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 Drnks 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 Drhman 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.
