Energy & Fatigue
Vitality, depletion, second wind, recovery curves, post-exertional malaise.
31 entries
All behaviors in Energy & Fatigue
Active Rest
Restoration through low-intensity engagement rather than withdrawal — a walk, a slow conversation, a gentle creative project, a stretch — where the system recovers by changing the kind of activity rather than by ceasing activity.
Bore-Out
The specific exhaustion of being chronically under-stimulated and under-used at work — a slow erosion of energy and self-worth that looks lazy from the outside but is, internally, the Reward System running on a dry well.
Brown-Out
The dimming phase before full burnout — effort still going in, but the lights inside have lowered, meaning thinning at the edges, the Reward System still working without delivering the deposit it used to.
Burnout
A structural state of exhaustion, cynicism, and reduced efficacy produced by prolonged mismatch between effort and recovery, demand and resource, role and meaning — the result of running a depleted system as if it were a full one for long enough that the system reorganises around the depletion.
Burnout Recovery
The structured, sustained process of reorganising a depleted system around real recovery — restoring the effort-and-rest rhythm, restructuring the conditions that produced the burnout, and slowly rebuilding the deposit channels the loop had collapsed.
Chronic Fatigue Patterns
The compounding pattern in which sustained depletion, untreated by adequate recovery, becomes its own baseline — a state distinct from the medical diagnoses of CFS, ME, and long-covid, though sometimes overlapping with them and always deserving of medical evaluation.
Compassion Fatigue
The accumulated cost of repeated exposure to other people's suffering — usually in caring or helping roles — without enough boundaries, processing, or shared load to allow the caring system to recover between asks.
Emotional Fatigue
The accumulated cost of feeling, holding, or managing emotion — your own or other people's — without sufficient windows to process, metabolise, or set it down.
Empathy Fatigue
The depletion of the moment-to-moment capacity to feel-into another person's experience — the mirror channel running flatter — after sustained or unbuffered exposure to others' emotional states.
Energy Budgeting
The practice of treating daily energy as a finite resource with deposits and withdrawals — accounting for the actual cost of activities against the actual available reserve, rather than running the body as if its capacity were unlimited.
Energy Leak Audit
A deliberate, structured pass through the recurring places where your energy is leaving the day without producing a deposit — the practice of converting a diffuse sense of depletion into a specific, addressable list.
Energy Mismatch
The specific exhaustion of running a body that was built for one kind of day in a life that requires the other kind — a morning chronotype in an evening job, a high-stimulation nervous system in a low-stimulation role, a need for stillness inside a life of noise.
Energy Pacing
The minute-by-minute practice of regulating effort within a session — slowing before depletion, pausing before collapse, distributing exertion across the available window so that work continues to produce deposit instead of corrupting it.
Energy Recharging Practices
The set of intentional activities that actually restore physiological and psychological reserve — distinguished from pseudo-rest, which interrupts work without restoring anything, and recognised by what the body reports the next morning.
Energy Vampires
The specific pattern of relationships and interactions that leave you noticeably more depleted than the contact should account for — a Belonging System quietly paying the cost of someone else's unmet need.
Mental Fatigue
The accumulating cost of sustained cognitive effort without adequate recovery or integration — the brain still on, still working, still producing output, while the apparatus that would consolidate the work goes uncalled.
Optimal Arousal Zone
The narrow band of nervous-system activation in which attention engages, effort coordinates, and the work performed actually leaves a deposit — the deposit-producing state that sits at the peak of the Yerkes-Dodson curve.
Passive Rest
Restoration through withdrawal and stillness — sleep, lying down, sitting quietly, doing nothing — where the system recovers by ceasing engagement rather than by changing its kind.
Physical Fatigue
The body's accumulating signal that effort has outrun recovery — muscles, metabolism, and nervous system asking for the rest that movement was supposed to be paired with, but which the day did not give back.
Post-Exertional Malaise
The specific, disproportionate worsening of symptoms that follows exertion — physical, cognitive, or emotional — in conditions where the body's recovery system has been altered, most commonly in ME/CFS, long COVID, and related illnesses.
Pseudo-Rest
Activity that has the form of rest without its substance — scrolling, half-watching, ambient consumption, occupied stillness — where the body looks rested from the outside while continuing to carry low-grade load underneath.
Recovery Curve
The shape and slope along which a depleted system returns to baseline after a load — the specific arc the body draws between effort ending and capacity restoring, which determines whether the work that came before becomes deposit or residue.
Recovery Debt
The compounding deficit a system accrues when recovery curves are repeatedly truncated — the gap between the recovery each load demanded and the recovery the system was actually allowed to take, paid back later with interest in capacity, mood, and presence.
Rest as Identity Threat
The condition in which stopping — even briefly — registers in the nervous system not as recovery but as self-erasure, because the productive self has become the only self the Meaning System recognises as real.
Rest Deficit
The accumulating gap between the rest a system needed and the rest it actually took — distinct from sleep deficit because it covers the full spectrum of recovery the body asks for, including time off-task, off-screen, off-load, and off-other-people.
Rest Guilt
The corrosive low-grade discomfort that arrives during rest itself — the feeling that resting is exposure, betrayal of standards, or threat to one's standing — which preserves the form of rest while quietly preventing the deposit.
Restoration Practices
Deliberate, repeated activities chosen to return a depleted system to baseline — the named, scheduled, body-honouring patterns that convert recovery from accident into reliable mechanism.
Rust-Out
The specific fatigue produced by chronic under-stimulation in a role that still demands presence — the slow corrosion of capacity that happens when the work asks too little of you for too long while still requiring you to show up.
Second Wind Phenomenon
The specific late-stage burst of energy that arrives after the body should have stopped — sometimes a clean physiological recovery, sometimes the Threat System buying borrowed time on credit the body will collect later.
Vitality Loss
The specific dimming of life-force — the felt sense of aliveness, appetite, and forward motion — when the Meaning System has been running for too long on a story that no longer carries it.
Yerkes-Dodson Curve
The empirical observation, first described in 1908, that performance rises with arousal up to a point and then collapses — the inverted-U shape that explains why both too little and too much activation produce effort without deposit.