Why Am I Always Tired? The Spiritual Meaning of Exhaustion Sleep Doesn't Fix

Tiredness that a full night of sleep does not repair has a spiritual reading, but only once the physical causes have been ruled out. This guide covers what spiritual exhaustion is, how it feels different from ordinary fatigue, which people and situations drain energy fastest, how alignment fatigue and awakening fatigue differ from each other, and what to do first.

Why am I always tired, and what does it mean spiritually?

If you are always tired, the first answer is medical and the second is spiritual, in that order. Persistent fatigue is one of the most common reasons people see a doctor, and thyroid disease, anemia, sleep apnea, diabetes, depression and a long list of ordinary deficiencies all announce themselves this way. The spiritual reading applies to what is left over: tiredness a clinician has looked at, found nothing to explain, and that rest still does not repair. Read spiritually, that leftover tiredness is a shortfall of life energy rather than of sleep. Sanskrit sources call that energy prana and discuss it at length in the Prashna Upanishad. Chinese medicine calls it qi, where qi deficiency is a working diagnostic category with fatigue as its leading sign. Greek medicine called it pneuma, and Galen in the second century built a working physiology on it, with a vital pneuma carried in the arteries alongside blood and a psychic pneuma distributed through the nerves. The blood matters to that sentence, because Galen's own dissections were what established that arteries carry blood at all, against the earlier claim of Erasistratus that they held pneuma and nothing else. Each of those systems assumes energy is spent and replenished daily, and that a person can run a deficit for months without ever locating where it goes. That is the whole spiritual claim, in plain terms: more is going out than is coming in, and sleep addresses only one of the ways it goes out.

The idea that exhaustion carries spiritual meaning is old and unusually specific. Evagrius Ponticus, a Christian monk writing in the Egyptian desert in the fourth century, listed acedia among the eight troubling thoughts and called it the noonday demon. His description reads like a modern account of unexplained tiredness: the monk cannot settle, keeps checking the window, finds the day endless, and feels a heaviness with no relationship to how much he slept. John Cassian carried the concept west, where acedia was eventually folded into sloth in the list of deadly sins, a move that flattened it into laziness and lost most of what Evagrius meant. Twelve centuries later John of the Cross described a related state in the Noche oscura, in which practice goes dry and effort stops producing anything at all. Neither Evagrius nor John of the Cross treated the condition as a character flaw. Both read it as information about where a person currently stood, and both assumed it would eventually pass. The question of whether acedia is really depression under an older name is still argued. Kathleen Norris, in her 2008 book Acedia and Me, made the case that the two are distinct and that psychiatry absorbed one into the other. Her distinction is that depression happens to a person, while acedia is closer to a state of not caring about one's own life, with the will implicated in a way she thinks the medical account leaves out. The objection to it is hard to answer: from the outside the two look almost identical, and a wrong call in that direction leaves a treatable illness untreated.

Is spiritual tiredness a real thing or a metaphor?

Spiritual tiredness is a description, not a diagnosis, though people use it as if it were both. No medical body recognizes it, no test detects it, and the phrase covers experiences ranging from grief to overwork to genuine contemplative dryness. What makes it useful is that people reaching for it are pointing at something consistent: fatigue that behaves oddly, ignores sleep, and tracks with meaning rather than with exertion.

Can tiredness be a spiritual message?

Tiredness can carry information, though treating every symptom as a message is a fast route to ignoring a treatable illness. The safer reading is diagnostic rather than mystical. Chronic tiredness reliably marks a place where you are overspending, and the useful question is where, not what the universe intended by it. Rule out the body first, then read the pattern that remains.

How common is unexplained fatigue?

Common enough that British general practice gave it an abbreviation. TATT, for tired all the time, is standard shorthand in UK primary care for a patient whose main complaint is fatigue. How often those consultations end without a physical cause has not been pinned to a figure worth quoting, since the answer moves with how hard a clinic looks and for how long it keeps looking. What is clear is that the presentation is routine rather than rare, which is neither evidence for an energetic explanation nor against one. It does mean a normal workup puts you in very ordinary company.

What is spiritual exhaustion and how does it feel different from ordinary tiredness?

