5 Reasons You’re Tired All The Time + How To Get More Energy

These days, many people are feeling the effects of an energy crisis. Not one within our environment—but one within our own bodies. As a health and sleep expert, I know how important it is to get optimal sleep and feel well-rested. That's why I'm sharing five big issues behind our great energy depression and key tips to help turn it around:

Factors like elevated cortisol (stress) levels and unstable blood sugar levels can throw off your sleep cycles. It doesn’t matter how much time you spend in bed if your sleep cycles are not healthy. Disrupted REM sleep, for example, has been found to be associated with mild psychological struggles such as irritability and difficulty concentrating.

Research suggests that getting more sunlight exposure in the morning can decrease cortisol levels later in the evening. You should also eat a well-balanced diet that’s focused on real food and avoid processed foods—good nutrition is foundational to keeping your blood sugar stable at night. A healthy diet can also help provide you with a number of key nutrients you need for great sleep, including potassium and vitamin D.

Magnesium is responsible for more than 300 enzymatic processes4 that help keep you energized and healthy.* If you’re deficient in magnesium, that’s more than 300 processes your body can’t effectively do. The end result is you feel totally wiped.

Magnesium gets zapped from your system pretty quickly because it’s involved in so much. To ensure you are supporting normal magnesium levels, a magnesium supplement can help.* There are also tons of delicious magnesium-rich foods like spinach, chard, and pumpkin seeds.

Of course, getting some exercise is clearly better than no exercise at all—but to bolster those energy levels we’ve got to get back to basics.

Set a timer on your phone to do two minutes of bodyweight exercises every 90 minutes. You'll easily feel more charged up during the day.

When you drink a glass of water, within mere minutes that water begins to become your blood and extracellular fluid and pushes out the used fluid that’s now littered with metabolic waste products. If you don’t drink enough water, then that stuff stays gummed up in your system. And you start to feel like a microwaved couch potato.

Make it a must to drink half of your body weight in ounces of water each day. So, a 150-pound person would make sure to get in 75 ounces, for example. Also, knock out a nice chunk of that first thing in the morning when you wake up: Give yourself an “inner bath” to start your day by drinking 20-30 ounces of water shortly after getting out of bed. This will set the pace and ensure that you become hydrated before the busyness of the day takes over.

Stress suffocates your energy in a number of ways. With chronically elevated stress, your adrenal glands are forced to operate in maximum gear. This keeps cortisol and other stress hormones high. Excess cortisol leads to a surge of glucose to facilitate the perceived “fight-or-flight” situation you’re living in. This is your body’s attempt to make sure you’ve got the energy to run away from that man-eating lion (or run away from that overdue phone bill—because to your body, that stress is all the same).

Find a practice that works for you and implement it for just a few minutes a day. A simple 5-10 minute practice can buffer your brain and body against stress and ensure you have the energy to have the quality of life you deserve.