YOU GOT EIGHT hours of sleep last night, you have a clean bill of health, and you’re on a deload week from the gym. Somehow, though, you’re exhausted. Turns out, there are actually several types of fatigue that could be getting you down, according to Saundra Dalton-Smith, MD, an internal medicine physician and author of Sacred Rest, who’s spent years researching the subject. “When someone says they're fatigued, my first question is what kind of tired are you?,” Dr. Dalton-Smith says, adding that answers may go beyond the usual suspects of mental and physical fatigue and include emotional, social, and/or sensory. And in order to bounce back, you need to know which one you’re dealing with.
Fatigue is multifaceted, agrees MH advisor W. Christopher Winter, MD, a sleep medicine and neurology expert. He even wrote a book—The Sleep Solution—in which he provides a potential cause for fatigue for every letter of the alphabet. “Sleepiness is inadequate sleep or dysfunctional sleep,” he says. Fatigue is much harder to pin down.
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