Spiritual exhaustion is tiredness out of proportion to what you have done, which does not lift after rest and shows up as flatness toward things that used to matter rather than as sleepiness. Ordinary tiredness has a cause you can name. You worked a double shift, you have a newborn, you ran farther than usual, and the fatigue is proportional and resolves. Spiritual exhaustion carries no such receipt. People describe weight rather than drowsiness, a sense of being emptied rather than used up, and a split where the body will function but nothing feels worth starting. The distinguishing sign most people report is indifference. Food tastes fine and means nothing. A friend calls, and answering it feels like an expense you cannot justify. A project you chose yourself sits untouched for a month. Sleepiness wants a bed; this wants something a bed does not supply. It also tends to be worse in the morning, which inverts the usual pattern, since ordinary tiredness accumulates across a day. Waking already depleted after eight uninterrupted hours is what most people mean when they say that sleep is not the answer.

Vocabulary matters here, because the wrong word sends people to the wrong help. Burnout, as the World Health Organization defines it in the ICD-11, is an occupational phenomenon: exhaustion, cynicism and reduced efficacy arising from chronic workplace stress that has not been managed. The WHO is explicit that burnout is not a medical condition and that the term is scoped to work. Depression is different again: a clinical diagnosis, with criteria and with treatments, and with real harm attached to leaving it alone. Spiritual exhaustion sits outside both frames. The overlap runs deep enough that all three get mistaken for one another routinely. Anhedonia, the loss of pleasure, appears in depression and in the state people call spiritual exhaustion, which is exactly why a confident self-diagnosis of the second can delay treatment for the first. Anyone whose flatness arrives with hopelessness, persistent low mood, or thoughts of self-harm is looking at something that needs a clinician now, not a practice.

What does spiritual exhaustion feel like in the body?

Spiritual exhaustion is usually described as heaviness rather than pain: limbs that feel weighted, a chest that will not fully expand, a dull pressure behind the eyes that reading does not explain. Many people report shallow breathing they only notice once somebody points it out. None of these sensations are specific to anything, which is why they should never be treated as confirmation on their own.

How is spiritual exhaustion different from laziness?

Laziness is a verdict somebody else passes on you, and it usually means they wanted more than you had. Spiritual exhaustion is marked by effort that produces nothing. You start the task, you push, and the push moves none of it. People in this state overwork more often than they underwork, which is why the accusation misses and why hearing it deepens the depletion.

Can spiritual exhaustion come on suddenly?

It can appear suddenly, though it more often follows a long period of running a deficit and then becomes noticeable at a single moment. A bereavement, a caretaking role ending, a project finishing, or a house move can each uncover exhaustion that was already there and had been held off by momentum. The onset you notice is rarely the onset that actually happened.

What is it like to live with spiritual exhaustion day to day?

Living with spiritual exhaustion day to day is the experience of being absent from a life you are still running competently. The distinction from physical tiredness is short to state: physical fatigue follows what you spent and answers to rest, while this follows context and meaning and answers to neither. Spiritual Fatigue vs Physical Fatigue: How to Tell Which You Have runs that comparison in full, test by test, so this page takes the distinction as settled and stays with the experience itself. What people describe is a narrowing. The future tense goes first, and plans further out than a week or two stop getting made. Then the discretionary half of a life empties while the obligatory half continues, so the work gets done, the children get fed, and a book stays face down on the same page for two months. Small decisions turn expensive. Messages sit unanswered long enough to become embarrassing to answer. Enjoyment gets reported rather than felt, and people catch themselves saying they had a good time as a conclusion drawn from evidence rather than as a memory. The competence is the part that fools everybody, including the person inside it.

The vocabulary people reach for is consistent, and it points somewhere. Physical tiredness produces metaphors of weight: dragging, sinking, heavy legs, a body that wants the floor. This produces metaphors of distance instead. Behind glass, watching from outside, on autopilot, a passenger in my own week. Almost nobody says sleepy. A description assembled entirely out of separation rather than out of weight has already told you which column you are in. From the outside it reads as coldness. The people close to you see cancelled plans, short replies and a warmth that has gone formal, and they usually conclude they have done something wrong or that they matter less than they used to. That misreading builds a second problem on top of the first, and it is the one thing here that a single plain sentence can prevent. Aldous Huxley, writing about accidie in the 1920s, thought the state had stopped being a monastic complaint and become an ordinary modern one. The concealment is the modern part.

Can you hold down a job while spiritually exhausted?

Most people do, and the high-functioning version is the common presentation rather than the rare one. Work has external structure, deadlines and witnesses, so performance holds long after everything unwitnessed has stopped. The collapse happens in the private hours: the evenings, the weekends, the drive home. That is also why nobody intervenes, and why the first person to notice is usually a partner rather than a manager.

