Why You Feel So Tired When You Haven’t Done Anything

By Monique Rhodes

May 22, 2026


There is a kind of tired that cannot be explained by anything you did.

Not the tired you feel after hard work or a bad night's sleep — those make sense. You can trace them. You can point to a reason.

This episode is about the other tired. The tired that arrives in the late afternoon when you have barely done anything. The tired that finds you sitting on the edge of the bed at nine in the morning, already wrung out. The tired you cannot explain to anybody else and have started to wonder if something is wrong with you.

There is nothing wrong with you. The tiredness has a name. And once you know the name, you can start to put some of it down.

Monique tells the story of a woman who sits in her driveway for ten minutes every evening before walking into her own house — not because anything is wrong at home, but because she needs ten minutes before becoming the person her family needs her to be. And a moment in an Auckland workshop where she asked forty women when the last time was they had been alone with their own thoughts, and the room went silent.

This is an episode about emotional labour — the invisible, unpaid, constant work of regulating everybody else's feelings. And one small, specific practice to begin getting fifteen minutes of your own life back each day.

Think you’re doing okay? This quiz might surprise you.

Most people don’t realize what’s really influencing their happiness — until they take this.

Click here to take the Happiness Quiz and discover what’s actually going on beneath the surface.

It only takes a few minutes, but it could change the way you see your life forever.

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