As I understand it, the most likely cause of tired all the time is lack of sleep. Easy to check: throw away your alarm clock. If you’re habitually using a machine to shorten your sleep then you’ll be tired, and getting rid should fix that. Apparently ‘stress’ is another common cause, but I don’t know what ‘stress’ is. It just appears to be a word for ‘bad stuff possibly including diseases and definitely including things that spoil your sleep’.
After those two are ruled out, then you should go and see your doctor. Fatigue isn’t normal, and there are about 200 different diseases that can cause it. Go pre-armed with arguments like ‘I get twelve hours sleep every night and I still need an afternoon nap’ and ‘I’ve lost the ability to read, I can’t concentrate’, then she’ll take you seriously.
She should check for anaemia and thyroid function, plus loads of other things. If after having tested for anything she, you, the NICE guidlines and the internet in general and any medical friends can think of, you’re still inexplicably tired but apparently perfectly well, then you’re probably on the verge of a CFS diagnosis.
I think up until that point, medicine and I are in agreement. Then the craziness starts:
Apparently low iron can be ‘low for you’ rather than ‘out of the population normal range’. If your iron levels are ‘low normal’, then there’s a nice-tasting iron supplement that you can try called Floradix that gets good reviews on Amazon. Don’t go overboard though, high iron levels are also a cause of fatigue and other nastiness.
Also try making a list of symptoms, by which I mean ‘everything about your state that isn’t the same as it was the last time you remembered being unambiguously bouncy and enthusiastic’. A lot of it just looks like aging. Then work out what your score is according to Billewicz’s test.
If Billewicz would have thought you were hypothyroid, then it might be worth trying to find a doctor who is prepared to give you a trial of thyroid hormones. But be very very careful. No one knows anything about this except hunches, and any doctor prepared to do this is pretty much by definition acting against best practice.
On no account mess about with this without medical advice. These hormones are very powerful and can be very dangerous.
It’s one thing to use an alarm clock as a safety net in case you oversleep. It’s quite a different one to have it wrench you out of deep sleep every morning. If you need it to get up every morning, try going to bed earlier.
People need different amounts of sleep. I think people complaining about being tired when they’re just not getting enough is a large part of why doctors tend to need convincing that people’s tiredness isn’t self-inflicted.
If you need it to get up every morning, try going to bed earlier.
Ah, but now we’ve replaced “throw away your alarm clock” with “make a possibly major change in your sleeping habits, and then use your alarm clock only as a safety net”. That’s not quite so easy.
No! That’s the fix. The check is still ‘throw away your alarm clock’. Or variants thereof adapted to specific circumstances. In fact you might just need to count how often you wake up before it goes off. Should be ‘mostly’.
But the check isn’t “easy” if doing it requires you also to implement a highly nontrivial fix.
Imagine that you go to your doctor because you’re worried you have Scary Disease X. He says “I have good news: there’s a really easy test for this. We just take a drop of blood from your finger and put it in this machine and see which of these two lights light up.” That sounds pretty good. ”… Now, before we can do this you’re going to have to eat a purely vegetarian diet for three months, and run a half-marathon every week during that time. And then we’re all set.”
g, we’re getting hung up on a misunderstanding here. I don’t think we disagree about anything. The check is ‘get rid of your alarm clock, see if you can still wake up at the right time’. Nothing else needs doing. If you have a job pressing the world-not-explode button at precisely 9am every morning then you might need to do something ever-so-slightly more complicated to allow for that. But not much more complicated. You know my number, give me a ring if I’m not making sense.
As I understand it, the most likely cause of tired all the time is lack of sleep. Easy to check: throw away your alarm clock. If you’re habitually using a machine to shorten your sleep then you’ll be tired, and getting rid should fix that. Apparently ‘stress’ is another common cause, but I don’t know what ‘stress’ is. It just appears to be a word for ‘bad stuff possibly including diseases and definitely including things that spoil your sleep’.
After those two are ruled out, then you should go and see your doctor. Fatigue isn’t normal, and there are about 200 different diseases that can cause it. Go pre-armed with arguments like ‘I get twelve hours sleep every night and I still need an afternoon nap’ and ‘I’ve lost the ability to read, I can’t concentrate’, then she’ll take you seriously.
She should check for anaemia and thyroid function, plus loads of other things. If after having tested for anything she, you, the NICE guidlines and the internet in general and any medical friends can think of, you’re still inexplicably tired but apparently perfectly well, then you’re probably on the verge of a CFS diagnosis.
I think up until that point, medicine and I are in agreement. Then the craziness starts:
Apparently low iron can be ‘low for you’ rather than ‘out of the population normal range’. If your iron levels are ‘low normal’, then there’s a nice-tasting iron supplement that you can try called Floradix that gets good reviews on Amazon. Don’t go overboard though, high iron levels are also a cause of fatigue and other nastiness.
Also try making a list of symptoms, by which I mean ‘everything about your state that isn’t the same as it was the last time you remembered being unambiguously bouncy and enthusiastic’. A lot of it just looks like aging. Then work out what your score is according to Billewicz’s test.
If Billewicz would have thought you were hypothyroid, then it might be worth trying to find a doctor who is prepared to give you a trial of thyroid hormones. But be very very careful. No one knows anything about this except hunches, and any doctor prepared to do this is pretty much by definition acting against best practice.
On no account mess about with this without medical advice. These hormones are very powerful and can be very dangerous.
Easy unless you happen to need the income from your job and your employer cares when you get into work.
(That is, unfortunately, the situation of a great many people.)
It’s one thing to use an alarm clock as a safety net in case you oversleep. It’s quite a different one to have it wrench you out of deep sleep every morning. If you need it to get up every morning, try going to bed earlier.
People need different amounts of sleep. I think people complaining about being tired when they’re just not getting enough is a large part of why doctors tend to need convincing that people’s tiredness isn’t self-inflicted.
Ah, but now we’ve replaced “throw away your alarm clock” with “make a possibly major change in your sleeping habits, and then use your alarm clock only as a safety net”. That’s not quite so easy.
No! That’s the fix. The check is still ‘throw away your alarm clock’. Or variants thereof adapted to specific circumstances. In fact you might just need to count how often you wake up before it goes off. Should be ‘mostly’.
But the check isn’t “easy” if doing it requires you also to implement a highly nontrivial fix.
Imagine that you go to your doctor because you’re worried you have Scary Disease X. He says “I have good news: there’s a really easy test for this. We just take a drop of blood from your finger and put it in this machine and see which of these two lights light up.” That sounds pretty good. ”… Now, before we can do this you’re going to have to eat a purely vegetarian diet for three months, and run a half-marathon every week during that time. And then we’re all set.”
g, we’re getting hung up on a misunderstanding here. I don’t think we disagree about anything. The check is ‘get rid of your alarm clock, see if you can still wake up at the right time’. Nothing else needs doing. If you have a job pressing the world-not-explode button at precisely 9am every morning then you might need to do something ever-so-slightly more complicated to allow for that. But not much more complicated. You know my number, give me a ring if I’m not making sense.
And you aren’t friends with your system I to the extend that it understands that it’s important that you get up on time.
That’s a bad sign. If you don’t naturally wake up at the time you normally get up, you’re forcing something.