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If the root cause of your exhaustion is physical, your mental state is unlikely to change until you rest.

Instead of pushing yourself to the limit, leave more room for unexpected twists and turns of life.

Depletion is a state, not a reflection of your resilience skills.

Natalie needs to make an appointment with a banker. She schedules it a week ahead and shows up. It takes some organization to make it to the appointment, but it's not super onerous.

When she gets there, she's told she needs to speak to someone else, who is only available by phone. Though the call might only be 10-15 minutes, not being able to finish the task and get it off her plate leaves her feeling defeated.

When the more specialized banker calls her, she lets it go to voicemail because she can't face completing any unexpected extra steps, even though they're minor.

Having no extra bandwidth to deal with the extra hurdle is a sign Natalie is depleted, which is the topic we'll explore here. We can become depleted for many different reasons, but the effects on our mental state are similar.

If you recognize these signs, like Natalie, you might be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

1. Being Asked to Do a Little Bit Extra Feels Crushing

Our opening example of Natalie fits this category. Another might be:

You need to fill out an online form. You're on page 3, thinking you're done, but realize there's a page 4, with information you need to go and find. You feel like crying.

2. Schedule Changes Throw You More Than They Should

When we're depleted, we often mentally prepare for what we're expecting and feel thrown when anything is changed.

Your friend wants to move a dinner reservation to 8:30 instead of 8pm, and it makes you not want to go at all. Re-planning your day feels overwhelming. You'd mentally rehearsed your evening, and now you have to rethink it.

Any little schedule change feels like you're at mile 26 of a marathon and you're suddenly told there are another 5 miles.

3. You Have to Really Gear Yourself Up for Routine Demands

Recently, I watched a video of a bodybuilder talking about how being at a low body fat percentage affects his cognition. He mentioned that needing to drive somewhere three hours away would usually feel like no big deal, but when he physically doesn't have many reserves, it feels like a huge undertaking.

Anything you do that's novel (meaning you haven't done it before) or even slightly taxing (like taking a short flight) can trigger anticipatory exhaustion when you're already depleted.

4. You Feel Antagonized by Your Supports

A tricky pattern emerges when we're depleted: navigating social relationships feels like an extra tax we don't have the emotional funds to pay. We feel annoyed or burdened by our supports. It can feel like all someone has to do is look at us the wrong way to trigger either explosive anger or crushing hurt about our needs not being accurately perceived or met.

This creates a problem where we either get mad at our supports or detach from them.

You might detach in a self-protective way because anyone burdening you with their needs feels like more weight than you can carry. But the catch-22 is that then your supports aren't available to you.

In Mind Over Grind, Dr. Guy Winch talks about self-neglect as a sign of burnout.

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You're overdue for a mammogram or the dentist.

You're too tired to brush your teeth.

You put your dirty socks back on because getting out another pair feels like too much effort.

When getting out a clean pair of socks feels like too much, you're not making a choice. You're out of bandwidth.

1. Address the root cause. Especially if the root cause of your exhaustion is physical, your mental state is unlikely to change until you fix the problem, e.g., eating more or addressing health concerns like low iron or thyroid hormone issues.

2. Leave more headroom between your daily energy expenditure and your ceiling. Instead of pushing yourself near the limit, leave more room for the unexpected twists and turns of life before you hit your hard limit. Of course, this is easier said than done when you're motivated to do your best in many spheres of life, or when you're pushing yourself in one particular area.

3. Get specific help for work-induced exhaustion. If your depletion is work-related, Dr. Guy Winch's book, Mind Over Grind, includes specific signs to watch for and is packed with doable strategies. It has many techniques that particularly help work not feel like it's constantly triggering alarms in your brain.

Depletion Is a State, Not a Reflection of Your Resilience Skills

The bodybuilder I mentioned clearly recognized that the cognitive and emotional changes he was experiencing were due to being in a state of extreme low body fat. In the most literal way, he had few reserves to buffer even minor friction or bumps. Not all of us are as insightful about recognizing depletion as a state, not a sign of weakness. The sequelae of the state won't change until we exit it. When we operate on no reserves, we feel it. It makes us feel emotionally fragile even when we're skilled in resilience.

Some root causes of depletion have obvious fixes, like restoring your body fat or your iron levels. Others don't. But the principle remains: if events like your reactions to microfrictions are revealing your depleted state, then attempting to address the cause of the depletion, not paper over it, will usually be your best course.

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