It’s not inherently bad to feel tired.
After a few hours of focused work, an intense workout, and a relaxing hot shower.
But going through life like a sluggish, red-eyed zombie is robbing you of your best ever future.
Tiredness is a multidimensional sensation.
It’s a physical, emotional, and psychological state that leaves you drained and unwilling to do anything productive.
Depending on how you experience tiredness, you’re receiving clues as to how best you should address it.
Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said:
“you have power over your mind, not outside events”
That’s not entirely true though, is it?
By improving the quality of your mind, and changing how you see the world, you open yourself up to opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.
After fixing your chronic tiredness, maybe you no longer need to plop down exhausted on the couch after work for a multi hour Netflix and hentai session.
Maybe instead, you start learning about something that interests you, like cooking or business.
A branched pathway of unseen potential futures has just opened up for you.
One leads to you meeting someone you fall in love with.
One leads to you starting a business that you’re passionate about.
When you change yourself, you change the world.
I heard it said that the most important part of a board game is your game piece.
So how can you break the cycle of chronic tiredness and get back your daily energy?
It all starts by giving up on the war you’re fighting against your body.
Fighting Your Biology
Your body will give you all the energy you need to be productive and energized throughout the day.
But not until you give it the required care, and avoid interrupting it’s natural processes.
By getting a sufficient amount of high quality sleep each night, you’re allowing your body to enter it’s mostly deeply restorative state.
It’s almost exactly like how you need to plug your phone in each night to recharge the battery, and let it do it’s overnight updates.
If you’re regularly feeling sleepy throughout the day, it’s worth experimenting with extending your overall time spent in bed.
Adding an extra hour under the covers each night could be all it takes to start feeling your best again.
While you might only need 6 hours of sleep, it might still take you 30 minutes to fall asleep.
So going to bed at midnight to get up at 6 am hasn’t been cutting it.
Some folks need more, and some need less – so you’ll have to experiment with this.
But what should you do if you have trouble falling asleep?
Try taking 3 mg of melatonin about 45 minutes before bed, taking some deep relaxing breaths, engaging in a relaxing screen free activity after a nice hot shower.
Stick with this routine for a week to really allow your body to etch that routine into your brain, so it knows to start winding down when you first pop that melatonin.
You’ll wake up in a week and wonder why you haven’t been doing this sooner.
Speaking of waking up, I find that I have a lot more energy when I wake up naturally – which probably has something to do with REM and deep sleep cycles.
Your body undergoes phases of sleep overnight, and if you wake up in the middle of one, it can make you feel groggy.
Kind of like if you’ve ever napped for longer than you anticipated, only to wake up and wonder what year it is.
So set your alarm clock as an insurance policy – keeping it in place only so you don’t sleep in longer than should be.
Then get to bed at a reasonable time, and you’ll wake up when your body is ready.
You might have also heard that exercise can also help you sleep better.
But what a pain in the ass that is.
If you’re too tired to workout, what do you do then?
You don’t need to smash a hardcore workout to start sleeping better.
Even a 20 minute brisk walk is enough to start.
It will improve your ability to fall asleep quickly, and stay in a deep sleep through the night.
Especially if you get the chance to walk in the middle of the day, because sun exposure probably has an impact on your sleep quality, too.
Walking daily will also help you lose weight, if that’s something you struggle with.
We talked about this in last week’s post – The Best Exercise for Losing Belly Fat
Obesity has a reciprocal link with depression – and it’s well documented that folks who are overweight generally experience EDS or excessive daytime sleepiness.
So if you’re in that camp – there’s a good reason for you to get started on losing weight.
If that’s you, go check out Body Recomp 101 – it’s my free guide to losing fat while building muscle at the same time.
It even includes a weight loss calculator that will spit out a 6 month plan for which weight milestones you should aim to hit by when.
Find yourself getting sleepy around 1-3 pm?
There are 2 things you can do about that afternoon crash, and 3 if you’re lucky.
Managing your diet
If you smash a huge lunch right before you get sleepy each afternoon, that’s part of the problem.
That food coma, or postprandial somnolence happens to just about everyone.
Your body is entering a restorative digestive state, and it will naturally increase production of hormones that make you sleepy.
This hits especially hard when you eat highly processed foods – so be sure to make a colourful plate with some fruit and vegetables, whole grains, and protein.
That will help slow digestion and provide a more gradual release of energy.
Large meals hitting your stomach and small intestine signals to your body to decrease the activity of your sympathetic nervous system (which controls your fight or flight responses) and increase the activity of your parasympathetic nervous system (the “rest and digest” system)
You can think of these two systems like a shopping mall that has a day shift and a night shift.
