Boost Your Energy: 4 Effective Tips to Combat Tiredness

if you feel like you're always tired then you're probably not alone one in eight people in the UK for example feel

tired all the time and one in four feel tired most of the time and according to this poll around 50% of people would

prefer an extra hour of sleep than to be given 20 lb now obviously nothing beats at good night's sleep for feeling more

energized but sometimes our schedules just don't allow for it and we need some other hacks or methods to feel less

tired so in this video we're going to be looking at four things that you can do to boost your energy throughout the day

oh and by the way if new here hello my name is Ali I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur and I'm the author of the

book Feelgood productivity which is about how to be more productive in a way that feels good and on this channel I've

been making videos for the last 7 years that explore ideas and books and tools and strategies that we can use to help

build a life that we love anyway let's go on to tip number one for boosting your energy which is to cut the caffeine

now based on nutrition surveys in the US we know that just under 90% of adults consume caffeine every single day

caffeine is found naturally in things like tea and coffee and chocolate it's added to Drinks like Coke and energy

drinks and workout supplements and most people caffeinate themselves every single day including myself to feel more

awake and energized but I'm not sure if you've ever found yourself in this cycle where firstly you wake up feeling tired

and so you drink tea or you have a coffee now this might stop you feeling tired during that moment but it can

often be a struggle than to sleep at night and then you wake up feeling even more tired the next day and you consume

even more caffeine so one reason why you might be feeling tired a lot is because you're consuming too much caffeine or

potentially even taking it at the wrong time and to solve this problem we need to understand how CA caffeine Works in

our bodies so the reason why caffeine makes you feel more awake is because it blocks adenosine receptors normally

adenosine which is a chemical in our bodies binds to adenosine receptors and it makes us feel tired and adenosine

builds up in our bodies during the day so that in the evening we feel tired and we can fall asleep but because caffeine

is a very similar shape to adenosine it also binds to those adenosine receptors this then blocks the adenosine receptor

and so now adenosine can't make us feel sleepy and instead we feel more alert and awake now you might have heard the

stat that it takes about 5 hours for caffeine to be cleared from the body but but what most people don't realize about

that stat is that that's actually the average half life of caffeine so this means that after 5 hours the level of

caffeine in your body will be reduced by half after 10 hours it'll be down to 25% and then 15 hours later it'll be at

12.5% and this is actually crucially not zero so if you consume caffeine in the morning then you'll probably fall asleep

okay because most of it will have been cleared from your body by the time you go to bed but caffeine later in the day

is not ideal because you'll still have a lot of caffeine in your body by the time you're trying to go to sleep and this is

going to stop adenosine from binding to The receptors which means the adenosine can't help you fall asleep so all of

this to say if you're going to drink caffeine the best time to drink caffeine is ideally before or during lunch and

actually drinking caffeine at any time in the afternoon is probably a bit late and it does put your sleep at risk now

unfortunately on top of that you probably don't want to drink caffeine immediately upon waking up either and

we're going to cite Andrew huberman here you wake up in the morning and your adenosine levels are low but they're not

zero and if you didn't sleep that well or deeply enough the night before you're going to have more adenosine in your

system you might think the logical thing to do is therefore to drink caffeine and to block the adenosine that's there but

what happens if you do that is there's an accumulation a sort of glut of adenosine that hangs around and then in

the afternoon when the effects of that caffeine start to wear off you will experience the so-called afternoon crash

so what Dr hman recommends is waiting 90 minutes to 2 hours after waking up to drink your first hit of caffeine but

another key reason why you might be feeling tired is related to your emotional well-being and mental health

and one way of improving that is with therapy provided by betterhelp who are very kindly the paid partner of this

video now I actually used better help last year when I was experiencing various bits of stress in my life some

of which I talked about on this YouTube channel and the sessions I had with the better help therapist were actually

really helpful so when I first got started I filled out a few questions and they matched me with a credential

therapist but the nice thing is that if you don't Vibe with your therapist for whatever reason you can switch to a

completely different one free of charge then you can talk to your therapist however you feel comfortable whether

it's via message or chat or phone or video call in my case I chose to have video calls with my therapist because

