Staving
off tiredness should be considered an artform. It may not quite have
the bohemian hipness of sculpting or jazz, and you don’t see
awake people on display at the Louvre. But it requires a special set of
skills, and maybe the odd chemical or two.
Being
a human is so counterintuitive sometimes. You’d think that getting a
proper night’s rest would help with being tired, and it sometimes
can, especially if you’re running the kind of sleep deficit that spurs
hallucinations of unicorns and talking ice cream cones. Rarely, though,
does it fully banish fatigue to the dark hinterlands from whence it
came. I can get a solid eight hours and still
be a dazed wreck by 3 p.m., speaking gibberish and walking into walls as though I’d just downed a fifth of Johnny Walker.
From
the look of things, plenty of others are in the same boat. When I
glance about my workplace near the end of the business day, I see
exhausted-looking faces that are disproportionate to the level of
effort being exerted; we work hard, but it’s not like our jobs involve
sprinting up stairs with kicking fourth-graders strapped to our chests.
We sit on our butts and fiddle with laptops. By
all rights we should have enough juice left by evening to do squat
thrusts ‘till our thighs catch fire. We never do. It’s all we can manage
to keep our eyes open on the commute home.
There’s
a term, “RBF,” which has crept into the lexicon in recent years. It
stands for “resting (expletive) face,” and refers to the unintentionally
mean or sullen look that some people get when their faces are at rest. I
would like to submit a new term for Merriam-Webster’s consideration:
RZF, or resting zombie face, meant to describe those who have been awake
for less than six hours but still look as
though they’re sleepwalking through a death dream in a coma. My own
face could usually serve as a baseline.
All sorts of strategies exist for battling fatigue, though it’s surprising how few of them actually work.
Coffee
is perhaps the most common weapon against tiredness, but I don’t trust
it. It betrays you at the worst moments. Everything starts
off promisingly, with a jolt of energy so sudden and strong you feel
like your brain’s an old appliance that’s been plugged back in, roaring
back to life after months in an attic. Then the crash happens. You’re
putting along nicely, feeling invincible, and
then boom. Brick wall. You go
from speeding Indy car to hollowed-out junker, from Superman to Sandman,
and it always happens right before an important meeting, or during a
presentation to your biology class about the evolution of
yak nostrils.
For
those who need their drugs to be druggier, there’s 5-Hour Energy, or
one of its high-powered imitators. This is for people who’ve tried
and failed to crush their coffee beans into powder and snort it like
cocaine. The selling point is that it’s stronger and longer-lasting than
traditional caffeinated beverages, but that amounts to escalation,
which makes me nervous. If you adopt the mentality
that more is always better, then before you know it you’re working out
of a makeshift meth lab in the hatchback of a Ford Fiesta. “Just a bump
before lunch!” you say. Yeah, OK.
In
the animated Comedy Central series “South Park,” Mr. Mackey, the
principal of the elementary school, is known for his catchphrase, “Drugs
are bad, m’kay?” He must have first uttered this line after a
hand-shaking caffeine bender. It’s no way to get through the day. Which
leaves diet as the most obvious lifestyle overhaul that could
potentially put a dent in our proclivity to slip into unplanned
siestas.
Does
diet make a difference? It can. There was a time in my life when the
only food groups I recognized were blueberry muffins and
quarter-pounders
with cheese, and aside from affecting my health generally, it also gave
me the energy of a dim-witted earthworm. Five minutes out on my bike
and I’d have to take a power nap just to make it through an episode of
“Frasier.”
What
a difference lifestyle makes -- I can now make it up a flight of stairs
without pausing to take a huff off an oxygen tank. By trading
French fries for apples and burgers for turkey sandwiches, I begin each
day with the chest-thumping air of a Roman gladiator. The problem is
that it doesn’t last, and it’s a fine balance. Too little food, and I’m
wracked with hunger pangs; too much, and my
eyelids droop like wilted flowers, requiring every drop of
concentration at my disposal to perform even simple tasks, like purging
my spam box of emails from Nigerian princes.
When
in doubt, turn to Google. A simple search for “fighting fatigue”
yielded a website called Prevention, which offers nine suggestions
for chokeslamming tiredness to the mat. I’ll offer a tenth suggestion:
Don’t chokeslam anything to a mat. It’s tiring.
A
lot of Prevention’s tips are a bit goofy. Some border on hippy-dippy --
let go of regret, they say, and be more decisive -- while others,
like color therapy, seem dubious. Wearing bright orange on an overcast
day may be whimsical and a tinge rebellious, but I don’t see a
clementine-colored sweatshirt powering me through an arduous work
project, unless said sweatshirt is made from a synthesized
brew of steroids and speed.
On
tip that stood out to me, though, was jumping. Like, literally jumping.
Up and down, on a bed, or at the watercooler, or wherever one
can conceivably jump. What it does, they say, is pump oxygen throughout
our bodies, stir up childhood enthusiasm, and break up the monotony of
the day, thus boosting our energy and drive.
No comments:
Post a Comment