Are you tired? OR Do you feel tired?
Scenario #1- Tired
Your teenager comes home late and you settle into bed just after midnight. Yeah, you can finally go to sleep! That’s when your youngest child cries out. She crawls on top of you and makes her way into the covers. The rest of the night she rolls back and forth and you try to to keep yourself from falling out of the bed. Now it’s 6AM and the alarm sounds. You wake up and are SO tired! You just experienced a sensation.
A sensation begins in the body. Here are some examples of sensations: tired, hungry, thirsty, hot, cold, etc. Maybe you get fewer hours of sleep or your fighting off sickness so your body produces the sensation of tired. I see this as more involuntary. It just happens.
Consider if your thoughts about your sensations cause you to fight against reality. If you wake up tired and immediately view it as something bothersome or frustrating, you may create a mental battle all day. You tell yourself to power through and ignore that you’re tired but by the end of the day you are burned out or you create greater illness. Sometimes you may do the opposite and give up before the day has begun. Your sensation becomes a perceived disruption so you don’t do anything at all. In truth, sensations are neutral. They are just vibrations in the body and you get to view them however you want. I like to tell myself, “This doesn’t need to be a problem. I can listen to my body and I will know how to carry out my day even though tired wasn’t on the calendar. It’s OK!”
Scenario #2- You Feel Tired
You return home from running errands and open the door to bring in some items. That’s when you are reminded that you rushed off and didn’t get the kitchen cleaned up before you left. The older kids have returned home from school now and you see snacks, backpacks, and shoes left out. There’s not even a clear or clean place to set things down. You think, “Oh dear, this is going to be a lot of work to clean up!” You now feel SO tired. You just experienced the feeling of tired.
A feeling is created from your mind. You have a particular thought (consciously or unconsciously) and then you feel tired, happy, sad, or mad, etc. You weren’t necessarily tired until you thought about how much work you had ahead of you. Thoughts like, “This is so much work,” “I have so much to do,” or “I never get a break,” could cause you to feel tired. Pay attention to the narrative playing in your head throughout the day. You may be creating unnecessary exhaustion and don’t even realize it.
I used the example of tired because it’s sneaky. It can go in both camps of sensation and feeling. In both scenarios you experience the unique vibration of tired, but ask yourself, “Where did this originate— my body or mind?” See if you can spot the difference between a sensation and a feeling.