Why you're always tired

One of the most common problems I hear about nowadays, and I'm sure everyone else does, is this feeling of being chronically tired. Because sometimes it feels like no matter how much sleep you get, you just can't seem to perk up, feel energetic for most of the day, every single day, so that you can tackle your day and your life with energy. You know, this lack of energy throughout the day, this chronic tiredness is something that you would expect to happen to you if you were like 60 years old, 70, 80 years old, but it's happening to 20 and 30-year-olds, 15-year-olds, young people who are supposed to have this youthful exuberance to them. But they find themselves operating in life with a sluggishness and dread.

Believe me, I've been there. I've been there so many times in my life. So many times, in fact, that it really caused me to dive deep and figure out what are the things that are actually going to contribute to me having more energy and how do I make those things happen every single day. And through all my research and self-experimentation, I’ve found out that the most important things are kind of the things that you hear all the time: sleep, exercise, and diet. You might be tempted now to click away from this video because you already know this, but that's exactly where I ran into problems. I was treating sleep, exercise, and diet like a checklist.

It's like, yeah, I get a reasonable amount of sleep. I exercise. I'm an athletic guy. Yeah, I eat food. So those things can't be the reason why I'm feeling sluggish. So I started looking for these like quick tips, and maybe I was iron deficient, or maybe I had a gluten sensitivity, or maybe I needed to decalcify my pineal gland. I skipped over the fundamentals in search for some miracle pill that would make me less tired throughout the day. It wasn't until I revisited the basics and tried to absolutely nail them that I realized that was the problem the whole time, especially sleep.

So in this video, I wanna go over some things that I've implemented in my life that really has given me a lot more energy throughout the day on a consistent basis. And yeah, hopefully, they work for you as well.

[Narrator] Are you always tired? Do you move around the house? Dreaming big dreams but like the energy to make them come true? Well, maybe it's because you suck. (bright upbeat music) What the fuck?

Okay, so thing number one, I stopped misusing caffeine. Now caffeine is one of those weird ones. People think they know a lot about how caffeine works. You know, you’ve probably heard that caffeine lasts between five and seven hours. So, you know, don't drink too much caffeine in the afternoon, or you might not be able to fall asleep. But the weird thing about caffeine is that it lasts a lot longer than five to seven hours. The half-life of caffeine is five to seven hours. And half-life means that after five to seven hours, half the caffeine is still in your system.

And then it takes another five to seven hours after that for half of that amount of caffeine to leave your system. So if you have a cup of coffee at like 4:00 PM, which is, you know, kind of late, but it's probably not gonna ruin your sleep or something like that. Think again, if you have coffee at 4:00 PM, by 11:00 PM, there's a good chance that 50% of that caffeine is still in your system. That means by like 5:00 AM, there's a good chance that a quarter of the original 4:00 PM cup of coffee is still in your system.

You know, deep into the night is when you're supposed to be having some of your deepest, most restorative sleep of your life. This is the kind of sleep that helps you form memories, process the information you were bombarded with throughout the day, form connections, form new ideas, so that you can be more creative. The kind of sleep that's supposed to be healing your muscle tissues, purging your body of adenosine so that you don't feel tired in the morning. There's a lot of important things that are going on while you're sleeping, and your body being filled with this caffeine is seriously inhibiting those processes.

So the simple tweak that I did that helped me not misuse caffeine is to just not drink caffeine past lunchtime. I have the one that I wake up with in the morning. And since I'm a little bit of a caffeine fiend, I have another one about two hours after that to really get my morning productivity, the kind of meth head high that I'm looking for. I'll still get the caffeine crash late after lunch. I expect that, it's the kind of game you play. If you're a caffeine addict like me, but at least when I want to put my head on the pillow after a hard day's work, I'm actually able to get the sleep that my body needs.

So do not drink caffeine past 12:00 PM. Just don't do it. The other thing that I started implementing was I gave myself a lot more sleep opportunity. Everyone's heard that you need eight hours of sleep a night, but the truth is in order to sleep for that long, you probably need to be in bed for longer. I take about half an hour to 45 minutes to fall asleep every single night. So I need to be in bed half an hour or 45 minutes earlier than I'm planning on falling asleep.

And that makes sure that I actually get the sleep that I need every single night. Because the benefits of a good night's sleep is something that's cumulative. You know, if you give yourself that much opportunity every single night, your amount of sleep baseline will go up over a long period of time. And you'll kind of work off your sleep debt. You'll work off your sleep deprivation that you've been chronically plagued with. All you need to do is give yourself more opportunity to sleep.

The other thing that I did was I fixed my circadian rhythm. For those of you who don't know, your circadian rhythm has sort of like this internal clock that tells your brain whether it's daytime or nighttime. When you should be given energy, and when you should slow down and get ready for bed. And a lot of your circadian rhythm is dictated by sunlight. How bright it is around you, how dark it is around you.

Which is why you've heard that you shouldn't go on social media or on smartphones, or look at screens right before bed, which is very, very true. When you're looking at all this blue light, your brain thinks that it's daytime. So it's not giving you the melatonin that you need, that your brain needs to know that it's like time to slow down and go to bed now. So one thing that's really helped me is to not look at screens right before I go to bed. And especially not in bed.

That way my brain can actually start producing adequate melatonin. You know, I can start slowing down psychologically. And by the time my head hits the pillow during my little sleep opportunity window, I'm out like a light. The other thing I did to fix my circadian rhythms was I pinned a black blanket over my windows because I'm a barbarian with no sense of interior design. But what that did was when it's the earlier hours of the morning when I'm still sleeping, like 5:00 AM, 6:00 AM, 7:00 AM.

