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How to Increase your Energy Levels
It seems that the older you get, the more sleep you require, but did you know that if you’re leading an overall healthy life, you should be requiring less sleep than in previous years? As you age, your body should be needing less sleep to perform at the same level. If you’re feeling exhausted when you hit the hay each night, and rush to push the snooze button each morning, there may be things at play to keep you in an exhausted state. Let’s look at what could be causing perpetual low energy levels.
Stress
Well, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Chronic stress weakens your immune system and can lead to problems such as depression and anxiety, cardiovascular problems, and, yes, perpetual exhaustion. It’s not always possible to eliminate the causes of stress in your life though. We thrive on stress and deadlines.
Instead, what you can do is change how you respond to those stressful situations. Meditating, acupuncture, self-hypnotherapy, and exercise are four ways to reduce the levels of stress in your body. Repeatedly performing one or more of these will significantly reduce stress and has the potential to increase your energy levels over time.
Sleep
You may actually be sleeping less than you think. Try tracking your sleep by wearing an activity watch to bed, or use a sleep app. If you need more advice on how to improve your sleep, check out a recent blog here, which focuses on getting enough sleep even while you’re stressed.
Nutrition
If you think your diet is something contributing to your low energy, you may want to try a few things. An elimination diet, which is typically used to diagnose allergy tests or food sensitivities, can help with this. Essentially, you create a very basic diet, and if you see improvements on your energy level while consuming the basic diet for several weeks, you slowly add in additional foods. It’s hard work and can be frustrating at times, especially when you’re re-eating things repeatedly. When you start to notice your energy dips, you can attribute it to one of the recent foods you’ve started consuming. Unfortunately, there may be a handful of foods that are making you feel less than energetic, so it can be a time-consuming process.
Another option is to hire a nutritionist to help get you feeling one hundred percent, but make sure that they are willing to look at more than just your food intake since things like stress, gut health, and genetics will all attribute to your energy levels. Kristen Blake Wellness is an online nutritionist that focuses on getting your energy levels back to optimal and looks at multiple aspects of your life to figure out what may be causing your lethargy.
Underlying health issues
If you have tried to find ways to combat your lack of energy, and are still finding yourself exhausted by your third cup of coffee, it may be time to check in with your doctor. Sometimes, health issues that exacerbate your lethargy are simple: as an example, women often have low thyroid levels, which is easy to diagnose and treat. If you are having concerns about not sleeping well, or find that you just can’t catch a break, meet with a doctor to discuss what options you have to improve your energy level.
