How are your reserves doing?
Most people can tell you how busy they are. Fewer can tell you what's left underneath it. These questions are about the second thing.
Six questions. Two or three minutes.
These are just questions to think about — not a test, and not a diagnosis. There's no score at the end.
Question 1 of 6You can stop at any point.
How did you feel when you woke up this morning?
When did you last do something purely because you enjoy it?
Not useful. Not productive. Just liked.
A free evening turns up with nothing in it. What happens?
Who do you get to be off-duty with?
People you don't have to be any particular way around.
How does resting feel to you?
If you took a week off, what would happen?
Before anything else, and with no fuss about it: if things are heavy enough that you'd like to talk to somebody today, these lines are free and they answer.
If you need urgent help right now, you're not alone.
If you or someone you know is in immediate danger, call 112 (national emergency).
- Tele-MANAS (Govt of India, 24×7, 20 languages)14416 or 1-800-891-4416
- AASRA (24×7 suicide prevention)+91 98204 66726
- Vandrevala Foundation (24×7, call or WhatsApp)+91 99996 66555
- iCall / TISS (Mon–Sat, 10 AM–8 PM)+91 91529 87821
- For a child in danger or facing abuse — Childline (24×7)1098
Reaching out is a brave first step. These services are free.
Something to sit with
From what you picked, there's still something in the tank — you know what you'd do with an empty evening, and there are people you don't have to perform for. Those two things do more quiet work than almost anything else.
No advice needed. Reserves tend to go down slowly and without announcing it, so the only thing worth doing is noticing when one of those two things starts to disappear.
A one-minute thing, for the ordinary stuck afternoons:
Two minutes, one windowThe smallest thing that reliably changes a stuck afternoon: go and stand at a window.1 min readIf something ever does shift and you'd like to talk it over, the door's open. No urgency in that.
Something to sit with
What comes through in your answers is a kind of low-level accounting: rest has to be justified, free time gets filled, and the people you'd relax with have drifted a bit further away than you meant them to.
None of that is dramatic, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed for years. It usually isn't that you're doing too little — it's that the things that put something back have quietly come off the list, one at a time, each for a good reason.
Worth asking, without judging the answer: what came off, and when?
On the rule underneath that, and where it comes from:
You don't have to earn restRest isn't the prize you get for finishing. It's part of how a person works.2 min readIf you'd like to work out what's actually going on with someone, a session is a reasonable place to start. Whenever you're ready.
Something to sit with
Taking your answers together, and saying this as plainly and kindly as possible: this reads like someone who has been running on empty for a while, and has got used to it.
Rest feeling like something you're getting away with, not being sure what you'd even choose to do — that isn't a personality trait. It's usually what's left after a long stretch where the outflow was bigger than the inflow, and nobody, including you, was counting.
You haven't failed at anything here. There's just less in reserve than there should be, and that's a real thing rather than a mood.
This one sets out the difference, and where to start:
The difference between being tired and being depletedTired goes away with a good night's sleep. Depleted doesn't, and that's the useful clue.6 min readAnd if you want someone alongside you while you look at it, you can book a session. There's no threshold you have to meet first.
That's fine
You skipped all of them, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to do — sometimes the questions aren't the right ones, or it isn't the day. Nothing was recorded. You're welcome to come back, or not.
Stopped there
Stopped, and nothing was kept. If a question was more than you wanted to look at right now, that's fine — it will still be here another time.
Nothing you picked was saved, sent anywhere or counted. It stayed in this browser tab and it's already gone.