The warmest of welcomes to you at a time in your life where you're beginning to seriously wonder about certain challenges you face.
I think it definitely pays to wonder (remain curious) when it comes to how we tick mentally, physically and even in a soulful sense at times. I believe an open mind can be far healthier than jumping to all the wrong conclusions. We all work differently at different times in our life, under different circumstances. The question becomes 'Why am I struggling now at this time in my life and what the heck am I struggling with exactly?'.
It sounds like your life is packed with a lot of mentally challenging/exhausting stuff. My daughter's partner just finished an engineering degree and while being a naturally highly energetic guy (with a really full life), he admitted the study really took a lot out of him, mentally and physically in some ways. How our chemistry and nervous system and other factors are tied into a lot of the mental stuff really is pretty amazing. Focus alone takes a fair amount of energy, which helps explain why relaxation can feel so peaceful. Relaxation requires next to no energy.
If we're someone who experiences the challenges of inner dialogue, it's definitely something that needs to be managed before it starts to get completely out of control. Being able to feel inner dialogue adds to the challenge. If we've got an inner stresser, inner pessimist, inner critic etc, such elements can really start to mess with us. 'What are you doing just sitting around? You're lazy', 'Why are you even bothering, when the world is going down the toilet?!', 'You need to hurry up and get that work done or you're going to fail!'. None of it's true of course, especially if the work is running to schedule, but it can start to feel believable if there aren't strategies in place to help combat inner dialogue. Whether we have strategically placed interruptions to the inner dialogue through certain distractions or friends/family interrupting it, this means it can't go on for long periods. Bit of a mindless binge on Netflix to help shift focus toward a story line is also not a bad thing occasionally, for example. If we do have inner facets, such as that inner critic or inner stresser, another strategy can involve developing the facets we really need. Our inner sage, in all its wisdom, may suggest 'You're not lazy, you're exhausted. You're in flat battery mode, now relax and start to constructively recharge. How can you expect to gain energy if you're not recharging?'.
Of course, we can be facing underlying factors at times too. Kind of like 'My autism or ADHD wasn't a problem until I started facing this amount of work with this level of complexity requiring this type of focus' or 'My poor sleeping habits were never a problem until I needed to exert more energy' or 'My B12 deficiency wasn't an issue 'til it became an issue' and so on. As a gal who can feel what's depressing, very high up on my list is 'Next to no energy' as being a factor. With next to no energy I tend to feel a lot of what you could call 'low end emotions'. When I'm on a high (with high levels of energy), I'll naturally feel the high end emotions.
