I Slept 8 Hours But Woke Up Exhausted Every Day

30 years of chronic fatigue that sleep couldn't fix—and how I finally got my energy back

I've been tired my entire life.

Not the normal "I stayed up late" tired. The kind of tired where you sleep 8, 9, 10 hours and still can't get out of bed.

Every morning, my alarm would go off. I'd hit snooze. Again. And again. By the time I actually dragged myself up, it was 10 AM. Sometimes 11 AM.

Not because I was lazy. Because my body felt like it weighed a thousand pounds.

A Day in the Life of Exhaustion

Mornings were hell. I'd wake up feeling like I hadn't slept at all. My head would be foggy, heavy. Just getting to the bathroom felt like running a marathon.

The fatigue would follow me all day. Every task felt monumental. Walking around? Tiring. Standing to cook? I'd need to sit down afterward. Having a conversation? My brain couldn't keep up.

The headaches were constant. A dull, grinding pressure in my temples. Sometimes it would spike—sharp, throbbing pain that made it hard to think.

Brain fog was my normal state. I'd lose my train of thought mid-sentence. Forget why I walked into a room. Read the same paragraph three times and still not absorb it.

Then, around 7 or 8 PM, after dinner, something strange would happen: I'd feel a spark of energy. For about two hours, I'd feel almost normal. Almost human.

That was my window. That was when I could actually do things.

Then it would fade, and I'd be back to exhaustion.

Exercise Was Impossible

People would say, "Just exercise! It'll give you energy!"

They didn't understand. Exercise didn't energize me. It destroyed me.

I'd try to work out. Even light exercise—a short run, some lifting—would leave me completely drained. I'd need the rest of the day to recover. Sometimes the next day too.

Doing it every day? Impossible. My body couldn't handle it.

I watched other people go to the gym daily, full of energy, and I couldn't understand how. What did they have that I didn't?

Caffeine Was a Trap

I tried coffee. Of course I tried coffee.

It would work for about an hour. A jolt of alertness, a brief escape from the fog. Then it would crash, hard. And my heart would race uncomfortably, pounding in my chest like it was struggling.

The boost wasn't worth the crash and the strain on my heart.

So I'd go back to just... being tired. All the time.

Doctors Had No Answers

I went to doctors. Told them I was exhausted constantly, despite sleeping enough.

They ran blood tests. Thyroid: normal. Iron: normal. Vitamin D: normal. Everything was "normal."

"Maybe you're depressed," they'd say. "Try getting more sleep. Exercise more. Reduce stress."

But I was sleeping. Exercise made it worse. And I was stressed because I had no energy, not the other way around.

The diagnosis was always the same: "You're fine. It's probably just stress."

But I wasn't fine. I was barely functioning.

The Real Problem: Empty Batteries

When I started working on my gut issues and learning about traditional medicine, I began to understand what was actually wrong.

In Western terms, chronic fatigue is often dismissed as "psychological" if your blood tests are normal. But traditional Eastern medicine has a completely different framework.

It's about energy production and circulation.

The Three Energy Systems

Traditional medicine views the body as having three core energy systems (simplifying here):

1. The Digestive System (Spleen) - Converts food into usable energy

2. The Kidney System - Stores your fundamental energy reserves (like a battery)

3. The Circulation System (Heart/Liver) - Distributes energy throughout your body

Here's what was wrong with mine:

My Digestive System Was Weak

As we covered in the SIBO post, my digestion was fundamentally weak. When you can't break down food properly, you can't extract energy from it efficiently.

I was eating, but my body wasn't converting that food into usable fuel. It's like putting gas in a car with a broken fuel pump—the gas is there, but it's not getting to the engine.

My Energy Reserves Were Depleted

The Kidney system in traditional medicine isn't just about your physical kidneys. It's about your fundamental life energy—your reserves.

Think of it like a phone battery. Every day, you use energy (discharging). Every night, you should recharge. But if your battery is damaged or your charging system is broken, you wake up at 30% instead of 100%.

