Ep 284 | How's Your Energy Level at 3pm Each Day

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Today I want to talk a little bit about energy, because I'm going to guess that you need to have high energy throughout your day. You're a high performer. You've got a lot to do. You lead lots of people. You've got to make big decisions. You maintaining energy throughout your day is critical to your success. I feel that way about my world. I don't think I'm the most important person by any stretch, but I do have a lot of things that I want to accomplish each and every day, from making decisions to working on specific projects, to having some tough conversations, whatever it may be. All of these things work better for me when my battery life is high versus when my battery life is low. So what I want to chat around today are the things that may be causing us to lose energy at an accelerated rate throughout the day and the steps that we can consider or the steps that we should take to limit the amount of energy that we in fact lose. The reality is this, right? We operate as, as humans, we have more or less a battery life. If you picture your cell phone, you know, it's got this battery, you plug it in overnight, you take it off the charger, of course that battery is full. And then as you use your phone throughout the day, what happens? Well, that battery life goes down. Sometimes that battery completely dies before the day's even up. Usually it makes it through the day, but that battery bar, you know, decreases, it depletes. Now, every once in a while, if you have an opportunity, you may plug your phone in, maybe not for the required time to plug it— I'm sorry, to re-energize it to a full status, But maybe it's down to 40%, you plug it in for a little while and it gets back up to 65%. So what happened? The battery life was going down, but you figured out a way to boost the energy a little bit. That's what I want to chat with you today around. So why do you feel like your energy has gone down throughout the day? Well, because you're human and it's going to, but what if it feels like it's going down at an accelerated rate? What caused that? Well, it goes without saying, sleep matters. Poor sleep quality, insufficient sleep is going to leave you feeling tired. It just, it just is, especially if you've stacked a number of insufficient sleep nights on top of one another. So for me, there are times where I will sleep, you know, 5 or 6 and a half hours, say 5 and a half to 6 and a half hours. And if I do that once, I'm probably okay. If I do it twice, I'm probably still going to be okay. But I found that if I stack 3, 4, 5 days in a row where I'm getting only 6 hours, my battery life on that third, on that third, fourth, fifth day, the life of it, you know, really, really accelerates in terms of loss, lost battery life. My energy by midday is substantially less than it is, say, 3, 4, 5 days prior when I was sleeping. So sleep quality, I think we all know that, but it's important we call it out here because if you have one, I have more energy, more sustained energy throughout the day, you're going to have to improve your sleep quality. Now what you're eating and what you're drinking specifically from a hydration standpoint, those are things that can lead to fatigue. Eating poorly, not being hydrated leads to fatigue. Mental health, stress, these things can be, can, can really beat you up. Do you have any of this going on in your life? Is that quite possibly what's draining your battery faster than you'd like it to? Lack of activity, physical activity, you know, not being active can contribute to feelings of tiredness, as can just overexertion. Sometimes you're pushing yourself too hard physically or mentally throughout the day. And again, you stack a number of days doing that, it can lead to fatigue. Some other things, of course, to be thinking around, maybe there's an underlying health condition. I'm not the expert here, so we're probably not going to talk about underlying health conditions in detail. But there may be something there that you got to keep in, you know, keep in your mind, like in the event you try these things we're about to talk about, they're not working. Circadian rhythm disruptions. This is not typically something that shows up on everybody's radar. For me, it absolutely does. Remember, your body has an internal clock. So irregular sleep schedules or, or irregular work schedules can really lead to feelings of tiredness. If you're working in the middle of the night, or you're You're going to work in the morning before the sun's up and coming home when the sun's already down. It's going to disrupt your circadian rhythm. And then lastly, random environmental factors. I know this sounds funny, but sometimes when there's excessive noise or maybe the temperature in the room isn't right, hot or cold, or maybe there's just poor lighting, all these things can affect your ability to recharge. What do we do about this? It's probably the most important thing for us to talk, talk about. What do I do about it? Not that I have this nailed, but I do