This is the short version of a story about someone I’ve been working with for the best part of a year. Why is he sick, weak, confused, and struggling to learn new things? Let’s look at his past, and at his reasons for low energy and tiredness.
I’ll call him Jonas. I can see his life force in there, a long way down. But something keeps him sick, frightened and weak — limping through his own life.
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Physically sick, mentally limited, emotionally hurt
Watching a kind, friendly, helpful person struggle with disease, a fearful mind and a folded-in posture is a hard thing to be near. That’s exactly what I’m describing here.
He’s been ill for years. He’s had part of a lung removed. His immune system is poor enough that he catches colds off nothing, and he has constant back problems on top of a run of other issues. His life force is low, and his stamina isn’t at a level where he can start understanding his own situation, let alone begin repairing it.
Foggy brain, blurry mental vision
When it comes to learning anything new, he tells me how forgetful he is. How he struggles with simple things, and how he NEEDS to write down every single step when I explain something technical. His physical energy stays low, and his brain feels like fog. Not a good place to be. Have you felt it?
When he walks, his posture hangs. He’s always looking down, head tilted forward. And I remember several conversations about the hobby he’s been putting time into where he was afraid of what his family, his friends and the congregation he’s associated with would say about it. He wanted an entirely separate Facebook identity so he could hide. Why?
He just wants to write. He loves writing, and he wants to use what he knows to help people.
His reasons for low energy and tiredness
I told him the first thing to do is stop giving a fuck what his family will say. His congregation and religious associations especially. Not much has shifted in the last hundred years in what those people believe and deem appropriate, and the elders hold onto that framework hard. It is not the place to wake up and start changing your life.
I remember a conversation from the summer before I started working with him. He told me about something that happened with his father when he was sixteen. Sunny day, his father up on the garage roof putting paint on it. The two of them never had much of a relationship — distant, cold. Jonas climbed up to help, and his father said:
“I don’t think this is for you, Jonas. You’re not really that sharp of a guy, are you?”
Sitting outside in the sun that day, I could see the whole thing move across his face as he told me. I knew immediately it had shaped everything since. And do you think that was the only time? It won’t have been. There’ll have been a long run of moments where whatever self-worth he had came apart a little more.
So life happens, and if you’re not one of the stronger characters in your particular cluster, the emotions start taking their toll on the body. It turns into a hidden depression — the kind plenty of people carry without ever naming it.
And that roof was almost certainly not the worst of what he’s pulled toward himself over the years.
What I told him about why he was stuck
We were working on a technical setup for his hobby when his drama-brain kicked in over a few simple steps.
He went straight to panic — frantic, losing the thread, needing to stop everything and break it down again. It’s like explaining a marathon to someone by starting with “first, you put one leg in front of the other… okaaaaay?”
I’d been noticing tendencies, then a pattern, for a long time. That day I had to say it to his face. If I was going to be any use to this man, there was no point tiptoeing around what I could see.
“Look, man, this isn’t working. You EXPECT things to be hard to learn. But they’re not. You’re used to finding things difficult because that’s what you’ve trained your mind to believe.
You’re so good at limiting yourself that you’ve made pen and paper a crutch for your brain. And every time you forget or fail, you’re reinforcing the story about how useless you are.
I think this starts in your childhood.”
When I put it that way, he started thinking, and started agreeing. Most of us already know why our lives are shaped the way they are. It’s just hard to point at until somebody says it out loud or a moment of clarity does it for you.
Then I went at his eating habits:
“What are you eating day to day? I told you last year to stop drinking milk and eating bread. A lot of why you feel fog-headed is that something in your diet isn’t working for you. Combine that with feeling helpless, forgetful and uncertain, and eating shit food makes all of it worse. That’s how it ends up as a hidden depression.”
He later told me he’d started seeing a nutritionist. I wasn’t surprised when he said the first instruction he got was to stop eating bread and drinking milk. Same thing I’d said to him a year earlier.
If you want the book that shaped how I think about food, brain fog and body energy, it’s The Bulletproof Diet by Dave Asprey.
Then his family and the rest of his relationships:
“This is about you, not your family. If you want to change for the better, that’s a choice you own by birthright. Whatever your family says or comments on is something you won’t give a fuck about. Do they want you happy, healthy and living with more passion? Then they’ll celebrate every step of progress you make.”
“You’re too afraid of what people will say, because you’ve been holding yourself cramped since you were young. Your dad’s comment had the biggest impact. Every similar moment after that just added another layer.”
I started painting the picture, and he started recognising it. That’s good. But it can take a while before an insight like that settles far enough in for anything to actually change.
Do you recognise this character in someone you know? Or in yourself?
So what are the actual reasons?
Jonas is one man, and his case is his own. But nothing in it is unusual. Strip the story back and you get four things worth checking in yourself:
- An old verdict you never questioned. Someone whose opinion counted told you what you were, early, and you’ve been running on it since. It costs energy to carry a verdict like that around.
- Living braced for other people’s reaction. Hiding a hobby behind a second identity is not a small tax. That’s a permanent low-level alert state, and it’s exhausting.
- Food that doesn’t work for you. Not a moral issue and not the same list for everyone — but if you’ve never once removed something to see what happens, you don’t know what your baseline actually is.
- A belief that learning is hard. Expect a thing to be difficult and you’ll produce the panic that makes it difficult. Then you’ll file the result as evidence.
Physical causes are real and they’re worth ruling out properly — Jonas has genuine medical history and I’ve never suggested otherwise. But when the tests keep coming back with nothing, this is the layer underneath that nobody checks.
You need a mental rewiring and a deliberate shift of focus
For anyone who’s lived a long time in that state, the shift is harder. Our emotional responses get wired in over years and it takes deliberate practice to rewire them. It can be done, and there’s more than one route.
Emotional limits get reinforced by bad food and bad habits. You’re not giving your body the conditions to do the thing it’s magnificent at:
Fixing itself. Healing itself. Becoming whole again.
If there are mental blockages or heavy emotional issues in the way, be calm about it and decide to figure things out. The method I keep pointing people to is meditation. Science has caught up enough that it’s an acceptable thing to do now — though it’s an ancient practice for a reason. It’s still the most effective way I know to start getting a grip on your own mind, quieten it, and make room for something new.
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