21 People with Chronic Conditions Describe What Fatigue Feels Like

1. I feel tired all the time. After any activity I take a nap. My sleep patterns are a mess. Going up steps takes my breath away.

2. I call it depressive fatigue. Like I know I need to get up and go brush my teeth; brush my hair; change my clothes but my body will not allow it.

3. For me it’s generally always tired but those bad fatigue days are like when you’ve been super sick (like the flu or something) and just cannot keep your eyes open or your brain focused. It’s deep, hard heavy sleep that leaves you still tired after you get up in a daze. It’s hard and miserable.

4. Whew idk if I can put it into words. It feels like I’m dying. Like my body is shutting down. I feel like I’m a couple of miles away from myself. Completely disconnected. I feel like I need to lay down and sleep but feel so tired it feels like I won’t wake back up but feel like if I don’t lay down it will kill me. Feel like I’m stuffed with cotton.

5. For me, my fatigue starts with my eyes. Like they will start to feel droopy but tight underneath. And that makes me feel extremely tired. But if I am up moving around like at work, i feel my shoulders start to weigh me down and i have to think harder about moving my legs forward. Which causes me mental fatigue. And the first thing after that is my lower back starts aching which usually causes a headache or dizziness.

6. Typical small easy tasks seem so complicated and overwhelming that it makes me not even want to start any of them. For example, making coffee becomes a 14 step process to the brain and body.

7. I’m tired. My body is really heavy like I have lead weights in my arms, hands, fingers, and legs. My brain feels foggy and I can’t spell or get my words out. My skin feels all tingly and keep going hot and cold.

8. It’s feels like no matter how much I sleep or improve my diet, I am always tired. Having a conversation even seems like a huge deal when my brain is foggy, and formulating sentences seems difficult.

9. Legs hurt, body hurts. Feel I’m existing but not living. Spasms in hands, knees and legs and back. Sleep all day and want to sleep some more.

10. Sleep 12+ hours, wake up and eat a nutritious breakfast and drink a cup of coffee and still have to take a mid-afternoon nap because I’m so tired.

11. Like my body would not digest the food so it turned on the garbage disposal and I can feel every blade.

12. When I pull back my covers in the morning, all I want to do….all I think about is crawling back under them…awake everything I do for work and personally seems to take 3x as long as it should. I am not the person I was before this last bad flare!

13. Sleep a good 8-10 hours a night and never feeling refreshed in the morning, feel like I’ve hardly had any sleep, and constantly eyes feeling heavy, yawning away most of the day  can also get moody at times because of how tired I get .

14. I always explain, imagine the time you have a small fever and body ache so you just want to lie down…because I don’t want them to think I’m being “lazy”. It is difficult for some people to really understand because it’s not like I’m in pain or anything, and they see me watching YouTube on the phone do I have enough energy to do the dishes? No. But what they see is just me not doing anything but watch YouTube. I’m lucky my family and close friends are very understanding but sometimes I wish everybody could understand so I don’t have to lie to my friends and colleagues when I cancel on them:(.

15. Drinking an energy drink and spending an hour mentally preparing to take a shower, even though you had to buy a shower chair because you can’t stand up that long so it should be really easy and relaxing.

16. Everything takes twice as much energy as it normally requires. Even something like walking to the fridge for a bottle of water feels like a journey to Mordor. Resting/sleeping doesn’t overcome it, there’s no catching up to it by taking it easy.

17. Gravity is stronger with a chronic illness.

18. When I have fatigue, my whole body hurts. The best way to describe it is that feeling you get when you swim for a long time and your limbs start to ache and moving your arms through the water becomes difficult due to the resistance. But you aren’t swimming. You are just moving from the couch to the bathroom but every movement is sore and has resistance. Even lifting your arm is hard to do and meets with resistance.

19. Like having jet lag every stinking day!

20. Fatigue is having so little energy that even necessary tasks are a challenge.

21. Everything requires effort, the need to push yourself to complete even simple stuff.

Chronic Exposure Network