Constantly Tired And Lethargic? Read This Article

Introduction

Many people, especially in hot weather, feel lethargic during the day. There are many reasons for this, but we will focus on the basics here. Just know that your lethargy and tiredness could be a sign of an underlying medical condition if you feel very tired all the time.

However, there are some basics to nail before going to see a doctor. And, in this article, I’ll try to help you nail them and explain to you what these basics are to beat fatigue and gain more energy, both in the afternoon and, as you’ll see, throughout the day.

So, let’s begin.

The importance of sleep

Sleep is way more crucial to the human body than you probably think. Sleep is a quintessential activity if you want your body to work properly. Think about it, it’s the phase where your body repairs itself, produces, sends, and receives tons of hormones, makes you grow in both bones and muscularity, as well as growing your hair, and your nails, and regenerating your skin, whilst digesting your food, breaking it down, using it for fuel, etc.

Without enough hours of sleep or with a low sleep quality you will run low on energy. This can make you feel constantly tired in the afternoon for example (if you’ve not slept enough you might have some energy at the beginning of the day but then it crashes), or it can also make you feel constantly tired during the whole day.

You need to get enough hours of sleep, which means you need at least 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. 7 hours is generally a great guideline for the vast majority of people. Some very rare individuals can survive very well on 6 hours or even lower, but in the majority of cases, you want to sleep 7 to 9 hours per day.

The more you are in your “growing stage”, which means puberty and young adulthood, the more you want to rest because your body is producing a lot. The older you get, more often than not, the less you will sleep, whether you want it or not (a lot of older people say they can only sleep a few hours, and then they wake up randomly, and some of them are still in excellent health).

Here is a quote from Andrew Huberman, Ph.D, a neuroscientist at the University of Stanford and a globally known podcaster: “Best nootropic: sleep Best stress relief: sleep Best trauma release: sleep Best immune booster: sleep Best hormone augmentation: sleep Best emotional stabilizer: sleep”

To be simple: sleep is crucial, especially if you think, work, and exercise a lot. You need to really sleep a lot if you want to be at your maximum “healthiness”. But, sleeping a lot can mean 7 hours like it can mean 9 hours, it doesn’t necessarily mean 10 hours or more.

The goal here is both quality and quantity, but the best is to focus on the quality of your sleep. It’s better to get 6 hours of deep sleep than 10 hours of shallow sleep. This is why you need to nail a few principles in order to better your sleep.

The first thing you want to do is to sleep in TOTAL darkness. Even a small LED light should be turned off preferably. You really want to sleep in total darkness because we don’t want any small or dim light to affect our sleep. Even the smallest light could possibly affect it, so better to forget about it.

The second thing you want to do is to preferably have NO SOUNDS around you. You want to sleep in silence, with no one speaking, no TV playing, nothing. You want to fall asleep in total darkness and in total silence. If you live with a particularly loud family, simply use earplugs for example.

The third thing you want to do is to sleep on your back or on your side, but if you sleep on your side, make sure you’re fully on your side and that both of your feet are aligned on top of eachother.

The fourth thing you want to do is to avoid caffeine before bed (you can take it in the morning, 90 minutes after waking up because the system in your body that processes caffeine only wakes up 90 minutes after you wake up, so before that, it’s purely mental and caffeine has no true effects on your energy levels), and to avoid hyper stimulants such as junk food, video games, smoking, social-media before bed. Also, try to avoid screen time before bed, as it could suppress melatonin production (the production of the hormone melatonin, which is a huge hormone responsible for making you fall asleep).

The fifth thing you want to do is not eat too close to bedtime. This could be too heavy on the stomach and it could impact negatively your sleep.

Finally, the most important thing you can get out of this article is to wake up at the same time every day and go to sleep at the same time every day. There is a rough “interval” of 30 minutes where you can wake up or go to sleep. For example, if you usually wake up every day at 7:30 AM and go to sleep at 10:30 PM, you can wake up at 7:00 AM and go to sleep at 10:00 PM, and you can also wake up at 8:00 AM and go to sleep at 11 PM, and you can also wake up at 7:42 AM and go to sleep at 10:12 PM, etc. It doesn’t matter much, simply stay in this interval of 30 minutes and you should be fine.

But why doing this? Well, in our bodies, we have a sort of internal clock called the circadian rhythm. Think of it very simply (I’ll reduce the circadian rhythm to a very simple system even tho it’s a very complicated mechanism in our body, but it’s for the sake of simplicity of explanation), think of it as a clock that depends on light. Depending if the sun is up or down, and in function of the time you go to sleep, your body and brain understand when to shut off, send hormones, and boost energy. In other words, it gets used to the sleep schedules you follow.

