Tired? Rundown? Exhausted? The effects may be having a more negative impact on your life than you’d like to admit.
When we’re tired and running on low our performance suffers, our relationships are strained, our productivity takes a nose dive, and our level of enjoyment for life goes way down.
Beyond this, being tired can also pose a serious risk to your life with a police estimated 100,000 vehicle crashes each year in the United States alone due to fatigue.
Unfortunately being in a chronic state of fatigue is now deemed socially acceptable with many bragging about how little sleep they get, or how much coffee they consume on a daily basis.
Sure there’s a time and place to push a little harder and work a little longer, but if you find that you’ve been tired for weeks or months on end, it’s time to do something about it.
How to get more energy
I’ve always been described as a high-energy person. Part of this is just naturally who I am but there are also some simple practices and habits I’ve developed that have not only allowed me to increase my energy even further, but also provide sustained and stable energy opposed to short bursts followed by a crash.
1. Prioritize
The first thing you’re going to need to do is take a look at what you’re currently doing and look for ways to “trim the fat”. Not everything is as important as everything else.
Prioritizing is a skill unto itself, but to get more energy you’re going to need to find ways to eliminate or minimize the things that take away from your energy instead of adding to it.
These could be things like small tasks that you could delegate or outsource, simple chores that you could hire someone to do or set aside a day each week to take care of all at once, or even watching too much TV can take away from your energy levels, so see if you can swap that out for reading, spending time with family or friends, or learning a new skill or hobby.
2. Desire
Take a look at what you’re doing now and where you’d like your life to go. If the two aren’t lining up
3. Nutrition
This is one of the most important aspects of increasing your energy. We’ve all heard garbage in, garbage out and this is doubly true for what we eat.
This is also one of the more simple concepts to understand but challenging concepts to implement, especially because our society associates comfort with food.
The best way to eat for energy is to focus on a few key things.
- Limit or eliminate sugar
- Limit or eliminate processed foods
- Lower your caffeine intake (especially after 3pm)
- Drink more water
- Eat more vegetables
- Eat lean and preferably organic protein sources
- Eat nuts and seeds
- Eat regularly
The last point of eat regularly has been debated by nutrition experts with some claiming that periods of fasting can actually help improve your energy. I’ve certainly not found this to be the case and find that regularly consuming high quality food every 3 to 4 hours allows me to stay focused, fuelled, and fully charged.
While it’s certainly not for everyone, I’m a huge fan of a kale and spinach smoothie, and drink one pretty much everyday.
It’s a quick and easy way to get a lot of good, leafy greens down quickly and painlessly. I simply combine all of the following ingredients in a Vitamix blender (or any high performance blender, necessary to ensure the greens get adequately blended) and I’ve got around 5-7 servings of vegetables providing me energy giving goodness.
Energy Smoothie Recipe
- 3 handfuls of greens (kale, spinach, lettuce, swiss chard, whatever else you like or have access to)
- 1 Banana
- 1 Cup of berries (I like blueberries best, but any will work)
- 1 scoop of Vega Protein + Greens Vanilla (you can use any protein powder but I like this one in these smoothies)
- Water (as much as necessary)
4. Sleep
Rest and recovery are vital parts of having more energy. The recommendation is still around 8 hours a night but many push this shorter and shorter getting 7, 6, 5 and sometimes even 4 hours of sleep a night.
If your goal is to increase your energy, performance, productivity, and level of success this is simply not a good approach.
You need to make sleep a priority.
Block out at least an 8 hour time chunk and do your best not to let life interfere.
You can also increase the quality of your sleep by ensuring your room is cool, dark, and comfortable, by avoiding caffeine late in the day, and by getting enough exercise during your day.
5. Exercise
More accurately, movement (of any kind). To have more you need to do more. Expending energy is a surprisingly effective way to get more energy as it signals your body that you need more energy to cope with the demands.
Exercise also releases a ton of feel good chemicals in our brains that instantly improve our mindset and wellbeing.
The beauty with exercise is while a well designed and balanced exercise plan is great, you can start to reap the rewards today by simply standing up and going for a walk. One small step at a time is all it takes.
