The fraudulent psychiatric billing bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), has quite a few entries related to one form or another of “sleep disorder,” many of which simply occur when a person is knocked out by some (legal or illegal) drug. And if a psychiatrist can’t find the real reason for a person’s troubled sleeping, they’ll just diagnose the catch-all “Unspecified sleep-wake disorder”. Psychiatrists assume that anything they can’t explain is a “mental illness.”
Of course, the psychiatric treatment of choice is a psychotropic drug, many of which have known side effects of difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep.
Lack of sufficient sleep, though, is only one cause of tiredness. There are quite a few medical and other reasons why someone might feel tired or exhausted, regardless of how much sleep they may or may not be getting. Clinical tests should be done by a competent, non-psychiatric health care professional, to determine if there are undiagnosed and untreated medical issues interfering with sleep. Oh, and the DSM also calls “sleep apnea” a psychiatric disorder, even though it may primarily be a medical or neurological issue.
Then there are a plethora of non-medical issues which might be causing tiredness. We’ll examine some, but not all of them, here.
We do not go deeply here into physical treatments; there are many good references on nutrition, exercise and body health which relate to the issues of sleep and tiredness.
What is Exhaustion?
Simple definition: Having wholly used up strength, patience, or resources; tired beyond endurance.
The surprising thing is that exhaustion can be a symptom of several things having nothing to do with extended effort. In fact, one thing that can cause exhaustion is inaction — the opposite of extended effort. Sitting around the house moping can make one just as tired as mountain climbing. It’s not real tiredness in this case; it’s psychosomatic.
Another thing tiredness can be traced to is some form of introversion or fixated attention. An example might be sitting in front of a computer or TV, eyes focused at a fixed distance for an extended period of time.
For these, the remedy is extroversion; go take a walk and look at the things around you.
Do You Feel Washed-Out?
Simple definition: Depleted in vigor or animation; faded.
When reading or studying, if you skip over words, symbols or abbreviations you don’t know and continue reading, you will start to feel washed-out. If you just now yawned, you are a good candidate for this remedy. The remedy is simple: go back, find the term you didn’t know, look it up in a dictionary, and use it in sentences until you understand it. Then re-read what you missed.
Have You Tried and Failed?
A blunted or abandoned purpose makes one feel tired or dopey. The remedy is to rekindle the failed purpose.
Are Your Efforts and Communications Cut or Incomplete?
Do you experience a lot of interruptions at work? Do people walk by, talk to you, and then walk away before you can respond?
When Cycles of Action or Cycles of Communication are cut or incomplete, you can experience tiredness that is otherwise unexplained. Again, the remedy is pretty simple: go back and complete the cycle of action or cycle of communication. Finish what was interrupted.
What Not To Do
These are not all the possible manifestations of tiredness, but these are fairly easy to recognize and have simple resolutions. The thing you must NOT do is think you have some “mental illness”, see a shrink, and take an antidepressant or other psychiatric drug which can be addictive and have horrific side effects. Take a nice long walk instead.
