Life is a never-ending rollercoaster that can offer us the highest highs and the lowest lows, but when lows outnumber the highs, we can end up utterly drained on just about every level.
When we’re being sucked dry of all our mental and emotional strength, the effects manifest physically as well as spiritually, and unless we find a way to stop all our strength being sucked out of us, we can bleed out, energy-wise.
If you’re suffering from any of the effects listed below, chances are you’re at the “can’t draw blood from a stone” level of being drained, in body, mind, and spirit.
1. Unceasing Fatigue
Fatigue is something different from just regular tiredness. We can be exhausted after a few days’ worth of partying or running after sugared-up toddlers, but that kind of exhaustion can be remedied with a couple of nights’ worth of decent sleep.
Fatigue can’t.
When you’re suffering from fatigue, it doesn’t matter if you sleep 20 hours a day or drink 30 coffees in the span of a few hours: you will still be tired to the very marrow in your bones. You’ll feel as though you have 500lb lead weights strapped to each of your limbs, and it might be damned near impossible to gather the strength to do even the most mundane of tasks.
2. Insomnia
Adding to the bone-weariness of fatigue, insomnia can also be a horrible way that mental and emotional depletion can manifest. You are so very, very tired, all the time, and all you want to do is sleep, but you can’t. Why? Because your thoughts are racing at top speed and you can’t shut them down. Just as you start to drift off, some worry will intrude and knock you back into wakefulness, so you can’t get much-needed rest… which compounds the fatigue that’s already draining you dry.
3. Illness Or Physical Symptoms
Are you having heart palpitations from low-level anxiety? Or perhaps regular bouts of gastro distress or vomiting? Do you have a headache that won’t seem to go away? How about joint pain?
Emotional exhaustion can often manifest physically, especially if you’re the sort of person who carries stress in your belly, or if you clench your muscles subconsciously to brace against whatever is hurting you.
If you’re in a position where you’ve been walking on eggshells to avoid upsetting someone, like a megalomaniacal boss or emotionally unstable romantic partner, you may have TMJ from grinding your teeth, shoulder pain from hunching your shoulders, or intestinal issues.
4. Crying Easily
If you’re at the point where having toothpaste fall off your toothbrush first thing in the morning is enough to bring you to a bout of hysterical weeping, that’s… really not good at all. When we’re depleted emotionally and mentally, our natural ability to handle things like normal, day-to-day stress or upset is shaved down to pretty much nothing, so the slightest thing can make us burst into tears.
Another possibility is actually the opposite of hypersensitivity, and that is:
5. Detachment
You can’t bring yourself to feel much of anything, good or bad. You’ve gone numb.
Whatever it is that you’re dealing with has drained your light to the point where you literally can’t feel the emotions you’d normally feel when you encounter a situation or subject. This is sort of like depression, only instead of feeling weighed down by emotion you’re weighed down by the absence thereof.
Anhedonia is a type of emotional detachment that specifically prevents you from being able to feel joy or pleasure, and is a strong sign that you are dangerously depleted.
6. Irritability And Anger
Another way that depletion can manifest is as ever-present irritability, or even bouts of abject rage. Tiny things that you could ordinarily block out, like the sound of your partner’s chewing or the fact that your coworker insists on using Comic Sans in her reports, will irritate the living crap out of you or make you want to throw the office microwave through a window.
Instead of dealing with the source of what is actually draining you, you’re hypersensitive to the tiniest irritation, and projecting those feelings onto sources other than the one that’s really mucking you up.
7. Lack Of Motivation
You really don’t have the wherewithal to do much of anything. You might be wearing the same underpants a few days in a row because you can’t be bothered to change your clothes, let alone shower. You might have lost weight because you can’t bring yourself to eat (it’s not like you have much of an appetite anyway), and all you want to do is go back to bed so you can sleep and hide away from either the overwhelming emotions you’re dealing with, or your awareness that you don’t feel anything at all.
This is especially difficult to contend with at one’s workplace or school, since there are inevitably due dates for various tasks or assignments, but if you have no motivation to get to those tasks, you won’t get them done on time… so they’ll accumulate, which will make you procrastinate more, etc. ad infinitum. This can result in you failing classes or getting warnings at work – if not fired outright – but if you’re feeling numb, you really won’t care much about that, will you?
8. Hopelessness
Running on the heels of a lack of motivation is the feeling of hopelessness: that it doesn’t matter if you even try to improve your situation – no good will come of it anyway. Or any attempt you make will be thwarted, so why bother?
It’s dangerous to reach this point, because once hopelessness sets in, you might feel so trapped in the situation that you’ll either resign yourself to this horrible fate forever, thus remaining in a state of depletion indefinitely, or consider taking drastic measures in order to stop it. If you’re at this point, please get help: it’s a very dangerous line to cross, and you may not be able to find your way back on your own.
Via
