If you find the secret, pass it along

I deal with this on and off myself. You have to find a way to get back to your old health habits, and create a schedule that allows you to do that. It sucks, because making time like that with your job is designed to be impossible, but you have no hope of ever feeling better if you have to work 8 hours a day or whatever AND you feel like crap because you are eating junk, not exercising, getting no sleep etc.

I’ll tell you what worked for me: Doing everything before work instead. Get up at 4am instead of 7 and go to bed at 7pm instead of 10.

Quit, then nothing is post work because everything is.

I don’t. That’s why I don’t have a job right now.

After work is exercise, which you need anyway, but it also shakes off the doldrums and provides a clean break between work and evening

You only need to cook one day a week to have good meals.

Make a whole roast chicken on Sunday. You can have that bird all week. Ceasar salad with chicken; chicken tacos, chicken sandwich.

Get a big pot and make a giant stew. Freeze it in pint size containers. Right now I’ve got chili and lentil soup sitting in the freezer, waiting to be nuked.

Keep plenty of fresh fruit and quality cheese on hand. An apple with some sharp cheddar is a great snack.

Angel hair pasta takes about five minutes to cook; put any sauce you like on it.

You don’t have to go to the gym to stay fit.

Use this manual, 15 minutes a day.

https://leisureguy.ca/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/rcaf_xbx_5bx_exercise_plans_text.pdf

Work out in the morning or integrate exercise into your commute: I ride a bike to work and walk everywhere I can. Depending on where you work, you might even be able to get in some body weight exercises, light cardio, etc. between stuff.

Do it in little bursts whenever you can, every little bit helps! Keep in mind also you cannot out-exercise a bad diet, so try to eat healthy nutritious meals as opposed to fast food trash.

Xbox.

Recently lost my wife and my whole life feels like this listlessness you describe. Some suggestions people have made.

Plan out an hour after work to do something even if it means not driving home for an hour and going and doing something. This one works for me.

Do all your extra work on the weekend when you have the energy. Laundry and cleaning the house fit in here.

Plan out and prepare your metals for the work week on the weekend. Its only 5 meals. Cook two big meals and portion out the extras as leftovers in frozen containers then make an extra small meal that is either quick to cook or precooked or frozen meal from store. You now have three meal variety you can pick to quickly cook during the week after work. This works for me as the variety makes me feel like I have a good selection to pick from and if I buy some junk otw home I can eat the extra on the weekend.

Force yourself to exercise for at least 20m every other day. A hard sweaty workout! Just fucking do it no matter what. I do this in morning before shower.

Life still fucking sucks and I hate it… But its better than it was and gets better day to day. You just have to do it.

That’s really what it all comes down to and the only real advise. Just do it. Pick one and do it for two weeks. Then add one more and do it with the first one for the next two week. And repeat. They say it takes two to three weeks to build a routine. At some point it will feel weird to NOT do it… But it takes time and energy. So just fucking do it because its not going to magically get better on its own.

Just do it already.

Personally my biggest hurdle is getting started on something. When I get home I NEVER feel like drawing, but if I sit down and force myself to start I slowly get more energy and focus.

If you've started this job recently, that sounds completely normal, at least to my neurodivergent ears.

You're learning how to ride a bike, except it doesn't require so much physical practice as mental practice. You're putting in a lot of mental effort all day every day, and it's exhausting. For me, this period at a new job can last three to six months, sometimes more. Eventually, you get the hang of it, and you don't have to put in nearly as much mental effort to do your job well. Then you can get back to your other life shit.

I don’t have a real solution, but for me I just try to be exceptionally mindful of precisely what you already described. On my way home I try to think of a few productive things I could possibly muster before compromising/collapsing back into idleness

I'm in this picture and I don't like it.

On a more serious note, I feel the same.

Don't get me wrong, I actually do like my job. I'm working with people I like, I like what I'm actually doing, and I'm not waking up with dread every (or really, any) morning. I can't even complain because I'm getting paid well, great benefits, tons of time off (so much in fact that my manager had to force me to take Fridays off until EOY just so I use up my base rate PTOs), great bonus situation, lots of options to travel, management is generally good as well.

But every single day, I just feel exhausted after work. Even when I'm WFH, or have little actually exhausting tasks to do... I'm just exhausted. Tired. No energy for anything but running a quick bath, or shower, reading for an hour or two, then sleeping.

In fact this lack of energy has been so bad recently that I've taken to inserting a workout+cooking+everythingelse hour in the middle of my WFH days just so things get done.

I’ve forced myself to go to the gym. I set a small goal of 30 minutes and stuck with it. Usually doing more, but there have been times where I have just done the bare minimum of 30 minutes and then left.

It’s something. But it is a chore after a long day.

Consider you might be depressed. Professional help could be in order. No shame in seeking help.

First accept that you won’t have the same time or energy.

The gym is not about motivation, it’s about dedication. Also, that will give you more energy paradoxically.