Which parts of your life empty out first?

Curiosity goes early, then hobbies, then the maintenance work that keeps friendships alive, then cooking anything you did not have to cook. Desire tends to follow. Paid work and childcare hold longest, because both come with consequences attached to stopping. The order is informative on its own. Anything nobody would notice you dropping is what gets dropped, so the losses stay invisible for months.

How does it change the way you treat people close to you?

Patience thins first, and warmth starts being produced deliberately rather than arriving on its own. People in this state cancel late instead of early, answer in fewer words, and let the small maintenance of a relationship lapse without deciding to. None of that is felt as coldness from inside, which is the trouble. It is felt as having nothing spare, and it reads to everybody else as withdrawal.

What does spiritual exhaustion ask of you once you recognize it?

Once you recognize it, spiritual exhaustion asks for an honest account of where your life is going out, and then for the willingness to disappoint somebody about it. The second demand is the one people stall on for years. This kind of tiredness behaves like a question with a specific referent rather than a malfunction to be repaired so your normal week can resume, which means the useful response starts by naming what has been running at a loss and who benefits from your continuing to pay it. It also asks for a stretch of lower output, and that nearly always costs something visible: a commitment dropped, a standard let go, a reputation for reliability dented in front of people whose opinion you have been carefully managing. It asks to be said out loud to at least one person, because concealment is expensive and a diagnosis conducted alone drifts toward whatever the diagnostician already wanted to hear. And it asks for patience on a timetable nobody can supply. What it does not ask for is a purchase, a retreat, a new personality, or a large decision made this week while you are least equipped to make one.

The traditions that described this state prescribed something contemporary advice rarely does. Evagrius told the monk under attack from acedia to stay in the cell, keep the hours, work with his hands and wait the assault out, on the reasoning that leaving would carry the condition to the next place unchanged. Benedict built the same instinct into monastic life roughly a century and a half later with the vow of stability, which binds a monk to one community rather than to whichever house currently looks more promising. Set that against the standard modern answer, which is to go: quit, move, end it, find somewhere with better light. Neither counsel works on its own, and the difference shows up in who is being advised. Stability offered to somebody in an abusive marriage or a job that is making them ill is bad advice with a long pedigree. Offered to somebody whose life is workable and who has already restructured it three times, it is the better of the two.

What if you are not sure the tiredness is spiritual at all?

Then settling that is the first job, and it is answerable rather than a matter of belief. The tests are external and cost nothing: whether sleep clears it, when in the day it lands, whether it sorts by company rather than by exertion. Spiritual Fatigue vs Physical Fatigue: How to Tell Which You Have runs them in order and names the findings that send you to a clinician before anything else.

Does naming it change anything by itself?

Naming it removes the self-blame layer, which is worth having, since most people arrive after months of treating a meaning problem with discipline, caffeine and earlier bedtimes. That relief usually lasts a week or two. Then the conditions that produced the state are still the conditions, and the name has done everything it can do. Recognition is a starting position rather than a repair.

What does it ask of the people around you?

Mostly that they stop offering solutions and keep inviting without requiring. Somebody in this state cannot manufacture enthusiasm and will decline most things, so an invitation that survives being declined four times is worth more than any advice attached to it. Taking a stated flatness at face value helps too. Arguing cheerfully with it, however kindly meant, teaches the person to stop reporting it.

What kinds of people and situations drain your energy the fastest?

The fastest energy drains share one feature: they require you to be someone other than yourself for a sustained stretch of time. One-directional relationships come first: any tie where you regulate the other person's mood and nobody regulates yours. Then contexts demanding a maintained persona, which is why a four-hour work event can cost more than a ten-hour day alone. Silent conflict is third. A disagreement you are managing instead of having runs in the background continuously, and it does not switch off when you leave the room. Fourth is caretaking without relief, particularly for a parent, a partner or a child whose needs do not pause. Last are the places where refusal carries a price you cannot pay: a job you need, a family you do not want to lose, a community that would exile you. The common mechanism is suppression. Holding a reaction in place takes continuous effort that appears on no schedule, and unlike physical work it leaves nothing behind you can look at. That is why people report being wrecked by a lunch and fine after moving furniture all afternoon.

