The Daily Habits Behind Low Energy

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman, the podcast where we explore the best of East and West, old and new, conventional and unconventional, in search of answers to medicine's toughest cases and most difficult problems. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Diagnostics and therapeutics discussed on this podcast may or may not be right for you, so talk to a qualified practitioner before taking action based on what you learn here. If you'd like to become a patient at at my practice, go to stillmanmd.com to schedule a complimentary discovery call. Thank you for listening and welcome to today's episode.

Do you feel like your energy has flatlined? We run into this all the time. Patients often describe their fatigue as being a flatline. They didn't crash. It doesn't go up and down. There's just no significant energy at any point during the day. There is this slow, stable, kind of miserable fatigue, always feeling like everything, whether it's doing the dishes or the laundry or just taking care of routine tasks at work, is like some kind of big project. Sadly, a lot of people get used to this and just think this is getting old. My experience has been quite the contrary of that, that this is something that is modifiable, that is predictable, and that with the right approach, we can solve. And that's today's topic for our video. So we had a case recently of a young woman who described her energy as just flatlined. She also described feeling like she had done everything right. She didn't just go to regular doctors when she started to feel fatigued and have health issues. She also then went to some integrative natural practitioners. She did the labs, she took the supplements, she followed the script and did not get great results. And this is the thing that really bothered me when I was operating in those types of practices. It's all well and good to come up with a very comprehensive and sophisticated supplement program and protocol. But as I like to say, the greatest medicine of all is teaching people how not to need it. And so before I'm coming up with a supplement protocol or prescribing a medication, I'm thinking to myself, what about this person's diet, lifestyle, environment, attitude, mental outlook is preventing them or keeping them exhausted? Okay, in almost all of these cases there is some component of this which is a lack of light during the day and darkness at night, or what we would call a circadian dysrhythmia or circadian disruption. There's many different ways to call that, but the basic idea is this: we need bright light during the day in order to tell our bodies that it's daytime. So why do we wake up in the morning? We wake up in the morning because light enters the environment and it's bright enough to wake us up even through our eyelids. Okay, over time this entrains or— in grains, you might say— our circadian rhythms so that they operate at the same time every day. And if you've never had consistency in your life, now is the time to start it, because the more consistent your daily routine, the better these rhythms become. And as we create order out of disorder, we often see that a lot of problems resolve. The reality is that people have a need for predictability. They also have a need for unpredictability. So I'm not telling you to script out your entire day. There's a place for spontaneity, there's a place for randomness, there's a place for Hey, we didn't plan this, but let's go do it because it'll be fun. But overwhelmingly, what people need in order to be healthy and well is they need a predictable daily routine. And really what drives that routine is actually light. So we need to get bright light early in the morning. It's why in the 14-Day Reset, the first thing that people are supposed to do is start with some kind of light therapy. Now, the simple, available to all of you, costs nothing, you can start it tomorrow Option is you go spend the first 5 minutes of your day in the brightest sunlight you can manage. Shout out to all my people living in very dark, cold places. It's not sunny in Bemidji, Minnesota in January most days, but hopefully you get my message here, which is that you should just go to the sunniest place that you can be. Why? You may not realize it, but your eye, because of how it's designed, it limits the amount of light coming in. And so you don't perceive how much brighter it is outside compared to inside, but what your brain does. And that's why people who live or operate or work in a dim environment often have a lot of health issues that go along with that. And when they get more and more daylight, they actually do better. This is also why one of the second habits of the 14-Day Reset is for people to go on 3 10-minute walks. I cannot tell you the life-changing stories I've heard from people about what it did for them to take 3 10-minute walks. It seems like it's not important. It's easy to blow off. It's easy to say, well, I'll just do that tomorrow. It's a game changer. So back to the story, a couple of things that we recommended. First, we recommended that she start her day with light. Then we recommended that she get the 3 10-minute walks, and then we recommended that she get darkness at night. So dimming the lights in the home. Today, people have these very bright overhead lights, and these overhead lights really have generally a very high color temperature. So for those of you who do not know anything about lighting, I didn't know anything about it either. It isn't that complicated. All lighting has a color temperature. So, the color temperatures that are high like 5,000 Kelvin, and they're measured in Kelvin, don't ask me why. The high color temperature lighting is full of blue and green light, and that wakes you up. Now, that's good if you want to wake up, but if you're trying to wind down, having very bright, very high color temperature area lighting is a recipe for disaster. This is one reason why so many people today are chronically exhausted. They are being bombarded with this high color temperature light. The effect of this light on the brain is to say, hey, It's the middle of the day and it's time for you to go out and do stuff. And if you really want to know how this works, this is actually really important at high latitudes like Scandinavia, Russia, Canada, Northern United States.

Why?

Because if you sleep through the summer in a place where it's really cold and dark in the winter, you will not chop enough firewood, you will not gather enough food, you will not dry enough food. Historically in those locations, the entire spring, summer, and fall were spent just gathering enough resources to be able to survive what was often a very dangerously cold winter, right? So your brain is designed to be awake when it's got bright full-spectrum light around, because otherwise people in those environments would have perished. So you really want to focus on getting your evening lighting right. And so I'll often tell people, just forget about the overhead lighting. Sure, it's all well and good if you want to go buy color temperature bulbs, or bulbs that are low blue light, or have a color temperature of 2500, 2200. Those are my favorite two color temperatures. They're the old-fashioned sort You'll, you'll think of an incandescent bulb if you're old enough to remember those, uh, when you see them. And so I tell people, buy those bulbs or for your overhead lights, or just buy area lights, small lamps, because they're dimmer anyway. You really don't want a lot of very bright light after dark. So a couple of area lamps, maybe a few overhead lights will illuminate everything you need at night and in the evening to get ready for bed. These couple of things have a huge, huge, huge impact on how well people recover. And what they often realize is that they feel like they haven't actually been resting for a long time. They have just been going and going and going. And a lot of this is actually being driven by the effects of artificial light on the central nervous system, which are grossly underappreciated by the vast majority of medical professionals. Although fortunately, thanks to social media, people are starting to wake up to this and they're starting to learn. And even in the mainstream, people are starting to wake up to how powerful light is after having forgotten about it for Frankly, generations of clinicians. So recap: outside time, particularly first thing in the morning, particularly first thing when you wake up, dimming things after dark, getting 3 10-minute walks. Those are 3 things we share with patients all the time in addition to slowing their breathing down in order to get the most out of their restorative time. I recently did a video on breathing mechanics and how important it is and how it can turn the nervous system on or off. Go check that out. Thank you for watching. Check out the 14-Day Reset. I mentioned it here. It's the first steps we share with every patient in the practice to get them started on their journey. They are the most impactful habits that I found after years of doing this and collaborating with other people with far more experience than me. Shout out particularly to my friend Jim Laird, who convinced me to put the 3 10-minute walks into our daily routine recommendations to our patients. Take care, everyone. Have a great day. Go check out The 14-Day Reset.