Ramp up and down your productivity through the day. Leave yourself time to recover during the last hours of work, both mentally and physically, so that you can do what you like when you get back home. Never tell your boss that you’re doing this. They will see the peak of your ramp and that alone, and their expectations will climb

I’ve heard that it’s fairly common in food service to “always be closing” so that you can finish and leave at the drop of a hat.

It might be worth it to try a 10min power nap after work and see if that helps.

Allow yourself to be bored. You’ll find the motivation.

Well currently I don’t have a job sooo… Honestly I know what you are talking about and I basically negotiate with myself on if im going to have fun after work or on the weekend. if I want to enjoy myself on the weekend I have to get stuff done during the week.

There’s a good dozen of great suggestions in the comments here for tips to sort out various things like cooking, etc. (I have saved a few for myself later).

So instead I’ll offer some meta advice for making these things feel effortless:

Find the paths of least resistance and chain them together.

Look at the additional activities you want to add on to your day before/after work and figure out what is the most effortless way to trigger starting one activity when the previous one ends.

For example, back in April I wanted to start going to the gym regularly so I did three things: put together a gym bag with enough sets of gym clothes for the week’s exercise, keep that gym bag in my car, and joined a gym as close to my place of work as possible.

By doing this I was able to build “going to the gym” into my commute home from work. I have managed to keep up the habit of three gym sessions a week since then (with the occasional miss due to illness or other life events getting in the way).

Make the good habits obvious and the bad ones obscure.

I struggled all my life with something so basic; remembering to brush my teeth both in the morning and at night. So what I did last year was use the IKEA peg board thing and found some holders for my toothbrush and toothpaste. That pegboard is right next to my bedroom door so I have to walk past my toothbrush whenever I leave the room as a visual trigger to go brush my teeth.

Think about how you can position physical reminders in your space to do the activities you want to do.

Or use your phone’s calendar/to do list app of your choice to book in reminders to nudge you into getting started.

Just five minutes to get started and if necessary do the bare minimum badly.

Whenever I’m feeling tired but there’s a task that needs doing I ask myself “will this take five minutes or less?”. If the answer is yes, then I just do it there and then.

If it’s something that will take more than five minutes to complete to 100% then I say to myself “ok I’m tired but I’m just going to do five minutes of it and see how I’m feeling then”. This works out great for the gym example. Today on the way home from work I was knackered but I told myself to just do the five minutes as the bare minimum. Once I’d done a few minutes of exercise I felt like I was achieving and then pushed past the five minutes for a good 30 minutes before deciding that was enough for today.

And yes, there have been days when I literally just did the five minutes and stopped. But that didn’t matter, because I still completed what I set as the bare minimum. Those minimums still get me closer to my goals and therefore they’re still a win. So long as I’m getting just one more of these little wins over losing (i.e. not going to the gym) then the progress keeps stacking and the good habit continues to form.

I go pretty much straight from work to yoga, make supper at a civilized hour afterwards, and take Wednesdays off workouts to, as you say, flop.

Gardening I do in the morning before work.

Cooking I do because others depend on me, that’s been true for 30 years now, before that I didn’t remember to eat, just when hungry. Don’t keep junk in the house if it tempts you, make your easy stuff healthier. Hummus, boil eggs on the weekends so you have those, fruit, bagged salad greens, make it easier to eat nutritious food.

I want to say suck it up and go to the gym, you will be glad you did. 9-5 is pretty nice hours, here it’s 8-5 or 9-6. Exercise is one non-negotiable for me. I have gotten up at 5 to run when that was the only option, and have gone to the gym at 20:30 after night classes after work when that was the only option. You will feel better if you just GO and work out even if you don’t want to.

Habit>willpower. Commit to 6 weeks, and by then your schedule will probably settle out. Personally I put exercise ahead of healthy eating because I know my body.

Whatever bullshit tasks you’re dreading, see if it’s possible to do them before work, or on your lunch break, or on the weekend, or on your scheduled vacation days

I have some after work martial arts classes and on the other days I practice for an hour or so on my own. I also think up what I want to cook and keep it interesting. Most of our crappy eating and snacking is due to boredom.

Viagra

One coping mechanism that helps me a lot, is taking evening walks. While listening to music or podcasts. If it does not alleaviate the exhaustion, it will at least convert the exhaustion into a more physical kind, rather that a burnt-out mental kind.

Also, you might suffer from burnout. I am not a doctor or psychologist though, so you may ask an actual professional.

There’s a lot of good advice to improve things by changing your behaviour. It is also worth checking your health. I have had similar issues but it got better after I was treated for vitamin B9 deficiency. I was just plain exhausted but after a blood test confirming the issue and a few weeks of supplements prescribed by my doc, things got so much better. Depression and burn out have also been mentioned and it is definitely worth asking for a depression test if you see a doctor. That shit is so exhausting. When I was depressed, I could sleep like 10h a night and I still had zero energy.