Why You’re So Tired After Work (And It’s Not Just the Hours)
You get to the end of the workday and you’re done.
You might not have been on a building site, lifting heavy boxes, or running back-to-back emergencies… yet you feel wrung out. You sit on the sofa, scroll on your phone, maybe open a bottle of wine, and wonder:
“Why am I this tired from basically… sitting at a desk?”
From an Energy-Flow perspective, the answer usually isn’t “you just need more sleep” or “you’re not fit enough.” Those might play a part, but there’s something deeper going on.
Your body is not just reacting to what you do at work.
It’s reacting to how you do it and who you think you need to be while you’re doing it.
Tired vs. Depleted
There’s a difference between feeling physically tired and feeling energetically depleted.
- Physical tiredness comes from using your muscles, brain, and body in a straightforward way. A good night’s sleep, some food, and you’re ready to go again.
- Energetic depletion is different. It’s what you feel after a day of:
- Being “on” all the time
- People-pleasing and managing others’ reactions
- Holding in frustration, anxiety, or disappointment
- Working against your own values or intuition
You come home with a kind of inner flatness. You might say, “I can’t face anyone,” or “I don’t even know what I feel, I’m just wiped.”
That’s not just tiredness. That’s chronic effort and emotional load.
What’s Actually Draining You?
From an Energy-Flow Coaching perspective, several patterns tend to drain people after work far more than the tasks themselves.
- Being permanently “on guard”
Many of us go to work wearing armour.
We’re scanning: How am I coming across? Am I performing well enough? What does my boss think? Am I allowed to say that?
That constant self-monitoring keeps your nervous system in a low-level threat mode. Your system doesn’t know the difference between “I might be rejected” and “I might be attacked.” It just stays slightly braced.
By 5pm, that bracing has a cost. Muscles tight. Breath shallow. Mind buzzing. You’ve been running an invisible marathon in your own head.
- Emotional labour that never completes
Most workplaces are not great at emotions.
- You feel irritation in a meeting but smile and say, “No problem.”
- You feel anxious before a presentation and power through on adrenaline.
- You feel sadness or disappointment and tell yourself, “I shouldn’t feel like this; other people have it worse.”
Every time you override an emotion, your system has to work harder to contain it.
Emotions are energy in motion. When they’re not allowed to move, they turn into symptoms: heaviness, tension, headaches, brain fog, exhaustion. It’s like keeping a beachball under water all day. By the time you get home, you’re shattered from holding it down.
- Living from the mind, ignoring the body
Most of us have been trained to live from the neck up.
We overthink, overanalyse, and try to manage life by running endless internal commentary: What did they mean by that email? What if I mess up? How do I fix this?
When we live almost entirely in the mind, we lose touch with the body’s signals. We miss the early whispers—slight tightness, subtle fatigue, small waves of sadness—and only notice when everything becomes a shout.
By the end of the day, the mind is overstimulated and the body has been ignored. That combination is exhausting.
- Working against your deeper truth
There’s another layer too.
If you’re spending hours each day doing work that feels misaligned—where you can’t use your strengths, where you’re not respected, or where your values are compromised—your system will quietly protest.
On the surface you may say, “It’s fine, it’s a good job, I should be grateful.”
Underneath, something in you knows this isn’t it.
That inner conflict—having to be one person at work while another part of you is whispering, “This isn’t who we are”—is incredibly draining.
Your Body as a Dashboard, Not an Enemy
One of the core principles in my work is simple:
Your body isn’t letting you down.
It’s giving you information.
Feeling wiped out after work isn’t a character flaw. It’s your system saying:
- “The way I’m doing this isn’t sustainable.”
- “I’m carrying too much emotional weight on my own.”
- “I’m bracing all day and never off duty.”
- “I’m out of alignment with myself.”
The invitation isn’t to push harder, toughen up, or layer on more productivity hacks. It’s to listen differently.
Three Simple Shifts to Experiment With
This isn’t about adding ten new habits to your already crowded day. Think of these as small experiments in relating to yourself differently.
- Drop the armour (just a little)
Pick one moment in your day—perhaps before a meeting, or right after you finish a big task—and try this:
- Pause for 20–30 seconds.
- Let your shoulders drop. Soften your jaw.
- Take a slow breath and feel your feet on the floor.
You’re not trying to relax perfectly. You’re simply signalling to your nervous system: Right now, in this moment, I am safe enough.
That tiny crack in the armour, repeated over time, reduces the constant background tension that leaves you exhausted.
- Let one emotion complete
At some point in the day, you’ll notice a feeling: irritation, sadness, anxiety, boredom.
Instead of pushing it away or jumping straight into fixing mode, try:
- Acknowledge it: “Something in me feels anxious/angry/sad.”
- Notice where it lives in the body—tight throat, heavy chest, fizzing in the stomach.
- Stay with the sensation for a few breaths without analysing it.
You’re not turning it into a project. You’re simply giving that emotion a bit of space to move, rather than locking it in. That alone conserves a surprising amount of energy.
- Ask, “What would be more truthful right now?”
Once a day, perhaps on your commute home or as you close your laptop, ask:
“If I were being 5% more true to myself in my work, what might I do differently?”
It might be:
- Saying “no” to one extra request
- Being honest in a check-in instead of saying “I’m fine”
- Taking a proper lunch break without pretending you’re not hungry
- Admitting to yourself that something in your role needs to change
This isn’t about quitting your job tomorrow. It’s about slowly reducing the gap between the role you perform and the person you actually are. When those two move closer together, your energy changes.
If You’re Coming Home Exhausted Every Day…
If you regularly arrive home feeling like a shell of yourself, it’s worth paying attention.
Not because you’re weak or failing, but because your system is wise.
Your tiredness may be pointing to:
- The cost of constantly performing and managing other people’s perceptions
- Emotions that need space rather than suppression
- A body that’s been ignored while the mind runs the show
- A deeper truth about where and how you want to be working
You don’t have to fix all of this overnight. But you can begin to relate to your fatigue as information rather than a problem.
That simple shift—listening to your tiredness instead of battling it—is often where real change begins.
And who knows… if you keep experimenting with these small shifts, you may find that “Why am I so tired after work?” slowly turns into:
“I’m still working hard. But I feel more myself. And I actually have some energy left for my life.”