How to Stop Being Tired All the Time // Do you want to stop being tired all the time, feel more energetic and feel great throughout your day? Getting better quality sleep is important, but if you want to truly feel great when you wake up, you have to change up your routine. In this video, peak performance expert and coach, Eric Partaker, provides some insights and tricks to not feel tired so you are ready to attack and pursue your goals, each and every day.
KEY POINTS
Wake Up And Work Out! – Exercise in the morning spikes your energy for the rest of the day. Just 20 minutes daily gives you a positive mood equivalent to taking an antidepressant.
You Are What You Eat – Whatever we ingest goes into our tissue, it forms everything in our body, it also contributes to us feeling energetic or fatigued. If you eat foods that are unhealthy you will feel more fatigued.
Life Is Better When You Get Enough Sleep – Ensure you’re getting 8 hours of sleep a night. Not getting the correct amount of sleep reduces your ability to focus. In the long term it increases the likelihood of cardiovascular disease, mental illness and even cancer risk.
When You Embrace Stress, You Transform Fear Into Courage – Stress builds strength. Stress is not the issue, often it is your perception of stress that is the problem. Rather than avoiding stress, flip it around and realize that it’s our perceptions which cause the problem.
TRANSCRIPT
Eric Partaker: Today, I’m going to share some tips about how you can stop feeling tired all the time, because look, if you’re tired all the time, there’s no chance that you’re going to be achieving all of the goals and the dreams and the things that you’ve set out for yourself.
Hi, my name is Eric Partaker, and I’ve been recognized as one of the top entrepreneurs in the country and I’m also the author of two best-selling books, including The 3 Alarms. Now, the number one thing that you can do to stop feeling tired all the time is make sure that you’re looking after your physical activity. I used to on a quite regular basis, especially in the first half of my career, I ended up feeling quite sluggish and drained throughout the day, but especially when I would get around to the mid-afternoon, then I would really crash, between 2:30 and say 4:30. I’d have about 80% tank of gas in the first half of the day, but sure enough I’d come to the afternoons and it was a struggle.
And at that same time in my life, I was also trying to do things outside of work. I was trying to further my development and skills in other areas. I was thinking about other career opportunities, and that work was taking place after my normal day job, but I never had the energy for it. And maybe you can relate to this, have you ever been in a situation where there was things that you wanted to be doing outside of work, for example, or your career, but you just constantly struggled because you struggled to just even have the energy for your job, let alone for all this extracurricular stuff that you were working on? Because that’s how I felt. But then, with some simple changes, some simple tweaks, I was able to really get my energy up to an entirely new level and I did that through physical activity. And the primary way that I achieved that was by developing the habit of exercising in the morning.
When you exercise in the morning, it literally spikes your energy for the rest of the day. Think of it as, you’re starting your day at the highest energy possible and then there’s obviously a gradual decline, right? As we go through the day, our energy does decline, eventually we get tired, we have to go to sleep. So, you want that decline to start from the highest point possible. And what research shows is that by exercising in the morning, you’re spiking that first point on the graph, so that the decline is going to be coming from a higher point, meaning that you will have more energy throughout the day. The other thing though that the physical activity does in the morning, is that it gives you a positive mood boost, a positive energy boost as well. And that’s incredibly important too, because when we have that positive mood boost going on, it’s hard to feel tired and exhausted and fatigued as well.
If you’re feeling vibrant and happy and you have all these positive hormones going through your body, all of which happens as a result of exercise in the morning. It’s so powerful in fact, that they’ve found that morning exercise, moderate exertion level in the morning, for just 20 minutes daily, actually gives you a positive mood boost equivalent in strength to taking an antidepressant. Next thing you can do to combat fatigue and to not feel tired all the time is just to make sure that you’re watching what you eat. We literally are what we eat. I mean, literally, right? So, our cells, all of the components that make up our bodies is derived from the foods that we eat. Whatever we ingest goes into our tissue, it forms everything in our body, and it will also contribute to us feeling super energetic or us feeling fatigued. And if you’re eating foods that are unhealthy, you’re going to feel more fatigued.
