Let’s be real here. We all feel tired sometimes without no reason, We know that it’s not your intelligence or your motivation that makes you different from other smart people, it’s your persistence, and it isn’t even your work ethic. The one difference between you and them is that you are constantly tired, right?

If not for that one teensy little difference, then you’d easily be able to crank out a couple of chapters in the next Great American novel each morning before heading out to fight crime and lesser tasks like studying for exams and not subsisting entirely off of Tottenham’s pizza rolls would be trivially easy, but as it stands, you can’t do those things because you are basically a zombie. Well, maybe not like a literal zombie-like in that one episode of Space Dandy, but the similarities are mounting.

You got bags under your eyes, you feel sluggish, and there is that inexplicable craving for raw meat, and feel tired. But more importantly, you just don’t have the energy to do the things you want to do on a daily basis. So what I want to do today is explore some methods for breaking that cycle of constantly being tired and getting back your daily energy reserves.

Now before we get started, I do want to mention that I am not talking about conditions like chronic Fatigue syndrome and Sed, which affect millions of people here in the US alone and are very difficult to cure and pin down. What I am talking about is that much more common feeling of getting tired that affects many more people and is entirely preventable through adopting healthier habits, chief among them being to get better sleep.

Better Sleep Habits Helps To Get Rid of Tired Ness

Now you’ve probably seen the recommendations put out by the National Sleep Foundation about how many hours you should be sleeping each night based on your age. But even if you’re using those figures to set your alarm clock, you still might be waking up in the morning feeling like you just got hit by a truck.

And if that’s the case, it’s probably because you’re not respecting your body’s sleep cycle. See, during the night, sleep happens in several different stages that each correspond to differing levels of brain activity, and together these are known as the sleep cycle. But what you need to know right now is that if you wake up in the wrong stage of the sleep cycle, you’re going to feel absolutely awful.

And that’s a risk you run when you use an alarm clock. For most of human history, we didn’t have access to alarm clocks or electric flights, for that matter. Our sleep patterns were much more in tune with the cycle of day and night, and they were also governed by the body’s sleep cycle itself.

Someone living before the invention of the alarm clock would almost always wake up at the completion of a sleep cycle if they were disturbed by something like a Rooster’s Crow or an invasion of Mongols, and because of that, they’d almost always wake up feeling well-rested. By contrast, if you like an alarm clock that startles you awake in the middle of a sleep cycle, then you’re going to be waking up in zombie mode.

As Pierce J. Howard put it in his book The Owner’s Manual for the Brain, that a person who sleeps only four cycles or 6 hours will feel more rested than someone who has slept for eight to 10 hours, but who has not been allowed to complete any one cycle because of being awakened before it was completed.

Now, each of these sleep cycles takes an average of 90 minutes to complete, A site called Sleepytime Me, which uses that number to help you figure out when you should wake up based on your bedtime. But one thing I’ve learned recently is that this 90 minutes figure really is just an average, and it can vary by up to 30 minutes in either direction. So instead of just setting your alarm based on that 90 minutes ballpark figure, you should instead work to figure out when you naturally wake up.

Learning how to use an alarm clock properly is important so you don’t forget and get woken up in the middle of the night. Ideally, you should use your alarm clock as a backup method so you’re always aware and ready for when it goes off. Of course, that also means you need to get into the habit of actually going to bed on time to wake up before the alarm goes off. And if you have trouble doing this as I do, the main key habit you need to establish now is building a wind-down ritual. Basically, you want to disengage from anything you typically get sucked into well before your bedtime.

For me, this means turning off my computer around 09:00 p.m. Each night. Otherwise, I’ll convince myself I can answer a couple of emails, and then I’ll inevitably get sucked into a quick Hole quiz to see if I have what it takes to train Freddy Krueger to be a barista. Spoilers I really don’t know. Even if you’ve got a rock-solid sleep schedule, you might still be suffering from feeling tired and a couple of problems that are really common to students and that are related to a lack of sunlight exposure and a lack of exercise.

Power Nap

You don’t need to be a naturalist to know that taking a power nap can be incredibly beneficial. By taking a quick 20- to 30-minute break from your busy day, you’ll be able to restore energy and focus and even improve your mood and stop feeling tired. But what should you do if you’re not able to take a regular break? If possible take a power nap in any situation, whether you’re at work, home, or on the go. Why Power Napping? As you’ve likely noticed, getting a good night’s sleep is difficult for most people. so, they feel tired.

Most nights after a stressful day at work are filled with tossing and turning in bed until the person finally crashes into consciousness around 5 AM. For some people, this cycle can continue from one week to the next without pause. The reality is that we all need sleep, but it appears for us humans as if we’re constantly living under a deadline on why not to nap (even before those little blue lines appear).

