Am I Tired?

It is my pleasure to introduce for your consideration, one of the most tangled questions I have run across in some time. I am coming at this question as I come at so many questions, viz. I have an idea about how to approach the question in a new way, but I have no idea whether I will be closer to a good answer than I was at the beginning. Let’s see how it goes.

I don’t know any way to tell whether I am tired than to know whether I am feeling tired. I think that is the best I can do, despite the fact that I know “feelings of tiredness” are, like all feelings, subject to misinterpretation. The question could easily be rephrased as “Do I know when I have feelings of tiredness?” The answer to that one is, “Yes, of course you do. But do you trust them?”

Why would I not trust my feeling tired? I have had the experience, and I’ll bet you have too, of “being tired,” and then having those feelings vanish in the flicker of an eye. You know as much about tiredness as I do. Can you get “un-tired” instantly? I don’t think so. What physical mechanisms would do such a thing? So what does it mean that “feeling tired” can vanish instantly? It means, at least, that: a) “being tired” and “feeling tired” are not the same thing, b) that they vary in their rhythms and c) very probably in their causes as well.

Since the fundamental concept is not clear to me, let me proceed by means of examples. When I ran a lot of 10K races, I noticed that there would come a time when my mind shifted over. It felt like gears being shifted in an automatic transmission. Since I was running so many races, I had a lot of opportunity to locate just where in the race that occurred and why. My conclusion, based on all this “research” (many races, but N = 1) was that at that point, my mind shifted over from monitoring how I was feeling to projecting whether I had enough stuff to finish the race.

I am quite sure that this shift in the focus of my mind’s continual audit of my energy coincided with “not feeling tired” any more. Now I am wondering whether that new question actually caused me not to feel tired any more. I’ve had the same lift in reading a demanding or dull (either one will work) article. I am slogging along, feeling slow, maybe feeling sleepy. I turn back to see how much more I have to read in that session. I learn that I am almost done and decide to finish up. I have “enough,” I find to finish. I discover, oddly that the tiredness has gone away. I have even found myself, to my embarrassment, turning back a few pages to see what I might have missed while I was slogging through the swamp and finding that what I had missed was really interesting. What is going on there?

So that’s the question, really. I said I have “an approach,” and I do, but the approach has problems of its own. What I think is that what I call “feeling tired” is not the result of a measurement like sticking a dipstick in the engine to check the oil. It is more like looking at the balance in your checking account to see if you have enough to cover the check you are about to write. It is, in other words, a comparison, but it seems to be a feeling.

But if it’s really a comparison—a ratio—then both terms need to be looked at. You can no longer ask whether you are tired; you must ask whether you are so tired that you really should not engage in X, attend Y, or attempt Z. And then you would need to know something about what X, Y, and Z are, since they seem to be substantially involved in whether you are feeling tired. What if X is something you really love to do; Y is something that feels “right” to you, it feels like a calling; and Z is something that needs to be done and you are the person who is there. What if?

Some of the people who read this blog—both followers and lurkers are welcome—are old and male. I want to talk to you for a little bit. Have you had the experience of lying in bed in the morning, trying to sort out your day or your relationships or your life? You feel just awful. Maybe you didn’t sleep well. Maybe some part of your body hurts. Maybe some feeling is worrisome; does it portend something dreadful? Then you remember that the first thing you need to do (after Starbucks has done its magic for you that morning) is to take the car in to get the oil changed. Without thinking about it, you find yourself asking whether you feel well enough to take the car in. This is a Z kind of event. You decide that you can do that and all of a sudden you feel better. Ever had that happen? It happens to me all the time.

As an experience—not this reconstruction I just did—it is the difference between feeling tired at 5:30 and not tired at 5:40. It feels like I surveyed my body at 5:30 and discovered a serious condition of some sort. I went back to check it at 5:40 and discovered that it was not there and, in my judgment as of 5:40, probably never had been.

So here’s a thought. I’m sixty years old and I am rich with X’s, Y's, and Z’s. Now I’m seventy years old and I am poor in X’s, Y’s, and Z’s. I don’t have very many and the ones I do have are moth-eaten or threadbare. Specifying, just for the purposes of this paragraph, that the actual condition of my body is the same in those two settings, I would guess that I would “feel tired” a lot more at seventy although I am “not actually more tired.” It feels like being tired,but it is, in fact, a slow decay of my reasons not to feel tired.

So here’s another thought. I’m seventy years old and I have these pathetic X’s, Y’s, and Z’s—these past their prime “reasons not to feel tired.” Something happens. A romance. A new neighbor. A new job. A stroke. A religious vision. Anything that will, just for the moment, restore this fund of “reasons not to feel tired.” Result, I stop feeling tired. Note that this is not the recurrence of reasons not to feel tired. All this processing happens off-stage, out of my awareness, and it happens very quickly. My experience has nothing to do with reasons at all. I stop feeling tired. So this is too good to be true, right?

Yes. It is. Certainly it’s too good for me to believe it. At least, it isn’t anything I’ve ever experienced. Let’s go back to 5:30 a.m. I feel tired. In the absence of my refurbished X’s, Y’s, and Z’s, I will go on feeling tired. I will say, “I AM tired.” But with these new X’s, I experience something else instead. I say, “Am I so tired that I can’t do X?” The answer is, “No. You feel good enough to do X.” So I get up and start getting ready to do X. As I get going, I either feel better or stop monitoring; I’m really not sure which.

So the “experience” of so many tired old men is, by this understanding, a calculation masquerading as an experience. It would be shown to be, if we had a camera fast enough and pointed at the right spot, an assessment of the value of the task, an assessment of the energy required (mental and physical) to address the task and a report, finally, to the part of my mind that I get to see, that I am not THAT tired.

By this account, you can feed stimulants to your body or to your available tasks. X’s, Y’s, and Z’s on steroids are pretty much the same as you on steroids, because it is the ratio that matters. And if you are diddled into thinking that “being tired” is an experience you are having and that as an experience it is “true,” or at least, “not likely to be challenged,” then you have thrown away the half of the ratio that could be most useful to you.

I want to end here. This argument is not essentially a religious argument. Whatever it is that beefs up the task to be done (or that summons you, particularly, to do it), will perform the same function. Hatred would do it if it were focused. Communist conquest would do it. The implacable blandness of bureaucrats would do it. The urgent goals of sects I have never heard of would do it.

But I think the reason this question has been buzzing around in my mind for so long came to me in the form of a prayer. Maybe it’s just a quip that is presented as a prayer. My brother Mark is the one who passed it along to me. Here it is: “Thank you, Lord, for giving me work to do that is so important that it doesn’t matter all that much whether I want to do it.”