How To Recharge Your Body And Beat Fatigue

Recharge Your Body:

Overcome Fatigue and Get Your Life Back

Many people are walking around, driving, going to work and living their lives in a permanent state of fatigue.

Sometimes people are tired for unexplained health reasons, but often there are very typical reasons for fatigue which include lack of regular sleep, poor diet, and not getting enough exercise or hours of sleep.

Fatigue can be very frustrating and even disabling due to feeling as if you cannot get things done or enjoy your downtime.

In this post, we’re going to look at different ways to combat and overcome fatigue so that you can get your life back.

There is no reason to be tired all the time.

It’s not a normal state of being in healthy people. If you use all these ideas there is no doubt that you’re going to be on your way to not just getting over fatigue, but also becoming an energetic, happy, recharged individual who can accomplish more than you ever thought you could.

Why You Feel Exhausted Even on Your Best Days

Before we get into the meat of getting recharged, let’s address the fact that sometimes medical issues will play an important role in your energy levels. These can drag you down no matter how well you do on any given day.

If you are suffering from unexplained exhaustion, it’s important that you seek medical answers first and look after your mental health.

Go to your doctor and ask him/her to give you a complete blood work-up to check all your vitamin and hormone levels, plus test you for common diseases that cause exhaustion like sleep apnea.

Alternatively, you may be taking medication for an illness and one of the side effects is tiredness. If you feel tired after taking the medication for two weeks, ask your doctor if there are alternatives.

The following conditions can easily be tested for and acknowledged by your primary care doctor through typical blood tests.

Depression and Anxiety

While there can be underlying causes of depression and anxiety such as anemia and other vitamin and mineral deficiencies, sometimes people have these conditions for other or even unknown reasons.

If you’ve checked everything and nothing shows up, talk to a professional about whether you suffer from depression or anxiety (or both).

Anxiety and chronic stress causes fatigue by preventing a good night’s rest, and depression sometimes has the effect of making you want to sleep away your problems regardless of how much sleep you get.

Sleep Apnea

An almost epidemic problem today, sleep apnea is caused by either an obstruction due to the way you sleep, or because the brain isn’t signaling your muscles to breathe properly even if your airway isn’t blocked (known as central sleep apnea).

Both types of apnea are very dangerous and can lead to sudden death while sleeping.

However, most often what it leads to is a low quality of life due to experiencing non-restorative sleep.

To diagnose this issue, you’ll be sent to a sleep center overnight to do a sleep study.

There are many ways to get help with this problem. Even if no one has mentioned that you snore, this is a great test to get to ensure that you are sleeping well.

How Mental Exhaustion Affects the Whole Body

Everyone thinks it’s normal for someone to be tired if they work out in a field all day or stand on their feet all day.

But, people who have a desk job or spend a lot of your time on mental tasks are often surprised and shocked that they are still exhausted.

Mental exhaustion can affect your entire body in negative ways further affecting your mental health.

Not only are people with mental exhaustion tired, they also often suffer from body aches as if they have worked out all day long. Overusing your mind is just as bad for you as overusing yourself physically.

For example, many people who suffer from mental exhaustion, in addition to being tired most of the time, may start to get sick more often, have a lot of headaches, experience back pain, muscle aches and more.

Plus, mental exhaustion can affect your ability to get a good night’s sleep which can just make all the above worse.

Take note of the symptoms that are caused by mental exhaustion. If you have more than a few of these and have been burning the wick at both ends, consider mental exhaustion a potential culprit.

Constant sleepiness
Frequent headaches
Hallucinations
Impaired decision making
Inability to concentrate and focus
Irritability
Loss of appetite
Memory problems
Moodiness
Muscle weakness
Poor coordination
Poor judgement
Reduced immunity
Slow reflexes
Sore or aching muscles
Unexplained dizziness
Unmotivated

When people are mentally exhausted, their body tries to get them to take a break and rest in every way it can.

That’s why it’s so important to pay attention to the signs of mental exhaustion. Thankfully, there are ways to combat and overcome mental exhaustion, which we will discuss next.

How to Overcome Mental Exhaustion

Suffering from mental exhaustion is not a fun experience.

