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What Exhaustion Actually Does to Your Nervous System

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How to Manifest When You're Already Exhausted › Lesson 3 of 6

"Tired" is a lazy word that we use for everything.

I'm tired after a good workout. I'm tired after a long flight. You may be tired after three years of holding a household together with no help and no end date in sight. It's the same word for all three, which is ridiculous! Those are three meanings of tired are completely different and each one causes something different to physically happen inside your body.

If you are filled with exhaustion and you don't know which way is up, what you've got isn't the kind of tired that a 1 hour nap fixes. You have a stuck nervous system. It's on a setting that it was never meant to stay in, and once you see how that works, that guilty feeling you have for wanting to rest is gonna start fading away.

There are many different types of TIRED. Here are a few:

Depleted. Something was drained out of you.

Worn out. Wear and tear over a long time.

Spent. You had a fixed amount of energy and now it's gone.

Drained. Emphasizes that something or someone did the draining.

Running on empty. This matches our phone battery analogy.

Burnt out. A long slow grind, not a just one rough week.

Frayed. You're coming apart at the edges but still holding it together..

The question is... Which kind of tired are you?

Your body has two settings

You've got a gas pedal and you've got a brake. That's it.

The gas pedal is your sympathetic nervous system. Think of it like this... A threat shows up, and before you've consciously decided anything about it, your body dumps adrenaline and cortisol into your bloodstream. Your heart rate and blood pressure climbs. Blood is pulled away from your gut and your skin and rushes to your muscles. Your pupils widen to see the threat better and your blood sugar spikes so that your muscles have enough fuel. Digestion shuts down because you don't need to eat while fighting. Your reproduction shuts down because you don't need to have sex while fending off an enemy. The rest and repair work in your body shuts down because you can't repair and defend at the same time. Anything your body doesn't need in the next sixty seconds gets put on hold. This is often called "Survival Mode" and it's your body's attempt at keeping you alive.

The brake is your parasympathetic nervous system, and it runs mostly through your vagus nerve, the long wandering cable that drops from your brainstem down past your heart, your lungs, your stomach and your intestines. When that nerve gets the message that you're safe, everything downstream stands down. Your heart rate settles down, your blood pressure drops and blood flows back to your gut and your skin. Your body finally gets to do the work it had been holding off on. This is where you digest your food instead of just swallowing it, where your immune system builds the cells that fight infection, where torn tissue gets rebuilt, where you drop into deep sleep, and where the reasoning part of your brain comes back online so you can think a thing through instead of just blindly reacting to it. This is often called "Rest and Digest," or "Rest and Repair Mode".

You can't have both at the same time! You can't have your foot on the gas and on the brake at the same time because your body will pick one. It will always picks survival over repair, every single time, because survival is the more urgent job to keep you alive in the next minute, hour or day.

What it was built for

Back in the olden days, you would see a predator and you instantly had to decide to run, hide, or fight.

If you hid and the predator found you and killed you, you died. If you hid and the predator didn't find you, it would eventually leave and you would be safe. Either way, it was all over in just a few short minutes.

If you decided to fight and the predator killed you or if you fought and killed the predator, it was all over in a few minutes.

If you decided to run and the predator ran faster than you and killed you or if you could outrun the predator and they gave up the chase, it was all over in a few minutes.

The whole thing would resolve in a few minutes, and then your survival mode would shut off. Cortisol would clear. Your heart rate would settle. Your body would flip back to the brake start resting and repairing the damage.

Threat. Response. Resolution. Recovery. That's the original design for thousands of years. It works that way for every animal except humans. Due to the fact that we have evolved a bit differently, our modern stresses are way different than just being chased by a presdator.

Let's look at life in today's world of modern conveniences.

The email you haven't answered. It sits in your inbox all weekend. Your body treats it like something crouching in the grass, except it doesn't leave and you don't fight it. It just waits for you on Monday.