The folk term for the first category is energy vampire, which is vivid, unkind, and worth handling carefully, since the label lands most often on people who are anxious, lonely or unwell rather than on anyone acting deliberately. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild gave the underlying pattern a better name in The Managed Heart, her 1983 book on flight attendants and bill collectors: emotional labor, the work of producing whatever feeling your role requires regardless of the feeling you actually have. Hochschild's argument was that this labor is real work, goes unpaid and unrecorded, and exhausts people in ways their employers never count. That framing puts responsibility where it usually belongs, on a structure rather than on an individual temperament. Chronic depletion traced to collapsed boundaries and habitual people-pleasing is territory that Solar Plexus Chakra (Manipura): Power, Confidence & Healing covers properly; this page stays with the situations rather than the anatomy. Notice too that the drain is often a role rather than a person, and roles can sometimes be renegotiated when people cannot be avoided.

Why do I feel drained after seeing family?

Family gatherings stack several drains into one room. You get a role assigned to you decades ago, a conflict everyone has agreed not to name, an audience that remembers every earlier version of you, and no exit until the meal ends. Most people find they are tired from the version of themselves the event required rather than from the event. The reliable test is timing: if you feel lighter within ten minutes of leaving, the room was the cost.

Can a job drain you spiritually?

A job drains this way when it asks you to perform values you do not hold, which is different from a job that is merely hard. Physically demanding work among people you trust rarely produces this state. Work requiring you to say things you disagree with, day after day, reliably does. It shows up on Sunday evening, not Friday night.

Do crowds and cities drain everyone?

No, and assuming they should makes some people miserable in the wrong direction. Crowds cost some people a great deal and restore others, and the difference does not map neatly onto introversion. Track your own data instead of borrowing a rule. If a busy street reliably lifts you and a quiet dinner party flattens you, that is your pattern, whatever the internet says.

Is soul tiredness a sign you are living out of alignment?

Soul tiredness is sometimes a sign of living out of alignment, and the way to tell is where the tiredness sits. Fatigue from living against your own grain is targeted rather than global: it lifts in one part of your life and stays put in another. If you are flattened by your work and fully alive on a Saturday morning on the same amount of sleep, the tiredness is telling you something about the work. If you are equally exhausted everywhere, in the things you chose and the things you did not, the alignment reading is probably wrong and something more ordinary is running underneath it. Out of alignment is a vague phrase that almost always means something concrete. You are spending your days on activity your own stated values do not endorse. That covers staying in a marriage you have privately ended, doing work you consider dishonest, keeping a friendship out of guilt, or holding a position in public you do not hold in private. Every one of those requires continuous maintenance, and maintenance is where the energy goes. The tiredness is the running cost of the gap between what you do and what you think.

This reading has a failure mode worth naming, because the wellness version of it gets used carelessly. Plenty of exhaustion is circumstantial rather than symbolic. Poverty is tiring. Caring for a dying parent is tiring. Chronic illness is tiring. Night shifts are tiring, and none of that means the person is misaligned with a purpose. Telling somebody in those situations that their fatigue is a message about authenticity moves the blame onto them and hands them nothing they can act on. The alignment reading earns its keep in the narrower case: a life that looks workable from outside, no acute crisis, adequate sleep, and a persistent flatness anyway. That is when the gap between stated values and daily activity deserves serious examination. For the astrological version of the purpose question, North Node in Astrology: Your Soul's Purpose Revealed handles direction and life aim; this page stays with the symptom. The distinction to hold onto is between a life you cannot change and a life you have not examined, since only the second one responds to this kind of reading.

How do I tell if my job is the problem?

Compare your energy on a workday with no meetings against a Saturday with the same sleep and the same chores. If the gap is large and holds for a month, the job is at least part of it. If both days are flat, the job is a passenger. People blame the most visible commitment in their week because it is the easiest one to picture themselves walking away from.

Can you be aligned and still exhausted?

Yes, and this catches people out badly. Work you believe in can still overrun your capacity, and meaningful caretaking exhausts people exactly as thoroughly as meaningless work does. Alignment governs whether the spending feels worth it, never how much you have to spend. A life full of things you endorse can still be a life with no unallocated hours anywhere in it.

Does the tiredness lift after a big change?

Often it lifts for a few weeks and then returns. That return tells you the change addressed the setting rather than the pattern, which is the more common outcome by a wide margin. People leave one demanding job and rebuild the same conditions inside the next one within a year. If exhaustion comes back within a season of a real change, look at what you reconstructed.

Can a spiritual awakening make you exhausted?

