Bernard O’Shea: The Dad Bod Diaries Week 7 — When tiredness masquerades as failure

A week of burgers, caffeine and broken sleep reminded me falling off the wagon isn’t the danger — exhaustion is

Bernard O'Shea: 'One late-night burger led to another, and then another, until suddenly I was six burgers deep across the week. Add in the caffeine required to stay alert on the road, and I was right back surviving on coffee and sugar like a man who’d learned absolutely nothing.'

There’s a very specific moment when you realise you’ve fallen off the diet wagon, and it’s rarely dramatic. There’s no crash, no announcement, no cinematic sense of failure. It’s usually just you, sitting in a car somewhere outside Naas, eating a burger you hadn’t planned on eating, telling yourself it’s grand because technically it’s dinner.

I was gigging in Dublin all week. No late nights in the rock ’n’ roll sense. Nothing excessive or wild. Just a lot of motorway driving, long stretches sitting in the car, a stiff hip that announces itself the second you step out, and the quiet tiredness that builds when your week becomes a sequence of boots opening and closing. 

One late-night burger led to another, and then another, until suddenly I was six burgers deep across the week. Add in the caffeine required to stay alert on the road, and I was right back surviving on coffee and sugar like a man who’d learned nothing.

The part that stings most isn’t the food itself, it’s the hypocrisy. Last week, I was talking confidently about packed lunches, vegetables, and no longer needing caffeine to prop myself up. This week, I was necking coffee and justifying it because I was ‘working’.

And then the most dangerous thought arrived, the one that has undone me more times than any burger ever has: 'Ah, sure, I’ve ruined it now’.

That sentence is lethal. It’s never really about food. It’s about permission. Permission to spiral, permission to abandon the whole thing, permission to tell yourself you’ll start again when life calms down, which it never does. But this time, something stopped me. Not discipline, not motivation — just a bit of awareness earned the hard way. Falling off the wagon isn’t the problem. Staying off it is.

I’m not doing this to have a six-pack. I’m not chasing abs, admiration, or sleek reinvention. At this stage of life, I would happily settle for six uninterrupted hours of sleep. And that’s when it hit me: I’d been looking in the wrong place.

Bernard O'Shea: 'I’m not doing this to have a six-pack. I’m not chasing abs, admiration, or some sleek reinvention. At this stage of life, I would happily settle for six uninterrupted hours of sleep. And that’s when it hit me: I’d been looking in the wrong place.'

For the last few years, my sleep has been quietly eroding. Not in a dramatic, doctor-visit way — just enough to wear you down slowly. Enough to leave you permanently a bit behind yourself. The main culprit is the dreaded night-time pee. Waking at four in the morning to go to the bathroom doesn’t sound like much until it happens night after night. It breaks your sleep cleanly in two. You never fully drop back into it.

What I didn’t fully understand until recently is what tiredness actually does to your head. When you’re exhausted, you don’t just feel worse — you think worse. You judge yourself more harshly. Your inner critic gets louder. Small slips feel like evidence of failure. You think you’re worse at your job, worse at parenting, worse at life, even when nothing has actually changed.

I’ve recently been working on a stand-up bit where I say I’d love to go into a nursing home now. Not later. Now. I’d be the youngest person there by a mile. I’d be wildly popular. I’d get my meals sent to the room every day. I’d catch up on daytime television without guilt. My bed would be made for me daily. And if anyone called and I didn’t feel like seeing them, I could just pretend I was asleep. Bliss.

This is how you know you’re tired. Not when you want a holiday. When you want institutional rest.

Of course, I then have to add the warning for my children, just to keep things balanced. "If you ever decide to put me in a home when I’m older without my permission, remember this: I have a very particular set of skills I have acquired over the course of a very long career. I will find you." You know the rest.

But the joke lands because there’s truth under it. The fantasy isn’t about age. It’s about rest. About someone else taking over the basics for a while so your brain can finally power down.

Bernard O'Shea: 'There is nothing like getting into a bed with freshly-changed sheets. It feels like a reset, a small act of care, a signal to your body that rest is allowed. Clean sheets make sleep feel inviting again.'

And this is where midlife plays its cruellest trick. Because ambition doesn’t fade with age. If anything, it sharpens. You still want to create, to work, to improve, to take chances, to say yes to things that matter. The ideas don’t get smaller. The goals don’t shrink. The appetite for life is still there. What fades is the fuel, and without sleep, ambition becomes impossible to access.

You can want things deeply and still not have the capacity to pursue them. You can care and still feel flat. You can be driven and still exhausted. Instead of questioning the sleep, we question ourselves. We assume we’re losing our edge, or our nerve, or our relevance, when in reality we’re just tired.

Like everyone else, I’ve read everything about sleep. I am up to my gills in articles. circadian rhythms, blue light, screen time, magnesium, bedroom decluttering, breathing techniques, podcasts with men whispering in caves telling you to let go. I’ve tried most of it. And do you know what has helped me more than any of those things?

Changing the bed sheets every three days. I can’t explain it scientifically, but there is nothing like getting into a bed with freshly-changed sheets. It feels like a reset, a small act of care, a signal to your body that rest is allowed. Clean sheets make sleep feel inviting again. And when I wake at four in the morning, resentful and bleary-eyed, I find it easier to drift back off instead of lying there catastrophising my entire existence.

And if that means prioritising clean sheets over grand plans for a while, then so be it. There are worse foundations on which to rebuild your energy.