The past due bill you can't pay. You know the exact number and the exact date, but you don't have the money. There's no running or hiding that makes it go away. It eventually resolves and then next month it comes back.

Your phone. A device in your pocket that can deliver a threat at any second, from anyone, 24 hours per day, every day, for the rest of your life. Your body never gets to fully stand down because the next alarm could arrive in the next thirty seconds.

The boss who "just needs a quick word." No information, no timeline, and now your nervous system has to hold the alert open and continually wonder if you will get fired, until the meeting happens next week.

The parent who calls to complain about how you raise your kids. This is sometimes a lifetime subscription that we refuse to put down because 'They are family.' You want to call them but you are apprehensive every time.

Traffic. You're sitting still, late for an appointment and this causes your heart rate and adrenaline to rise. You have all the fight chemistry but nothing to fight so your stress level increases with every horn honk.

The news. Threats from every corner of the planet, delivered to your face all day, keeping you all jacked up. All of the threats are real but there is nothing you can personally do about them. You can't even run from them.

Comparison on social media. Your brain reads a negative comment as a genuine survival threat, and you can now scroll through a thousand reasons to feel like you are the lowest of the low, all before breakfast.

Your kid who isn't doing well in school. When someone isn't doing well in school because they are rebelling due to your actions that were casue by a perceived threat on the news about how jobs are hard to come by can stretch out over years.

Your spouse's lack of desire. You try to connect but you feel rejected because they snapped at you, only because they had a stressful work day. Now your body is on alert for the rest of the week.

Job insecurity. Rumors of layoffs, a shrinking department, a contract that ends in March. Your body prepares for a threat that hasn't arrived and might not, and it prepares every single day.

Unlike the days of old, when the threat was over in a few minutes, in our modern society, none our threats resolve in a few minutes. Heck, they might not even resolve for days or years or...ever! Your body doesn't flip back and for from survival to rest and repair. It stays in survival mode... which doesn't allow you to rest or repair yourself.

Remember the Gas and Brake analogy? Think about holding your foot on the gas pedal while the car sits in the driveway. The engine's screaming, the fuel's burning, your tires are melting, smoke is billowing, and you aren't going anywhere.

That's similar to the chronic stress you might feel in every day life. It's just constant and doesn't let up. It doesn't give you room to breathe or to think. It's not the stress that kills you. It's the CONSTANT STRESS that does the damage.

The Science Says:

Researchers call the accumulated wear from this "allostatic load," which is a fancy way of saying your body keeps a running tab and eventually presents you with the bill that has to be paid.

Allostatic load is the cumulative physiological "wear and tear" on the body resulting from chronic or repeated exposure to stress. It was coined by Bruce McEwen and Eliot Stellar in 1993 and represents the biological cost of adapting to stressors, where prolonged activation of a stress response systems leads to physiological dysregulation.

This condition manifests as dysfunction across four key biological systems:

Neuroendocrine: Excess secretion of hormones like cortisol.
Cardiovascular: Increased blood pressure and arterial turbulence.
Metabolic: Elevated blood sugar and lipid levels.
Inflammatory: Chronic immune system activation and cytokine release.

When the body's adaptive capacity is exceeded by environmental challenges, it results in allostatic overload, which accelerates disease progression and is linked to conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and depression.

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32799204/

Why you're exhausted at 8 a.m. and wired at midnight

Cortisol is supposed to run on a curve. It rises sharply in the first hour after you wake up in the morning, which is what gets you out of bed, then it tapers down all day, and by night it's low enough that melatonin can do its job and you can drop into deep sleep.

However, when you've been holding your foot on the gas pedal for months or years, that curve gets flattened and shoved around. Morning cortisol doesn't spike the way it should, so you wake up feeling like you got hit by a truck so you reach for coffee before your eyes are fully open just to get you started for the day.

