PPI #172: How to Stop Being Tired All the Time

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 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 Three 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, end up feeling quite sluggish and drained, you know, throughout the day, but especially when I would get around to the mid afternoon, then I would really crash, you know, between 2:30 and say Friday 4:30, I'd have about 80% tank of gas, you know, 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 kind of day job. But I never had the energy for it. And maybe you can relate to this, you know, 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 struggle because you struggle 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 know, 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. You know, eventually we get tired, we have to go to sleep. So you want that decline to start from the highest point possible. And what, what research shows is that by exercising in the morning you're spiking that first kind of 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, like, 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, it's kind of hard to feel tired and exhausted and, you know, 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. So powerful, in fact, that they 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 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 kind of 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 food, foods that are not made in factories, that are not processed. So, you know, a bag of chips is not a great choice. A potato, actually, that grows in the ground, that's a much better choice. So kind of think of it as, if I can't find this food somewhere kind of like naturally, you know, like in nature. If I can't find it, if it only comes out of, you know, 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, you know, 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 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 sort of think of it as like 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. You know, 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 kind of 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. You know, 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, means that I have like 16 hours a day that my body's just completely cleansing itself and there's no, you know, like, food, you know, 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, that's, you know, again, you want to kind of 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, you know, almost like 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 these other reasons. But. But I think the energy improvement is reason enough to optimize your sleep. Now, a lot of people would love to 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 would wake up at. I might wake up, for example, in the middle of the night to use the bathroom at like 2:33 in the morning or something. And then, boom, I wouldn't be able to fall back asleep. And I just end up getting up. I mean, there. I remember once I went to bed at midnight. I Woke up at 1:50. So like 1 hour and 50 minutes later and I just stayed up and I started working and went all the way, you know, 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 8 hours of sleep a night. You know, the exact range is 7 to 9. I think the international average, that range is about 8 hours and 15 minutes. But it can go from about 7 to 9 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 you know, 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. Like 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, you know, getting some professional advice. You know, 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 Three 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 Three Alarms.