You’re getting to the gym. You make an effort with your food. You’re doing plenty of things that should help you feel better.
Yet you wake up tired, struggle to concentrate in the afternoon and get home with very little left.
It’s frustrating. Especially when your response has been to put more effort in.
Exercise and healthy eating matter, but they don’t rule out poor sleep, stress or a medical cause of tiredness. Before adding another workout or tightening your diet, look at the week around them.
For founders and senior leaders, that’s often where the difficulties become clearer.
You get the session done before work. But that means setting your alarm for 5.30 after answering emails until 11.
You eat a decent lunch when you can. On meeting days, it’s whatever fits between calls.
You intend to switch off in the evening. Then something needs your attention, and you’re back on the laptop.
By Friday, you’ve completed your training sessions. You’ve also spent the week squeezing everything else around work.
Being consistent in the gym doesn’t tell you whether your whole approach is working.
A plan that depends on finishing on time, controlling every meal and having quiet evenings will be difficult to sustain if your role rarely allows those things.
Travel, client dinners and busy periods need to be accounted for when you make the plan.
When you run a business, getting the job done can become your measure of whether you’re okay.
The meetings happen. Decisions get made. Nobody is questioning your ability to deliver.
But you’ve started making adjustments.
You save difficult work for the morning because afternoons are harder. You rely on another coffee to get through. You turn down plans because you’re worn out.
Your family gets a version of you that has already spent most of its energy elsewhere.
These changes can happen gradually. A demanding month becomes a demanding year, and you stop expecting to feel any different.
I call this Executive Health Drift: the gradual decline in how you feel and function that starts to become normal. It describes a pattern we discuss in coaching, rather than a medical diagnosis.
A question worth asking yourself is:
Are you feeling well, or have you become good at working around feeling tired?
When Haresh came to TRUTH, he was training and making an effort with his food.
He was also struggling with poor sleep and brain fog.
Over the following months of coaching, he reported sleeping through the night, having more energy and thinking more clearly.
His experience doesn’t establish the cause of anyone else’s tiredness. It does illustrate why we look beyond workouts and food when someone says they’re doing the right things but still feels exhausted.
When do you finish working? When do you go to bed? When does the alarm go off?
Then consider how you sleep. Do you repeatedly wake during the night? Do you wake feeling refreshed?
Look at what actually happens across a normal week, including the difficult days.
Perhaps you manage well at home but struggle when travelling. Perhaps late meetings regularly push dinner and bedtime back.
Be specific. “I need to be healthier” gives you very little to work with. “I regularly miss lunch on meeting days” gives you a practical problem to address.
A routine you built five years ago may no longer suit your responsibilities, available time or current health.
Before adding more, consider what you can sustain and how you feel around your sessions. Persistent exhaustion deserves investigation, rather than being treated as a reason to push harder.
Do you have the energy to enjoy your family, see friends or do something you’ve been looking forward to?
Those things belong in your assessment of how you’re doing. Your ability to get through another working day is only part of the picture.
If you’ve been tired for a few weeks without knowing why, or tiredness is affecting your daily life, speak to your GP. Ongoing fatigue can have medical causes and shouldn’t simply be put down to age or a demanding role.
NHS guidance on tiredness and fatigue.
At TRUTH, we provide private executive health coaching for founders and senior leaders, built around demanding working lives.
If you recognise yourself here, our Executive Health Diagnostic helps you take stock of your habits and identify where to focus first. It’s a starting point for a coaching conversation, not a medical assessment.
You’ll receive your results immediately, with the option to discuss them in a private review with a TRUTH coach.
Take the Executive Health Diagnostic.
