I had coffee recently with a friend of mine who I hadn’t seen in a few years. As we caught up, she mentioned that she’d recently realised that she must have been tired for about 3 years. At first I thought that maybe she must have been run down with illness, but no, she’d been fine. She explained that she worked long hours, and when she went on holiday she’d be exhausted as soon as she arrived. She had downloaded a meditation app and opened it twice. She had been feeling really tired on Sunday evenings but didn’t know why.
She’s not unusual. If anything, she’s the norm.
Something has shifted in the adult world to how we deal with our inner world, and that shift is happening fast. It is not to look at as a trend in wellness; rather, it is a cultural shift in how stress is perceived and what it will take to recognize the emotional impact that stress has on a person.
The quiet accumulation of everything
Most people do not wake up one morning to realize that they are exhausted. Instead, the feeling of exhaustion tends to creep up on a person over time. Each stressful event, whether it is work-related, relationship-related, parent- or child-related, or even career-related, can be managed in the short-term. However, as the events continue to pile up over time, the feeling of being exhausted can become overwhelming.
Unmanaged stress from a mentally draining job, a special needs child that does not receive the support that it needs, a failing marriage, an aging parent in decline. The inability to manage the stress of these issues individually can become seemingly insurmountable as they all combine together to create an unmanageable emotional burden.
The stress on professionals at work has increased to extreme levels in the last few years. People are constantly ‘on call’ and can be reached by email and phone 24 hours a day. In addition to this, the boundaries between work and personal life have become increasingly blurred. As a result, many professionals feel they are expected to be ‘on’ all the time and are struggling to keep up. As a result, they feel that they are pretending to be fine, while secretly struggling to cope. The constant performance of work is leaving people exhausted with little energy or desire for anything else.
For a long time we treated our mental health with the same disregard that we give to the car maintenance. Why bother when it’s running just fine? Eventually we’ll get around to filling up the gas tank and getting the oil changed. Eventually we’ll deal with the issues going on in our lives. But we never quite get around to it. And then suddenly the car stalls in the middle of the road, and we’re left wondering what on earth happened. Why didn’t we take better care of it?
Why Adults Specifically are Waking Up to this
There is a feeling of disillusionment that adult children of age thirty-three to forty-four experience as they realize that their efforts to fulfill their parents’ expectations as well as society’s have led them down a false path. Having worked hard and reached what they thought was the promised land of various milestones: having finished college, gotten a good job, being married, having children, amassing wealth, staying in shape, they suddenly realize that their program has not worked. Yes, there is a lot of pain in this realization, but there is also the potential for great self-discovery of who they really are and what their true program really is. This process can be particularly painful if a lot of time, money, and energy have gone into the previously failed program.
Major life transitions; changes in career; changes in relationships (including romantic relationship breakups and makeups); decisions about whether or not to have children, etc. all require a lot of emotional processing, and many people are at a loss as to how to do this because they have not been taught how to do this.
But what has really changed are the generations entering adulthood. The mental health issues of the past were often swept under the carpet and ignored, but there is a total change in how adults today deal with and approach their mental health, and they are leading the way with an open and honest dialogue around the subject that is far more advanced than any previous generation. This change is being driven by the younger generations entering adulthood, and it is having a profound impact on the working lives of adults, particularly when it comes to setting and maintaining emotional boundaries at work. Many adults have struggled to get their managers to engage in conversations around emotional boundaries at work, but that all changes as soon as their manager’s younger colleagues openly admit to doing the same.
Work with a Therapist
If people do “the work” of healing from their emotional wounds, they may begin by journaling and months later, reading back their own honest words from months or years prior and realize that they have been circling the same old wounds for a long time without ever dealing with them in real life. People go to individual and group therapy, have honest conversations with people they trust to be honest with them, and for whatever reason, admit out loud that they are not okay.
It’s also common for deep patterns to exist within an individual. If an individual becomes aware of a pattern and is making attempts to change in order to work through a transition, it can be of great value to work with a licensed therapist. This is because a trained therapist is able to recognize aspects of your personality and ways of being that you are no longer able to recognize in yourself. Even if an individual recognizes the pattern of their disease and is trying to change, the root cause of their inability to change in the first place can also be revealed with the help of a therapist. Thus, working with a licensed therapist is one of the most powerful tools available to us because it gives us great insight into the workings of our own minds.
A rough outline of what motivates a person to do their best to take care of their mental health and what they actually do first.
| Common trigger | First step people often take | What tends to actually help |
| Chronic work stress | Time off, productivity hacks | Boundary-setting, values clarification |
| Relationship breakdown | Talking to friends | Couples or individual therapy |
| Major life transition | Staying busy, avoiding the feeling | Grief work, identity exploration |
| Persistent low mood | Exercise, sleep improvements | Professional assessment and support |
There is no easy solution to this growing health issue in the adult population. But there is an honest description of the problem: that most adults are unaware that they have been running on fumes for years and have been too busy or distracted to realize it.
The calculus is changing
Emotional wellness was once viewed with suspicion as something that self-indulgent people did and that required a therapist or indicated a crisis. In the past, talking about one’s inner life was seen as being inappropriate, as being too much, as being too narcissistic. As a result, most adults have grown up pushing through their tiredness in order to be able to do more in their very full lives and have compartmentalized their emotions in order to be able to function.
It may bring some people despair and give others hope that many adults are waking up to realize that their own mental health affects every area of their lives and is therefore worth exploring and getting healthy. In other words, they are realizing that if they get their own mental health together, their physical health, relationships, work, decision making, parenting and aging will also be greatly improved.
- Adults who address mental health concerns early consistently report better relationship quality over time
- Unmanaged chronic stress is directly linked to cardiovascular disease, immune suppression, and compounding sleep disorders
- People who seek support during major transitions tend to adapt faster and with significantly less collateral damage to their surrounding relationships
The untreated psychological problems of adults have a collateral impact on and affect those around them. The children, partners, friends, and colleagues of someone dealing with untreated problems can be forced to deal with them instead.
My friend recently changed how she refers to her own fatigue. For a long time she had been saying she was tired all the time. Recently she’s stopped saying that and just states the facts. That’s it. No more, no less. I don’t know what her process was, but I do know that was hard for her to do.See More
So there! More adults are figuring this out. Slowly. Imperfectly. Embarrassedly late for many. But there.