I have seen both terms - ‘Fatigued’ & ‘Tired’ used frequently in this forum, but which term is correct?
I always believed that ‘Fatigued’ meant physical exhaustion - used to hear the expression ‘muscle fatigue’ all the time at the weights-room in the gym, when we simply couldn’t perform any more reps during an exercise.
Because of that, I always assumed ‘tiredness’ was a purely mental thing - where you could no longer concentrate fully.
Do others have a similar understanding ?
It would be nice (…but certainly not essential) to better understand what these terms really mean - so that I could better explain them to others !!
(…If - by some fluke - the above distinction is reasonably accurate - I would say I’m more prone to fatigue than tiredness !!)
Look forward to thoughts and maybe explanations ?!
I think that everybody has slightly different experience of fatigue. Explaining fatigue and the difference between fatigue and tiredness is really difficult…
In my case it usually looks like this: I do something and at some point I become so overwhelmed by weakness/sleepiness that I need a break. I have concentration problems too, my dizziness gets worse, I feel sick etc. I go to bed, take a nap and it usually helps. Something like this happens a few times a day.
It’s quite annoying because it affects my everyday life - I always try to be able to come back home during the day for an hour or so, because I know I will need to rest because of fatigue.
Mmm… To me, being tired means that if I really had to do something, I would be able to. When I’m fatigued, no matter how much I may want to do something, my body just refuses to cooperate, as I have nothing left (energy wise) to give…
The way I tend to look at the diference is that if I was suddenly transported to the middle of the road with a bus bearing down on me, and I was tired, I would roll out of the way. If I was fatigued, I would just close my eyes and hope for the best!