it's just nicer Vibes and the therapist I spoke to was super supportive and friendly and actually knew what they

were doing various of my stresses that we were talking about were related specifically to the business and even

though the therapist wasn't an experienced business coach or anything like that the fact that he was a

qualified therapist meant that he was able to get to the underlying emotional core of what I thought were business

strategy problems but actually what was going on was far more like emotional deep inner work underneath all that with

better help you can tap into a network of credentialed and experienced therapists who can help you with a wide

range of issues all remotely and regardless of whether you have a clinical mental health issue like

depression or anxiety or if you are merely a human being who lives through the world and who is going through a

hard time therapy can give you the tools to approach your life or in my case business in a very different way so if

you're struggling and think you'd benefit from a therapy session then you can check out the link in the video

description or you could go to betterhelp.com Al abdal and that will get you 10% off your first month of

therapy so thank you so much betterhelp for being the paid partner on this video Let's now talk about strategy number two

for staying more energized and less tired during the day now the idea here is a key core concept that I talk about

in my book Feelgood productivity which is that when we can find a way to make our work feel good to make our work

enjoyable that is a massive source of energy when you're feeling good and generating positive emotions related to

work or anything else you're doing that causes you to be more productive it causes you to be more creative it causes

you to be less stressed but it also generates energy that we can then give to the other important areas of our life

and you've probably experienced this right like if you're at work and you're doing something that you feel is

absorbing you in like a good way it's sufficiently challenging maybe you're in the Flow State maybe you're sort of

approaching it with a healthy amount of lightness and ease doing the work can actually be quite energizing yes you're

using mental effort and you might even be doing something physical so you'd be using energy but you'd be getting energy

in return but we've all had those experiences where you're working on something that is so mind numbingly

tedious and boring and it seems to suck away our energy even though maybe it just involves typing on a keyboard or

something it doesn't actually use that much energy like physically but it sucks away our motivational energy our Vigor

our zest these are all different terms that scientists use to describe this sort of mental energy that we're talking

about generally when we say that we feel very tired now when it comes to enjoying our work there there are sort of two

axes upon which this can work firstly there's choosing to do things that are inherently enjoyable which actually is

quite a privileged position most of us probably aren't in the position where the work we happen to be doing also

happens to be really fun if you're in that position then you're very lucky and so there's another AIS that we can work

on which is finding a way to enjoy the things that we happen to be doing now I really like the story from my friend

Matthew Dix here he used to work at McDonald's when he was younger and he was working at the McDonald's

drive-through and he found ways to make the process feel more like a game so for example uh he would decide that on a

Monday was barbecue sauce day and on a Tuesday was sweet and sour sauce day and so on a Monday what he would do is that

whenever a customer would go through the drive-thru they would order their order from whatever burger fries blah blah

blah and then he would ask them would you like barbecue sauce with that and they might say no and then he would he

would kind of insist he'd say Hey you know you sure about that the barbecue sauce is really tasty you know my last

customer said that she didn't want the barbecue sauce and then she tried it and was really happy and so he made it a bit

of a challenge to himself to upsell his customers on barbecue sauce on a Monday sweet and sour sauce on a Tuesday

mayonnaise on a Wednesday whatever the thing might be he found a way to add this arbitrary challenge a little bit of

a game into his otherwise mind-numbingly tedious and boring job and if this guy can do this at something like working on

a McDonald's drive-through you can probably find a way to do that with your job if you're watching this channel

you're probably some kind of knowledge worker you probably use your brain to create value in some sort of way maybe

you might be a student which involves a lot of brain power to sort of memorize things there are always ways to make

whatever we're doing just 10% more enjoyable if you're interested this is literally what my entire book is about

we've got the three PS play power in people firstly we find a way to bring play into whatever we're doing

approaching it with more of a sense of lightness and ease and there's a bunch of strategies for that secondly we try

and approach it with a sense of power so actually taking ownership and responsibility for the thing we've all

had the experience that when you're being micromanaged by a boss or something like that like it sort of

sucks a bit of the energy out of doing the work whereas when it's your own project and you're feeling like you can

