Tired All the Time: Your Body Knows Why
By Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor --- There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep.
Tired All the Time: Your Body Knows Why
*By Isla Camilleri, Global Affairs & Lifestyle Editor*
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There is a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep. I recognised it first in Singapore, where the air conditioning ran so cold and the hours ran so long that by Thursday I had forgotten what it felt like to be actually awake. I was sleeping eight hours and arriving everywhere exhausted. Nobody talked about it. Everyone just ordered another coffee.
That specific fog — functional but flattened, present but not quite there — turns out to be one of the most common and most misread states a body can be in. And the reasons, when you lay them out honestly, are rarely dramatic.
Chronic fatigue that doesn't resolve with sleep usually points to one of a handful of culprits: nutritional deficiency (iron and B12 are the quiet offenders most people never test), disrupted sleep architecture (meaning you're horizontal for eight hours but your body isn't cycling properly through the stages that actually restore you), blood sugar instability from eating patterns that spike and crash, low-grade dehydration, or — less often discussed — the cumulative cortisol load of living permanently at a moderate level of stress without ever fully discharging it.
The alcohol piece matters here too, and it's worth saying plainly: a drink before bed feels like sedation but fragments sleep in the second half of the night. You wake at three, mind running, body already half-alert. You call it insomnia. It's chemistry.
What's interesting about the current research is how much it's moving away from single-cause thinking. The body doesn't get tired for one reason. It gets tired because three systems are slightly off simultaneously — and none of them, individually, would show up as a problem. It's the combination that floors you.
The Mediterranean diet keeps appearing in these studies not because researchers are nostalgic for olive groves, but because the data keeps pointing to it: lower inflammation, more stable blood sugar, better microbiome diversity, all of which feed back into energy regulation. Diet quality, it turns out, matters more than calorie arithmetic — and the difference shows up not just on the scale but in how you feel getting through a Wednesday.
There is also, for what it's worth, a genuine case for the 90-minute nap after a genuinely bad night — not as a lifestyle, but as an occasional reset. One full sleep cycle. Set the alarm. Don't apologise for it.
Tomorrow: get a basic blood panel done. Iron, B12, vitamin D, thyroid. Not because something is necessarily wrong — but because you deserve to rule it out.
