You did not go anywhere. You did not exercise. You did not do anything that should leave you this tired.
And yet you are completely drained.
Not just sleepy. Drained. Heavy.
As though someone pulled the plug and your energy just emptied out. The idea of cooking dinner feels like climbing a mountain. A simple text message feels like it requires more effort than you have available. Even getting off the sofa feels like a negotiation with your own body.
The confusing part is that you cannot point to what used up the energy. You did not run a marathon. You might not have even left the house. So where did it all go?
If you are experiencing this, the answer is simpler than you might think, and it has nothing to do with laziness.
Most people think of anxiety as a mental experience, something that happens in your head. But as I described in an earlier post, anxiety is a state that involves your entire system, your subjective reality, your emotions, your physiology, and your behaviour, all interacting and reinforcing each other.
The physiology part is where the exhaustion comes from.
When your nervous system detects threat, whether real or predicted, it mobilises your body. Stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol are released. Your heart rate increases. Your muscles tense. Your breathing shifts. Your digestive system slows. Blood flow is redirected toward the systems that would help you flee or fight.
This is designed to be a short-term response. A burst of energy for a specific situation, followed by a return to baseline once the threat has passed. But when anxiety is ongoing, the threat never passes. Your system stays mobilised, hour after hour, day after day. The engine keeps running at high revs even though the car is parked in the driveway.
That costs energy. A lot of it.
Think about what your body has actually been doing while you sat on the sofa feeling like you were doing nothing.
Your muscles have been holding tension, probably in your shoulders, your jaw, your stomach, your back. Not dramatic tension, just a constant low-level bracing that you may not even consciously notice anymore.
Your heart has been beating faster than it needs to. Your breathing has been shallower than it should be. Your digestive system has been disrupted, which is why anxiety so often comes with nausea, stomach problems, or loss of appetite.
Your brain has been running its own marathon, detecting threats, generating scenarios, monitoring your internal state, processing the emotional load of living in a state of unease. The brain accounts for roughly twenty percent of the body's total energy consumption under normal conditions. When it is running overtime, that figure climbs.
All of this is happening below the level of conscious awareness. You are not choosing to do any of it. But your body and mind are doing it nonetheless, and it is using real, measurable energy to do so.
By the end of the day, your body has been through the physiological equivalent of sustained physical exertion, without any of the visible output that would explain why you feel so spent.
Here is where the pattern becomes self-reinforcing.
When you are exhausted, your capacity to cope with anything drops. Tasks that would normally be straightforward start to feel overwhelming. Your tolerance for stressors shrinks. Your ability to think clearly decreases. Your emotional resilience thins out.
All of which makes you more anxious.
Because now you are not just dealing with the original anxiety. You are also dealing with the anxiety about not being able to function. The worry that something is wrong with you. The frustration of watching yourself fall behind on things that should not be this hard. The fear that people will notice, or that things will start to unravel.
This additional anxiety adds more load to an already overloaded system, which generates more exhaustion, which reduces capacity further, which increases anxiety further.
If you have been caught in this cycle, you may have noticed that it tends to get worse over time, not better. That is not because you are deteriorating. It is because the loop is compounding. Each pass through the cycle adds a little more weight than the last.
You might expect that rest would solve the problem. And in theory, it should. If the body is tired, sleep and downtime should replenish the energy.
But as I explored in the previous post, anxiety often interferes with the body's ability to rest properly. Your nervous system stays in alert mode even when you lie down. Sleep, when it comes, may be shallow, fragmented, or filled with vivid, unsettling dreams. You may wake up feeling as tired as when you went to bed.
And even during waking rest, if your mind is still hyperalert and your body is still holding tension, you are not truly resting. You are sitting still while your system continues to burn energy at an elevated rate.
This is why people experiencing anxiety-related exhaustion often feel guilty about resting, because it does not seem to help. They rest all weekend and still feel drained on Monday. They take time off work and wonder why they do not feel any better. The rest is not reaching the layer that needs it, because the nervous system is not standing down.
For some people, the exhaustion is a side effect, noticeable but secondary to other anxiety symptoms like racing thoughts or avoidance.
For others, it becomes the main event. The tiredness is so profound that it starts to define daily life. Getting through basic responsibilities feels like an endurance test. Social contact becomes too draining to maintain. The gap between what you want to do and what you have the energy for grows wider and wider.
This is often a feature of low-functioning anxiety, where the system has been running so hard for so long that it begins to shut down. The exhaustion is not separate from the anxiety. It is the anxiety's long-term cost, the bill that eventually comes due when the nervous system has been in overdrive without adequate recovery.
It is also closely tied to chronic stress, where sustained demands have depleted the body's capacity to regulate itself. The line between chronic stress and anxiety-driven exhaustion can be blurry, and for many people the two overlap significantly.
If anxiety has been draining your energy for a while, the answer is not simply to rest more. It is to address the reason your system is burning through energy in the first place.
In my one-to-one work with clients, this is where the combination of coaching and clinical hypnotherapy becomes especially important.
Coaching helps you look at the patterns that are keeping your system in overdrive. Where is the pressure coming from? What are the demands, real and perceived, that your system never gets a break from? What are the characteristics of your cycle of anxiety, reduced capacity, more anxiety, more exhaustion that are compounding the problem? Seeing the pattern clearly is the first step toward changing the load.
Clinical hypnotherapy works with the nervous system's ability to actually stand down. When the system has been in alert mode for a long time, it can lose the ability to return to a genuine resting state, even when the conscious mind wants to. Hypnotherapy supports that process directly, helping the nervous system recalibrate so that rest becomes real rest again, and the body can begin to recover the energy it has been spending on survival.
Together, they address both the conscious patterns maintaining the cycle and the deeper nervous system state that is driving the energy drain.
If exhaustion has been making everything harder, you may feel like you do not deserve support because you have not been "doing enough" to justify being this tired. That feeling is part of the pattern, not evidence that the pattern is not real.
A 30-minute consultation is a simple, low-energy first step. A calm conversation via Zoom about what has been happening and whether this kind of support might help. No preparation required. No pressure to decide anything on the day.
The exhaustion is not proof that you are not trying hard enough. It is proof that your system has been trying too hard for too long.
This is the fourth post in an ongoing series exploring the specific ways anxiety shows up in daily life. The next post looks at why anxiety can make even simple decisions feel impossible, and what is happening when your brain treats every choice as a potential threat.
Important Information: This blog post is for general informational purposes only. It does not constitute medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. If you are experiencing persistent anxiety or have concerns about your mental health, please consult your registered health practitioner. Persistent fatigue can have medical causes unrelated to anxiety, and it is important to discuss ongoing exhaustion with your GP to rule out other conditions. If you are experiencing a mental health crisis or have urgent concerns about your safety, contact your GP or local emergency services immediately.
Tony Yuile is a Wellington-based Life Coach and Clinical Hypnotherapist dedicated to helping individuals navigate the complexities of anxiety and stress. Tony’s mission is driven by the belief that everyone deserves to feel in control of their own mental well-being. He specialises in providing practical, mind-based tools that empower his clients to manage anxiety and stress effectively and rediscover a sense of calm and confidence in their daily lives.
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