Welcome to Black Girl Burnout. Kelly here. And today I'm going to start off with a question. Are you tired? If you've been around, you may have heard

people say, I know I've had people either in my family or just in my life or seen it on TV.

Black people say, I'm sick and tired or being sick and tired. And this episode is all about how we can

opt out of being tired and opt into tapping into our

energy, opt into energy, I guess is the way to say it. I know if you're like me, you're tired.

I've been tired. I have actually like like, gotten treatment for sleep issues that I have

because I was an insomniac for a lot of years. And so I've walked through the world tired.

And then there's just the emotional fatigue, even more than the physical, that weight that you feel

on yourself when there's another moment of

microaggressions that occur, when somebody says something to you that's just so ridiculous and

offensive, or when you feel like you have to struggle twice as hard as everybody else to get,

as they say, half as far, it's exhausting. And unfortunately, we have a cultural myth that black people are

meant to be exhausted. That being tired is just part of the black experience. And opting into a

life of tiredness is opting into a life of struggle because oftentimes

it's that weariness it takes a toll on ourselves physically, mentally, spiritually, culturally.

Being tired has some significant consequences.

You can actually die from a lack of sleep physically.

Not sleeping is correlated to weight gain, to heart problems, to a host of other illnesses

that can happen when you don't sleep. And so it goes for emotional

exhaustion, it being correlated to depression, burnout, anxiety, all kinds of things that

weigh us down and keep us sick and keep us stuck, not able to move

forward and not able to have the life that we deserve. I was having a conversation with someone,

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