believe energy is critical to your success each and every day. What am I doing? Number 1, if I really want to make a difference, I got to focus on my sleep. That's a given. Number 2, hydration for me is a really big thing. When I say hydration, I don't mean just drinking water, though that is, that is the essence of hydration. We got to have fluids, specifically water. For me though, I will add electrolytes to my water. Specifically, I have Element, which you may have heard of before. Most everyone's kind of endorsing it if you're listening to any podcast. I am a sucker, fell for it, but I actually love it. And I do feel a noticeable difference when I drink these electrolytes, Element, me specifically, the salt. Is a little high, but I've usually been sweating because I worked out in the morning or something like that. So I've depleted myself of these electrolytes. So having an electrolyte-based drink at some point during the day, I do feel an uptick in my energy. It recharges the battery slight bit. Food without question matters. Eat something bad and see how it affects your— you know, eat a giant cheeseburger and fries for lunch, see how that's going to impact your energy. Eat a salad with some chicken, Maybe oil and vinegar. See how that affects your energy. It's just, I would test this. I would mess around with it. I try different foods. Some people could probably have a cheeseburger and be all right, but the vast majority, if you fill your stomach with something that's not super healthy for you, it is going to have an impact on, on your energy levels. No question about it. So for me, if I want high energy, I got to hydrate. I got to eat right. I've also got to have my head right in terms of my stress and anxiety. These things could drain your battery, right? Drains my battery. How do I get right? For me, I got to take breaks. Breaks for me mean that I'm off the phone, I'm off the computer, and I get outside. If I'm working from home, I actually take the dog for a walk every day, midday. Gets me out, gets him out, and I'll go for 20 minutes or so and just take a break. I'll also walk away from the computer for 5 minutes or 10 minutes at a time after I complete a specific task, just to reset. I find that these short breaks, especially the one where I'm outside walking, re-energizes me, charges that battery again, and helps me maintain my stress levels and anxiety that comes along with a busy schedule. Kind of leads to something we've talked about before around physical activity. I do believe that if your, if your battery life is down, Doing some sort of physical activity, we call it exercise snacking. It's in a previous episode, probably should have looked at that episode number up before I started recording. It's called exercise snacking, where you're just doing some quick, you know, short exercise burst. Maybe I'm doing 5 minutes of air squats or 3 minutes of push-ups or anything like that, just to move around, just to get the blood flow, makes me feel different. So if my energy levels are down, I will knock out 50 air squats, probably break a little sweat, but I'll tell you, I get a boost of energy from that and my battery life is slightly up again. Uh, last things I would talk about, I mentioned environmental factors. I think this is one that's easily overlooked. For me, I know when I'm not working in my ideal environment, be it too much noise or maybe it's too hot, or maybe just the lighting is bad, it does throw me off. It does drain me a little bit. So what do I do? I fix it. I fix it. Today, even earlier today, I was working and there was music pretty loud coming from my next-door neighbor in my building, in my office. And I got frustrated by it. Like, I felt like stress rise. I felt like, oh my gosh, this is loud. This is annoying me. Once I got past that, put my headphones in, turned on, you know, some white noise, and I was good to go. I had to change the environment because if I had to mentally fight that noise all day long, my battery would be drained. That's what I'm talking about when I say environmental factors. So focusing question for you today: how are your energy levels throughout the day? How are you feeling around 2, 3, 4 o'clock? If you are not feeling great, why might that be? What is causing that? I think we got to take a step back and analyze. Again, if you're going to be a high achiever, if you're going to outperform most everyone around you, if you want to hit these goals, all of this stuff matters. So why is that in fact happening? Let's assess. Now we'll probably come up with a few different ideas as to why that's happening. Cool. What action steps will you take in order to impact or eliminate, I should say, those problems and the symptoms that come from it. Something big to think about. This is something that I think we all should take a bit more seriously. Again, if you're a high achiever, you got to get out there and you got to get after it. You need energy to in fact do that. So on that note, it's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day, brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.