My reserves had been depleted for so long that even a full night's sleep wasn't enough to restore me.

The pattern made sense now:

• Morning exhaustion: reserves depleted overnight, not recharged
• All-day fatigue: running on empty, no reserves to draw from
• Evening energy spike: after eating dinner, briefly got energy from food
• Then exhaustion again: food energy used up, back to empty reserves

Why My Head Hurt and My Brain Fogged

Your brain is the most energy-intensive organ in your body. When your overall energy is low, your brain suffers first.

The headaches, the fog, the inability to concentrate—all signs of insufficient energy reaching my brain.

In traditional medicine terms, my "Qi" (energy) wasn't rising to my head properly. In modern terms, poor circulation and low metabolic energy.

The Solution: Recharge the Battery

Once I understood the real problem, the solution became clear:

1. Strengthen my digestive system (so I could produce energy from food)
2. Rebuild my energy reserves (recharge the depleted battery)
3. Improve circulation (so energy could reach everywhere it needed to go)

I worked with AI to add specific herbs to my formula:

How It Works Together

Immediate energy: Ginseng + Astragalus give you the initial boost to function

Energy production: Atractylodes + Poria fix your ability to generate energy from food

Deep reserves: Rehmannia slowly rebuilds your depleted battery

Energy circulation: Ligusticum gets energy to your brain, Schisandra prevents it from leaking out

The Timeline: 3 Months to Normal Energy

Why This Worked When Sleep Didn't

The problem was never sleep quantity. I was sleeping plenty. The problem was that my energy production and storage systems were broken.

More sleep didn't help because:

• My digestion couldn't convert food to energy efficiently
• My reserves were so depleted that one night couldn't refill them
• My energy wasn't circulating properly to reach my muscles and brain

It's like telling someone with a dead car battery to "just let it sit overnight." The battery is broken. Time alone won't fix it. You need to actually recharge and repair the system.

Coffee didn't work because it was forcing a broken system to work harder. Stimulating an exhausted body just burns it out faster.

The herbs worked because they repaired the underlying systems. They didn't just stimulate—they rebuilt.

What Changed

I can exercise now. Not just once in a while. Every single day. For hours. My body recovers. It gets stronger. This was unimaginable before.

My mind is clear. No more brain fog. No more losing my train of thought. I can focus, think deeply, be present in conversations.

The headaches are gone. Occasionally I'll get a mild one if I'm dehydrated or stressed, but the constant grinding pressure in my temples? Gone.

I wake up like a normal person. 7 hours is enough. I don't need 10 or 11 hours anymore. I wake up and I'm actually awake.

I'm standing all day. Working, moving, living. Not collapsed on the couch, rationing my limited energy.

For 30 years, I thought this was just who I was. The tired person. The one who couldn't keep up.

Turns out, I wasn't fundamentally broken. My energy systems just needed to be repaired.

The Simple Truth

Chronic fatigue isn't "all in your head."

It's not laziness. It's not just stress. It's not solved by "getting more sleep."

It's a sign that your body's energy production, storage, or circulation systems aren't working properly.

You can sleep 12 hours a day, but if your digestive system isn't converting food to energy, if your reserves are depleted, if your circulation can't deliver that energy where it needs to go—you'll still be exhausted.

Modern medicine looks at your blood work and says "you're fine" because the tests don't measure energy production. They measure outcomes (hemoglobin, thyroid hormones, glucose) but not the underlying capacity to generate and circulate energy.

Traditional medicine has been dealing with this for thousands of years. It has frameworks for understanding different types of fatigue and specific treatments to rebuild the systems that produce energy.

Once those systems were repaired, my body finally worked the way it was supposed to.

This is part of a series exploring how traditional medicine principles combined with AI helped solve health problems modern medicine couldn't. Next in the series: Depression and anxiety that therapy couldn't touch—how balancing my body finally freed my mind.