Day 167 - 5 Quick Recommendations When Tired

March 25, 2024

Summary In this conversation, Guy Reams discusses strategies to combat tiredness and improve energy levels. He highlights the scarcity of resources addressing this topic and emphasizes the importance of not feeling discouraged during sluggish times. Guy provides five strategies to overcome tiredness, including sticking to core tasks, prioritizing sleep, staying hydrated, focusing on nutrition, and managing stress and caffeine intake. He encourages self-reflection and experimentation to identify the underlying causes of fatigue. Takeaways Feeling tired is a common experience, but there is a scarcity of resources addressing this topic. To combat tiredness, it is important to stick to core tasks and not feel discouraged during sluggish times. Prioritizing sleep, staying hydrated, focusing on nutrition, and managing stress and caffeine intake are key strategies to improve energy levels. Self-reflection and experimentation are necessary to identify the underlying causes of fatigue. Chapters 00:00 Introduction 00:48 The Scarcity of Dealing with Feeling Tired 03:09 Strategy 1: Stick to Core Tasks 03:37 Strategy 2: Prioritize Sleep 05:04 Strategy 3: Stay Hydrated 06:21 Strategy 4: Focus on Nutrition 08:45 Strategy 5: Manage Stress and Caffeine Intake 12:24 Conclusion

Episode Transcript

Guy Reams (00:01.422)
All right, today is day 167, five quick recommendations when tired. So somebody told me that I had to come up with catchier titles. I mean, I really don't care about SEO and all this stuff. Maybe I should, but I just don't care. But anyway, so I thought I would give it a try and write a catchier title. So see if that works. However, the topic of today is,

is something that's really near and dear to my heart because oftentimes I wake up feeling very tired. So I battled with this my whole life and I don't really honestly see a lot of people talking about it.

I mean, I feel sluggish often, right? Like, so I get something going, I'm doing really great. And then I'll wake up one day and I'll just suddenly feel like really sluggish. And I'm just fighting through it. It's like fighting through molasses. Now, I think everybody goes through this. I think I don't think I'm unique. I just don't see a lot of people talking about it. I have, I have, um,

Lots of self -help books on my bookshelf over here. I've read countless blogs. I follow various self -help gurus. And they talk a lot about what you need to do to improve your life and all that, but they rarely talk about the sluggish times, the times when you're really struggling, when you just wake up and you just don't feel like doing anything, where you go for that run and your legs feel like lead. They just don't talk about these times. And I think the reason they don't talk about them is because frankly, they're scared of them.

they're afraid of those times because this is like, you know, this is like the nemesis, right? It's like when this comes, it's like you just have to fight through it. So, you know, a lot of the advice would be you just gotta push through it. You just gotta suck it up soldier and fight. Well, I'm sorry. There's just times when I just don't even like doing that, right? So, you know, there's days when I'm just like not there. So I think there's a scarcity of dealing with this topic.

Guy Reams (02:16.398)
So I'm nowhere near the expert to deal with it, but I felt like I would dive in today and try to really narrow down on things that I can improve in my life to help me become not so tired or to get that energy back as fast as possible.

So I dove in today to really research it and unfortunately, you're not gonna like the answers, because I didn't like the answers. The answers are obvious and it sucks because you know what, it is what it is. You just gotta do certain things and do them well, otherwise you're gonna wake up feeling tired. And when you do, you have to correct what it was the thing that you were missing out on. So.

Come up with five basic strategies.

The first one is don't get yourself, don't start feeling discouraged, right? So stick to the core. I have seven things that I do every day. Like there's seven things that I feel like if I do every day, I'll feel like at least I accomplished something if I got these seven things done. So I recommend that you stick with the seven things, right? Or whatever number of things you have.

But there's probably certain things that if you do them every day, you'll feel good about yourself. So make sure you get those things done at the very minimum, no matter how tired you are. Like this morning, I woke up feeling very sluggish. I didn't get a lot of sleep. That's the reason. But I was feeling very sluggish. But I went for a run. Now, I didn't run very fast. I didn't run very well. But I at least did it. And then I went to the gym. Now,

Guy Reams (04:07.694)
My gym experience wasn't great. I didn't get all the sets in I wanted to do. I didn't get all the reps in I wanted to do. And I didn't lift that very much heavy weight, honestly. But at least I did it, right? So I got through it. And then of course there's a few other things that I do every day that I just have to get done every day. So if I can get those seven things done, then I know, hey, at least I made it. And that will fight my desire to get, or,

that'll fight my inclination to get discouraged. So that's strategy one. Pick a few things that you stick to no matter what and even on the bad days, get through them. Okay, strategy number two, sleep. Now, I hate to say this because it sounds really stupid, but if you're tired, chances are sleep is the problem. Now, you may say, well, I got a lot of sleep last night.

or I couldn't sleep very well. But here's the problem. If you go day after day after day, continuously not having great quality sleep, eventually it builds up into a sleep debt. And so eventually you just get tired, you get worn out, your body needs rest.

And so we'll over mask this by taking caffeine or eating too much sugar. We'll mask this tired feeling, but eventually it catches up and you just gotta pay the price.

So the way I handle this is I need to wake up at the same time every day, usually about 5 a .m., otherwise I'm just not gonna get anything done. So what I started to do was just go to bed early. Just go to bed an hour or two early for a couple nights in a row. You don't have to do it all the time.

Guy Reams (05:54.093)
But if you get that tired feeling, that overwhelmed tired feeling, then just for a couple days in a row, like maybe three nights, just tell your spouse and family, hey, I'm really tired right now. I'm going to bed an hour early or two hours early and just get that extra time in bed. Now you may not still have lower quality sleep. You're just increasing the amount of time with you to rest and that's good. Now you can work on the quality of your sleep.

I'm sure there's many gurus out there that'll tell you how. I'm not gonna tell you how. But I would say figure the sleep thing out and sleep some extra time if you need. Number three, a lot of adults are running around dehydrated right. Medical science goes back and forth on how many, but I'll just say it's probably about 15 % to 30 % of the population are probably dehydrated.

By the way dehydration builds you get to dehydration, right? So if you're out in the desert if I like when I go on a backpacking trip and I'm in the hot Sun high altitude I Can feel the effects of dehydration right away like it's immediate But if I'm at home, I'm drinking some water and some soda or some whatever. I'm getting some fluids from my food I'm Maintaining I'm keeping some liquids going

But it's not enough. And what happens is slowly over time, day two, day three, day four, day five, of not getting enough, it builds to this point where your body's lacking the water and even the electrolytes it needs to function. And so you slowly work your way into a dehydrated state. And once you get the dehydration, the effects are immediate and real. You're tired, you're wiped out, you're struggling, you can barely lift your arms, you just feel horrible, right? So.

And by the way, you can't just drink a bunch of water and fix it. It takes a while for your body to process the water and get it flowing. And drinking it all in one gulp ain't gonna help either, because your body will flood most that out. So you gotta sip on water and keep a constant flow going in for a couple of days to get past the effects of dehydration. Unless you go to the doctor and get an IV and they fill you with fluids. And by the way, that happens a lot. A lot of people complain of, you know,

Guy Reams (08:17.069)
health problems and they go in and it's just dehydration. So water and electrolytes, if you're feeling bad and sluggish, immediately fix that problem. Couple days later, see how you feel. If you suddenly start feeling better, you're like, wow, I feel pretty good. Well, now you know the problem, right? You allowed yourself to get dehydrated. So nutrition, this one I don't want to say because I hate it.

Everybody always says this, well you gotta watch what you eat. Well, it's freaking true. You gotta watch what you eat. Now, this can be in two forms. You can be not getting enough of something or getting too much of something. Both of those things are true. Usually eating crappy leads to feeling crappy. Eating too little makes you tired. Eating too much makes you tired. So dialing in the nutrition is important.

I go on a lot of fasts, so I do a lot of fasting, and I also tend to eat restricted diets sometimes. So I went on this restricted diet where I was eating whole foods, very basic whole foods for a period of time, and then slowly started introducing food. I discovered a couple of foods that caused me problems, like dairy, specifically cheese, hard cheeses, tend to cause me to feel not so great.

If I eat a very small quantity, I'm okay, but if I eat too much, I start feeling really tired. Another one that gets me is spinach. Usually when I try to go on a health kick, I try to start eating a lot of spinach. And I didn't realize this until after I was done fasting and introduced spinach into my life. I realized that spinach is actually making me not feel so good, giving me a little bit of a headache. I learned later there's toxins in spinach. So cooked spinach, not so much, but I hate cooked spinach.

But spinach was the thing that was causing me to feel a little whacked out. So certain foods can really cause you a problem, but mostly it's eating bad that causes you a problem. So if you wake up one day and you're feeling really wiped out, you may want to spend two or three days and just clean your diet out of Go lean for two or three days. Eat whole, healthy foods for two to three days and then see how you feel. Chances are you'll start to feel better and then you'll know.

Guy Reams (10:39.149)
Last one, stress and caffeine. I'm putting stress and caffeine together because they're cousins. So we are designed to handle stress. When a stressful situation hits us, our bodies are designed to gear up really fast and deal with the stress. But what we're not designed for is when we're under constant stress, stress constantly on us all the time. Like being in constant state of

anxiety and stress. Your body doesn't react that well to that because all the functionality, all the hormones that are designed to keep your body at that fight or flight response, that instant response mode, that eventually can be very wearing on you, very waning on you because everything is geared up and ready for the action and when the action doesn't come, you're still kind of stuck in that. So that's stress and too much of that

can really cause you to feel exhausted. So check your stress level. Talk to people. Relax. Do some things to get your stress. And by the way, watching drama on TV is not a stress reducing activity. Those shows are designed to increase your stress. So purposefully, artificially, but it does. So that doesn't help you. Reading books, same thing. Reading books can be relaxing.

But reading books can also be stress inducing. Most removing of stress is to do nothing. Think about nothing. That's the big way. Put your body in a situation where it does not have to respond.

And caffeine. Caffeine artificially does what your stress response does. So you're artificially kicking yourself into gear. So a little bit of caffeine is fine. We're fine with having that instant response as long as it goes away. But a lot of people keep consuming caffeine all day and all night long, constantly, in large quantities. Well, you're basically artificially putting your body into this response mode. And over time,

Guy Reams (12:54.925)
that's going to wear you down. You are going to crash and burn. And so when you wake up and you're just tired, you can't even raise your arms, you don't even want to tie your shoes. You may want to look at your stress level, but you also may want to look at your caffeine level. So this has been a self -reflection exercise for me. You know, I woke up tired. By the way, I know why I woke up tired. It's obvious what the problem was. I mean, I ate like crap this weekend.

and I also didn't get a lot of sleep last night, so I was pretty aware of what my problem was. But nonetheless, you might want to check some of these options because these are the obvious ones. Now there could be medically something wrong with you, there could be something else going on, that's all true, but you got to check these five boxes first. With that I'll say thank you and goodbye.