I still want it to be dark so I can still be deep in sleep, getting as much high-quality sleep as I can. Rather than having all this sun blasting in the window interrupting my hard-earned slumber. So make your room darker so that for the time you're asleep your brain thinks it's nighttime and that you should be sleeping.

And the last thing that I implemented to improve my sleep seems like a little quick fix. I don’t know if this applies to you. But I was reading this book called Breath by James Nestor, and he talked about the benefits of nasal breathing as opposed to mouth breathing. And I noticed that when I put my head on my pillow every night, my nose gets really congested. And I end up opting in the middle of the night to mouth breathing. And in the book, he talks about how nasal breathing is a lot better for you.

So anyways, if you can't breathe out of your nose at night, fix that. I fixed it by using Breathe Right strips. This video is not sponsored by Breathe Right, but that's just what I did. And they work for me. I'll put a Amazon, actually, I'm not going to put an Amazon, like just type in Breathe Right strips.

Okay, so let's talk about exercise. There is a fascinating link between your psychology and your physiology. It seems like what's good for the body is also good for the mind. It's the reason why power posing somehow, you know like you're like standing up and putting your hands on your hips or whatever, that kind of stuff increases testosterone. It's bizarre to think of it, but literally just power posing, feeling powerful lowers your cortisol, which is your stress hormone and increases your testosterone, making you feel more confident and powerful.

And you hear so many accounts of people who fix their posture, which allowed them to go about the day with more confidence. It's like a chicken or the egg thing. They fixed their physiology, which translated into benefits for their psychology. The only reason why I'm saying this is because one of the most effective ways that you can have more energy throughout the day is to move your body.

[Narrator] See how the hips act as a pivot.

You would think that if everyone had the same baseline energy to work with, that if you expend that energy by being active, you'll have less energy throughout the day. But the exact opposite is true. People who regularly expend their energy have a higher baseline of energy to expend.

[Trainer] He's tight with the buttocks and slowly put the buttocks way back.

It's almost like there's a golden rule baked into the universe that says, "That which costeth energy, giveth energy." I should probably make a t-shirt with that.

[Narrator] It wasn't long before Ernie began to feel the benefits of his regular exercise.

So you might be thinking, Joey, you're an active guy. You go to the gym, you play hockey. So that probably wasn't that big of a problem for you. Well, it turns out it was. I play hockey once or twice in the evenings. And then I go to the gym for like half an hour to 45 minutes to do some heavy lifting three to four times a week. But I spend the rest of that time by and large sitting on my butt, editing videos, writing content, whatever.

This sedentary lifestyle was draining my energy. So I made a simple tweak. Not only do I make sure I get out and take a walk every single day, I do something to get out of the house, get moving, but I also bought a standing desk. So I spend a large portion of my time when I'm being productive, standing up on my desk rather than sitting down. And this has that power posing effect. The fact that I'm standing up, my body kind of learns that I'm more active and I'm somebody who stands up. So it's like here have more energy.

So use this weird phenomenon to your advantage. Make sure that every single day you're getting up, out of your chair, you're going for a walk. You know, a minute, every hour, three to five minutes every hour. If you wanna be ambitious, get up from your chair, go for a walk, go do something. The energy benefits will come in droves.

[Singer] ♪ Take good care of yourself ♪ ♪ It's so easy ♪

And now just briefly I'm actually not gonna talk about diet because I feel like I don't want to add to the noise. One thing I've learned is that it's really genetically dependent. If your ancestors were from a certain part of the universe, maybe a Paleo diet works better for you. Maybe you have a gluten sensitivity. By and large though, avoid packaged food, avoid sugar, drink enough water. You know, all these things.

There's a million diets that you can look up on the internet. If you're putting a reasonable amount of effort into what you're putting into your body, and you're not taking care of your sleep or exercise, you'll probably still be sluggish. It's the combination of these three things, especially sleep, especially exercise with like a reasonable effort put into your diet. You'll have energy to work with.

You know, you'll finally be somebody who is perky, who has energy, who can tackle their daily tasks and actually get things done without constantly feeling like somebody is just dragging you down, holding onto your shirt and just like covering your eyes all the time. I don't think that was a terrible analogy.

I just want to give a big thank you to Audible for sponsoring this video. And I actually only made this video because I started reading the book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker on Audible. It was just like a really fascinating book. Talking about the benefits of sleep, the complex mechanics that go on under the surface. You know, it talked about the mechanics of dreams, which is some Christopher Nolan stuff.

And I'd highly recommend the Audible version specifically because the guy who's narrating it has just such a golden voice, and you can listen to it as you're drifting off into slumber. And for those of you who don't know, Audible is the leading provider of spoken word entertainment and audiobooks, ranging from best sellers to celebrity memoirs, to news, business, and self-development.

Every single month, Audible sends you one credit, which you can spend on any audiobook of your choosing, regardless of price. Audible members also get instant access to a bunch of news digests and guided meditation programs, which is also pretty cool. And by far, one of the most useful things about Audible is that if you cancel your membership for any reason at any time, you still keep your entire library of audiobooks, including the books that you got for free using their credit system.

So to sign up for your free 30-day trial, either click the link in the description below, or text "betterideas" to 500 500. Once again, to sign up for your free 30-day trial, click the link in the description below or text "betterideas" to 500-500. Thanks so much for watching, guys. As usual, if you liked this video, make sure you hit like, because the algorithm does its magic. It works its magic.

And it actually recommends my video depending on how many likes it gets and how many comments it gets. If you're lurking here and you haven't subscribed yet, make sure you hit subscribe because there's just, there's more of this where this came from. There's more of that. There's more of this video where I, there's more of me where I came from. There's more where that came from. There's more where that came from. (bright upbeat music)