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What’s more, because of the busyness of our modern world, there are plenty of occasions when we can’t afford to stop our commutes or enter a regular rest period at home. Power Napping is great for situations like these because it solves the problem in one fell swoop. You don’t have to find an inconvenient time and place, you don’t need a special location that’s quiet and private, and there are no rules about what position you’re allowed to take (versus taking care of business by turning off your alarm clock).

And no impact on sleep patterns—we’ve all had the experience where taking even just 15 minutes may make everything seem better. Check out The Different Kinds of Sleep Below is a list of the different kinds and functions that our brains perform during each cycle.

Stage 1: Non-REM In deep non- REM, your brain prepares to enter slow-wave sleep, also known as DUS. During this time, there are few interconnections between various parts within your brain; if something happens in one part that impacts another portion it may be weeks until they connect.

Stage 2: Rapid Eye Movement or REM (70% of your sleep time) During REM, the brain produces what’s called ” thought spindles “. Since these waves can only last for a few hundred milliseconds, they send signals to other parts of our brains as if we are having an intense dream. The next stage is more like that: Our body shuts down non-essential functions and focuses on dreaming while our mind wanders without purpose. As this cycle continues, many people experience it from 2– 3 am till the early morning hours.

Sunlight Exposure For Daily Vitamin D Needs

We’re going to get into some science here in a second. But first, I do want to note that when I feel tired during the day, when I get those feelings of brain fog, going outside for 20 minutes walking is the best way to get out of a bad mood. Even if I’m feeling down, walking always helps me feel better. So I definitely recommend trying it out. And honestly, this makes intuitive sense because our bodies were designed to move. Humans used to track miles and miles to catch their prey.

And even when we turn to agriculture for food production, that still involves being outside for most of the day doing hard work, and plus you get to wear stylish overalls. But now a lot of us are sedentary. We spend a lot of time in chairs, and all the time we sink into screens, and books keep us indoors and away from the sun. And that can be a huge contributor to why you feel so tired. It might not be as obvious a connection as it is for plants, which need nothing but sunlight and Brondo.

But make no mistake, the sun plays a huge role in maintaining your energy levels. For one, sunlight exposure helps your body correct the time its production of melatonin, which is a hormone that helps you go to sleep and plays a part in maintaining your circadian rhythm, which helps you stay in sync with the cycle of day and night.

But sunlight exposure is also your body’s main source of vitamin D, which not only plays a role in keeping your bones healthy, keeps your immune system working and your lungs working but also plays a big role in helping you avoid fatigue and stop feeling tired. A study that was done in 2014 found a high correlation between vitamin D deficiency and fatigue, as well as a big improvement in those fatigue symptoms once patients in the study got their vitamin D levels back to normal. Now, you might think that you can just eat better food to get your vitamin D, but that isn’t the case.

While improving your diet will definitely help your energy levels in other ways. As Mark Sisson points out in his book The Primal Blueprint, dietary efforts to obtain vitamin D are almost inconsequential compared to sun exposure. To put some hard numbers behind that, a standard American diet will get you about 300 IU’s, or international units of vitamin D per day, but experts recommend getting around 4000.

That’s a pretty big gap, but fortunately, just going outside for 20 minutes during the peak months of sun exposure can easily make up the difference. Now, one thing to note here is that sun exposure alone often isn’t enough during the winter months.

If you don’t live near the equator, it’s just not powerful enough, which is why a lot of people suffer from the seasonal affective disorder. So if that’s the case for you, you might also want to look into a vitamin D supplement during those months. But even with those, it is a good idea to try to get outside in the sun at least a little bit every single day, even if it’s for just a quick walk it will help u stop feeling tired.

Lack Of Exercise

And that brings us to the topic of exercise. Now you might be thinking, I’m going to tell you that the only way to not feel tired all the time is to do an intense workout every single day.

But luckily, that isn’t the case. In fact, just doing some low-intensity exercise, like going for a 20-minute walk outside, like we just said, might even be more effective at getting rid of those symptoms of fatigue and brain fog than a more intense workout. In 2008, researchers at the University of Georgia did a study and found that students who did just 20 minutes of exercise three times a week had huge improvements in both their daily energy levels and their levels of fatigue.

And what’s more, their improvements in these areas were actually better than the group in the study that did more intense exercise. So the bottom line is if you’re tired all the time, getting some exercise every single day will help u feel fresh and not tired.

If doing a heavy bench workout or running 10 miles is fun for you, then definitely do that.

Caffeine Intake

But if not, you’ll still benefit from a quick walk at a pace that won’t make you steal your coffee. Caffeine is a drug that is found in many different types of drinks. It is often used to make people feel more awake and alert when they feel tired. Now, I am not going to outright condemn caffeine here, because if you use it every once in a while, it can actually be a useful tool for staving off fatigue when you need to finish a particularly big project. But as this recovering caffeine addict can tell you, it is super easy to start using caffeine on a regular basis.

