Imagine, it’s Monday morning, alarm bell rings at 5:30 am, with your eyes still closed, you drowsily move your hand and after dragging yourself a bit, your hand finally reaches to stop the alarm. Although it’s time to get up and start moving ahead with your routine activities like a small work-out, cup of coffee, newspaper, getting ready and finally off to office, you still lay in bed as you don’t feel like going to work today. You feel really exhausted and even before you realise, a chain of thoughts gets triggered in your mind,  

“Should I go to office or take a day-off?“,  

“I am badly tired”, 

“I am putting so much of hard-work, I truly deserve some rest”,  

“I am really exhausted”,   

“It’s fine to take a day-off sometimes”  

You mentally decide to take some rest, as you really had a hectic week. You plan to take a day-off in order to refresh yourself and gather some energy. The more you think about your strenuous week and the way you had to really slog to complete your project, you feel all the more tired. While you lay in bed with this self-talk, you suddenly realise that you are so badly tired and can’t even gather the courage to move from your bed. You decide to call your boss to inform that you won’t be coming today and a minute later you finally you pick up the phone…  

Sounds Similar ???

“Why do we get tired?“, I sometimes wonder……

Is it because of the physical and/or mental fatigue, that we experience after a frenetic day? 

Or, is it just a state of mind? 

If it is just because of the exhaustion that we experience after a hectic day, then how come we suddenly start oozing up with energy if we get a phone call from our best childhood buddy even if we have just entered home after a long day or if it’s a weekend and we have plans to go out. 

We binge-watch our favourite series for hours together and we still feel energetic but only an hour of working on a presentation or some data analysis reminds us of the screen time going higher and we start feeling our eyes burning. 

We get bored and feel sleepy after reading a document pertaining to the terms and conditions of the insurance policy that we have just purchased, however, we want to finish an interesting thriller novel in one sitting. 

Our exhaustion from the entire day melts away just after having a look at the innocent smile on our son/daughter’s face. 

What does all this suggest? 

It means tiredness is more of a psychological thing than a physical thing. Having said so, I am in no way discounting the efforts that we all put while commuting to our workplaces or while working on a challenging project or handling daily chores and so on. We all work really hard towards a lot of things and we do get tired also, nonetheless, up to a “great extent” it is psychological than anything else. 

So, what does it mean? 

Does it mean, if we are in control, we can switch-on and switch-off our mental states? 

In my opinion, the answer is “yes”. If we can prep our mind not to get overwhelmed by the challenges that we have handled “today” or the challenges that we are expecting to face “tomorrow”. I believe the key lies in training our mind to live in the “NOW”, the “present moment”, rather than living the stress of the day all over again or thinking and getting anxious about what’s going to happen tomorrow. This doesn’t mean that we should not plan things, it is very important to plan our goals but as they say “journeys are often more enjoyable than the destination”, therefore, we must learn to enjoy every moment of the journey rather than getting astounded by the complexity of the final goal.  

Robin Sharma also quoted beautifully in his bestseller, The Monk who Sold his Ferrari, 

“The past is water under the bridge and the future is a distant sun on the horizon of your imagination. The most important moment is NOW”. 

If we can train our mind to step away from this “time-trap” of living either in the past experiences or in the anticipation of future events, we can enjoy each and every moment with almost similar energy and it will surely add more life to our lives. 

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