It can sneak up on you. You may think you’re doing wonderfully well and then one day you realize you’re not.

Therefore, let’s go through some steps to overcome mental exhaustion but also learn how to prevent it in the first place. After all, prevention is the best medicine of all.

Track How You Spend Your Time – If you don’t know how much you’re really doing, it can be easy to just keep going 24/7 and never take a break. Take some time to track what you’re doing daily for about a week. You can use your smartphone to track your activities or you can go old school and carry around a small notebook to record your activities in.

Drop Activities That Don’t Produce Real Results – When you look at the activities you did while tracking, note the things that aren’t really producing results, or that are busy work, or that are completely unnecessary.

For example, do you go to a lot of meetings? Do you have to? Do you spend a lot of time trying to help a relative, friend, or someone else without results?

Let go of anything that you can either just stop doing or outsource. Or if you must keep doing it, find a way to put limits on it.

Put Everything in Your Calendar – One reason people get overscheduled doing too much and become mentally exhausted is that they think they’re magic. They think they can do 48 hours of work in 24 hours.

But, if you started putting everything on your calendar properly, you would see that you just can’t.

First, schedule the must-dos. Then add in family time, date night, friend time, and “me” time to your day. Don’t add anything to your schedule that will reduce these important things.

Get a Good Night’s Sleep – Don’t forget how important sleep is. Most adults should seek to get between six and nine hours a night. It largely depends on your genetics how much sleep feels right for you. Work with what you know you need. If you’re having trouble sleeping at night, address that issue so that you fall asleep fast and your sleeping time is productive.

To help get used to this process, go to bed and wake up at the same time every day for at least 30 days.

You can start with the least time and work your way up to find out which amount of time works best for you to make you feel rested each day.

Exercise Every Day – Schedule in exercise time each day. It doesn’t have to be strenuous exercise. It can be as simple as a brisk walk. You also don’t need to schedule in an entire hour, regular exercise is important.

Look at your schedule so that you can determine if you have 10 minutes to walk six times a day, or three 20-minute walks a day.

You can also separate that out into different types of exercise. The important thing is to get up out of a chair and move as much as you can, this helps your blood circulation as well.

Eat Right – Enough cannot be stated about eating the right type of food for your body. What you eat often depends on what you need. Ask your doctor to test your blood levels for vitamins and then eat the things you need to avoid deficiencies.

Try eating smaller meals throughout the day which will give you a break, boost your energy, and help you stay more focused.

Stay Hydrated – It can be very easy to get dehydrated. Most adults should drink between eight and ten 8-ounce glasses of water each day to stay hydrated.

If you exercise strenuously you’ll need more.

Tea, coffee, soda, and sugary drinks (even fake sugar) are all dehydrating and don’t do the same thing as clean, filtered water will.

Take the challenge and commit to drinking enough water for 30 days, and you’ll see a huge difference.

Take Regular Breaks – When you are doing mental tasks, it’s hard to want to take a break sometimes because there are times when the time is just flying by as you work, and you just don’t notice. But, it’s imperative that you take regular breaks.

Since the brain works in 90-minute cycles, one way to accomplish breaks is to set up five- to ten-minute breaks every 115 minutes.

Set a timer if you must. Get up and stretch, go for a fast walk, grab a snack, drink some water, and you’ll come back refreshed.

Rest Your Eyes – Many people who are using their brains all day tend to sit in front of a computer. Computer monitors are very bad for your eyes. You can install software such as f.lux (https://justgetflux.com) to help lessen the strain, but getting away from the monitor on your regular breaks is going to help too.

Understand That It’s OK to Do Nothing – A lot of smart, busy people tend to be uncomfortable with downtime. They feel as if they’re slackers. But, even if you have a mentally exhausting job as compared to a physically exhausting one, everyone needs to get away sometime.

Schedule your yearly vacations and do something.

Even if you just stay home and look at local sites, that’s okay – everyone needs downtime and everyone needs time to do nothing.

If you are currently mentally exhausted due to a project of some kind, and if it’s possible, take a sick day on a Friday or Monday, or take two vacation days – one on a Friday and one on a Monday.

