Chances are in the last few days, you have felt tired or depleted, but there are a few simple habits that almost anyone can do that are proven to boost your energy.
Help is there for those who look for it. The Internet is a treasure trove of information that can equip us with important lifestyle hacks that physicians often fail to point out.
The main reason for this is the community of individuals who are closer in age and tend to have shared experiences tend to bounce around ideas and remedies. There are also several verified dieticians and lifestyle coaches available online and some really good influencers who can equip you with the right information.
The important thing is not to ignore the issue and stay connected. Xfinity is a provider that does so without any lag. Servicio al cliente Xfinity ensures that you experience minimum downtime even during peak hours so you can stay up-to-date with the latest research, stay connected, and gain support from your online community when you don’t feel your best.
Tip # 1
Go outside and get some morning sunlight as soon as you can after waking up. You are probably used to starting your day scrolling Instagram, and checking email until you eventually rolling out of bed feeling anxious.
Scientists agree with this. They say that when we view sunlight first thing in the morning, we get so many benefits out of it. It improves our mood, as well as our energy, and it sinks our circadian rhythm, so it primes us for better sleep at night.
You can combine your sunlight time with a 20 to 30-minute walk in the morning, to get your body moving. You will find your creative juices flowing and you will feel more excited to start your day. If you cannot carve out that time, even two minutes on a sunny day has been shown to have lots of benefits.
Tip # 2
Consume caffeine consciously. There are two parts to this. Let’s talk about the more obvious one first. Don’t consume your caffeine too late in the day. Most of us know that intuitively, but the science behind it is pretty interesting.
Caffeine on average has a half-life of five hours, sometimes six hours. And what that means is let’s say you have a cup of coffee at 4:00 PM every day. It’s going to peak in your system around 4:30 or 5pm PM, which is great if you want to go to the gym and feel energized.
However, five hours later at 9:00 PM, when you’re maybe trying to wind down and get ready for bed, you still have half of that caffeine left in your system. So, don’t drink your coffee too late in the day. Now for the not-so-obvious part, drinking caffeine too early in the day, just like drinking it too late in the day, can also negatively affect your energy levels.
That’s because there’s a molecule in our body called adenosine. Adenosine makes us feel sleepy. So, when we wake up in the morning after a good night of sleep, our adenosine levels are naturally low and they continue to get even lower. But if you drink caffeine as soon as you wake up, it’s going to interfere with that natural process.
By the time your coffee wears off at let’s say one or 2:00 PM, you have more adenosine, i.e. more sleepiness in your system than you ordinarily would. For this reason, it is advisable to wait an hour to two hours after you wake up to have your first cup of caffeine. That means your body is able to naturally clear those adenosine levels.
Tip # 3
Remove the biggest distractions from your work environment. One of the greatest lies we’ve been told is that we humans can multitask. We cannot. What we think of as multitasking is just us very quickly switching back and forth between different tasks. This not only makes us more tired and less energized than if we were to work on a single task at a time, but it also makes us less productive.
It can take upwards of 20 minutes to get back into the flow of things once we’ve been disrupted. Now multiply that 20 minutes by every time we get distracted. One of the ways you can try to prevent this energy drain is to start your workday by removing the biggest distraction from your workspace, the cell phone. You will find that you have so much more energy and focus and get more work done when this thing is out of your office, ideally in another room, tucked away in a drawer, so you don’t see it even when you take a break.
Tip # 4
Avoid eating a sugary breakfast. As a kid who grew up in the nineties, you may have eaten a very standard American diet for breakfast, sugary cereals of all kinds, pop tarts of all kinds, and of course Eggo waffles.
Luckily though, as a kid, you have pretty limitless energy. But as with most things in life, as you get older, as you become an adult, it gets a little more complicated. As we age, when we eat sugary foods, especially on an empty stomach like we do when we break our fast in the morning, it causes our glucose levels to spike and then inevitably crash, and that leaves us with that sluggish energy state.
Eat a savory breakfast, ideally one with a good amount of protein, fat, and fiber, something like seeded whole grain toast with avocado and smashed chickpeas and hemp seed, or just leftovers from last night’s tofu curry.
Tip # 6
Develop and implement a workday shutdown ritual. You take five to 10 minutes at the end of your workday to prepare for the next workday, to get all of your to-dos and work worries out of your head and onto paper. Once you have that list, then start to schedule specific tasks into specific time slots. This is known as time blocking.
While it might sound rigid to some people to schedule every hour of the day, including when you exercise or eat lunch, you will find that it’s liberating and gives you energy back.
Another benefit is that you don’t have to spend the time or energy in the morning thinking about what’s the biggest thing you want to accomplish today. When am I going to get it done? How am I going to fit it around my meetings? Because you have already done all that work for me the night before.
Tip # 7
This one revolves around optimizing your sleep environment. Possibly the best thing you can do for more energy that no pill or energy drink or even workday routine can do is to get enough good quality sleep consistently. It is important to get seven and a half to eight hours of sleep each night.
The first thing you can do to optimize my sleep environment is to keep the bedroom as cold as comfortably possible. For our house, that’s about 68 degrees Fahrenheit, sometimes cooler. In the summer, we use the AC to make that happen.
Summing Up
You see, making healthier life choices is all about conviction. If you have conviction, you will be more inclined to cultivate an environment for yourself that is conducive to making good decisions.