Yes. Heavy, unexplained fatigue is one of the most consistently reported features of the periods people describe as spiritual awakening, and it usually arrives alongside disrupted sleep, emotional volatility and a sudden loss of interest in a former life. The reported pattern runs like this: a stretch of intense practice, or a bereavement, or a crisis, and then months in which the person feels stripped, tired in a way that bears no relationship to activity, and unable to resume the routine they had before. Many describe waves, days of unusual clarity followed by days flat on their back. What is happening physiologically during those months has never been tested to a clinical standard, and honest accounts say so rather than inventing a mechanism. Contemplative traditions treat these stretches as expected rather than exceptional. John of the Cross wrote about the dryness that follows a period of spiritual sweetness, in which practice keeps producing nothing and the practitioner concludes they have failed at it. His counsel was to continue without expecting the earlier rewards. The exhaustion in those accounts is a phase with a shape and an end.

The risk in this framing is obvious and serious: awakening is a comfortable label to place on depression, and using it delays treatment. Clinicians have taken the territory seriously enough to make room for it. The DSM-IV added a category called Religious or Spiritual Problem in 1994, coded V62.89, intended for distress connected to faith or practice that is not itself a mental illness, and DSM-5 kept it among the conditions that may be a focus of clinical attention. It exists precisely so the two can be told apart instead of merged. There is also a practical reason to be careful about practice volume. Adverse effects from intensive meditation, including agitation, dissociation and severe fatigue, appear in many first-person accounts and are now an active area of clinical research, and some retreat centers screen for vulnerability before admitting people. Anyone whose awakening includes hopelessness, an inability to function, or thoughts of self-harm needs medical help first and interpretation afterward. A teacher worth having will ask about your medical history before your practice history.

How long does awakening fatigue last?

Accounts range from a few weeks to a couple of years, with most describing several months that ease in stages rather than ending on a date. No reliable figures exist. Nobody has followed a defined group through one of these from start to finish, so every number in circulation comes from self-report and self-selection. Treat a confident timeline as a guess dressed up as knowledge, however kindly it is offered.

Is awakening fatigue different from depression?

The distinction people usually report is that awakening fatigue coexists with curiosity and depression does not. In the first, the person is tired and still interested in what is happening to them. In depression, interest itself collapses and hopelessness sets in. The distinction is not reliable enough to self-apply, and anyone uncertain should be assessed rather than reasoning it out alone.

Should I stop meditating if practice makes me tired?

Reduce before you stop, and change the kind of practice before you change the amount. Long silent sittings destabilize some people, particularly anyone with a trauma history, while short grounded practice and movement often do not. If a session reliably leaves you worse for hours, scale back and talk to a teacher who asks about your history rather than one who tells you to push through.

What is the first thing to do once you know the tiredness is energetic?

Once the tiredness looks energetic rather than medical, the first move is subtraction, not addition. Find the single largest recurring drain in your log and reduce it by a measurable amount, before you take up any practice, buy anything, or start a program. The order matters, because adding a morning routine to an unchanged week is how people end up more tired than they started and newly convinced they are failing at healing as well. Pick one drain. Reduce it in a way you can describe in a sentence: two fewer hours of the obligation, one conversation held instead of avoided, one standing commitment ended. Then hold that change for three weeks and rate your energy daily on the same one-to-ten scale you used before, so you finish with numbers to compare rather than impressions. Three weeks is long enough to see past a good fortnight and short enough that you will actually complete it. If the numbers move, keep going in that direction and repeat with the next drain. If they do not move at all, the drain you named was not the main one, and you have learned something a new practice would never have taught you.

Two things belong alongside the subtraction. First, settle the physical questions if you have not, because running a spiritual protocol on top of untreated sleep apnea wastes a year of your life. Second, protect one unallocated hour a week that is not sleep, not exercise, not scheduled and not observed by anybody. People carrying this kind of tiredness usually cannot remember their last one, and it is the cheapest intervention available to them. Only after those two does the choice of practice deserve your attention, and what you take up then depends on which model you find credible. Breath work suits people who want a lever they can pull in ninety seconds. If the drain is a relationship you cannot yet say out loud, that is the specific thing talking therapy is good at. Time outdoors gets dismissed by almost everybody on the grounds that it is free, which is a poor reason to skip the one intervention nobody has to save up for. Chakra Healing: How to Unblock & Balance Energy Centers covers the energy-body modalities in depth if that is the direction you want to go. Sequencing is the part people get wrong, far more often than the choice of method. Whatever you choose, choose one thing and give it a fixed trial length before judging it.

