Self Help

Even peak performers in life experience those hours in the day when they feel totally fatigued and not much good for anything. Have you ever said to yourself, “I’m just too tired. I’ll do it later”? That’s an indication you’ve stepped into total fatigue time. Fatigue seems a natural excuse for inaction; when repeated over time, it leads to a pattern of personal ineffectiveness. Get tired, and you are often stopped in your tracks. But there are powerful strategies you can use to overcome fatigue and reduce the number of totally fatigued hours you experience each day.

Fatigue does not have to impede your progress toward your objectives and goals. Getting tired is not a signal to quit. Instead, fatigue can be used as a signal that it is time to switch gears from a creative project best done during peak performance periods to a project needing less brain power. There is normally no end to the number of activities on your list from which you can choose, but you will find that when you hit your fatigue time, you can operate more effectively on lower priority projects.

Many people, when tired, mistakenly attempt to continue to work on projects requiring too much concentration and creativity, and only end up becoming stalled by frustration. Others simply quit. The effect of the fatigue-inaction response then becomes cumulative, resulting in the feeling of getting further and further behind. If you get into the habit of quitting a task just because you’re feeling tired, your mind begins to play tricks on you. Whenever you face a challenging project that requires intense or creative thought, your mind may then trigger fatigue to create an excuse for not even getting started.

Alertness and fatigue occur in about ninety-minute cycles, just as hunger does. You are likely to feel more tired during twenty of every ninety minutes than during the other seventy minutes. But the bad news is also the good news: When you do feel tired, you will feel that way only during a twenty-minute period during each cycle. If you continue to stay awake and remain active in the face of fatigue, the fatigue will pass, and then once again, for no apparent reason, you will experience alertness. By becoming more aware of your body’s responses, you will discover your fatigue cycle and be able to use it to your benefit.

How do you push through the fatigue cycles you will encounter? Just do it. Pushing past fatigue means consciously choosing to stay active through the roughest twenty minutes of the cycle, forcing yourself to concentrate without self-criticism or frustration, aware that the fatigue factor will soon pass without the necessity of sleep or stopping your activity.

During most periods of the day you can expect to experience twenty-minute fatigue cycles, but there is one period when you can expect fatigue to last longer. Even if you are in good to excellent health, you will still typically experience about two hours of ragged-out chronic fatigue each day, a time when you feel totally ineffective and want to stare at walls instead of rush down halls. For many people these fatigue hours occur after lunch or after work. Stress, eating habits, and lack of exercise all contribute to longer, deeper fatigue periods. All are manageable through setting habit-changing goals.