#lethargy

#lethargy

Tyburski was a professional adventurer, financing his pursuits via magazine articles and speaking gigs, and even making a documentary about his quest. His whole raison d'etre was to push past his limitations, showing what a person is capable of when their mindset is strong enough.

I got rid of my social media account. After a couple stints of temporarily deactivating my account, last summer I made the decision to delete my account for good. I haven't looked back. I realized I was craving connection and validation and decided to pursue that in the real world instead.

After 40, stress physiology changes. Recovery slows. Hormonal responses linger longer. Sleep disruption compounds more quickly. Cognitive fatigue accumulates across weeks instead of days. Entrepreneurs, in particular, face chronic cognitive load: constant decision-making, emotional responsibility for teams, financial pressure (from investors, shareholders, and stakeholders), unpredictable stress cycles that follow you home to your family.

Research shows that summertime conditions can lead to cognitive impairments, particularly in memory and concentration. Factors such as sleep disruption, heat, dehydration, and smoke exposure are significant contributors to these effects.

They are depleted by accepting additional responsibilities, over delivering, taking on emotional labour, supplying the Colin the Caterpillar birthday cake, and generally being the person to whom everyone complacently says: What would we do without you?! It's a familiar story in the domestic sphere, where women shoulder disproportionate responsibilities plus a bonus mental load.

Your brain is like a muscle that only gets stronger when challenged with variety. Feed it the same mental diet every day, and it atrophies. The sharp elderly people in her studies had one thing in common—they deliberately sought intellectual discomfort. This doesn't mean forcing yourself through content you hate. It means breaking patterns.

I used to brag about how little sleep I got. It felt like a superpower: I could sleep just three or four hours a night, and still operate at a very high level. That helped me get ahead early on. As a teen, I bused tables and sold firewood. By the time I was 19, I bought a house (which was possible because it was the subprime mortgage days). Having a mortgage gave me real responsibility at a young age.

In response to threats by US President Donald Trump to somehow acquire Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), US scientists have drafted what they call a statement in solidarity with the island, open to any US-based researchers who have conducted research there. "A lot of people in the US - not just scientists - are very upset about the rhetoric directed towards Greenland. But scientists who work there feel it very personally," says paleoclimatologist Yarrow Axford, who is one of the creators of the initiative.

Most of us treat our inbox like a storage unit. We open an email, think 'I'll deal with this later,' and move on. Before we know it, we're buried. People with clean inboxes get that every email is actually a decision waiting to be made. Delete it? Respond now? Schedule for later? Delegate it? They don't let decisions pile up because they know that unmade decisions drain mental energy.

Picture this: You've just spent an amazing evening with friends. The conversation was great, everyone was laughing, and you genuinely had a wonderful time. Yet the moment you get home, you collapse on your couch feeling like you've run a marathon. Your social battery isn't just low; it's completely drained. If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. And despite what many people might tell you, this doesn't mean you're antisocial or that you didn't truly enjoy yourself.

Think of your creativity like a high-performance garden: If you focus only on the visible harvest (outputs) and never allow the soil to lie fallow (liminal space) or the bees to roam freely (play), the ground eventually becomes depleted. Boredom is the signal that the soil needs replenishing, ensuring that your next season of work is a flourish rather than a struggle.

Actually, it makes perfect sense once you understand what's really happening in your brain. After spending months unemployed following media layoffs, I became intimately familiar with this paradox. Days spent scrolling job boards and refreshing email left me more drained than my busiest workdays ever had. The exhaustion wasn't physical-it was something deeper, something that sleep couldn't fix.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law, first described in 1908, suggests that our performance improves with physiological or mental arousal-but only up to a point. Picture a bell curve: Too little arousal ( boredom, fatigue), and we underperform. Too much arousal ( anxiety, panic), and performance drops. Somewhere in the middle is our "zone of optimal arousal," where we're alert, focused, and effective (Yerkes & Dodson, 1908).

What fuels one person's energy may drain another. For instance, some people thrive on early morning workouts and feel ready to take on the day. For others, the same routine leaves them tired before the day even starts. Can you relate? These differences aren't signs that something is wrong with you-they're messages from how your nervous system is built to operate.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that has nothing to do with external stressors or excessive work. It is generated by a mind prone to hostile self-interpretations. You may be familiar with the tiring labour of constantly analysing, judging, and questioning yourself, the heavy mental load of second-guessing every feeling, reaction, desire, and decision. All of that comes at a high cost.