For the same sleeping time, your sleep quality will improve, because your body simply knows that from 10:30 PM to 7:30 AM, you’re sleeping. So, since it knows that on most days it’s working like that, it’s sending sleep hormones and all that stuff at this time. For example, in the first 30 minutes of sleeping, your body will produce way more HGH (human growth hormone) than in the other stages. If you miss this, just like you can miss a bus, your body's internal clock will move on to other stages of sleep.

This is why trying to go to sleep at exactly the same hour every day is better than the thirty-minute interval, but the thirty-minute interval is generally fine too, and it's obviously more realistic.

Also, when you wake up, go and practice sunlight exposure in the first three hours of your day. Exposing yourself to sunlight is CRUCIAL because it sends messages to your body's internal clock. Also, to wake up more easily, boost your energy, and help with your dopamine system, go and do cold exposure, whether that’s jumping in a pool, taking an ice bath, or taking a cold shower. Suffer straight in the morning through cold exposure (maybe expose your neck more so it’s way harder to resist the cold, etc) so it wakes your mind and your body too.

For sunlight exposure, practice it for 5 to 10 minutes on sunny days, looking at the direction of the sun (so sunlights enter your eyes directly) but not looking at the sun directly (so as to not burn your eyes). More is preferable but 5 to 10 minutes seems the most sustainable approach. You can read for example with a book oriented toward the sun.

On cloudy days, watch directly the sky for 10 to 20 minutes. On both sunny and cloudy days, don’t practice morning sunlight exposure behind a window or a windshield. It will not work. Remove sunglasses too. Expose your eyes without anything blocking their view, or else the process will take too long and will therefore not work. Glasses and contact lenses are fine.

If you can’t have access to the sun or natural light in the morning (maybe you wake up too early), then I suggest exposing yourself to artificial bright light. Turn on the maximum of lights you can for example. It’s suboptimal but can still help.

At night, you can take a warm bath or shower to ease your body into a sleeping mood, and reduce your light exposure or expose yourself only to red light. Focus on relaxation, and you can even meditate.

The importance of meals

I’ll go straight to the point there: avoid heavy meals. Heavy meals can push your body to go into heavy digestion and therefore it can sap a lot of energy away from your body, especially in the afternoon after eating. In fact, the windows where most drivers tend to be tired are late at night but also early in the afternoon.

So, try to opt either for lighter meals or make sure to digest correctly before moving on. You can eat heavy meals, just make sure that you can digest them proprely. Be careful of carbs, especially refined carbs (pasta, refined sugar, etc) as not only is it unhealthy but it's also often causing energetic crashes.

Eat natural, healthy foods that are good for you and fuel you with energy whilst not abusing carbs (especially refined carbs), and you’ll probably have made a step toward helping your body be more energetic in the afternoon.

Movement

To not be lethargic or tired in the afternoon, try to move. Go for a small walk after eating, maybe exercise in the morning or in the afternoon, go and do something. If you don’t move and stay seated for most of the morning and the afternoon, you’re undeniably going to be tired and lethargic. Leaving like a modern human leads to being healthy like a modern human, which is often deeply unhealthy.

Supplementation

Supplementation can also help boost your overall energy levels, even tho this should probably be the least of your priorities in the "energy boosting methods", as diet should always be the number one priority. Vitamin D, Magnesium, Iron, Zinc, and Multivitamins, all of these can help you gain more energy in the day. Creatine can also help you get a quick burst of energy in the day.

If all of the strategies I’ve given don’t work, maybe go and see a doctor if the problem really prolongs itself. I remember that when I used to be in this situation, the causes were clear: heavy meals with a lot of carbs, sitting all day long, taking caffeine which caused an afternoon energy crash, high temperatures, etc.

The best is to live, in my opinion, without caffeine (or with caffeine rarely) and to simply eat low carbs, and healthy meals, to keep your body moving and to sleep well and wake up early in the morning. In this way, you can improve your health and sleep immeasurably.

But remember that sometimes your energy levels will be lower. If you had a bad night of sleep, for example, your energy might dip during the day. But these should stay as occasional problems and shouldn’t occur too often.

If you feel energetic dips too often despite optimizing correctly your sleep, your morning routines, and your exercising habits as well as your diet, go to a doctor. Fatigue is a sign of a lot of health problems, some serious and some less serious, so go and consult with a medical profesional to make sure nothing dangerous is causing you this fatigue.

Conclusion

Try to get moving, to eat a better, more natural diet, and to improve your sleep. In this manner, you will have set the fundamentals to fix your energy problem. Staying at a cooler temperature and meditating could also help, as well as practicing NSDR (Non-Sleep-Deep-Rest) throughout the day, etc.

As always, I hope this article was of help to you. Thank you for reading, and, as always, I'll see you next time.