Cut From Steel

This week's hero is the man reading this right now.

You are this week's hero. I have filled this space with fighters, explorers, and men who came back from nothing. Today the light points at you.

You got out of bed this morning with less in the tank than you used to carry. The work still got done. Nobody heard you complain about it, because complaining has never been your style.

I want you to see that clearly. A man who performs on a full battery is doing something ordinary. Performing on a quarter battery is something else entirely. You have run near empty for years, and you kept your word to everybody who counted on you.

You also did something most men never do. Instead of deleting this letter, you opened it. Then you went looking for a cause rather than accepting the verdict. Doctors have a polite name for that behaviour. I call it refusing to sign the paperwork.

I will tell you the part nobody said out loud. Your tiredness may have nothing to do with your age or your character. It may be coming from a bottle on the shelf above your sink, prescribed for something else, doing its job and charging your energy as the fee. You are not weak. Check the shelf. Nobody handed you that sentence before today.

The eight seconds you never think about

You stand at the sink every morning and swallow whatever the pharmacy handed you. The whole business takes eight seconds. Not once in all those years have you turned a bottle around to read the back.

I have listened to men blame their fatigue on fifty-two, on a punishing job, on a marriage that went cold. Some of them were right. Many of them walked past the real cause twice a day.

You never made the connection, because nobody in a white coat made it for you.

It's not age. It's these three.

I want to walk you through three ordinary medicines that can flatten a man. You may take one of them. Plenty of men your age take all three.

01 / Your Blood Pressure Pill

Beta blockers slow your heart down on purpose. Mayo Clinic lists extreme tiredness among the common side effects, along with cold hands and weight gain. You may notice it most on a staircase or on your third set in the garage, when your heart cannot answer the demand the way it used to. Cleveland Clinic names fatigue and dizziness as well. Quitting the drug is not the move here. You ask your doctor whether another class would do the same job for less.

02 / Your Allergy Tablet

Diphenhydramine is the old antihistamine in Benadryl, and it is also the PM in most nighttime painkillers. Mayo Clinic reports daytime drowsiness as a main side effect, and says tolerance to the sleep effect builds fast. You get sedated without sleeping any better. Adults 65 and older typically should not use these drugs at all, according to that same Mayo guidance. So you may be swallowing one every night and calling the result insomnia.

03 / Your Metformin

Metformin is a good drug, and I am not going to talk you out of it. Long-term use is linked to low vitamin B12, and a low B12 can look exactly like ordinary exhaustion. The American Diabetes Association now advises doctors to check B12 periodically in men on long-term metformin, especially those with anemia or nerve symptoms. You may have taken it for six years and never had that test. It costs very little.

Take it back today

You are going to do one thing tonight. Put every bottle, tablet and capsule on the kitchen table, prescription and drugstore both, and write the list out on paper.

I also want you honest about the other side of this. Researchers ran a trial called SAMSON on people who had quit statins over side effects, and roughly ninety percent of the symptom burden turned up on placebo tablets too. In other words, some of what we pin on a pill is not the pill. That is exactly why you hand your doctor a list rather than a conclusion.

You book ten minutes with your pharmacist or your doctor and ask one question. Is anything on this list likely to be making me tired? Pharmacists run that review free in most of America. Never stop a drug or change a dose on your own. Mayo Clinic warns that stopping a beta blocker suddenly may raise your risk of a heart attack.

You have treated your fatigue as a character flaw. The cause may be sitting on a shelf you can reach tonight. Go and read the labels.

— Travis

Insider Member's Corner

6 free habits that put fuel back in the tank:

You didn't put in 45 years to settle for beige.

01 / Watch · Breitling Navitimer

Willy Breitling built this one in the early fifties because the world's largest pilots' club asked him for a chronograph. The bezel is a working slide rule, so a pilot could run fuel maths in the air without a pencil. Miles Davis wore a Navitimer, and so did the astronaut Scott Carpenter. The Navitimer Automatic 41 starts around $8,300 on Breitling's own site. This began life as a tool, which is exactly why it still looks right on a man who works.

02 / Leather · Schott Perfecto 618

Schott has been cutting this jacket in the United States for the better part of a century. Marlon Brando wore a Perfecto in The Wild One, and American schools banned the style for a year afterward. The 618 is heavyweight steerhide with the asymmetric zip that every other brand went on to copy. You should buy it a touch snug, because the leather gives as you wear it. One of these outlasts three cheap jackets and looks better for the miles.

03 / Whisky · Yamazaki 12 Year

Suntory bottles this Japanese single malt at 43 percent, and it drinks softer than a peated Scotch without turning sweet on you. Honey, orchard fruit, a little vanilla. US listings run roughly $150 to $225, so it pays to shop around before you commit. Pour it with one large cube and leave it alone. This is a bottle for the night you actually finished something.