Psychologists say the difference between being tired from a full life and being tired from an empty one is that rest fixes the first kind. Nothing fixes the second kind except changing what you wake up to.

I noticed it first on a Tuesday morning—not a dramatic Tuesday, not a Tuesday after a funeral or a diagnosis or a fight. Just a regular one. I was sixty-six years old, sitting at my kitchen table with a cup of coffee I'd already reheated twice, and I realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd woken up looking forward to something. Not dreading anything, mind you. Not sad, exactly. Just... absent. Like someone had taken the pilot light out of me while I slept and I'd been running on residual warmth ever since.

My daughter called that afternoon. She asked how I was. I said what I always say: tired. And she said what she always says: Maybe you need more rest, Mom.

But here's the thing I couldn't explain to her then—and what I've spent the better part of a year trying to understand since. There's a kind of tired that rest fixes. And there's a kind that rest has absolutely nothing to do with.

The Two Kinds of Tired

Psychologists have been circling this distinction for decades, though they don't always use the word "tired" the way the rest of us do. What most of us experience after a full day—after chasing grandchildren, after cooking a meal that took three hours, after a long hike or a satisfying argument or a wedding that ran past midnight—is what researchers call acute fatigue. It's the body's honest response to expenditure. You gave something, and now you need to refill. Sleep does the trick. A slow morning. A bath. A Saturday with nothing on the calendar.

But the other kind—the kind I was sitting in that Tuesday morning—is what psychologists increasingly describe as existential exhaustion, a depletion that doesn't come from doing too much but from a life that has lost its psychological scaffolding. Research published in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that emotional exhaustion isn't always correlated with workload; it's more tightly linked to a perceived lack of meaning, autonomy, and purpose in one's daily activities. You can be doing very little and still be the most exhausted person in the room—because nothing you're doing connects to anything that matters to you.

The difference is direction. The first kind of tired points backward—toward something you just finished. The second kind points at nothing at all.

When Rest Becomes a Symptom Instead of a Cure

After my husband passed—six years ago now—everyone told me to rest. And I did. Lord, did I rest. I rested so thoroughly that I stopped leaving the house some weeks. I rested through entire seasons. I rested until rest itself became the thing I was tired from.

There's a concept in psychology called self-determination theory, developed by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, that argues human well-being depends on three basic needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. When those three things are present, even hard work feels energizing. When they're absent, even leisure feels draining. I was resting in a house where nobody needed me to be competent at anything, where my autonomy extended only to choosing between the couch and the bed, and where my deepest form of relatedness was a phone call from a daughter who lived nine hundred miles away.

Rest wasn't fixing anything because rest wasn't the problem. The problem was that I had nothing worth getting tired for.

I think about this now when I hear people—especially people my age—talk about retirement like it's the finish line. Like the whole point of working was to stop. Like stillness is the prize. And for some, maybe it is. But the way you describe your retirement says a lot about how happy you actually are inside it. I described mine as "peaceful." What I meant was "empty."

The Quiet Epidemic No One Names

Here's what I wish someone had told me earlier: you can grieve a life that hasn't ended. You can mourn the version of your days that used to have texture—the school drop-offs, the faculty meetings I pretended to hate, the Sunday dinners that required three trips to the grocery store—without anything technically being wrong. The hardest kind of loneliness isn't being alone—it's being surrounded by people who love you but no longer seek your company.

I taught high school English for thirty-two years. Every September, I knew what I was waking up to. Every May, I was bone-tired—the good kind, the kind that sleeps deep and dreams vivid. My body ached, my voice was half gone, and I felt more alive than I ever did sitting still. That tiredness was proof I'd spent myself on something real.

The tiredness I felt at sixty-six was proof of nothing. It was just the weight of hours with no shape.

A 2021 Lancet Commission on dementia prevention identified social isolation and lack of purposeful activity as significant risk factors not just for cognitive decline but for a broader deterioration in quality of life among older adults. The body reads purposelessness as a threat. It responds with fatigue, inflammation, withdrawal—the same signals it sends when you're sick. Because in a way, you are. You're sick with stillness.

What Changed—And What It Cost Me to Change It

I'd like to tell you the turning point was graceful. That I woke up one morning with clarity and purpose and a five-year plan written on the back of a napkin. But it wasn't like that.

What happened was this: my neighbor, Carol, asked me to help her plant a garden. Not a metaphorical garden. A literal one. Raised beds, tomatoes, basil, kale. She was sixty-nine and had decided—seemingly on a whim—that she wanted to stop buying produce and start growing it. She needed someone to help her build the frames.

I said yes because I had no reason to say no. And for the next three weekends, I was outside in the dirt, measuring wood and pulling weeds and arguing about whether cilantro was worth the effort. I came home aching. Truly aching—my knees, my shoulders, the muscles in my forearms I forgot I had. I fell asleep by eight-thirty.

And I woke up the next morning wanting to get up.

That was the difference. Not the garden itself—though the garden became something I loved. It was having something on the other side of sleep that pulled me forward. Something that required my hands, my presence, my opinions about cilantro. Something that made me tired in a way that rest could actually repair.

The Courage It Takes to Admit What You're Really Tired Of

I think the reason so many of us stay in the second kind of tired—the empty kind—is that naming it honestly requires an admission most people aren't ready to make. You have to look at your life and say: This isn't enough for me anymore. And that feels ungrateful. Especially when you have a roof and a pension and children who call. Especially when people around you are dealing with real crises—illness, poverty, loss—and your complaint is that Tuesday mornings feel beige.

But research from the University of Virginia found that people would rather administer electric shocks to themselves than sit alone with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. We are not built for emptiness. We are built for engagement—messy, imperfect, sometimes exhausting engagement. And when we don't have it, we don't just feel bored. We feel like we're disappearing.

One of the quietest regrets people carry is all the time they spent living someone else's idea of happy. For me, that meant accepting a version of retirement that looked right from the outside—calm, quiet, "well-earned"—while on the inside, I was slowly becoming a person I didn't recognize. Not the woman who stayed up past midnight grading papers and somehow still had the energy to make French toast on Saturday. Just a woman on a couch, reheating coffee, wondering where the pilot light went.

Changing What You Wake Up To

The garden led to other things. I started volunteering at a food bank—my mother had done that for years, and I'd always meant to but never had. Then Carol and I looked into plant-based eating after she watched a documentary about it, and suddenly our garden had a purpose beyond decoration. We were growing food we actually ate. I started cooking again—not the elaborate holiday meals I used to make, but weeknight dishes with whatever the garden gave us. Lentil soup with fresh basil. Kale salads that I actually wanted to eat rather than ones I forced down out of obligation.

None of this sounds revolutionary. That's the point. I didn't climb Kilimanjaro or write a novel or start a nonprofit. I just—slowly, awkwardly, with dirt under my fingernails—rebuilt a life that asked something of me each morning.

And that's all it took to change the kind of tired I was.

I still get exhausted. Some evenings I can barely make it to nine o'clock. My knees protest every time I kneel beside the garden beds. I wake up stiff and slow. But I wake up toward something—and that makes all the difference. The people I know who've aged most happily aren't the ones who rested the most—they're the ones who kept building reasons to get out of bed.

If you're reading this and you recognize yourself in that Tuesday morning kitchen—the reheated coffee, the hollow tiredness, the sense that something's missing but nothing's technically wrong—I want you to know: you don't need more sleep. You don't need a vacation. You don't need to be less busy, because you're probably not busy enough with things that matter.

You need to change what you wake up to. Even if it starts with someone else's garden. Even if it starts with cilantro.