Then night cortisol doesn't drop the way it should, so at 11:40 p.m. your body is still on alert, and you lie there with a mind that's cycling through everything you didn't finish. At 1am, you are still doom scrolling through social media, trying to plot yourself against the perfection of all the fake profiles.

The phone or TV light hitting your eyes tells a small clock in your brain that it's daytime, and that clock shuts your melatonin production down.

At 2am, you try to sleep but are still worried if you are gonna get fired next week. You aren't bad at sleeping, nor are you undisciplined. Your chemistry is just in the wrong order.

Case Studies

Case #1: Researchers at Ohio State gave a small standardized skin wound to women who were caring for a relative with Alzheimer's and to a matched group who weren't. The caregivers' wounds took about 49 days to close, compared to about 39 days for the control group. That's roughly 24% slower healing, from nothing but the stress of the life they were living. Same wound, same care, different nervous system.

Case #2: Researchers took hundreds of healthy volunteers, measured their stress levels, then deliberately dripped cold viruses into their noses and quarantined them to watch what happened. Higher stress levels showed a higher rate of actual infection. Everybody got the same virus. Their bodies just handled it differently.

Case #3: Researchers looked at nearly 25,000 people across 52 countries to figure out what actually causes heart attacks. People reporting permanent stress at work or home had roughly double the odds of a first heart attack compared to those without it. When the researchers ranked all the risk factors, psychosocial factors carried an odds ratio of 2.67 and accounted for about a third of the population risk, putting them in the same league as high blood pressure and belly fat. Stress sits near the top for leading factors of disease.

Case #4: Researchers measured telomeres, the protective caps on your chromosomes that get shorter as you age, in mothers of chronically ill children. The women reporting the highest stress had telomeres shorter by the equivalent of at least a decade of extra aging. And the longer the child had been sick, the shorter the telomeres and the lower the telomerase.

Case #5: A meta-analysis of over 600,000 people found that working 55 hours or more a week came with a 33% higher stroke risk and a 13% higher risk of coronary heart disease compared to a standard 35 to 40 hour week. And it climbed as the hours climbed.

So is stress "the leading cause of disease"?

Stress isn't a disease. You can't get diagnosed with it. What it is, is the accelerant sitting underneath disease. Chronic stress raises your blood pressure, keeps low-grade inflammation running, suppresses your immune response, wrecks your sleep, spikes your blood sugar, and shuts down the repair work your body was going to do tonight.

If you can't repair, can you heal? Highly doubtful.

Think about what it does to your behavior. When you're depleted, you don't want to cook at home so you order fast food which we all know is poison. You binge watch TV instead of taking a walk. You drink more just to take the edge off. You scroll instead of sleep.

So stress hits you twice, once through your chemistry and once through the choices you make when you have no energy left.

It doesn't cause any one particular disease. Stress makes you worse at surviving all of them. That's scarier.

Why you can't meditate your way around a stressor that's still in the room

Now we get to the uncomfortable part of this lesson.

Meditation is a very real action that works very well. It's the phone charger for your life we talked about in our last lesson. But if you plug your phone in and leave forty apps running, you're still going to sit there at 5% wondering why nothing's happening.

You can meditate for twenty minutes every morning and still be shredded by noon if the actual sources of the drain are untouched. The practice raises your capacity to handle situations but it doesn't lesson the strain on your life. Both have to happen.

Take an honest inventory. Stress shows up in three forms, and most of us are carrying all three at once without ever separating them out.

Physical stress is what you're doing to your body. Poor sleep, skipped meals, too much caffeine and not enough water, sitting for ten hours, chronic pain you've stopped mentioning, an illness you're pushing through, toxic food choices, alcohol to take the edge off at night.

Emotional stress is what you're carrying about other people and about yourself. Conflict, obligation, resentment, worry, guilt, and the running mental list of everyone who needs something from you.

Environmental stress is what your surroundings are doing to you whether you notice or not. Noise, pollution, mold, clutter, the news, the air in a room where somebody's angry.

Now find yours. Is it...

