some sleep before my fourth twelve in a row and my acute psych nurse brain just went nooo nooooooo oh noooooooooooo but assuming you never experience significant mania, psychosis, or delirium, I LOVE that for you.
Fuuuck we got an Amish patient one time, manic as hell (and you have to be pretty damn hyperreligious for your Amish family to get you committed) and EVERY time we had to tussle security would come out of it like “DAMN we were NOT expecting that from a first glance!” Wiry little thing but once you’d had to deal with it first hand you found out a few things about old-fashioned farm work!
My neighbour doesn’t even go inside when she comes back from work, she parks her car, ditches her bag in the bike shed, hops on her bicycle and tears off into the distance. I’ve seen her on her racing bike in a suit.
So, don’t give yourself the chance to veg out, do something on the way back home or go for a walk before you go in?
A lot of it is just figuring out a new routine. Once you do, and you work that routine for a couple of weeks, it will feel weird to NOT hit the gym after work a few times a week.
This is a fucking lie. I work out to keep my blood pressure down and I HATE it. Every fucking day I hate it. “IT wIlL feEL WeIrD NOT tO HiT tHe gYm-” fuck off. No it doesn’t. Every second I’m at the gym I wish I could be laying down relaxing. It also doesn’t get easier. Oh the workouts do, but the motivation to go? The awful post-workout routine of being exhausted and needing to shower but STILL having to cook and do all the household chores that need to get done that day? The desire to do ANYTHING else besides go to the gym? That does NOT get easier.
I’m so fucking tired of working out. If I didn’t have blood pressure issues, there is no way in hell I would subject myself to that BS 5/7 days of the week. There is no enjoyment from this activity. People talk about post-workout endorphins and I feel like they have to be bullshitting because I’ve never felt anything of the sort. Just a vague relief that it’s over… At least for that day.
there was a youtube short video I wish I could find again about a guy who got dumped by his girlfriend and started going to the gym and on the treadmill every day and he hated every minute of it and never really grew to like it but slow got more in shape and his life went from pit of despair to just ok and I feel like that sort of thing - recognizing that some of us don’t get runners high, some of us don’t don’t get that habit-formation and it remains a slog - is way more motivating than people saying “it’ll get easier! stay positive!” etc.
Honestly cannot fathom this. Are you pushing yourself at the gym? Are you eating healthy and enough protein? Resting enough?
There’s literally never been a period of my life where going to the gym regularly hasn’t made me feel better. I havent gone for like 6 months because I’ve been brutally busy, but I honestly cannot fathom how you could be going and not getting something positive out of it.
I bet you’re also a morning person who just doesn’t understand why people struggle waking up and being productive.
Nope, night owl who likes to sleep in.
If I didn’t have blood pressure issues, there is no way in hell I would subject myself to that BS 5/7 days of the week
You shouldn’t necessarily ever expect to enjoy doing something that you’re essentially forced to do. The gym is kinda like work for you so its perfectly reasonable that you hate it.
I love playing guitar and working on music but if I was ever forced to do it daily I would start hating it real quick. This is why I avoid monetization routes for my music that would require adhering to a routine.
When it comes to the gym, I’ve certainly gotten well into it to the point that it feels weird not to go. Same with running, but even more potent. I’d actually be in a shit mood if I had to skip a scheduled run for some reason.
Its a real bummer that you’re struggling to enjoy the gym, but I totally understand where you’re coming from. Life is busy and sometimes all that I have the bandwidth for is a beer on the couch after work. We all have our limits and that’s OK.
Glad to hear you’re pushing through it for the sake of your health. There’s likely no better reason to hit the gym. 💪
Maybe you’re a morning person. Wake up and do all your important stuff in the mornings and be lazy at night.
As soon as I get home: I do not sit down. If I do I’ll lose all motivation to get up. Go to the gym, do meal prep etc before I’m even close to my chair.
This is actually what I did when I was in a miserable work schedule and it works!
The moment you sit down, your lethargy keeps going up to a point you barely want to do anything.
Sounds awful
But functional
One coping mechanism that helps me a lot, is taking evening walks. While listening to music or podcasts. If it does not alleaviate the exhaustion, it will at least convert the exhaustion into a more physical kind, rather that a burnt-out mental kind.
Also, you might suffer from burnout. I am not a doctor or psychologist though, so you may ask an actual professional.
Burnout isnt a thing, it’s just situational depression.