take the initiative and you really own the thing even if the thing is really hard it can be a source of energy and

the third PE is for people we are social creatures all of us even the most introverted amongst us and being

surrounded by other people finding a way to help out the people around us finding a way to connect our work to some sort

of purpose Beyond ourselves all of that makes the work a lot more energizing and so my whole point with this is that if

you're feeling like you're tired all the time or most of the time if you're feeling like your job sucks and sucks

your energy away we yeah one option is quit your job Follow Your Passion become a YouTuber for goodness sake that's one

option but if you know in most scenarios that might not be possible at least right now and so the alternative is to

take the thing that you have already that thing that job that you already have and find a way to make it a little

bit more enjoyable it might sound too good to be true people always like well screw you you're a YouTuber you can't

tell me I can make my job more fun etc etc I would say look there's loads of evidence around this psychologists and

scientists have done research on this there are reliably ways to increase the amount of enjoyment you're getting from

whatever you're doing but here's a little sound bite from a conversation I had with psychologist Julie Smith about

this exact Topic in reality most most people have a job that they would didn't dream of or wouldn't choose if they

could choose any job in the world right they're just they're trying to feed the families and keep a roof over their

heads and this is where they've landed and rather than that kind of you've got to leave your job and fill the risk and

create a you know your own company and and all of these things that in reality are really far from where most people

are able to to get to um because of life's limitations um actually it doesn't mean

then you've got to just endure hardship and and awfulness if you hate your job you can you can work on improving what

is even if you have you know Ambitions of of doing other things that's not the only way yeah and I guess with any job

however difficult or kind of emotionally taxing is there's always something to be grateful for or something to find in

that we feel thankful for or find even the slightest pleasure in so the key takeaway here is to try your best to

turn your work into a source of energy by making it fun make it more enjoyable if it's enjoyable it's energizing

something that my friend and executive Coach Joe Hudson says is enjoyment equals efficiency the more you're able

to find enjoyment in whatever you're doing the more energy you're going to derive from it and therefore you won't

be so tired all the time all right let's move on to strategy number three so a lot of us are familiar with

qutis ol which is the stress hormone and it is true that high levels of cortisol over long periods of time can be pretty

bad for our health but we shouldn't forget that cortisol is actually really important in helping us wake up and go

to sleep at night and cortisol essentially does the opposite of adenosine so we talked about how

adenosine levels rise during the day and this creates what we call Sleep pressure and so we fall asleep at night but

cortisol levels actually Peak right in the morning within the first hour after we wake up and we want cortisol to be

low by the time we go to bed now this morning Spike in cortisol is what we call the cortisol Awakening response

that C and we help reinforce this if we move our body first thing in the morning because exercise also temporarily

increases our cortisol now this was a pretty interesting study and it looked to see how exercise affects what we call

Sleep inertia which is that very relatable feeling of grogginess when you first wake up and apparently this

feeling can actually last for up to 3 hours but this is what happened in the experiment so a bunch of people had to

stay awake all night but they took a 2-hour nap at midnight when they woke up they had to do 30 seconds of

high-intensity cycling on a stationary bike and then the researchers took a load of different measurements after

after four nights the experiment was repeated a second time but after the nap they did 30 seconds of low intensity

exercise instead and then after another four nights they repeated the experiment but this time after the nap they didn't

do any exercise now the results of this study showed two key things so firstly people felt the least tired after high

intensity cycling but a more interesting result was that cortisol or the C cortisol Awakening response was highest

after high intensity exercise as well so this tells us that pretty intense exercise can help you feel less groggy

and more energized after wake up which is really cool and it's something you might like to try out for yourself in my

case I've decided I don't like doing high-intensity exercise first thing in the morning but I do low intensity

exercise and I try my best to go for a little walk back when I was living in London I used to go for a nice walk

around region Park sometimes while going on a walk I listen to a podcast or an audio book sometimes I just sit with my

thoughts and try and be a little bit mindful sometimes I use an app called voice pal that me and my friends are

built as a sort of Ghost Writer in your pocket but whatever I'm doing on the walk I found that on the days where I go

