I am so tired. There, I said it. I say it in private all the time, sometimes to myself, aloud, when I’m moving dishes from the counter to the sink, and constantly to friends, who say it back to me, so that there are days when it seems like it’s the only thing we do say.

How can I be so tired and not actually dying, we say, Googling symptoms and bothering our doctors – who, given that all doctors now seem to be approximately my age, appear themselves to be completely exhausted.

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Did previous generations feel this tired and, if so, did they go on about it like this? The release last week of a study undertaken at Warwick University concluded that parents, particularly mothers, are sleep deprived for up to six years after having a first child, losing on average 25 minutes’ sleep a night – findings that seemed to me simultaneously obvious and hugely conservative. Twenty-five minutes! This far into cold season, when no sooner has one child stopped barking than the other starts up, I found myself scoffing, and that’s before we get to sleep-shouting and “growing pains” and bed invasion.

At a playdate the other day, while the four children in the room climbed over the furniture and used a toy drill to detach Peppa Pig’s head from her body, the other mother and I sat at her kitchen table and talked about how tired we were. She told me she woke at 5am every morning – by which time her two kids, aged four and two, had inevitably migrated to her bed and she dared not move for two hours lest they awake. As a result, her neck was at a strange angle to her shoulders, but it was worth it for the extra sleep. Other friends have kids who won’t stop talking before 10.30pm or lie in later than 5.30am. Nobody knows what to do about this.

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And then there are the self-inflicted wounds – instead of having an early night when one can, lying listlessly on the sofa watching Netflix until midnight. Structural downtime that isn’t sleep, but isn’t talking, seeing anyone, going anywhere or doing anything, is apparently necessary to process the day – as is leaving everything to the last minute because, increasingly, you need a small measure of panic to haul yourself over the line.

There is a certain amount of enjoyable complaining to all this. And while you are not supposed to admit to being tired, you can use it as a soft boast about your endurance – although this only works if you’re not as tired as you claim. Then people start saying, “you look tired”, which, however laser-like in its accuracy, always sounds like a euphemism for something worse.

Of course, being tired is not incompatible with being cheerful and enjoying one’s life, and there are workarounds. I was at Newark airport this week and found myself ordering a Coke and a coffee; when the two cups arrived, it struck me as a small act of lunacy, but I downed them before trudging to the gate. People milled around, clutching their phones. Everyone looked completely wiped out.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist