Hacks to avoid fatigue and instead feel stable energy throughout each day, yes it is possible!
The classic energy crash: falling asleep or almost falling asleep at your desk in the afternoon, but you need to work, so you eat a sugary snack and have a cup of coffee - does this sound familiar?
How do you prevent this from happening?
No, this doesn’t have to happen and be your normal - there are loads of things you can do to help stabilise your energy, and a lot of it has to do with balancing. your blood sugar so you’re not on an up and down rollercoaster of peaks and crashes.
This post is going to bring you back to considering the basics however. It’s easy to think that you may need to add some new technique in or new supplement to help find that energy, but today I am going to simply remind you to get the essentials right and see if it helps stabilise those energy crashes, or prevent them from happening.
If you’re often tired in the middle of the day, reflect on this essential so you can start to feel energised consistently:
✧ Are you getting enough sleep?
Proper sleep is crucial for feeling alert during the day and to support healing and repair of your body overnight, from all the cellular damage that occurs each day.
People need about eight hours of uninterrupted sleep to move through the natural rhythms of a sleep cycle. Everyone is a little different here, you may need a little less or a little more, try to find your own balance for setting your circadian rhythms. It usually lays between 7-9 depending on the individual.
When you wake up in the morning your cortisol starts to increase, this makes you wake up feeling awake, alert and energised. Throughout the day cortisol naturally depletes, making you feel increasingly tired until it's time to go to bed. At the same time your melatonin, which makes you tired, and is also a powerful antioxidant that helps your body help and repair overnight, starts to increase slowly over the course of the day. Melatonin is at its max in the evening, making you tired enough to go to bed and fall asleep.
Basically cortisol and melatonin have an inverse relationship, UNLESS the rhythms are out of whack for some reason. This reason could be due to stress, lack of sleep, diet caused (sugar impacts these natural hormone fluctuations, cortisol and melatonin are both hormones).
If you go past this rhythm you may experience a ‘second wind’ in the evening: your cortisol rises again, making it harder to fall asleep when you want to go to bed. Instead you feel wide awake, trying to fall asleep, laying in bed feeling like your mind is buzzing. Blue light causes a decrease in melatonin.
This is all great, but how do you reset your circadian rhythms, cortisol and melatonin to be able to support sleep?
✦ Wear blue light blocking glasses in the evening if looking at screens, can help to reduce any affects on your melatonin production.
✦ Consider the types of lighting in your home: try low lighting or lights with a red or orange tint, again to support melatonin production.
✦ Setting consistent sleep and wake times (even on the weekend or days off!) will help your support your body moving into a stable circadian rhythm.
✦ Try to minimise the chances of waking up in the middle of the night. For example, try not drinking liquids within an hour of going to bed (so you don’t have to wake up and pee), using a white noise machine if you live on a noisy street and traffic or loud people wakre you up easily. There are white noise apps you can download on your phone too.
✦ Try not using screens 1-2 hours before bed. Again, the light tricks your brain into believing it’s day time and hence disrupts your hormones in the circadian rhythm.
✦ Try to limit your intake of sugar. It can cause you to wake up in the night because of disrupted blood sugar patterns, plus when you have a bad night sleep, you tend to reach for more sugar throughout the next day, which leads into a vicious cycle. How do you break the cycle and minimise sugar cravings? Try having a breakfast that focuses on good quality proteins and fats, but mostly protein: chia seeds, yogurt, eggs, tofu, quinoa, smoothie with protein powder - there are lots of options. Protein in breakfast helps to regulate your blood sugar levels so after eating you minimise the chances of crashing from a sugar high (which would happen from a high carbohydrate breakfast, like a croissant or muffin).
Try implementing this list to support your sleep and in turn support your circadian rhythms.
One last technique I would like to mention (that I am personally a big fan of) is going outside in the morning and standing in the sunlight for about 10 minutes. It helps to reset your circadian rhythms too and stimulate cortisol production.
Even though cortisol is your stress hormone, it is vital to feeling energised and awake - the problems with cortisol occur when you’re constantly relying on it to stay awake and your body and mind struggle to rest and switch off. This is called living in a stress response and leads to adrenal exhaustion (your adrenal glands make your cortisol).
We are natural beings and the more we misalign ourselves from nature, the worse we feel. Tap into your natural hormone cycles to feel your best self during the day, sleepy in the night, and get those circadian rhythms aligning back to their natural rhythm!
We are talking about realistic self-care on Season 2 Episode 10 of my Conversations with Yogis podcast, hosted by Melinda Szepesi & myself, Ashley Ahrens.
It’s up for you to listen to now on Spotify and Apple Podcasts plus you can watch us on YouTube