for the walk I feel a lot less tired than on the days where I was scrolling social media on the toilet instead for

an extended period of time there are other times that you can strategically exercise so for example I don't like

working out in the morning but I actually quite like working out in the afternoon straight after lunch because

it helps me avoid that afternoon slump where energy levels are pretty low and although you might have heard people say

that exercise at night makes your sleep worse apparently this isn't actually true as this research paper said which

took data from a lot of studies neither exercise intensity or timing had an effect on Sleep Quality now we come to

tip number four which pairs very nicely with the morning exercise as well so if we look at what cortisol does in the

morning when you're not exposed to Bright Light this is the graph we see you can see the cortisol kind of

releases slowly but there is a big difference in that morning cortisol Spike when we get bright sunlight first

thing in the morning you can see that there's a much sharper increase in cortisol and this helps us feel more

alert right at the start of the day and again this is all just part of this cortisol Awakening response that we saw

before so the key thing here is that if you want to feel less tired during the day try your best to get morning

sunlight now this helps with the cortisol Awakening response but it also has a bunch of other benefits so firstly

sunlight helps our bodies make serotonin which boosts our mood and generally makes us feel happy here here is my

friend and neuroscientist TJ power on this topic if for example right now like you are waking up and you have like a

bit of a check of your phone and you don't like really make your bed and you kind of gradually get the day started if

tomorrow morning you have an extremely disciplined morning where you wake up you immediately go and brush your teeth

and splash cold water on your face you come back you make your bed and then you go and get your sunlight before you see

social media if you make only your goal that you then going to suddenly think wow you're going to have a huge

elevation of dopamine and serotonin in your brain which is going to have give you energy a better mood and more

motivation secondly melatonin is one of the hormones that contributes to feeling sleepy and having exposure to Bright

Light in the morning tells your brain to stop making melatonin and so you feel less tired thirdly morning sunlight

helps keep our internal body clock or Cadian rhythm in check and what it does is that morning sunlight basically tells

our brain to set an internal timer so that about 14 hours later you'll start to make melatonin again so if you wake

up around 7:00 a.m. then around 9:00 p.m. you'll start to feel sleepy and light is a really powerful signal that

basically synchronizes our internal body clock or zadian rhythm with the external day night cycle and that's why generally

it's better for our health if we are awake and alert during light hours and we're asleep when it's dark I've even

spoken to Professor Russell Foster on my podcast Deep dive who is a sleep expert and he's done loads and loads of

research on circadian rhythms so in the nursing home environment uh where it's many individuals don't get out very much

and where sleep wake is really awful in some cases and indeed the light environment Alan suan uh wonderful

colleague from the Netherlands you know put in the nursing home en environment big Banks of Lights of producing a th000

to 2,000 Lux um darkness in the bedrooms and con Consolidated really ragged sleep weight profiles into much more robust

sleep weight profiles and what was interesting is that those individuals who showed um a stable sleep weight

profile uh their cognition went up by almost 10% so there's a very nice correlation there with improved sleep

and cognition in the LD simply by regulating the Cadian system so the key takeaway here is that we want to be

getting sunlight as soon as possible after we wake up ideally in that first hour when cortisol normally spikes again

we're going to cite Andrew hubman who tweeted The Following on clear days do 5 to 10 minutes overcast days 20 to 30

minutes don't stare and of course one of the easiest ways to do this is to go on a walk first thing in the morning and

that way you combine both morning sunlight with the morning exercise thing alternatively if you can't do that then

you want to try your best to flood your indoor environment with lots of natural light by opening the curtains and the

windows the obvious stuff and you can always try one of those like sad lamps or the Lumi lamps or any of these lamps

that mimic natural sunlight if you're in a place that's particularly dark or particularly cold and if you're someone

who might be struggling to get off your phone at night and that is one thing that's ruining your sleep and

contributing to you feeling tired during the day and I'd love for you to watch this video that I recently made about

how to quit your phone addiction so that brings us to the end of the video thank you so much for watching I hope you took

at least one thing away from this that you might be able to apply to your life to help build a life that you love

thanks for watching and I'll see you hopefully in the next video bye-bye