If you’re like me, you’ve been feeling very tired lately, and you don’t know why that is.

Sure, you can guess. You’ve been busy. So much so that if you ever make a mistake, and it’s before noon, you can just tell the other person, “I haven’t woken up yet.”

“You haven’t? Didn’t you drive here?”

“I don’t remember.”

This is why I work at home. When I woke up this morning I was so tired that I filled the kettle with water and put it in the fridge. I didn’t even notice what I was doing. I was trying to rearrange things in the fridge to fit the kettle in, and the main thought occupying my mind was, “What’s going on here? There’s never room in the fridge for anything!”

(This is how someone came up with iced coffee.)

So it would definitely help to find some way to feel less tired. But how? We’re too tired to even think.

Of course, the answer everyone gives is, “Get more sleep.” But then when you do get more sleep, everyone’s all over you for being late to things. I learned that in yeshiva. (I learned a lot of things in yeshiva.) In fact, even now that I’m out of yeshiva, my kids’ yeshiva keeps asking, “Why are you bringing your kids late?” I had a total of five minutes of my life where I wasn’t answering to a menahel.

It’s very easy for people to say, “Get more sleep,” but you obviously have a lot to do. That’s why you’re tired in the first place. When do these people expect you to do all these things?

So I looked around for some articles featuring new tips that people didn’t hear from their mothers. But most of the tips I found involve eating. So no such luck, then.

The first tip I found is:

“Eat breakfast.”

I don’t have time to eat breakfast. I’m busy getting more sleep.

Supposedly, though, if you eat something in the morning, your body will suddenly realize it’s morning.

“Oh! Milk with things in it! It must be morning.”

And in fact, according to articles, studies show that people who eat breakfast are perkier in the mornings!

No, studies show that people who eat breakfast are morning people who are perkier anyway.

But I found some other tips as well, before my head hit the keyboard:

Eat small meals throughout the day. According to an article, “Instead of three large meals with many hours in between, try eating more, smaller meals throughout the day.” Your wife will love that. I already spend half the day trying to figure out what we’re going to have for supper. It can only get worse with 6 meals.

Supposedly, though, eating six times a day stimulates your metabolism—breakfast, brunch, lunch, linner, dinner, and dreakfast. Six meals. You can either lose weight or be less tired, but not both.

But squeezing in more meals might be an issue, because you may have heard certain health-conscious people say that you shouldn’t eat after eight o’clock at night. Because eight isn’t just an arbitrary number that doesn’t take into account daylight saving time, and when each individual person goes to sleep, and whether or not they had supper yet. But with six meals, your evenings are going to be crazy. (“We have to finish this meal so we can start the next one! It’s almost eight!”)

Apparently, eating numerous small meals a day helps you avoid being too full or too hungry, because both of those things make you tired. Because if you’re hungry, you’re tired. That’s why people lie down on fasts. Also, if you’re full, you’re tired. That’s why people lie down on Shabbos.

But this doesn’t make sense. If six short meals a day is supposed to help you feel awake, then how come in the old days, they used to eat two squares, tops, and they were still able to get up at the crack of dawn to milk the chickens?

Also, if you eat six meals a day, no one will want to come to you for Yom Tov:

“Oh my goodness, he fed us 18 meals in three days. I was like, ‘We want to sleep!’ But he was banging on the door during naps: ‘Get up! You need another meal, or you’ll be tired!’”

I don’t have enough room in the fridge for that amount of food. I have a kettle in there.

But here’s my idea: Kids have a lot of energy. Can we live like they do?

It’s a great idea! We can eat lots of candy, never clean our rooms, take two hours in the tub, have people drag us through stores when we don’t want to walk, announce that we don’t like a food before we try it, drink more bathwater, take 20 minutes to eat a chicken cutlet, come over to our parents on afternoons where there’s no school and ask for something called “English snack,” never stop making noise, not put any effort into finding anything, have a set bedtime but don’t go to sleep at that bedtime, jump on our beds for two hours, and fall asleep on the floor!

If we live like kids, we won’t really get tired! We’ll just get cranky. In case you couldn’t tell from this article.

Mordechai Schmutter is a freelance writer and a humor columnist for Hamodia, The Jewish Press, and Aish.com, among others. He also has four books out and does stand-up comedy. You can contact him at [email protected]

By Mordechai Schmutter