You might get a bit of an energy spike, but then you’re going to come crashing much lower than you would have had you stuck with healthier food choices. So, what do I mean by healthy food choices? Well, there’s a statement from Michael Pollan, which simplifies healthy eating plans across the board, which is simply, “Eat food, mostly plants, not too much.” So, what does that mean? So, “Eat food,” so, what he means there is to eat foods that are not made in factories, that are not processed. So, a bag of chips is not a great choice. A potato actually that grows in the ground, that’s a much better choice. So, think of it as, if I can’t find this food somewhere naturally, in nature, if I can’t find it, if it only comes out of some kind of a horrible factory, then you shouldn’t be putting it in your body.
Now the next statement, “Mostly plants,” I’m not going to get into the whole vegan, vegetarian versus omnivore. There’s a lot of science that can support all of those different paths. There’s lots of studies that can support each and every one of them. I think you have to choose whatever makes the most sense for you, but what you will find, a commonality across all healthy eating plans and suggestions, is that we need more plants in our diet. And what do we mean by plants? We mean, more fruits and vegetables. Fruits, try to eat seasonal fruits, the fruits that would naturally be occurring if you weren’t getting them from the shop. And when it comes to vegetables, try to eat as wide of a color palette as possible. So, lots of dark, leafy greens, you’ve got your cruciferous vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower.
And then, you have all your colorful vegetables from squash to bell peppers of different shades as well. So, think of it as eating the rainbow when it comes to vegetables and just eating much more than you currently do. We probably could all benefit from increasing our fruit and vegetable intake. And then, the last point, “Not too much.” That just relates to portion control. If you find yourself feeling really, really tired, and you still think that you’re eating very well, it might be that you’re eating too much. When you eat a lot of food, it requires a lot of blood flow to go to the stomach and to your digestive system, because it’s the blood that comes to your digestive system that then takes the nutrients from the food and then distributes it through the body. And if all that blood’s going there, it’s coming out of your limbs and elsewhere in your body and so, it will make you feel fatigued.
So, you want to eat to the point where you’re not full. If you’ve eaten to the point where you feel stuffed, you’ve eaten too much. Eating a little bit less than that point is probably the way to go. And also, you could experiment with fasting, right? So, I experiment with intermittent fasting, which is simply cutting a certain amount of time per day, out of your day, where you just don’t eat anything. And you’d be surprised how energy boosting it is. At least it has massively been for me. So, for years I’ve not eaten breakfast, but I’ve always eaten lunch and dinner. And that breakfast, that time from when I wake up until say 12 o’clock, combined with the eight hours that I’ve slept, it means that I have 16 hours a day that my body’s just completely cleansing itself and there’s no continuous food coming into my system.
And last but not least, as part of eating a balanced and nutritious diet, just make sure you’re drinking enough water. If you’re feeling thirsty at any point in the day … Again, you want to make it through your day, drinking enough water along the way so that you don’t suddenly feel like, “Oh my gosh, I need a glass of water. I’m very, very thirsty.” That means that you’re getting to the point where your body is not hydrated enough, that it’s needing to signal almost an emergency response to you, “We need liquids now.” So, we don’t want the body to get to that point. Next up, if you’re feeling tired all the time, it could be because you haven’t optimized your sleep.
Sleep has become my best friend. In the first half of my career, it was my worst enemy. I remember I thought, “Oh my gosh, it’s such a waste to sleep away one third of my life.” But the problem is that if you don’t get the right amount of sleep, you actually destroy your ability to focus. You leave yourself open to be more irritable and just not happy. And of course, you don’t feel energized as well. You feel more fatigued. In the long-term, it sets you up for some quite scary things, cardiovascular disease and mental illness and even increases your cancer risk. So, if you’re not going to sleep more to increase your energy, well then sleep more for all of these other reasons. But I think the energy improvement is reason enough to optimize your sleep.
