How to not be tired & have more energy throughout the day

Being tired can place a large barrier to you being able to do what you want most. For those suffering from chronic tiredness, it can be difficult to even do small tasks like get out of bed or go to social gatherings. Beyond that, tiredness in some situations can be downright dangerous.

Below is a closer look at some ways you can avoid being tired in the first place as well as ways you can facilitate more energy throughout the day.

Tiredness prevention

Like with most problems in life, proactive prevention is key to experience less of an issue later down the road. With tiredness specifically, this rings true and there are things you can do to effectively reduce the likelihood that you will feel tired.

Below is a closer look at ways you can prevent yourself from that daytime sleepiness, which can significantly improve your quality of life and ability to get things done. Without tiredness to hold you back, you can march to the beat of your own drum and get the absolute most out of each and every day.

Get enough sleep

If you are feeling tired, the first thing you should ask yourself is how well you are sleeping at night and for how long. Sleep is an integral aspect of your health and is vital to allowing you to get through a day tired-free. Both longevity and quality of sleep are important to ensure you are getting the most out of your sleep to feel ready to tackle the next day.

Getting sleep problems under wraps can seem like an intimidating task at first. Oftentimes people know they need better sleep, but do not know how to improve their quality of sleep, and simply overlook that aspect of their wellbeing.

Rather than ignore it and hope for a good night’s sleep, you should take an active role in initiating change in your life to help improve your sleep. In other words, your bedtime routine can have a huge effect on your morning routine.

The first step to getting good quality sleep is to train your circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm can be thought of as your body’s internal clock. At points within the day, the body makes changes such as transitioning your body to sleep by decreasing body temperature.

Having a well-trained circadian rhythm can enable you to fall asleep faster, help you to stay asleep, and even help you to feel more energized when you wake up. Training your circadian rhythm is all about consistency in wake-up times.

By choosing and sticking to a regular wake-up time you begin to train your body to become its own alarm clock. When you wake up at the same time every day regardless of when you go to bed, you give your sleep some needed tough love to maintain the trained circadian rhythm you work so hard for (and the sleep hormones like cortisol and melatonin that love routine so much can get into a groove of keeping you awake and making you sleepy at the right time).

Even if you don’t get enough sleep, your body will naturally be tired the next day and ensure it is made up for.

Set work-life balance

Another common source of a drained feeling is having a work-life imbalance where work consumes your ability to do the things you enjoy in life. You have most likely encountered a long day that spilled over into your personal time, but this needs to be the exception and not the expectation.

Feelings of anxiety and insomnia caused by work stress won’t be resolved by snoozing the alarm or squeezing in some deep breaths and vitamins after a bad meeting — you need balance that gives you time to turn off the alertness of responding to emails.

Setting a work-life balance is all about setting expectations and ensuring your time is respected and valued. Turning off email after hours, choosing to fully utilize your vacation time, and even just setting reasonable goals with your coworkers can save you from feeling obligated to work past what you’re responsible for.

Taking a few minutes for meditation in the middle of your work day or making sure you get a little sunlight during your lunch break can also help improve the micro-balance within each day.

Cut down on caffeine

There are countless products today that contain large amounts of caffeine — coffee, tea, chocolate, energy drinks, and more. Consuming caffeine in moderation and during the right parts of the day can help your energy levels, but if it is consumed too frequently and late at night, caffeine can be detrimental to your sleep and ability to feel awake throughout the next day.

A great rule to implement for caffeine is to ensure you don’t have caffeine after 12 o’clock. This rule will give your body the time it needs to remove caffeine from your system and allow your body to naturally feel tired and get proper quality of sleep.

Ways to get more energy

Prevention provides a good first step to ensure nothing is holding you back from having more energy. While prevention can help restore your energy levels, it only represents half of the equation to feeling more energized throughout the day. The other half lies in your lifestyle choices and how you choose to fuel your body.

Below is a closer look at some of the ways that you can energize your day through positive lifestyle changes.

Eat healthily

Food is the means by which the energy your body needs is obtained. The body is incredibly adapted to take in food, break it down, and transport it to fuel the trillions of cells within your body.

Choosing healthy snacks that yield the most benefit from a nutritional standpoint is the essence of healthy eating.

While there are many diets to choose from, the best from an energy perspective is one that is well-rounded and derives its source of macros from good sources. An example of this would be choosing whole-grain bread over a bagel, or choosing frozen fruit rather than ice cream.

With these examples, the foods are all sources of carbohydrates, yet the latter provides a better source that comes with many other nutrients and healthful benefits.

While individual food choices are important to giving your body the proper fuel to feel energized, it is only half the battle. A diet consists of the patterns of food choices you make.

Great diets that can help energize and provide healthful benefits include the Mediterranean diet, vegetarian diet, and pescatarian diets — these are all excellent for nutritional diversity and can provide your body the support it needs for prolonged energy throughout the day.

Exercise

Exercising to feel more awake may sound like an oxymoron, but in reality, regular exercise is a great way to boost energy levels throughout the entire day.

From a logical perspective, it would seem like exercise would utilize more energy and cause you to become fatigued faster. While you certainly burn energy while exercising, the increase in heart rate, blood flow, oxygenation, and other physiological exertions can provide you with an increased feeling of wakefulness.

A great way to have more energy within the day is to start working out first thing in the morning or taking time out of your lunch to get your blood moving. Even moderate physical activity such as taking a brisk walk can give your body the physical energy boost and mental break needed to get you through the day.

That said, less cardio-intense exercise like yoga or doing some reps at the gym can still help!

Supplementation

Declined energy levels and feeling tired can be a result of nutritional deficiencies. Deficiencies in B12, for instance, are common, and one of the most apparent consequences of the deficiency is declined energy levels.

CoQ10 is another molecule that can decline with age or other reasons, and result in poor energy levels. MitoQ is a supplement tailor-made to help with declined CoQ10 levels and help restore natural energy levels.

Conclusion

In summary, if you are tired, it is important to take a multifactorial assessment as to what could be causing your tiredness and tackling it head-on, whether that be addressing sleep habits, or ensuring your body is fueled with high-quality nutrients.

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