The Voice That Calls Tiredness Laziness

Lily Ahluwalia’s Oct. 16 essay, “My Experience with Idiopathic Hypersomnia,” holds a sentence I wish every student at Wesleyan would read twice: “In a society that values productivity above all else, I felt lazy.” Her diagnosis is her own, and I would not borrow it. But the voice she describes, the one that files exhaustion under character flaw, is one I hear constantly as a licensed clinical social worker, usually from people with no sleep disorder at all.

That voice has a long career ahead of it. Much of my clinical work is with physicians, attorneys, founders and executives, and many of them were once the student Ahluwalia describes, the one who “knew what I was capable of, so I made myself do it.” The instinct got them admitted, hired and promoted. It also taught them to treat their own depletion as a performance problem to override, not information to read.

The cost hides well because the work keeps getting done. A 2026 CEREVITY report, The Performance Paradox Index 2026, found that 67 percent of the 287 high-achieving people who sought therapy through the CEREVITY network said their strongest stretches of professional output came during their highest internal strain, fog or exhaustion. The results held. The person producing them did not. Output is often the last thing to go, which makes it a poor alarm.

Perfectionism is often mistaken for high standards. It is closer to a rule: any shortfall says something about your worth. Under that rule, rest never feels earned, so it never actually restores you, and the standards become impossible to sustain. Selective colleges are full of people who learned the rule early because it worked.

Two questions are worth asking this semester, long before anyone hands you a title. When you are tired, ask what the tiredness is telling you before you ask what it says about you. And notice whether a free evening feels like rest or like something you stole. If it is the second, that is worth bringing to someone. Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) is on campus for exactly that conversation, and it is a far easier one to have at 20 than at 45.

Ahluwalia ends by saying she may have to live differently, “and that’s okay.” That is not a lowered standard. It is the standard many of the professionals I work with wish someone had taught them in college.

Martha Fernandez, LCSW

Martha Fernandez is a licensed clinical social worker and co-founder of CEREVITY. CEREVITY is a private-pay concierge network of independent licensed clinicians built for high achievers: executives, founders, physicians, attorneys and finance leaders.