Now, a lot of people would love sleep more, but they have trouble with their sleep, and that’s how it was for me. I used to be a horrible insomniac. I mean, I might wake up for example, in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, at like 2:30, 3:30 in the morning or something. And then boom, I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep and I end up getting up. I mean, I remember once I went to bed at midnight, I woke up at 1:50, so one hour and 50 minutes later, and I just stayed up and I started working and went all the way into the night. And that’s not healthy, that doesn’t serve us well. And that’s just going to make you even more fatigued. We need eight hours of sleep a night.
Yeah. The exact range is seven to nine. I think the international average in that range is about eight hours and 15 minutes, but it can go from about seven to nine hours. That’s what we need, not just to survive, but to thrive. And if you’re just trying to survive, then survival will come with fatigue. If you’re just surviving on the minimal amount of sleep, well, then you also will feel probably fatigued as well, but we want to thrive, we don’t want to feel fatigued, so that we can achieve the things that we’re trying to achieve in work and life. And we do that by sleeping better, by optimizing our sleep. If you’re struggling to do that, one of the simple things that you can do is stop using all your electronic devices in that one hour before bedtime. Doing that can double the amount of melatonin in your brain, which is a sleep inducing hormone, and will help you sleep more restfully.
So, try doing that, one hour before you go to bed, all the electronics off. Choose a bedtime such that you can get eight hours of sleep. Don’t have any of that artificial light from your electronic devices going through your eyes, because when it does, it actually lowers your melatonin production. Why? Because your brain thinks that it’s still daylight out and we’ve evolved to sleep at night. So, if your brain still thinks that it’s daylight out, it’s going to not produce the hormone to induce sleep, because it thinks that you should be awake. So, we’re actually tricking our brain in a very dangerous way when we use our electronic devices too late into the evening.
Next up, if you’re feeling tired all the time, you want to look at stress, and it’s not just a matter of reducing stress because people immediately go there, reduce stress. Yes, if you have a lot of unhealthy levels of stress in life or if you’re constantly allowing yourself to be stressed out by things, well, then we need to reduce stress. But there’s another way to go after stress too and it’s actually to embrace it. And so, what do I mean by that? Well, stress actually builds strength. It’s really not stress that’s the issue. More often than not, it’s your perception of stress, which is the problem. So, rather than trying to avoid stress, we need to really flip it around and realize that it’s our perception of stress, which causes the problem.
I’ll give you a very quick example, with your physical body you know most certainly that to grow a muscle, you need to stress the muscle, right? We all know that if you lift weights or heavy things, over time the muscle grows. Why? Because it’s being stressed. So, it’s the actual stress that’s building the strength, right? So, it’s the same thing with our minds. And if we go through the day constantly trying to avoid stress or think that stress is going to weaken us, it would be like showing up to exercise, constantly trying to avoid the weights or thinking that anytime somebody handed us a weight, that it was going to weaken us. That’s the opposite of actually what happens. And if we can reframe stress as something that builds strength, then it totally relieves a lot of stress. Simply because we’re changing the way we react to it.
So, when things don’t go to plan, or when you realize that there’s something that you need to do, that you haven’t done before, or you suddenly feel a little bit overwhelmed with a lot of tasks, those stressful triggers, they’re like weights in the gym of life being presented to you. And if you can reframe those as, “Okay, come on, bring it on. I’m ready for this. I can step into this.” Then you can actually become a lot stronger as a result, and also not feel so fatigued because you’re not trying to run away from something, instead you’re actually embracing it and stepping into it.
Last but not least, if you’re feeling fatigued all the time and you just don’t know what it is, then think about speaking to a doctor, think about getting some professional advice. There could be other things that are going on that are contributing to your fatigue. And if you’re not sure, then speak to someone else and see what they might tell you. And I’d love to hear from you, so don’t forget to leave a comment and a rating as well. And if you’d like to get a copy of my new book, The 3 Alarms, please head over to my website at ericpartaker.com. That’s E-R-I-C, ericpartaker.com, where you can pick up a free digital copy of my new best-selling book, The 3 Alarms.
