The Mum Who Thought Exhaustion Was Just Part of Having Small Children

Three kids under seven. A job. A house. Of course she was tired. What Emma did not realise was that she had been running herself chronically dry for months — and that the tiredness she had written off as inevitable had a very fixable component.

Emma is 36. She has three children aged seven, five, and two. She works part-time as a marketing manager. She runs the household. By any objective measure, her life is demanding. Being tired makes sense.

But the exhaustion she had been experiencing over the last year had started to feel qualitatively different from ordinary tired. She described it as "a foggy, almost physical heaviness that was there from the moment I got up." She was having more headaches than usual. Her concentration at work felt compromised. She was reaching for coffee by 9am and again by 2pm, and the second coffee had stopped working.

Her morning routine, timed at a precise 37 minutes from alarm to leaving the house, involved making packed lunches, dressing three children, making two coffees for herself and her husband, and getting everyone out of the door. In that 37 minutes, she drank one coffee. She ate nothing. She drank no water.

By the time she dropped the kids at school and arrived at her desk, it was 9:15am. She had been awake for two hours, had consumed 240ml of coffee, and had drunk no water. Her overnight deficit had not been addressed at all.

Her perpHect target on a typical workday was around 2,200ml. She was averaging 900–1,100ml based on her first week of logging. She had been running at approximately half her actual requirement, consistently, for months.

The changes she made were small, because they had to be: a glass of water while making the packed lunches. A 500ml bottle to drink on the school run. A second bottle on her desk throughout the morning.

The headaches became infrequent. The morning fog lifted noticeably. She described the change as "not feeling superhuman — just normal again, which I had apparently forgotten what that felt like."