Behavioral scientists found that people who describe themselves as tired all the time but sleep well are often mourning a version of their life they expected to be living by now. The fatigue is unprocessed disappointment.

I started noticing it about two years ago—this heaviness that had nothing to do with how many hours I'd slept. I'd wake up after a solid eight hours, sunlight pressing through the blinds of my Venice Beach apartment, and still feel like I was dragging myself through wet cement. My partner would ask if I was okay, and I'd say what I always said: just tired. But the thing is, I wasn't tired. Not really. Not in any way that sleep could fix. I was something else entirely, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what.

The claim circulating online—that behavioral scientists found people who describe themselves as "tired all the time" despite sleeping well are often mourning a version of their life they expected to be living by now—isn't attributable to a single viral study. But it's not fabricated from thin air, either. It draws on real, well-documented psychological phenomena: chronic disappointment masquerading as physical fatigue, the grief of unrealized futures, and the way our bodies absorb what our minds refuse to process. And when I finally sat with that idea—really sat with it, the way I almost never do anymore—something cracked open.

The Ghost Life You're Grieving

There's a concept in psychology called the unived life—the parallel existence you imagined for yourself at twenty-two, or thirty, or whenever you last believed the trajectory was clear. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote about it extensively, arguing that we are haunted not by what happened to us but by what didn't. The lives we never lived are as formative as the ones we're actually inhabiting. And when the gap between expectation and reality becomes wide enough, the psyche doesn't just shrug it off. It grieves.

Researchers studying what's known as goal disengagement and well-being have found that people who struggle to let go of unattainable goals experience significantly higher levels of both psychological distress and physical symptoms—including fatigue. The body keeps score, as they say, but it doesn't always keep it in obvious ways. Sometimes it keeps it in the heaviness of your limbs at two in the afternoon, in the fog that descends right around the time you should be feeling most alive.

I thought, at thirty-six, that I'd figured out the big things. I'd gone vegan—cold turkey, cleaned the fridge in two days, the whole dramatic conversion. I'd found my partner. I'd built a writing life that let me work from coffee shops and talk about things that actually mattered to me. But at forty-four, I started running the internal math on all the other things I'd quietly assumed would happen by now. The novel. The travel. Some version of stability that didn't involve refreshing my inbox for freelance checks. And I realized: I wasn't exhausted from the life I was living. I was exhausted from carrying the life I wasn't.

When Your Body Speaks What Your Mind Won't

There's a term for this in clinical literature: somatization—the process by which psychological distress manifests as physical symptoms. A study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research found that individuals with high levels of unresolved emotional conflict were significantly more likely to report chronic fatigue, even when no medical cause could be identified. The body, in the absence of a narrative for the disappointment, writes one anyway—in aching joints, in brain fog, in the heaviness that no amount of sleep, supplements, or matcha lattes can touch.

And here's what gets me: we live in a culture that has a solution for every symptom. Tired? Optimize your sleep hygiene. Still tired? Try magnesium. Still tired after that? Track your circadian rhythm with an app. The wellness industry has made billions selling answers to a question most of us haven't even properly asked. Because the question isn't why am I tired? The question is what am I not letting myself feel?

I think about this when I scroll through my mornings—those first ten minutes when the phone is already in my hand before I've even registered the impulse to reach for it. There's something telling about the inability to sit in silence without reaching for a device—it's not just about attention spans. It's about avoidance. It's about the discomfort of the gap between the life on the screen and the one in the room.

The Specific Shape of Disappointment

I want to be clear: this isn't about ingratitude. I'm not talking about people who have everything and still feel empty—though that exists too, and it deserves compassion rather than judgment. I'm talking about the quiet, low-grade ache of specific unmet expectations. The ones you might not even consciously hold anymore.

For me, one of them was tied to food—to the vision I'd had of what my vegan life would look like after eight years. I'd imagined myself as someone who cooked elaborate, photogenic meals every night, who hosted dinner parties that converted skeptics, who had somehow alchemized my dietary choices into a whole aesthetic. Instead, most nights I make the same three or four things—the kind of meals every broke vegan knows by heart—and eat them standing at the kitchen counter while reading something on my phone. It's fine. It's more than fine. But it's not the picture I'd painted.

