Build Habits When You're Running on Empty

You know what you should be doing. Exercise would give you more energy. Meal prep would improve your diet. A consistent sleep schedule would help you rest better. But doing any of these things requires energy you don’t have. You’re trapped in a loop: too tired to build the habits that would make you less tired.

The way out isn’t more discipline. It’s building habits that cost almost nothing to maintain, even on your worst days.

The Problem

Every Sunday night, you make a plan. This week will be different. You’ll meal prep, go to the gym, get to bed on time, finally start that morning routine you’ve been reading about. Monday morning, you wake up already exhausted. Not from poor sleep—from existing. The thought of doing anything beyond the absolute minimum feels impossible.

You power through anyway. Maybe you make it to Wednesday. Maybe just Tuesday. Either way, by midweek, the plan has collapsed. You’re eating whatever’s fastest, skipping the gym because you can barely stay awake at your desk, staying up too late because you need a few hours where you’re not performing for anyone. The routines that were supposed to help feel like just another demand.

The worst part is the guilt. You’re not even trying to build impressive habits—just basic functional adult behaviors. Cook real food. Move your body. Sleep enough. Other people manage this while doing far more than you. Why can’t you maintain even the basics? The answer feels obvious: you’re not trying hard enough. But you’re so tired that trying harder isn’t an option.

This pattern repeats until you stop making plans entirely. You just survive, day to day, knowing you’re not taking care of yourself but lacking the energy to do anything about it. The habits that might help feel like luxuries for people who aren’t constantly running on fumes.

Why this happens when you’re already depleted

When you’re chronically tired, you’re operating with a severely limited energy budget. Every decision, every transition, every instance of forcing yourself to do something you don’t feel like doing costs more than you can afford. Habit advice written for people with normal energy reserves doesn’t account for this constraint.

Research suggests that executive function—the mental capacity for planning, initiating tasks, and following through—is significantly impaired when you’re exhausted. It’s not that you lack willpower; you lack the cognitive resources that make willpower possible. Your brain is already spending everything it has just getting you through the day.

Many people find that chronic fatigue creates a vicious cycle. You’re too tired to exercise, which makes you more tired. Too tired to cook, so you eat poorly, which affects your energy. Too tired to maintain a sleep schedule, which disrupts your rest. The habits that would help require an upfront energy investment you can’t make, so the cycle continues.

What Most People Try

The standard advice is to start small and build gradually. Can’t do a full workout? Just do five minutes. Can’t meal prep for the week? Just prep one meal. The idea is that small actions compound into big results, and eventually the habit becomes easy.

But when you’re exhausted, even the small version feels impossible. Five minutes of exercise still requires getting changed, working out, showering, getting dressed again. That’s not five minutes—that’s half an hour of transitions and decisions. One meal still requires planning what to cook, checking if you have ingredients, shopping if you don’t, and actually cooking. Each step is a friction point that costs energy you don’t have.

Some people try to optimize their way out of the problem. They research the perfect workout for tired people, the most efficient meal prep system, the ideal sleep hygiene protocol. They buy supplements, track their metrics, experiment with different schedules. The optimization itself becomes exhausting. You spend your limited energy researching solutions instead of implementing simple ones.

Others take the opposite approach: accept defeat temporarily. You’ll start the habits when you have more energy. Once work calms down, once you get through this busy period, once things settle—then you’ll build the routines you need. But things never settle. The busy period becomes the new normal. Waiting for ideal conditions means waiting forever.

The fundamental mistake is treating tiredness as a temporary obstacle to overcome rather than a permanent constraint to design around. As long as your habits require energy you don’t reliably have, they’ll always be fragile.

What Actually Helps

1. Build habits that require zero transitions

The biggest hidden cost in any habit is the switching cost—stopping what you’re doing, changing contexts, initiating the new behavior, then switching back. When you’re tired, transitions are often more expensive than the habit itself. The solution is to design habits that happen inside contexts you’re already in.

Instead of “go for a walk,” the habit becomes “walk during phone calls.” You’re already taking the call—now you’re just doing it while moving. No change of clothes, no special time block, no mental gear shift. Instead of “cook a healthy dinner,” it’s “when you’re already making something, double it.” You’re already in cooking mode; you’re just making more.

For many people, this means embedding habits into existing routines so thoroughly that they’re not separate activities. Not “work out, then shower,” but “do squats while waiting for shower water to heat up.” Not “make coffee, then journal,” but “write three sentences while coffee brews.” The habit fills dead time in something you’re already doing.

This works because it removes the initiation cost. You don’t have to decide to start the habit—you’re already in motion, and the habit is just a slight variation on what you’re doing anyway. Your brain doesn’t register it as an additional task requiring energy. It’s just part of the flow you’re already in.

The key is identifying the gaps in your existing day where small behaviors could slot in without requiring any context switch. Waiting for something to load, riding an elevator, standing in line, the two minutes before a meeting starts—these are spaces where habits can happen without costing you transitions.

2. Make the default option the habit

When you’re exhausted, you’ll always take the path of least resistance. Instead of fighting this, make the path of least resistance the behavior you want. The habit shouldn’t require active decision-making or effort—it should happen automatically unless you actively choose otherwise.

For some people, this means aggressive environmental design. Put fruit on the counter and hide the junk food. Keep a water bottle at your desk so drinking water is easier than getting up for anything else. Lay out tomorrow’s clothes tonight so getting dressed requires zero decisions. The easier option wins by default, so make the easier option the helpful one.

Automation serves the same function. Set up automatic transfers to savings so you save by default. Use subscription services for things you need regularly so they arrive without you thinking about it. Set bills to autopay. Every automated behavior is one fewer decision draining your energy budget.

Many people find that batch decision-making helps. Instead of deciding what to eat every day, you decide once for the whole week. Instead of choosing a workout each morning, you have a set rotation and just do whatever’s next. You spend energy on the decision once, then execute on autopilot. The habit becomes “do the next thing on the list,” which requires almost no mental effort.

This approach acknowledges reality: when you’re tired, you will choose the easy option. Trying to override that with willpower is a losing strategy. Instead, make the easy option align with your goals.

3. Design for maintenance mode, not growth mode

Most habit advice is about building and improving—adding more, doing better, leveling up. But when you’re chronically tired, maintenance is the goal. Not building new habits, just protecting the minimum viable version of the ones you have.

This means explicitly defining what maintenance mode looks like for each important behavior. For exercise, maybe maintenance mode is “take the stairs instead of the elevator” and “stretch while watching TV.” For nutrition, it’s “always have frozen vegetables” and “protein at every meal, even if it’s just yogurt.” For sleep, it’s “in bed by midnight” and “no screens after 11.”

These aren’t aspirational. They’re the floor, not the ceiling. On good days, you might do more. On terrible days, you do this bare minimum and consider it a win. The habit isn’t dead—it’s just running in maintenance mode until you have energy for growth mode again.

Many people find that maintenance mode needs to be significantly smaller than they initially think. If you can’t imagine doing it on your absolute worst day, it’s too big. The version that survives exhaustion is the version that’s so small it barely counts. That’s the version you protect.

This also means letting go of progress for its own sake. You’re not building up to something bigger right now. You’re just holding the line. The person who maintains a 10-minute walk every day for a year is healthier than the person who does intense workouts for a month then burns out and quits. Maintenance beats optimization when you’re running on empty.

The Takeaway

When you’re chronically tired, habits need to be nearly effortless to survive. Build them into existing routines to eliminate transitions, make them the default option so they don’t require active decisions, and focus on maintenance rather than growth. You’re not being lazy—you’re being strategic about an extremely limited energy budget.