And that is where the problems begin. For starters, if you drink something caffeinated late enough in the day, it can really mess up your sleep. And by late enough, I’m not talking about like a. 09:00 P.m. Cup of Joe.

I’m talking about like 6 hours before bedtime, according to one study. So if you’re having an afternoon coffee, you could be compromising your sleep, which just makes you further dependent on it the next day. Just like with other drugs, your body gets used to the caffeine in coffee. After using coffee regularly, your body starts to have a tolerance to caffeine. This means that it needs more and more of the drug to get the same effect.

To put this really, really simply, your body and your brain both have lots of receptors for a compound called adenosine, and this compound tells your body that it’s tired and that it’s ready to sleep. Caffeine works by essentially impersonating that adenosine, and it blocks out the receptors, and it prevents the adenosine from getting through, which makes you temporarily feel like you’re energetic and not tired.

The author, Stephen Brown, likened this process to putting a block of wood underneath one of the brain’s primary brake pedals. Once the caffeine has moved through the system, though, all that built-up adenosine comes rushing through, creating that all too familiar caffeine crash. Not only that, but regular caffeine use will also cause your body to upregulate to create more adenosine receptors and you will like to have more and more of it as u feel tired.

And that means that as time goes on, you need more and more caffeine to do the same job and get the same feeling eventually become like my friend in College who would chug three to four pots of coffee every single day. Now, if you are already at that point, maybe you’re a friend of mine from college or you’re on your way to it.

Like I have been at several points in my life. The process of weaning yourself off of caffeine can be tough. Adopting the sleep and exercise habits we’ve already talked about in this post can definitely help you not feel tired, but you can also use the following few tips to make the process even easier. First, if you drink coffee or energy drinks, try switching to tea. While most tea does have some caffeine, it’s almost always a lot less than those other drinks.

And for those of you that think tea tastes like dirty rainwater out of a gutter, I have three words for you loose leaf tea. Not only is it more flavorful and higher quality than the bagged kind, but there are hundreds of different flavors out there. If you’re a coffee drinker, you might want to start with something like Girl Gray or Irish Breakfast, which aren’t exactly like coffee, but when mixed with milk, make pretty good substitutes.

Drink More Water

And lastly, drink more water and you can create this habit by carrying your own water bottle with you wherever you go. This will basically make water a replacement for all those caffeinated drinks you usually turn to. And while it won’t give you a buzz, it actually will help with those feelings of fatigue and brain fog when you feel tired. Even mild dehydration can make you feel tired. That’s because basically every part of your body, including your brain, needs a good supply of water to function properly.

And while the old advice to get eight glasses a day might not be scientifically sound, most people aren’t even getting close to that amount, and that often includes me. If I don’t bring that water bottle with me when I go out, I will drink barely any water during the day at all. All right, we have covered a lot in this post, so let’s do a quick recap. If you want to not be tired all the time, you want to be energetic. First, get enough sleep and respect your body’s sleep cycles by not waking up with an alarm clock.

Try to wake up naturally and use your alarm clock just as a backup. Second, get outside. Get a little bit of sunlight exposure every single day and in the winter months. Also, consider using a vitamin D supplement this will help you not feel tired. Third, get some exercise every day as well, even if it’s something relatively low level, like going for a quick walk or pulling around jumbo jets with your teeth. Fourth, use caffeine sparingly. Use it as a tool. Don’t be like my friend in College and drink three or four pots of coffee a day and build a dependence. And finally, number five, make sure you’re drinking enough water.

Now you might be thinking that none of these habits seems particularly out of the blue or insightful, but I would ask you, how many of them are you sticking to? Because really avoiding a life of constantly tired ness comes down to adopting healthy habits. They might seem obvious, but sometimes we need a simple reminder we need to stop and make a commitment or put a system in place to make us take them seriously, especially when we have things like goals in school and relationships and video games all vying for our attention at the same time.

Now, I don’t agree with a lot of what the dude says these days, but Elliot Holmes made a very good point when he said the most important part of the game is your game piece. So make your health a priority, and in return, you’ll be rewarded with an uncommon level of energy and getting rid of feeling tired and focused that you can use to tackle all those other things with a much greater level of intensity.

You might even find yourself with the energy to take on projects that you wouldn’t have even considered before. Instead of finishing your homework and then just watching Netflix or playing video games, you might actually have the energy to teach yourself how to build video games or learn landscape photography. And instead of just ordering pizza or making something easy, you might actually want to Cook something that takes real skill. Once you’re at that point, you’ll probably want to accelerate your learning process as much as you possibly can.