fighting fatigue

what we can learn from our tired eyes, shaky legs, and tight shoulders

There are nights where I feel utterly exhausted after I take off my contact lenses.

Now, I’m not talking about dry, tired eyes from extended contact wear, though that does happen to me occasionally.

No, what I experience is a whole-body fatigue that RKOs me into my couch. While this doesn’t happen every night, it does occur at such an irregular cadence that I’ve had trouble piecing together what could be driving it.

I looked for answers online, but ultimately wasn’t able to find anything helpful. Even Reddit had nothing for me.

So, as a last resort, I consulted my physician about this issue. Here’s how that went down:

She brings up good points.

Perhaps the fatigue I’m feeling is a Pavlovian response my body has learned, associating the removal of my contacts with the cue to finally ~relax~. It sounds childishly simple, but the stress I get from looking at numbers and faces on my computer screen during the day is probably the root cause of my overwhelmingly tired nights.

From this I’m gently reminded that our body relies on physical cues to help us be more aware of our emotional state. The only problem is, we fall into the habit of completely ignoring those signals.

As an ex-neuroscience major, I know our physical and mental states are deeply intertwined. For example, take these three competing theories of emotion:

• The James-Lange theory of emotion proposes that physiological reactions (smiling) cause emotion (happiness)

• The Cannon-Bard theory states that we feel emotion (happiness) and elicit physiological reactions (smiling) independently, but at the same time

• The Schachter-Singer theory proposes that we learn to label physiological reactions (smiling) to emotion (through repeated experience, I have learned that I feel happy when I am smiling)

I don’t remember there being a consensus “more correct” theory out of the three. What I do know is that it's a whole lot easier to identify our physical discomforts than our emotional ones, and that our physical and emotional states are inextricably linked together. So the next time you find yourself shaking your leg, biting your fingernails, or tight in the shoulders, take it as an invitation to look inwards and address any emotional discomforts you might be carrying.

What’s tragic is that, even though I have all this cognitive behavioral stuff fully internalized, I still consistently fail to acknowledge the feedback my body gives to me. Only after drafting and editing this post did I finally come to the conclusion that I accumulate stress in my eyes throughout the workday. In the coming weeks, I’m looking to implement healthier habits into my day to address this—such as setting Slack reminders to take my eyes off the screen more often, changing up where I’m sitting, maybe even using a bigger font size—to make sure I’m still feeling relatively fresh after logging off.

If you’ve made it this far, I’m going to assume you’re somewhat interested in this sort of stuff. So to wrap things up, I want to share with you with this beautifully animated and narrated video I watched a few days ago titled “How Repressed Emotions Make Us Sick.” Don’t worry, its not long:

I’ve benefited a lot from similar versions of the full-body check-in exercise. Given that it’s much easier to identify physical discomforts than emotions, you might find it surprising how accurately you can identify the emotions associated with different parts of your body. From doing these check-ins on myself, I've learned that I feel happiness in my heart, guilt in my stomach, and anxiety in the form of itchy delts. I know, quite cliché, but also… oddly specific?

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Now that I’ve finally found the cure to my “tired-after-taking-off-my-contacts syndrome”, I eagerly await the day that I can spread my wisdom to help advance the ever-evolving field that is online medicine.

Perhaps one day, a young, lost soul will ask about this very same illness on r/AskDocs. My tears well up just thinking about the civic duty I must fulfill. On a platform where users crave validation for their unique problems, I'm obligated to offer a gut-wrenching dismissal: yeah that’s completely normal—you’ve just had a long day.