Your Body Isn't Tired Because You're Lazy – It's Tired Because It's Overworked

One thing I have noticed over the years is that women apologise for being tired far more often than they should.

"I don't know what's wrong with me these days."

"I have become so lazy."

"I just don't have the energy I used to have."

These are sentences I hear quite often, and every single time I find myself wondering why we are so quick to blame ourselves. We rarely stop to look at the life we are trying to manage before deciding that the problem must be our lack of discipline. Somewhere along the way, we have started believing that if we feel exhausted, it is because we are not trying hard enough.

Perhaps the problem isn't that women have become lazy. Perhaps the problem is that we have become so used to being overworked that exhaustion has started feeling normal.

Think about what an average day looks like for most women. The morning begins before everyone else wakes up. There are lunches to prepare, children to get ready, work responsibilities waiting, ageing parents to think about, household chores that somehow never end and a hundred little things that don't appear on anyone's to-do list but still need to be done. By the time the day comes to an end, there is hardly any physical energy left, and yet many women still feel guilty for not exercising, not eating perfectly or not doing enough.

When I look at this routine, I don't see laziness.

I see a woman who has been giving her energy away from the moment she opened her eyes.

I think one of the biggest mistakes we make is assuming that being busy and being healthy are somehow the same thing. We celebrate people who are constantly occupied, who manage everything without asking for help and who never seem to stop. From the outside, it looks admirable. But our body doesn't measure success by how many responsibilities we complete in a day. It responds to how well we sleep, how we nourish ourselves, how much we move, how we manage stress and whether we ever allow ourselves to recover.

Recovery is something we rarely talk about, especially when it comes to women.

We are comfortable discussing workouts, diets and weight loss, but very few conversations revolve around rest. It almost feels as though slowing down has become something we have to justify. If we sit quietly for a few minutes, we feel we should be doing something more productive. If we decide to take an afternoon off because we are exhausted, guilt often arrives before relaxation does.

Over the years, I have realised that our body doesn't see rest as a reward. It sees it as a necessity.

This became even more evident to me as I entered my forties. There were days when I followed my routine exactly as I always had, yet my body responded differently. Recovery took longer, sleep became more important, and I realised that pushing through fatigue was no longer something I wanted to celebrate. Instead of asking, "How much more can I do?" I slowly started asking, "What does my body need from me today?"

That one question changed the way I looked at health.

Some days the answer was a strength workout.

Some days it was yoga.

Some days it was an evening walk.

And sometimes the answer was simply going to bed a little earlier because that was what my body genuinely needed.

Years ago, I might have looked at those quieter days as a sign that I was losing my discipline. Today, I see them very differently. I have learnt that listening to my body is not the opposite of discipline. In many ways, it is a much wiser form of discipline because it asks me to respond with awareness instead of habit.

I also think we underestimate how exhausting mental load can be. Even on days when we haven't done anything physically demanding, our mind may have spent hours making decisions, solving problems, worrying about our family or planning the next day's responsibilities. By evening, we tell ourselves that we haven't done enough because we haven't exercised, without recognising that our mind has been working continuously since morning.

Our body doesn't separate physical stress from emotional stress as neatly as we sometimes do. It experiences both.

That is why I have gradually stopped looking at health as something that begins with another workout or another diet. Health begins much earlier than that. It begins with asking ourselves whether we are giving our body what it needs to keep showing up for us every day.

Are we sleeping enough?

Are we eating meals that truly nourish us?

Are we moving regularly without constantly punishing ourselves?

Are we creating even a few quiet moments in the day where our nervous system has an opportunity to slow down?

These questions have become far more important to me than asking how many calories I burnt or how many steps I walked.

One thing I often remind the women I work with is that feeling tired is not always a sign that your body needs more willpower. Sometimes it is simply asking for more care. We have become so accustomed to ignoring those signals that we often wait until our body forces us to stop through illness, burnout or constant fatigue. Looking back, I think many of those signals had been there all along. We were simply too busy to notice them.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons yoga has remained such an important part of my life. It doesn't just help me become stronger or more flexible. It gives me a few quiet moments to check in with myself before the rest of the world asks for my attention. Some days I step onto the mat feeling energetic, and other days I realise how tired I actually am. Both experiences are equally valuable because they help me respond to my body with a little more kindness instead of criticism.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that women don't need another reason to feel guilty. We already carry enough expectations on our shoulders. What we need is permission to acknowledge that constantly giving to everyone else without taking care of ourselves eventually comes at a cost. Looking after our own health isn't selfish, and it certainly isn't a luxury. It is one of the reasons we are able to continue showing up for the people we love.

Perhaps that is why I no longer use the word lazy as casually as I once did. Before I blame myself for feeling tired, I have learnt to pause and ask a different question. Has my body really become lazy, or has it simply been carrying more than I have given it credit for? More often than not, the answer reminds me that what my body needs isn't harsher discipline. It needs a little more nourishment, a little more recovery and a little more compassion. Sometimes those are the things that restore our energy far more than pushing ourselves ever could.