When you’re young, “tired” is one feeling. As you age, it becomes a spectrum, like a rainbow in which every colour is a slightly different beige and none of them ends in a pot of gold. Scientists (me, unfunded) have developed a scale.
Level 1: Pleasantly Sleepy
The tired you feel after a big lunch or a walk by the sea. Charming. Cosy. Someone says “aww.” Enjoy it. You will not feel it again until a holiday you can’t afford.
Level 2: Normal Adult Tired
Your factory setting since about thirty-two. You function. You answer emails. But if someone offered you a nap in a cupboard, you’d ask about the cupboard’s dimensions and notice period.
Level 3: Eyes Doing Their Own Thing
You’ve read the same paragraph four times. Your eyes are open but have stopped reporting back to head office, which is fair, because head office stopped paying them.
Being tired in your twenties is a mood. Being tired in your forties is a personality, and it’s the only one you have left.
Level 4: Sentence Collapse
You start a sentence and simply don’t finish it. “Did you see the…” Then nothing. Everyone waits. You wait. Nobody finds out. That sentence is gone forever, like your twenties.
Level 5: Kitchen Confusion
Milk in the cupboard. Cereal in the fridge. You walk into a room with purpose, then stand in it like a sheep awaiting instructions. You look for your glasses while wearing your glasses. Your GP says “at your age.”
Level 6: Emotional Tired
A mildly sweet advert about a grandad and a dog makes you cry. Properly. You blame your eye. It isn’t your eye. It’s the grandad, and the fact you’re nearer his age than the dog’s.
Level 7: Beyond Tired
A strange calm. You’re so tired you’re briefly wide awake. You reorganise the spice rack at 11pm. You label things. You are serene. You are not well. The spices will outlive the labels.
How to Use This Scale
Share it with the people you live with. When someone asks “how are you?”, say a number. “Bit of a five.” They’ll understand. They are a six. Nobody will make the tea.
And remember: being tired isn’t a failure. It’s the subscription. It renews automatically, the price goes up every year, and there is no cancel button. Go to bed. You’ll wake up at Level 2. That’s the good news.