Your tiredness has a message: it's time to reconnect
- Phil McAuliffe
- Jun 23
- 8 min read
Your constant tiredness could be loneliness in disguise. Discover how meaningful connection is the key to you feeling energised and alive.
Hello my friend
You’re tired, aren’t you?
But you’ve got that kind of tired that a good sleep doesn’t shift. You’ve got the kind of tired that you feel in your bones, that follows you through the day and makes everything feel heavier.
You tell yourself it’s just life: work, responsibilities, everything piling up.
But what if your tiredness isn’t just about being busy?
What if it’s your body’s quiet way of saying: I need connection?
Why do we feel so tired?
You and I would find it difficult to meet someone in our day who, in response to the question ‘How are you?’, would not answer ‘busy’ and ‘tired’.
Busyness and tiredness are everywhere.
It makes sense. We live in a society that prizes productivity and busyness. We strive to be busy. We can feel that we’re being left behind if we’re not busy.
If we’re not busy at work, then we fear that we’d be exposed and made redundant. This loss of our income would be catastrophic for us and those who depend on us, especially when trying to pay for life’s essentials like housing, food, medicines and warmth.
We can also be busy at home. Depending on your circumstances, you may spend part of your days ferrying others around to various commitments.
When I get in that mode, I always feel like I’m 10 minutes late to everything (which, to be honest, I usually am). When I am somewhere, I’m not there. I’m always watching the clock to make sure the show keeps moving so we don’t miss our next engagement.
At the end of those days, I just want to collapse onto the couch and stare in the direction of a screen and wonder where the day went. Then I think ahead to the next day and try to do all the things on my list that I didn’t get to that day plus those items on tomorrow’s list.
I’ve come to believe that busyness proves I’m important. I’m someone on the move, someone worthy.
It’s relentless. It’s exhausting.
Busyness and tiredness kill connection, and disconnection feeds tiredness
Like you, I fall into the mode of trying to be all things to everyone, everywhere, all the time.
It would be easy to leave the issue here and simply give the advice to ‘stop being so busy’. But that’s unhelpful. You and I live in a society and work in workplaces that are not set up for our social wellbeing. How we live and where we spend time are socially unhealthy for us. But it’s the reality we live in.
The consequences of this eternally time-poor reality affect us deeply – physically, mentally, emotionally and socially. This eternal time poverty shoves us onto the downward spiral towards loneliness and social disconnection.
The busyness means that we’re often so tired. We have little time and energy left over for the type of social connection that we need, because the connection that we need takes time and energy.
Conversely, social disconnection – whether through loneliness or social isolation – feeds our tiredness. This study shows how feeling disconnected makes us so tired (Read this summary article if you want something less academic).
We’ve evolved to connect
We’ve evolved to connect, not to watch clocks and rush around. Connection is vital to our wellbeing. Vital. Life-sustaining.
If we don’t feel connected, we die.
We’ve evolved to be at our best when we feel connected. We go into a kind of panic mode when we feel disconnected.
We’re no longer afforded the protection of others watching out for us and caring for us. We become hyper-vigilant and hyper-aroused, lest the sound of that snapping twig turn into the sign that we’re being stalked by a hungry sabre-toothed tiger. Adrenaline then cortisol, our stress hormone, surges through us keeping us in the hyper-vigilant and hyper-aroused state of fight, flight, freeze or fawn until we feel connected and safe again.
What does cortisol do?
Cortisol is a wonderous hormone. Cortisol is what our bodies release after releasing adrenaline, meaning that we stay on high alert for longer.
Cortisol helps regulate our stress response, providing fast energy in times of stress (like when we’re being sized up as that sabre-toothed tiger’s snack). Cortisol regulates our metabolism and blood sugar levels (our liver releases sugars into our bloodstream to act as quick muscle fuel), it boosts immunity and suppresses inflammation, regulates our blood pressure, and plays a key role in maintaining our circadian rhythm (cortisol drops in the evening and peaks in the morning just before we wake up, helping us to wake up) (source: Cleveland Clinic).
You want to have cortisol on your side when you’re in danger.
When good cortisol goes bad
But having cortisol surging through us often is not great. Our bodies can get accustomed to all the cortisol surging through us and its effectiveness at reducing inflammation can be reversed – leading to more inflammation. Our immune systems are also weaker.
All that hyper-vigilance puts our organs under continual stress. We store more fat. It increases our blood pressure, putting stress on our cardiovascular systems. Over the long term, cortisol puts us at risk of heart attacks, strokes and diabetes - cortisol tells the pancreas to lower insulin (which usually brings blood sugar down) and raise glucagon (which pushes it up). Prolonged cortisol exposure also increases our risk of developing dementia and some cancers.