A specific person. (Emotional.) Every call leaves you flattened. You check who it is before you answer and your stomach drops. Your lever: less contact, shorter contact, contact on your terms. You don't owe anyone unlimited access to you.
Family obligations. (Emotional, and physical once it's been going long enough.) You're the one who handles everything, and everyone else has quietly agreed that's the arrangement.
Work. (All three at once.) Sunday nights ruined. Hours you don't get paid for. A boss whose mood sets the tone for your whole week.
Volunteered load. (Emotional.) The committee. The group chat. The side project. The favor you keep doing because you did it once.
Your body. (Physical.) Five hours of sleep. Coffee for breakfast and nothing until two. Pain you've decided is just normal now. A drink every night to shut your brain off.
Your space. (Environmental.) Clutter, noise, chaos, no door that closes, no ten minutes anywhere that belong to you.
Your inputs. (Environmental.) Living beside the data center, News before bed, doom-scrolling, comparing your life to strangers, bright light at midnight, the phone on the nightstand, drinking our of lead laced jars.

Your nervous system doesn't sort out the types of stressors. It doesn't know that one alarm came from your mother and one came from four hours of sleep and one came from inhaling toxic fumes. It just adds them up and reacts to the total.

So if the emotional stuff feels impossible to change right now, and for a lot of people it genuinely is, you might not be stuck. Take the load down somewhere else. Physical and environmental are usually the cheapest to move, and your body feels the drop just the same.

There is an old saying that is very true. You can't heal in the same environment that made you sick.

Energy Vampires

Unfortunately, some people cost you more than they give back. You already know who they are, because you thought of a name before you finished this sentence.

I can't ethically tell you to cut off your mother or best friend. That's not my call and life is more complicated than a piece of advice from a stranger but deep down, you already know exactly who you should remove from your life. You can love certain friends and/or family members at a distance, instead of having a close relationship.

You can reduce contact without a dramatic confrontation. You can stop answering at 10 p.m. You can let a call go to voicemail and return it on your terms. You can stop volunteering information that turns into a two-hour conversation. You can end a visit at 15 minutes instead of 3 hours.

None of that requires you to become a different person. It requires you to accept that your nervous system is a finite resource and that spending it on someone who resents you for having limits isn't generous. It's just slow self-harm with good manners.

A word on narcissism:

We all know a narcissist; someone whose whole world runs on how THEY look and how THEY feel, or how rich THEY are, or how THEY are better than everyone else. You only matter to them when you're making them look good.

Let's face it, most everyone is a little like this sometimes but it's a real problem when it's all the time, when the person simply can't handle being wrong about anything. The story always comes back around to them. They need praise constantly. They care about your feelings when it's convenient and can't seem to see them at all when it isn't. They are always complaining about being the victim and how they are always mistreated.

If you bring up a problem, they say it never happened and then get mad at you for mentioning it. Somehow you end up being the one apologizing. They tell you you're remembering it wrong and/or you're too sensitive. You start doubting yourself.

Everything they did becomes your fault... They yelled because you pushed them. They lied because you'd have overreacted anyway. And your body pays for all of it, because that fight never actually ends. You stay on alert, reading their mood, planning your defense, replaying conversations in the shower. That's your energy, going somewhere that gives you nothing back.

A Harsh Opinion:

In my opinion, I would highly suggest eliminating anyone from your life that is a narcissist. That sounds harsh and rude at first but in hindsight, it's always creates a better life, literally 100% of the time.

What actually put the brakes back on

There is Good news!

Your parasympathetic system has been outvoted for a long time but it's still there, and it still works! It will respond much faster than you think when you intentionally turn it on.

Slow breathing with a longer exhales, silence, becoming aware of the present moment, warmth, darkness, visualization, the feeling of safety, and emotional stillness... They're the actual physical inputs that flip the switch.

That's next. We are getting into the HOW!

Ready to continue?

Mark this lesson as complete to move on.