The day shift has all the stores open for business, the lights are on, there’s music playing, and people at the customer service counter.
During the night shift, everything is turned off, there are just a few security guards roaming around, and the janitorial team is cleaning up the mall so it can be puked on by some unruly teenagers the next day.
And there’s actually a way you can trick your body into keeping the day shift on longer than it should be.
It’s hidden in this photo…
Caffeine
Here’s one thing I’ve learned about caffeine after competing in powerlifting, starting my own business, and years of caffeine abuse in while working in the restaurant industry:
It takes VERY little caffeine to benefit from it.
And it also takes very little to experience negative side effects.
Caffeine can be great for helping you stay more alert and energized.
It’s like giving a cash bonus to all the workers on the day shift for doing an outstanding job.
All the employees are happier, they work later, and the businesses have better customer service.
The problem is that it’s only a temporary and “artificial” boost.
And if you keep bonusing the day shift to stick around longer and work harder, they get tired, and the night shift doesn’t get the time they need to clean up the mall properly.
Your bodies energy source is called ATP – adenosine triphosphate.
When you use ATP, it gives off a byproduct of adenosine.
That adenosine is picked up by receptors in your brain, and this gives your body the signal to begin feeling tired.
Caffeine attaches to those adenosine receptors, to prevent them from being recognized.
It’s like putting a block of wood under the brake pedal in your brain.
The problem is that you can’t just take it out once you’ve put it there.
Caffeine has a half-life of about 6 hours.
Meaning that if you drink a cup of coffee at noon, you still have half a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine in your body at 6 pm.
At midnight, a quarter cup.
So cut out caffeine as early as you can in the day and switch to decaf in the afternoon if you love the taste, like me.
A 2023 study by Marcus and colleagues looked at just over 100 adults, and found that caffeine consumption increased their daily step count by about 1000 steps per day, and reduced their sleep by about 40 minutes per night on average.
I recommend reading this article by Eric Trexler for an in-depth look at the Pros and Cons of Caffeine Use – The Pros and Cons of Caffeine • Stronger by Science
And if you’re blessed with a flexible schedule, then an afternoon nap could be just what the doctor ordered.
But what if you’ve got your sleep, nutrition, and workouts in order..
But you’re still feeling drained and tired all the time?
Medical disclaimer: if you’re concerned about your sleepiness / fatigue after implementing some basics consistently, it might be worth speaking to your doctor about this…
Lack of meaning and purpose
Tiredness is also an energy preservation mechanism.
It can be a result of your assessment of the workload required of a certain task, in relation to the payoff.
Think back to when you’ve been in a new relationship and everything is exciting.
You’d stay out late with that person, get up early to meet them for coffee, and go out of your routine to do fun things with them you wouldn’t normally do.
If that person asked you out on the date, and you just felt meh about them, you might feel like you were too tired to go out.
- Or maybe you’re too tired to deal with your taxes.
- Or maybe you feel tired of going to your job.
- Or too tired to go to the gym.
Is it possible that tiredness is your body telling you what you want to avoid?
You don’t hate working.
You just might not enjoy what you’ve been working on.
You don’t hate exercise.
You just don’t enjoy the way you’ve been doing it.
Try learning something new to reignite your passion wherever it’s been lacking.
I heard a great saying recently:
you can only cook what’s in the kitchen
You won’t find better ideas and better ways of living by doing what you’ve always done.
Expose yourself to videos, books, podcasts, and people who give you fresh perspectives.
Otherwise you’ll always be working with stale ingredients.
Reclaiming mental real estate
Clean up your space, and finish or eliminate any annoying undone tasks.
All those little ‘to-do’s’ are rotting on the shelves in your brain.
They occupy valuable mental real estate.
You can also try shaking up your daily routine by doing something different today.
Take a different route home from work.
Get a drink at a corner store.
Sit quietly in the park for a while.
Your brain is an information processing machine.
If you want different mental outputs, it’s worth changing the inputs.
Taking action:
It can be difficult to get started when you’re feeling drained of energy all the time.
You can use this stoic philosophy to guide your best course of action:
The obstacle is the way.
If you’re feeling bloated and sluggish in the afternoons, try working on your diet first.
If your workouts have been feeling like a stale chore lately, try experimenting with something new.
If you’re not able to fall asleep or stay asleep, get that in order first.
Just pick SOMETHING and work on it for the next 2 weeks.
That way you can start to see some tangible improvements.
Your future depends on it.
– Matteo
PS: the feedback I’ve received so far from the 150+ people who enrolled in Four Point Fat Loss has been incredible.
If want to shrink your waistline and become your own weight loss coach by using a simplified approach, check it out.
