Understanding How Fatigue Affects Your Health and What to Do About It

Many of us live very chaotic lives, with many juggling multiple responsibilities such as work, taking care of the house as well as looking after the children. When you lead such a lifestyle feeling constantly exhausted is very common. Although feeling tired is common, sleep is crucial to your health and lack of sleep and extreme fatigue can have significant impacts on your health.

There are a few things that affect our fatigue levels that are easily spotted. For example, staying up late at night, if you are working long hours on a daily basis or even having a newborn baby. You can try to work around these things in order to be able to get more sleep.  However, when fatigue becomes chronic, going on for a long time, it is not normal. In this article, we will discuss the causes of fatigue, how this affects your health, and what you should do about it.

Review Your Lifestyle

If you are feeling constantly tired, you should sit back and think about the lifestyle that you are living and what possible reasons you have to be feeling that tired. For example, managing various responsibilities such as work and family without taking a break, can lead you to become exhausted both physically and emotionally. Going through a major life event such as bereavement, relationship breakup, or even planning a wedding, can also have an impact on your well-being and fatigue levels and you may require additional support from a professional in order to cope and manage this issue. If you are located in Australia,  the people at https://familydoctor.com.au/alphington suggests that you can conveniently look for an available doctor online and book an appointment, saving you the time from physically looking for them and avoiding long waiting lines in their clinic. It is important to deal with issues such as fatigue as soon as possible before it starts to deteriorate the condition of your health.

Psychological Causes of Tiredness

Your exhaustion may be a result of underlying psychological issues, leading to insomnia or poor quality of sleep. Some examples of psychological issues include:

Stress

Stress is a significant factor contributing to the quality of your sleep. We all had nights where our brain did not seem to switch off as we overthink and worry about the issues in our lives. The demands of daily life can cause us to feel stressed at some point. Stress is not always a result of something negative, positive life changes can also cause stress such as getting married.

Depression

If you are suffering from depression, this may result in your feeling tired all the time and lacking energy. This is something that your doctor should diagnose and support you with.

Anxiety

Another common psychological disorder that strongly affects how well you sleep is anxiety. This will cause me to feel worried constantly as well as irritability. Medication and psychological therapies may help.

Physical Fatigue

There are several health conditions that can make you feel tired or exhausted, such as anemia, sleep apnea, pregnancy, malnutrition, and weight problems.

How Fatigue Affects Your Health

Chronic fatigue can have a serious impact on your health.  The majority of us have experienced fatigue, short temper, and lack of focus that often follow a poor night’s sleep. A rare night without sleep makes you feel sleepy and bad-tempered the next day, but it will not have seriously harmed your health in the long-term.

However, if this is a frequent occurrence, the mental impacts on your health become more serious. Your brain will fog, resulting in difficulty concentrating and reducing the effectiveness of your decision-making process. You may start to feel down, and even fall asleep during the day, which could increase your propensity to be involved in an accident, at home at work, or even on the road. If it continues, lack of sleep can affect your overall health and as a result, you may develop serious medical conditions, such as obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure, and diabetes.

What to Do

The first thing you should be aware of is that fatigue is a symptom and not a condition itself. This is being caused by an underlying motive, and you must be able to identify the causes of the fatigue in order to manage it or eliminate it.

If fatigue is significantly affecting your quality of life or causing you distress, you should consider consulting your doctor or health professional. By asking questions, they may be able to support you, realize why you are experiencing fatigue, and provide some suggestions on how to improve this. If required, your doctor may even suggest further medical tests if there is a reasonable chance that the cause of your fatigue may be an undiagnosed medical issue, like the ones described above.

This kind of health issue shouldn’t be taken lightly or ignored. If you think you suffer from fatigue, you should seek the help of a medical professional to address the problem immediately. Fortunately, for the majority of people, fatigue does improve over time on its own or with some simple and practical lifestyle changes