The flippant response is, join the club. Research shows that, at any one time, up to a third of the general population believe they don’t have as much energy as they should.

This complaint is so common that GPs give it its very own acronym - the derogatory sounding TATT. It's not an insult though, just shorthand for 'tired all the time'.

When people complain about tiredness, they're usually concerned with two things. The first, that the tiredness is caused by some serious disease. Second, they want a quick fix.

The good news is that tiredness, in the absence of other symptoms, is very rarely a sign of any significant problem. It’s different if you’re tired and you’ve lost weight, or are thirsty, or you have persistent diarrhoea, and so on – then we have to think about thyroid problems, diabetes, bowel disease, in fact just about anything in the medical dictionary.

Tiredness on its own though is unlikely to be the tip of some disease iceberg – the exception being depression, as men are rather more likely to present this problem as ‘feeling knackered’ rather than ‘feeling down’.

There's no quick fix

The not so good news is that there’s no quick fix. In most cases, tiredness is the result of a combination of factors: stress, lack of sleep, inadequate exercise, unhealthy habits like excess booze and so on.

The shelves full of vitamin pills and tonics in your local pharmacy demonstrate how people are looking for a magic bullet to cure the symptom.

But they don’t achieve anything. You’re not lacking vitamins and tonics are nothing more than placebo. Admittedly, sorting out your lifestyle is harder than popping a pill – but it will achieve much more, too.