Running on Empty
What exhaustion is costing us in our classrooms, homes, and ability to pay attention.
Lately, every conversation I have circles back to the same refrain. It doesn’t matter whether the topic is politics, relationships, work, or just deciding where to grab lunch. Everyone says the same thing: I’m tired.
They’re not talking about the kind of tired that sleep fixes. It’s a deeper depletion, the kind that drains your ability to think, to process, to understand where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
As the end of the year (aka holidays) approach, that exhaustion only amplifies. People joke about being “so busy,” “so behind,” “so over it.” The calendar fills up with gatherings, shopping lists, and school events, and somehow what’s meant to be joyful becomes another race to the finish. By December, it feels like the entire world is running on fumes, already talking about resolutions, promising themselves they’ll start fresh next year, a cycle of pressure that keeps us chasing improvement instead of rest.
We call it the end-of-year rush, but what we’re really describing is collective depletion.
Johann Hari calls it a civilization permanently jet-lagged. In Stolen Focus, he argues that attention isn’t about discipline; it’s about rhythm, rest, and care. When our days are designed to keep us stimulated, scrolling, and striving, exhaustion becomes inevitable. You can’t truly focus if you’re exhausted all the time. Rest isn’t a reward. It’s the foundation of attention.
What We Teach Without Meaning To
That truth echoes in classrooms every day. Teachers are running on the same kind of empty, grading through lunch, planning between meetings, and telling students to focus while quietly falling apart themselves. The conversation about exhaustion isn’t separate from education; it is the curriculum.
I used to tell my students to get at least eight hours of sleep. If they came to me apologizing for a late assignment, saying they fell asleep trying to finish it, I’d tell them I’d rather they sleep. I didn’t want to see their names timestamped on an online submission at two in the morning (and not only did I tell them this, I would lock assignments at 11pm so they couldn’t submit). That was never the goal. My class was designed for learning to happen in class, structured enough that late-night panic wasn’t necessary. When I said, “Go to bed,” I meant it. Because sleep mattered more than one missing assignment ever would.
That belief wasn’t just about empathy. It was about health. Rest is how the body repairs itself, and that fact is explicitly taught and reinforced in my classroom. Yet in education, and in our everyday lives, we often model the opposite: constant motion that looks productive but erodes our ability to learn. What if recovery was part of the lesson plan? What if slowing down was the real pedagogy?
Attention deepens when curiosity is given time to breathe. We can’t teach critical thinking inside systems built on reaction. We can’t nurture curiosity if we don’t model calm. Exhaustion doesn’t create better learners or better people; it creates compliance, detachment, and burnout disguised as diligence.
The Cost of Speed
When I left the classroom, I thought the fatigue would fade. It didn’t. It just changed shape. I’d felt that same pressure long before teaching, during my years in advertising, where being “on” was part of the job description. In both professions, and in most work across the U.S., the expectation is the same: let work seep into your life, answer quickly, be available. Now the fatigue lives in inboxes, endless news cycles, social media notifications, algorithmic engagement, and the constant pressure to maintain an online presence. Technology promised to free us by automating the menial, but it only multiplied the noise. We’ve built entire infrastructures around the illusion of efficiency. We were raised to believe that speed equals virtue and stillness signals laziness.
The cost of that conditioning is subtle but severe. A culture that never pauses forgets how to think. Without reflection, depth disappears, and that’s where empathy, creativity, and progress begin.
This isn’t just an individual issue. A society that runs on exhaustion becomes easier to manipulate because fatigue dulls outrage and curiosity alike. The more drained we are, the less likely we are to question the systems that keep us this way. The less inclined we are to think of the possibilities our lives direction can take, because we’re just trying to stay afloat. Maybe rest is where the real body politics begin, learning to protect our collective health by respecting our individual limits.
Rest, then, becomes an act of resistance.
Not the kind sold through meditation apps or branded as “self-care,” but the kind that’s inconvenient, intentional, and real. It looks like closing the laptop before the workday ends. It sounds like silence that doesn’t need to be filled. It’s the small but radical act of refusing to perform productivity when presence would do more good.
It’s easy to tell others to rest. Living that advice is harder. Yet this is where influence begins for teachers, parents, leaders, and anyone trying to model something better. The most radical example we can set is to show that being present matters more than being perfect.
As this year winds down, the temptation to start over or do more will be strong. Before deciding what to add, consider what to release. The world doesn’t need more output; it needs more clarity. You can’t care deeply about anything if you never give yourself the time to feel it.
Rest isn’t the prize waiting at the finish line. It’s the ground beneath your feet, the thing that keeps you steady enough to notice what matters.
Homework
We teach sleep hygiene like it’s a personal routine, but it’s really a civic one. Here are a few things worth knowing:
1 in 3 adults in the U.S. get less than seven hours of sleep each night.
Losing 1–2 hours of sleep can reduce focus and emotional control as much as alcohol consumption.
Chronic sleep deprivation increases the risk of heart disease by 48%, stroke by 15%, and type 2 diabetes by 30%.
People who consistently sleep fewer than six hours have a 13% higher mortality risk than those who sleep seven to nine hours.
Teens who sleep fewer than eight hours are 70% more likely to experience symptoms of depression.
After California delayed school start times, teen car crashes dropped by 16% and attendance improved by 5%.
Sleep deprivation costs the U.S. $411 billion annually in lost productivity and workdays.
People in unsafe or noisy neighborhoods experience up to 40 minutes less sleep per night.
Continued Reflection: As you think about resolutions or goals for the new year, what might shift if you treated rest as a foundation for growth instead of a reward for endurance?
