The Better Life Perspective
Feeling tired is easy to blame on sleep, particularly when every health article seems to begin by asking whether you are getting your eight hours, but the more useful question may be what your entire life is asking your body and mind to carry before you even get into bed. You can sleep reasonably well, eat sensibly, exercise when you can and still find yourself reaching the middle of the afternoon wondering where your energy has gone. Sometimes the answer will be sleep, but sometimes the problem sits elsewhere, hidden among the mental workload, constant decisions, insufficient recovery, inconsistent eating, caffeine, stress and the simple fact that there may be almost no point in your day when you genuinely stop. The answer may therefore begin less with finding another way to create energy and more with understanding where yours is already being spent.
The Better Life Founders Journal
Why You Feel Tired Even When You’re Doing Everything Right.
There is a particular kind of tiredness that I suspect almost everyone recognises, because it does not necessarily arrive after a terrible night’s sleep, an unusually difficult week or anything dramatic enough to explain it.
You went to bed at a sensible time and slept reasonably well. Breakfast was decent, lunch was not particularly disastrous and you may even have exercised the day before. On paper, most of the obvious boxes have been ticked, yet by three in the afternoon you are considering another coffee and wondering why you feel as though somebody silently removed twenty per cent of your battery while you were not looking.
That is where tiredness becomes frustrating, because you can begin to feel that you are already doing most of the things you have been told should help.
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Where Is Your Energy Going?
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Perhaps the problem is that we tend to think about energy as though it has one obvious source, when in everyday life it may be more useful to think of it as the outcome of everything your day asks of you.
Sleep obviously matters enormously, but so does what happens during the sixteen or seventeen hours when you are awake. You may spend much of that time sitting at a desk and still finish the day feeling thoroughly depleted because physical movement is only one form of demand. There is also the meeting you are thinking about before it happens, the conversation you need to remember to have, the family logistics sitting somewhere in the background, the notifications and messages arriving while you are doing something else, the decision about dinner, the thing you forgot yesterday and the work problem that follows you home even when the laptop does not.
The body may be sitting still while the mind has been on its feet all day.
None of those things has to be particularly serious on its own. An ordinary everyday life can contain enough small demands that we barely notice any individual one, while still creating a surprisingly large cumulative bill by the end of the day.
Then we sometimes respond to that feeling by adding more.
Another coffee helps for a while, or a harder workout feels virtuous. We try to become more productive, squeeze more into the available hours and perhaps become slightly frustrated with ourselves for not having quite the energy we think we should have.
Which leads to what I think may be the more interesting question.
Stop Asking “How Do I Get More Energy?”
The better first question may be:
“Where is mine going?”
That changes the investigation completely.
If your sleep is repeatedly interrupted, the answer may indeed begin at night, but another person may be sleeping adequately while consistently under-fuelling a busy day. Someone else may be exercising hard several times a week without allowing enough recovery between sessions, while another may be carrying a level of mental and emotional workload that makes the evening feel like the final few miles of a much longer journey than anyone around them can see.
Caffeine can disguise some of that temporarily, alcohol may make an evening feel relaxing without necessarily helping the quality of the recovery that follows and even activities we normally regard as healthy can become another demand when they are simply added to an already overloaded life.
This is why generic advice available everywhere about energy can totally miss the point. If four people are tired for four different reasons, giving all of them the same morning routine, supplement or productivity trick is unlikely to solve very much.
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Your Tiredness Probably Doesn’t Need Another Generic Checklist
Coach Max can look across your sleep, stress, eating, exercise, caffeine, recovery and the shape of an ordinary day, then help you identify patterns and test the changes most relevant to you.
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This is one of the areas where we believe the Better Life approach becomes genuinely unique, because Max does not need to begin with an assumption about why you are tired. He can begin with you.
What time do you wake? When do you normally feel best? At what point does your energy begin disappearing? What does breakfast look like, rather than what you know it probably should look like? How much caffeine are you using and when? What is happening with exercise? How do evenings usually unfold? Are weekends restorative or simply a different collection of jobs?
You begin building a hyper-personalised picture.
Perhaps the pattern is obvious once you see it written down, or perhaps it takes a little experimentation. You might change the timing of a meal, reduce the amount of exercise for a week, protect one evening, move the final coffee earlier or look more closely at what is happening to your sleep.
None of those is necessarily the only answer. The useful thing is that you are no longer firing random solutions at a problem you have not yet understood.
There is also an important thing to note here. Persistent, unexplained or unusually severe fatigue deserves proper medical attention because lifestyle is not the explanation for everything and feeling genuinely unwell should never be reduced to another wellbeing experiment.
For the much more familiar experience of simply feeling as though normal life is taking more out of you than it ought to, though, we think there is something powerful about turning the question around.
Instead of asking how you can somehow manufacture more energy, look at the places where yours may be unknowingly leaking away.
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Get More of Yourself Back
Tell Coach Max what feeling properly energised would allow you to do differently, then let Better Life help you work backwards towards the changes most likely to get you there.
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Perhaps that is the outcome worth aiming for. Not becoming one of those relentlessly energetic people who apparently leap out of bed at five every morning and never require an afternoon on the sofa, but simply having enough energy for the life you want to live, with enough of yourself still available at the end of the day to enjoy it.
The Better Life Founders Journal
Written with the thought that sometimes the answer to having more energy may begin by discovering where the energy you already have keeps going.