I was tired for years

For a long stretch of my life I was tired all the time, and I kept telling everyone I was fine.

I was not sleeping. For the longest time I leaned on prescriptions just to get a few hours and somehow function the next day. I came home from work with nothing left, not for my family, not for myself, not for anything, and I complained about all of it. My motivation was still sky high, but my head was full of fog. I did not think clearly. I made mistakes I would not normally make. I let my own standards slip and quietly called it good enough. I dreaded every big meeting, every seminar and every trip long before it arrived.

And at home, the five-year-old version of me showed up far more often than I would like to admit, blowing up over small things that did not deserve it. The people who got the worst of me were the people I loved the most. That is the cost no spreadsheet ever measures. Your best hours go to work, and whoever is waiting for you at the end of the day gets the version of you with nothing left in it.

For a while I quietly started looking for a way out, nothing dramatic, just a growing certainty that I could not keep doing this for another week, let alone another twenty years.

There was no single moment that turned it around. No rock bottom, no epiphany, no grand overhaul of my life. And that is exactly the point I want you to take from this, because you do not need one. What I had was a simple, stubborn thought: if I wanted to keep working for another twenty or thirty years and actually be alive for my own life, I had to find a way.

So I started paying attention. I read, I studied, I learned from the gurus and the biohackers, and I quietly ignored the extreme half of what they said, because I still had a job and a family and no wish to turn my life into a science experiment. I looked for the things I could fold into an ordinary working day, and I kept the ones that actually moved my energy.

It worked, slowly, and it is still working. These days the people at work get my full attention and my real energy, not the tired shell of me. I think I am a better leader for it. I show up with energy, with some passion, with something worth following. My thinking is clearer. I almost never get sick anymore, which was never the goal, just a side effect of running the machine properly.

I still work long hours and I still travel more than I should. But when the work is done, I have something left for the things I love. My weekends are full again, sport, events, travel, the people who matter. For the first time in a long time, I am genuinely enjoying my life.

So if you recognise yourself in the tired version of me, take it as good news rather than bad. You are not broken, and you are not stuck. You are running low, and that is fixable, in small pieces, starting today. And we are here to help you, one small thing at a time.