That Wired-But-Exhausted Feeling? Here’s Why

So today I'm going to talk about something that I call over-revving.

And I came up with this term.

I was looking into a situation that was occurring for me at the time, which was of getting kind of overly exhausted, overwhelmed.

not burnt out, just kind of overtired.

And I was chatting with a friend and exploring it with her.

She said, ah, you went into your second wind.

And what she meant by that was that I'd been working away, I'd reached a point where I was tired.

And instead of stopping and resting and regrouping and recuperating, I went into my second wind, which is A term, I don't know if you're familiar with it, but over here in the UK, it's a term which means where you dig deeper and you pull up another reserve of energy to draw from.

Now, the thing about going into your second wind, it's probably actually a survival technique because what it allows you to do is if you're running away from the tiger or if you're in a desperate situation and you just need to keep going, it means that you can go beyond the point that you would normally stop.

You can go beyond the point where you're actually tired and pull another piece of energy in and use that to keep going.

Now, this is actually originally designed to be used in emergency situations, not to be used as a lifestyle.

But unfortunately, a lot of us have got into the habit of using it as a lifestyle.

Why would we do that? Well, Partly because when you go into your second wind, you can actually get maybe 10, 20, 30, 40, 50% more productivity achieved in the same period of time or within the same 24-hour period because you're actually resting for less of it.

You're not relaxing, hanging out with your family.

Going for a walk, dancing, sleeping, cooking, having fun, whatever else you might be doing, which would actually help you to restore yourself ready for the next day.

And also because we're in such a progress-oriented and outcome-oriented culture that we think that more productivity, more performance is better than less.

The problem with it is, well, there are several problems with it, but one of the problems with it is that the second wind is actually, we're actually digging into our energy reserves.

And our energy reserves are there for a reason.

It's a bit like in the old days in the car, there used to be a reserve tank whereby you'd get to the bottom, you almost run out of petrol in the main tank and then the reserve tank would click in and you'd use the fuel in there.

But the point was you had to keep the reserve tank full up because otherwise, if you ran out of petrol in the main tank, there'd be nothing there.

And so when we go into our second wind...

We are using up the reserve tank, which means it's no longer full, which we need it to be full in those situations where we become ill or when there's a crisis or an emergency or something, and we need extra resource to deal with it.

And recovering from simply being tired is relatively straightforward for our system.

But recovering from having no reserves, no reserve energy in our tank, as it were, is much, much more difficult.

And in fact, always impossible for many of us because along with the habit of going into our second wind is the habit of resting just enough so that we can then function properly.