Excerpt of the Day: "The Fatigue Prescription" by Linda Hawes Clever, MD

It’s a Monday.  You’re tired, stressed, working on autopilot with fantasies of your warm bed filling your head.  There’s a pile of tasks at work and a pile of chores at home.  You know you should get started on them but you’re just so tired.  That exhaustion (not to mention abandoned work) carries on to Tuesday, carries on to Wednesday, carries on to Thursday, and even carries on to the ever-fabulous and promising Friday.  You live in a constant haze of energy drinks, coffee, energy bars, and energy shots and suffer the caffeine crashes that follow.

Not anymore.

Renew your energy, health, and life with The Fatigue Prescription.  Linda Hawes Clever, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and founder of RENEW, provides a straight-forward guide to taking care of your whole self.  Filled with easy self-assessments, informational charts, and sound advice from a physician who healed herself, this book will help you avoid illness, reset priorities, and most importantly, regain your health and happiness.

Convinced? Not yet?  Well, here’s an excerpt for your sleepy eyes:

No wonder you’re tired! You have wants and needs. You want to get a lot done and you want to do it well. Your family and friends need and expect your attention. So does your checkbook. You also have plenty of shoulds and ought tos. You should be an informed voter. You ought to get some exercise. And for goodness sake, you want to see a good movie sometime soon! In your rare quiet times, you realize that you want to be better than busy. You want some time to think and plan. You want some peace and quiet without feeling guilty and selfish.

This book puts your closest buddy—you—into the driver’s seat, moving out of the rat race and into fatigue-free good health.

How?

In medicine, we try to determine the cause of the symptoms— the diagnosis—and then we can design the appropriate treatment: the remedy. That is what I hope this book does for you.

In this chapter, you and I will sort out the whys and wherefores—some of the reasons you have accumulated so many demands and commitments, what these relentless responsibilities are, and what they may be doing to you. You’ll give your energy bucket the onceover and come up with a couple of favors you can do for yourself. After discussing two important qualities—courage and pride—the chapter wraps up with a preview of the Fatigue Prescription and its four steps.

Later in Part One, since this is the diagnosis section, you’ll do your own checkup and see the Prescription’s benefits. Soon you’ll be well positioned to launch into the remedy. Part Two, The Renewing Remedy, uses the Prescription’s four steps to help you reconnect with your values and discover what you really want and how to get it. You’ll see how others have renewed their bodies, spirits, and energy. You will get some quick tips and ideas for long-term maintenance.

Why all this emphasis on you? Because you are important! And it is not selfish to take care of yourself. It is self-preservation so you can do what you want to do or must do. You are the one who can best take care of yourself. No one else can do it as well, and no one else cares about you as much.

By way of example, and to help you start understanding the challenges you may face and the way you may approach them—and why—let me tell you about a young musician. She was trying to make a living by patching together jobs as a church choir director, a high-school rehearsal accompanist, a greeting card designer, and a piano teacher—all while she was thinking about a new career, hunting for a full-time job, dealing with family demands, and dating an interesting guy. One day she came home to find her low-rent apartment flooded with sewage. The manager said he would fix the drainage system, but when the apartment flooded for a second time, her spirits hit bottom. She was angry, and she felt betrayed. She caught a cold, snapped at her friends and students, and cried. Anybody would! She was stuck, however, with no money, a tight schedule, and lots of distractions. She was determined to fix the problem but didn’t want to add a disruptive move to her situation. So she enlisted her father’s help. He checked the plumbing and made firm recommendations to the manager. She persuaded the manager to pay for the cleanup so she wouldn’t have to call the health department. When the dust and goo settled, she had an after-the-flood-get-together. Her grit and network got her through.

Where do you get your grit, and how do you develop your network? What about your drive, even your tastes and preferences? How did you get so much on your plate that you got exhausted and, perhaps worse, stale? Nature, nurture, combinations, circumstances? All of these, most likely.