Spend that time resting, doing nothing, eating right, drinking water, and just getting yourself back. Then start fresh when you go back to work or school.

Activities That Raise Your Physical and Mental Energy Levels

There are many activities that you can do to help raise your energy level, whether you need more mental energy or physical energy.

Your mental and physical energy are so intertwined that when you do something to help one you’re automatically helping the other. Here are some effective activities to try.

Develop a Daily Meditation Practice – Meditation is an important way to help reduce mental stress so that you can focus better. Not only that; you’ll also learn to be more mindful of everything you do, which will help you avoid exhaustion in the first place, most of the time.

Move Your Body Every Single Day – Moving is something that is so important that even if you have a physical job, you should still find a way to get in more moving in an intentional way.

Even if it’s just a few brisk ten-minute walks, it’s a way to clear your mind and get your blood flowing. Anytime you feel a slump coming on, take a fast walk.

Keep a Gratitude Journal – Another way to stay energetic, both mentally and physically, is to be a positive person. Not everyone is positive naturally, but you can start to trick your mind into being that way by keeping a gratitude journal.

Each night before bed, write down three things you’re grateful for.

That will make it the last thing you think of each night. You can make this even more effective if you use a journal that is also a coloring book. Coloring will soothe your mind and relax you.

Find Your Energy Music – Everyone has positive, uplifting music that they really enjoy and that makes them feel upbeat. However, some of it can also make you unproductive, so it’s important to try out different types of music for different activities. If you think a song you sing to might not be the right one for work, it may very well be just the ticket for your ride home in the car.

Play a Game – Games and puzzles are great ways to have some downtime but are also good for your mind. Do at least one type of puzzle each day (such as a crossword puzzle) to help keep your brain thinking and to get your mind off other things that are pressuring you and sucking your energy.

Sometimes it’s fun to play a game with another person too, such as a silly fast card game like Uno just to break the pace.

Start a Yoga Practice – One of the best exercises for both mind and body is yoga. There are all types of yoga that you can get involved in.

If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, you can get free videos for beginners to get started.

Alternatively, you can join a class, which is a great way to feel more connected to the world at the same time.

Drink Water and Eat Chocolate – Sometimes, it’s impossible to take time out to do anything mentioned. If that’s the case, a fast way to improve your energy is to drink water so that you’re hydrated and eat a small serving of real, low-sugar chocolate. If you cannot eat chocolate, another alternative is a crunchy apple.

It might seem like these activities will take away from the time you need to spend on things you need to do. But the truth is, the more productive you are, the easier everything will be.

Productivity doesn’t mean that you need to take more time doing something.

It means that you need to focus closely on what’s at hand, and not what’s to come.

By taking breaks with these activities, you can help yourself become far more productive and reduce mental and physical exhaustion exponentially.

How to Rest If You’re an Insomniac

For many people, the main reason they are mentally and/or physically exhausted can all come down to issues with sleep.

If you are an insomniac, there are steps that you can take to get rest and hopefully reverse your situation. Regular and sufficient sleep will repair cells and rejuvenate you.

Seek Medical Assistance

The very first thing anyone with insomnia should do is make a doctor’s appointment to talk about the issues.

It might help to track the situation using a device like a Fitbit so that you can show your doctor your records.

But you can also just write things down, so you don’t forget what to talk about with your doctor.

Your doctor should take you seriously and not just automatically prescribe drugs to help you sleep. Even though that might be a short-term answer, it is not a long-term solution.

Your doctor will do a complete blood work-up to ensure that you are doing well nutritionally. If you have low iron, B12, or D, these can cause anxiety and insomnia in some people.

Turn Your Bedroom into a Fortress

This is a great excuse to redo your bedroom.

Your bedroom should be a sanctuary made for sleeping. Your bed should be the most comfortable that you can afford to buy, along with the sheets and blankets that you use on it.

You may need to test out a few mattresses, but you usually want something that is firmer than you might have thought but also giving.

Many types of memory foam mattresses are great for this, as are some of the sleep number type beds.

You can buy good sheets less expensively than you might think if you know what type of sheets you like. Check on Overstock.com and Amazon to find good prices on well-made sheets.

