Resilience : Application and Practical exercises: Tiredness, sleepiness, exhaustion

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A systems view of biological health

Section 4: Application and Practical exercises

14 : Tiredness, sleepiness, exhaustion

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Various states of tiredness, sleepiness, doziness (and similar) are common experiences both as a result of overwhelm and during treatment/ recovery.

There is an almost infinite range of nuance to these states, discriminating between them is very individual in detail, and so navigating them requires that you assume nothing but instead accumulate a vocabulary of experiences. Once you have accumulated that experience, you will know:

if something is a familiar pattern or is unfamiliar,
whether it is in its "normal" range, or whether it is larger or smaller than normal,
how long it usually persists, and whether that is changing
and possibly, sometimes, also what is driving the tiredness (see below)

I stopped assuming that I knew all variations many years ago. Yes, there are things that are most copmmon, but there are alwasy individual outliers and adaptations that do not fit to the usual patterns. What I can say is that there are a small number of most-common reasons why you might experience sleepiness, tiredness (or exhaustion) during and after a treatment session and when exploring your body-mind for yourself. These can be easily confused (at least initially) and there may often be more than one of them happening at once.

1. Innate exhaustion

Sometimes people have been running on adrenaline for years and the tank has been empty for years. The first time your body actually relaxes, it starts to want to reduce that accumulated deficit. If this is the case it may not be unusual to need to sleep for 12 or 14 hours a day for a few weeks. The normal demands of Life (work, family, friends, commitments, etc) may get in the way of this. But they may also useful prompts to come back out of it... see below.

2. Healing and re-organisation

Associated with (1) above, but also something in its own right beyond simple exhaustion. According to Plan A / Plan B the body heals itself best by going into a vegetative state (i.e. heading some way towards a hibernation physiology). If something has re-organised itself and become less (unnecessarily) adapted, that usually results in more energyised aliviness. But it may also go through a transition in which major internal adjustments to the immune system, metabolic balance (etc) require that you just go to sleep while the body does its stuff.

3. More dissiciation

It's very easy when dealing with memnories of overwhelm to accidentally push a little too far. Then instead of something useful happening, the overwhelm temporarily increases and becomes more obvious. Sometimes this is very obvious because there is also an accompanying feeling of having being run over by a bus, or increased feelings of overwhelm or anxiety. But sometimes it manifests just as Vegetative tiredness. Here, with a little self-reflection and an open mind that is not deliberately imaginative (we're not making things up here), there may be recognisable states that feel very young or even spacious, fluid, universal - like an embryo might feel, floating in amniotic fluid. This is an altered state of consciousness...

4. Altered states

When the body-mind begins to process and re-organise itself it is not unusual to enter a short sleep or a semi-dreamlike semi-awake altered state of consciousness. These can be quite deep, may result in a minute or so wooziness afterwards, but they are temporary (lasting just a few minutes or tens of minutes at most) and relatively easy to re-emerge from into a sense of being back in control. If the state persists, then it is most likely (to also be) a dissociation, and somehow the fuses were blown. Altered states may bring intensely profound spiritual experiences. But they also share common metabolic / neurological ground with dissociative memories. If you struggle to re-emerge from the altered state, then even if it had meaningful spiritual content, it is to some degree entangled with overwhelm memories. In this case the spiritual experience is still valid, and also it would be better if the overwhelm/dissociative memories be processed by resourcing - because in most circumstances they do not go away by repeated immersion. In all cases where dissociation and spiritual experience are mixed together it is important to learn to navigate Plan A+ / Plan B+, and to re-frame tightness/stiffness as - for now - being potentially helpful(!)

Dealing with these possibilities: A rule of thumb

Which of these is actually happening is sometimes very obvious - there is a clear "knowing" what your body is doing. But often it is not so obvious or is somewhat more ambiguous or ambivalent. So a useful general rule is :

if after several days you feel better than you did before it started, then this was a simple healing reaction
if after several days you feel the same, it could have been any of them - in which case just repeat what you did, observe, gather experiences and see the further "rules" below
if after several days you feel "worse" then most probably the fuses blew and whatever precipitated it should be reined back and reduced somewhat in intensity and duration, with more support. What all these words mean is very specific to individual circumstance.
If you repeat and the same thing repeats many times (no obvious change or something gets "worse") then whatever precipitated it is blowing the fuses, is not helpful, and you need to reconsider your approach. As stated elsewhere, things that work for smaller stuff may cease to work as you progress down the pile. The further you go, the more you are obliged to cooperate with your body-mind's rules and/or with spiritual rules, and the less useful is your will and the western cultural attitude of "doing and fixing it".
the strategy I have presented in this whole body of work follows the evolved rules of your nervous system, so has the potential to be "helpful" in most circumstances - except where dissociation is inducing psycghosis or where there is severe fragmentation of the identity. Even in these it may be helpful for some people. But another general rule of thumb is that the earlier in life overwhelm begins, and/or the more substantially it results in endogenous opiate production, and/or the more it fragments the identity - the more likely it is that this is not going to be a self-help project. Nevertheless the approach I suggest here will still develop useful skills.

Tiredness is a state that can easily flood

There are many mental-emotopnal-physical states that can flood - i.e. that draw the attention strongly, and therefore tend to take over and feel as if they occupy your whole being. Sometimes they actually don't occupy more than a small fraction of your being - it's just that they have flooded and APPEAR to be everywhere. Tiredness, exhaustion, heaviness, dullness, depression, lack of interest, implacable stubborn-ness and many other forms of resistance are some of the denser mental-somatic states that may be truly whole-being, are but more often deceptively feel all-consuming because they have flooded. See the section on Language - particularly "...what else is there?".

Also note that other states more related to compliance or dissociation, terror, etc may also flood - even more easily - so I am not implying any kind of gaslighting value-judgement here on tiredness/exhaustion - merely saying that sometimes tiredness and heaviness are semi-illusory. The issue is that it is easy to become habituated to the attention falling into and even expecting a particular way of experiencing the world, whereas 24/7 self-honesty and true freedom, of choice of experience has for cultural reasons to be worked at 24/7.