The irony is that despite us being tired, excess cortisol messes with our sleep. Cortisol is the reason why we can often struggle to have a good sleep the first night in a hotel room: our body cannot properly rest lest the noise coming from the minibar or people talking in the corridor is a threat. We sleep best when we feel safe.
Cortisol is rocket fuel: we move quickly, but not for very long. In the short term, once the surge of cortisol and adrenaline is done, we’re exhausted.
We plumb new depths of tiredness.
The tiredness truth
Unlike the powerful stories that you use to convince yourself that your busyness and the consequent tiredness means that you’re worthy and important, your body doesn’t lie.
Your body is exhausted. Here are five clues:
‘Tired’ is your default answer whenever someone asks you how you are
If you find yourself saying no to connection opportunities because you’re too tired to get off the couch
If you find yourself bailing at the last minute on opportunities to connect because you’re too tired to leave the house
If you find yourself procrastinating or looking for reasons to make a quick getaway
If you’re too tired to get out of bed (or even too tired to go to bed)
This tiredness is an obstacle to getting the connection that you need.
And when tiredness becomes your default, it starts to shape more than just your energy level. It begins to shape your worldview.
Cue the black turtleneck and order a café au lait – we’re going existential
I want to come back to the downward spiral into loneliness and social disconnection.
At a point on that descent, the tiredness we experience from being too busy to connect evolves into something more.
The loneliness and social disconnection we’re experiencing becomes an existential danger to us.
The effort to get out of the rut, to climb back up the spiral or to even stop our descent becomes too much. Loneliness and social disconnection turn from something uncomfortable we experience in the short term into something that we no longer notice. It becomes background noise that we tune out and only pay attention to when everything else has gone quiet.
I feel that this is how we slip into chronic, or persistent, loneliness. We simply don’t notice it anymore and think that this is just our default state. That this is all we deserve and all we should expect.
We enter a state of existential dread.
And channelling Jean-Paul Sartre for a moment, this existential dread is what makes us do the equivalent of shrugging our shoulders and saying ‘La vie est inutile’ before drawing on a Gaulloise cigarette and returning to read our copy of ‘L’être et le néant’ when talking about a tough subject like loneliness and are being called to act.
It’s just all too much and too hard. It’s easier to numb, distract, avoid and succumb.
I feel this is the reason why loneliness is an antecedent state for depression. It’s a short trip from chronic loneliness to a depression.
My friend, you’re here reading these words written by me – someone who’s also lived this dread. I’m saying these words to you clearly and with love:
You’re worthy of better, but you must fight against the existential dread.
The fight starts now, as you read the rest of this article.
It begins by really listening to what your tiredness is trying to tell you.
Let’s end your loneliness: pay attention to tiredness
We’re going to reframe our relationship with tiredness. Stop accepting tiredness as a state of being. Stop wearing your tiredness as some kind of perverse badge of honour.
Start seeing tiredness as a signal that you need some meaningful connection.
The irony is that you’re too tired to connect, but getting the connection that you need nourishes and energises you.
I know that often the last thing you want to do is socialise when you’re tired. I understand, the siren call of the couch and staring towards a screen is strong. I also understand that connection can be just one more thing that you don’t have time for in your eternally busy life.
The reframe here is to get connection that’s meaningful for you, in that moment.
Our work at HUMANS:CONNECTING centres on the concept of the three pillars of connection. The three pillars are connection to self, connection to those most important to you and connection to community (read this article for more details on these pillars).
Knowing your connection needs within each pillar helps you know what connection is meaningful for you and how you get it. Feeling the connection that’s meaningful for you helps you move through your loneliness and keep it as you’re meant to experience it: in the short term.
For example, if you’re tired, perhaps the most meaningful connection within the ‘connection to self’ pillar isn’t pushing through, but giving yourself permission to rest. Maybe it means an early night. Maybe it’s simply stopping, just for a moment.
The key is always meaningful connection.
Your tiredness has something to say. Listen, and allow it to lead you back to meaningful connection.
What’s one small act of meaningful connection you can make today?
A quick ask
If this resonated, share this article with someone who might need to hear it. Sharing the article can be a helpful way to start a conversation and get the meaningful connection you and those with whom you share it need.
That’s it for this article
Thanks for spending time with these words. We share them to support, challenge, and inspire you as you grow into a more connected, intentional human.
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Until next time, be awesomely you.
~ Phil
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