The higher thread count 100 percent cotton sheets are typically the best for most people, as they stay cool and are easy to care for.

For blankets, choose layers of blankets instead of one heavy comforter. That way you can adjust as needed for the time of year.

Invest in blackout shades for your windows. You can get them made for your windows at places like Home Depot or Lowe’s.

They are well worth it. Even if you have a rule with your HOA that they should be white on the back, you can still get blackout shades that will enable you to sleep better at night.

Get a white noise maker too.

You can also use a fan if you prefer. The inexpensive box fans make the right type of white noise. It’s better to use a white noise that is like a fan or static over sounds of animals or water dripping.

Keep your thermostat set properly. In the winter it should be set on 68 degrees F and in the summer 72. Having a fan to circulate the air is also helpful.

If it’s nice outside, try opening your window about an hour before you go to bed, but close it if you can when you go to bed so outside noises don’t interfere (unless you’re lucky enough to live where it’s super-quiet or you have the sound of the ocean to lull you to sleep).

Additionally, invest in very comfortable sleeping attire or sleep naked to avoid anything getting in the way of your comfort.

If you or your partner snore, consider using comfortable earplugs to help further block the sound. (Hint: parents of young children can take turns so every other night at least one parent gets a full night of sleep.)

Turn Off the Lights and Electronics

The darker you can make your room, the better.

But, once the sun goes down outside, it’s important to make the house dimmer too. You want to turn off all electronics at least an hour or two before you go to bed, so that your body gets used to the idea that it’s bedtime.

That includes your TV, your computer, and your mobile device.

This is probably the hardest one for insomniacs to deal with, but it’s very important for your health to disconnect.

If you’re nervous that something is going to happen to anyone if you’re not there immediately, understand that long before there were cell phones there were parents.

Of course, you’re going to want to be available to your kids if they’re teenagers, but that’s what curfews are about and that’s why people have two parents.

Ask for help and take turns.

If you do not have children living at home, you really don’t need to be available 24/7 to anyone most of the time. Anyone who has something to say to you, even if something bad happens, can be dealt with in the morning.

Try it for at least 30 days.

You’ll see after that time that you’re not in charge of the world, and no one needs to bother you about anything when you’re sleeping.

If you have elderly parents, share the job with your siblings with each of you having assigned “on call” times or something like that so that everyone can get sleep.

Remember, you cannot take care of others if you don’t take care of yourself first.

Start a Bedtime Ritual

A great way to ensure that you get more sleep is to create a bedtime ritual.

Since you already need to turn electronics off and turn down the lights, think of something you can do that doesn’t require either.

For example, soft slow stretches, meditation, a hot bath, taking care of your hygiene such as by brushing and flossing your teeth, doing a facial, applying lotion, and other activities.

Think about how babies go to sleep. Mom and Dad create a ritual around bedtime. They get a bath, a quiet story, cuddles, comfy clothing, and clean bed, and soft blankets.

All of this starts well before bedtime and helps the child calm down, so that when you sit down in bed to read they usually fall asleep fast if not with the first book, then by the third. You should do the same thing for yourself.

Do the same things nightly to help you sleep such as stretching, bathing, applying lotion, dressing for bed, and reading something positive.

Bedtime is not the time to read anything upsetting, scary, or even exciting. Use that time to read uplifting or thoughtful poetry, history, or something that keeps your heart rate low.

Finally, you really need to make time for sleep.

Set a daily schedule for your life and stick to it. Sleep is one of the most important factors in your schedule.

You should be able to get everything you need to do done daily and still sleep at least seven to eight hours a night.

But, it may require you to learn to say no, because it’s that important to your health and your daily energy levels.

To Sum Up

Recharging your body and overcoming fatigue so that you can get your life back is one of the most important ways you can improve the quality of your life.

There is no reason you need to be exhausted and tired all the time.

If it’s not a medical condition (and even if it is), you have a lot more control over how you feel each day than you think.

It might be as simple as getting enough sleep and drinking enough water. You are the one with the power to figure it out. Don’t delay, so that you can get your life back and do wonderful things.