Tactics for Tiredness

I woke up this morning, Monday morning, with that feeling of ‘oh, here we go again’ and a fairly deep-set tiredness. The latter probably isn’t surprising as yesterday I ran 7.2 miles and then walked about 5.5 miles so I deserve to feel a bit tired, but I think it was more a result of having had a heavily planned and highly productive week last week which I carried on, albeit to a lesser extent, over the weekend. I oscillate between thinking that it is better to fill every scrap of time with some kind of activity and leaving plenty of space for recovery. Somehow, I am not convinced that the former makes me feel more tired or the latter more refreshed because inaction often leads to a sense of lethargy and missed opportunity and action often leads of a burst of extra energy. But I did feel tired this morning and knowing that I want to keep trying to push forwards with my heavily scheduled working days I decided that it would be sensible to do something to try to build in a bit of extra slack/rest. Out of this came my plan for this evening…

On Monday and Tuesday nights the TV series Silent Witness (forensic pathology drama) started up a new series last week. It is a series which I can watch but don’t particularly enjoy, whereas my wife and elder daughter (who is at home at the moment) do both like it – so what tends to happen is that we record it and then they try to squeeze watching it into ‘spare’ time in the day. On the other hand, there are some TV series on at the moment that I quite enjoy (e.g. Hunted) but my wife doesn’t like so much which makes it difficult for me to watch them, and there is also usually some decent football on Monday nights (although tonight it is Manchester United so perhaps decent isn’t the right word). Consequently, tonight and tomorrow night I plan to get myself to bed at 9pm when Silent Witness comes on, and watch either the football (tonight) or Hunted on catch-up (tomorrow) on my iPad, switching off at 10pm to pick up a book and read. This plan should give me a bit of extra-lazy rest time and has the added bonus of getting me to bed early so that I might actually read for a bit, as I have developed a bad habit of getting stuck downstairs (e.g. watching the news headlines at 10pm) and not making it to bed with much time left to read. The exact detail of this plan isn’t really so important. What I like about it though is that I am deliberately opting to take a positive step towards rest/relaxation rather than either watching something I don’t really want to watch or being generally inactive in an entirely passive way. I’m not sure I have really managed to capture my thoughts very well in this post – man decides to go to bed early and watch TV isn’t exactly a profound revelation – but I know what I am trying to express and, in any case, I am rather looking forward to my little bit of lazy space-time.