What if I cannot remove the drain?

When the drain cannot be removed, and frequently it cannot, reduce contact time, add recovery immediately afterward, and stop spending energy on wishing the situation were otherwise. A caregiver cannot resign. What a caregiver can sometimes do is secure two protected hours a week and defend them like a medical appointment. Partial reduction produces partial results, which still beats none at all.

How long until I feel different?

Most people who reduce a genuine drain notice something within two to three weeks, usually as a small return of interest rather than a surge of energy. Full recovery from a long deficit takes considerably longer and arrives unevenly. Expect the first sign to be that something sounds appealing again, not that you wake up rested and ready. The order of return surprises people.

Do I need to tell people what I am doing?

Tell the people whose behavior has to change, and nobody else. Announcing a spiritual reason to a skeptical family invites an argument you have no energy for. A plain sentence about capacity works better than a framework: you are cutting back for a while, and here is what that means for them in practice. Explanations can wait until you have something to report.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is spiritual exhaustion the same thing as burnout?

No. Burnout is defined by the World Health Organization in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon arising from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed, with three features: exhaustion, mental distance from the job, and reduced effectiveness. The WHO does not classify burnout as a medical condition, and it scopes the term to work. Spiritual exhaustion is tied to no single domain, is defined by no authority, and turns up in people whose jobs are fine. The two overlap heavily and often run together, but their scope is different.

Should I see a doctor if I am tired all the time?

Yes, and before any spiritual interpretation. Fatigue lasting more than a few weeks deserves a workup, and some features need attention urgently: unexplained weight loss, fever or night sweats, breathlessness, chest pain, fainting, a new lump, bleeding you cannot account for, or thoughts of suicide. Ask what was tested. A fatigue panel commonly covers thyroid function, iron studies and a complete blood count, and none of those will find an apnea, which needs a sleep study, or a mood disorder, which needs somebody asking you questions. A clean set of results does not undermine an energetic reading. It earns you the right to make one.

What does it mean when you feel drained around certain people?

Feeling drained around specific people usually means the relationship runs one way: you monitor their mood and manage their reactions, and none of that comes back the other direction. Anxious people produce this effect without intending anything at all, because anxiety in one person recruits attention from everyone in range. Verify it before you act on it. Memory is unreliable about who costs you what, and a grudge organizes recollection fast. Log five encounters with that person and five without, rate each the same day, and see whether the difference survives contact with your own notes.

Can someone else take your energy without meaning to?

In the energetic model, yes, and unintentional draining is treated as the ordinary case rather than the exception. The plainer explanation accounts for most of it: some people need constant attention, reassurance or emotional management, and supplying it costs you whatever their intentions are. Either way the remedy is the same, and it is not confrontation. Reduce exposure, shorten encounters, and stop volunteering for the regulating role in every room you walk into. Intent matters morally. It does not change the price you pay.

Why am I exhausted but unable to fall asleep at night?

Exhausted and wired means the body is still in an activated state that tiredness alone does not switch off, which is a physiological pattern rather than a contradiction. Common contributors include stress hormones running late into the evening, stimulating input in the last hour before bed, caffeine you metabolize slowly, alcohol, and a mind finally quiet enough to raise everything it postponed all day. Persistent insomnia is treatable and deserves attention rather than tolerance. Cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is recommended as the first-line treatment for chronic insomnia in adults by the American College of Physicians, ahead of sleeping pills rather than alongside them.

How long does spiritual exhaustion usually last?

There is no established duration, because nothing about the condition has been measured to a standard worth quoting. In practice it lasts as long as the drain does, which is the most useful thing anyone can tell you about it. People who identify a specific drain and reduce it often report a change within weeks. People who change nothing describe years. The exception is exhaustion following a bereavement or a major ending, which frequently eases on a timetable of its own regardless of what you do about it.

Do empaths and highly sensitive people get tired more easily?

Probably, though the two terms carry very different weight. Empath is a self-descriptive term with no clinical standing and no agreed definition. Sensory processing sensitivity, the trait the psychologist Elaine Aron described in the 1990s under the label highly sensitive person, refers to deeper processing of stimulus and stronger reactions to environment, and it is measured by a self-report questionnaire rather than by anything physiological. People who score high on it tend to report needing more recovery time after social and sensory demand, which is the kind of thing self-report can establish and the kind it cannot settle alone. The cost they describe is real to them either way, and it points at a temperament rather than a defect.