Another was tied to my creative work. I'd spent the early 2000s blogging about indie music in the LA underground scene, utterly convinced I was building toward something—a book, a documentary, some cultural artifact that would outlast the blogs themselves. Twenty years later, those blogs are dead links. The bands I championed are mostly forgotten. The artifact never materialized. And I carry that not as a sharp pain but as a dull weight, the kind you forget you're holding until someone asks why your shoulders are always up around your ears.

Mourning Forward Instead of Looking Back

Here's what the research actually suggests about moving through this kind of grief—because it is grief, even if nobody died. Work by psychologists Wrosch and Scheier on goal adjustment has consistently shown that the ability to disengage from unattainable goals and reengage with new, meaningful ones is one of the strongest predictors of well-being in adulthood. It's not about giving up. It's about being honest about what's actually available to you now—and finding something worth wanting in that.

But there's a step before reengagement, and it's the one most of us skip: acknowledgment. You have to actually name the disappointment. You have to say—out loud, or in a journal, or to someone who won't try to fix it—I thought my life would look different by now, and I'm sad about that. Not ashamed. Not motivated to hustle harder. Just sad. There's a reason people who still write by hand in journals tend to process emotions differently—the slowness of the act forces a kind of honesty that typing or scrolling never requires.

I started doing this about six months ago. Not in any structured therapeutic way—just in small, private moments. Standing on the boardwalk with my camera, watching the light change over the water, letting myself think: I thought I'd have published a book by forty-four. I haven't. That hurts. Or cooking dinner for my partner—who still eats cheese, still leaves the parmesan in the fridge where I can smell it—and thinking: I imagined we'd both be vegan by now. We're not. That's a small grief, but it's real.

And here's the thing nobody tells you about naming disappointment: it doesn't make you more tired. It makes you less. The fatigue starts to lift—not all at once, not dramatically, but like fog burning off in the morning. You realize how much energy it takes to not feel something. How the constant, unconscious act of suppressing disappointment is itself the most exhausting thing you do all day.

The Vegan Parallel Nobody Talks About

I think there's a version of this that's specific to people who've made significant ethical life changes—going vegan, choosing minimalism, stepping off the consumer treadmill. Because when you restructure your life around values, you often carry an implicit expectation that the restructuring will feel like enough. That alignment between your ethics and your actions will produce a kind of settled peace.

Sometimes it does. But sometimes you're six, eight, ten years into your vegan life and you realize the alignment didn't solve the other things. The career uncertainty. The creative stagnation. The relationships that still feel incomplete. We talk a lot about what resistance to change reveals, but we don't talk enough about what happens after the change—when the life you've built is genuinely good, genuinely intentional, and still somehow not the one you imagined.

A study published in Emotion found that people who suppress negative emotions don't eliminate them—they simply redirect the physiological cost. The emotions emerge as fatigue, tension, even immune suppression. The irony is devastating: the very act of trying to stay positive, to focus on gratitude, to be the person who doesn't complain—that's what's wearing you down.

What I'm Learning to Do Instead

I don't have a five-step program for this. I'm suspicious of anyone who does. But I can tell you what's helped me, incrementally, imperfectly.

I stopped treating tiredness as a problem to solve and started treating it as information to receive. When the heaviness arrives—usually around mid-afternoon, usually when I'm between tasks and the momentum drops—I pause and ask myself: What am I not acknowledging right now? Sometimes the answer is mundane. Sometimes it's devastating. Both are useful.

I started being more honest with my partner about the gap between expectation and reality—not as a complaint, but as an offering. I thought we'd be somewhere different by now is not an accusation. It's an invitation to grieve together, to build something new from what's actually here.

And I started paying closer attention to the small daily rituals that genuinely sustain joy—not the optimized, productivity-hacked version of joy, but the quiet, almost invisible kind. The morning light on the Venice canals. The smell of cumin in a cast-iron pan. A vinyl record that I've played four hundred times and still haven't gotten tired of.

The fatigue isn't gone. But it's lighter now. And I understand what it is—not a failure of sleep hygiene or a vitamin deficiency, but the weight of a life I was carrying that was never mine to live. Putting it down doesn't mean giving up. It means finally being awake inside the life I actually have.