Not eating enough was the cause, it turned out

What helped was scheduling the tiredness rather than fighting it. I moved the demanding parts of my week to mornings and stopped pretending afternoons were productive.

My tiredness arrived without warning at about week five and lasted a month. It was not dramatic, it was just that everything took more out of me than it should have.

Just marking that I read this properly rather than skimming it.

Sleep got better for me before it got worse. Two good months, then a strange stretch, then it settled at something new.

The thing I would raise with somebody qualified is fatigue that is not improving over months rather than weeks. Mine was, so I did, and it was worth it.

What I found was that eating something earlier in the evening changed my nights more than anything I did about sleep directly.

Mine was worst in winter and much better in summer, and I now think a good half of it was seasonal and would have happened anyway.

No wisdom, just: I am sorry. That sounds genuinely hard.

Mine was much worse for the first three days after each step up and then fine. Once I saw that pattern in my notes I planned around it.

The exhaustion is real and it is not laziness, and I spent a month calling it laziness before somebody here corrected me kindly.

What Leif described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My honest experience: my sleep is now noticeably better than it was before any of this, which was not something I expected or was aiming for.

Naps helped me and made things worse for somebody I talk to weekly, so I am reluctant to recommend them. Worth trying and worth abandoning.

Reading this properly rather than skimming, which is all I have to offer today.

What made the difference for me was a fixed wake time rather than a fixed bedtime. Somebody here suggested it and it took about ten days to work.

Mine correlated with hydration far more than I would have believed. Very dull, very consistent across three months of notes.

What I noticed was that the tiredness came in a wave in the mid-afternoon and if I could get through forty minutes it passed. Trying to push through it never worked.

Somebody here said to treat energy as a budget rather than a personal quality, and that single reframing changed how I planned my weeks.

I found the tiredness hardest to explain to other people. It is not the tiredness of a bad night, it is a different quality, and there is no good vocabulary for it.

Something practical: I stopped scheduling anything on the evening of the day I do it. That one change took the pressure out of the whole week.