Hello!
Seiiti Arata.
Why are you always tired?
Why don’t you have the necessary energy to do your everyday tasks, reach your goals,
chase your dreams?
Even though you really want to advance, why aren’t you able to start moving?
Notice that I didn’t even ask you whether you’re feeling tired.
Nowadays, that question is almost unnecessary.
Almost everyone feels tired nowadays.
According to some surveys, up to ninety eight percent of the respondents reported feeling
tired.
[source: https://arata.se/fonte-i76k]
You can spend hours on the internet searching for the reason why you’re always tired.
There are millions of possible results for that search, but they will, almost invariably,
limit themselves to four causes: lack of sleep, lack of exercise, a poor nutrition or an excess
of stimuli.
Most of the time, your tiredness comes from all four causes combined.
So, today I’ll invite you to do an experiment.
An experiment that only takes seventy two hours.
Three days for you to regain your energies and be in the mood to do whatever you have
to do again.
If you want, you can write in the comments below this video and tell us how you’re
feeling today before starting the experiment.
In three days time, or whenever you finish this challenge, come back here and leave an
answer to your own comment telling how you feel after having done what I’m now going
to suggest.
Agreed?
Then let’s see what you need to do during the next three days so that you can regain
your energies and stop feeling tired all the time.
Have three good nights of sleep.
Sleeping is the essential tool for your body and mind to recover from tiredness.
Lack of sleep is the main reason why you’re always tired.
Lack of sleep can mean that you’re sleeping for less hours than you should and also that
your quality of sleep is poorer than necessary.
So, during the three-day challenge, your objective is to have three good nights of sleep.
That means sleeping the necessary amount of hours for you to wake up feeling well rested.
For most people, that’s eight hours of sleep.
But there are people who need slightly more or slightly less.
Now, keep in mind that this is the number of hours you have to spend actually sleeping.
If you go to bed at ten and you stay up watching TV or using your phone, that doesn’t mean
you can wake up eight hours later.
In addition to the amount of hours you sleep, you need to care about the quality of your
sleep.
In order to make your quality of sleep better during this challenge, try not to consume
caffeine after lunchtime during these three days.
You can take a cup of coffee when you wake up, later in the morning, or right after lunch.
After that, try not to consume any caffeine at all.
Remember that caffeine isn’t only present in coffee.
Chocolates, soft drinks, energy drinks and even some teas can have a lot of caffeine.
Avoid all that after lunchtime.
If you’re used to drinking alcoholic drinks, I’ll ask you to also try to quit drinking
during these three days.
I know a lot of people think that alcohol helps you fall asleep, and that may be true.
You fall asleep faster, but your quality of sleep is negatively affected by the consumption
of alcohol, especially during the deep sleep phase, which is precisely the most important
phase to make you feel well rested [source: https://arata.se/source-rluq].
Your sleep quality can also be enhanced by following some simple tips.
If you can, leave your bedroom in complete darkness, silent and with a controlled temperature.
The ideal is that you try to follow the rule of sleeping when the sun sets and waking up
when the sun rises, in case your work and lifestyle allow you to do it.
In any case, avoid having electronic devices in your bedroom, especially your phone, just
during these three days.
If it takes you a long time to fall asleep, calculate when you need to go to bed so that
you can sleep the necessary amount of hours until the time you need to wake up.
Move your body.
The more energy you spend, the more energy you’ll have.
This can look counterintuitive, but if you’re feeling physically tired, a good solution
is to do physical exercise.
Physical tiredness is a cycle.
That cycle can be vicious or virtuous.
An example of a vicious cycle is the following: you’re feeling tired.
Then you sit down or lay down and don’t move your body.
Instead of resting, what happens is that you feel even more tired, and without energy to
do exercise.
And the cycle goes on.
In order to change that, you need to turn it into a virtuous cycle.
Yes, you’re tired.
But even though you’re tired, you can move, you can exercise.
Instead of feeling more tired, that will give you extra energy to complete your tasks.
And this is how you’ll be willing to do exercise again.
Some studies [source: https://arata.se/source-x9wf] show that adults that started doing mild exercise
a few times a week needed around forty days of practice to notice meaningful changes,
but you can start feeling the benefits during the first few days.
Studies also show that those who exercise also sleep better.
Now, there are two possible scenarios.
In the first scenario you’re a sedentary person.
In the second scenario, you already exercise regularly.
If you’re sedentary, try to simply move your body during these three days of the challenge.
The easiest way of doing it is simply by going outdoors for a walk, preferably sunbathing
a bit in an appropriate solar time frame.
Instead of trying to leave your sedentary lifestyle all of a sudden and become an athlete,
just move your body.
Go for a long walk once a day, early in the morning or in the late afternoon, and try
moving around a bit throughout the day as well.
Remember standing up from your chair from time to time, correcting your posture, stretching
your muscles.
Avoid doing heavy exercise before going to bed, because it could interfere with your
sleep.
If you already do physical exercise and still feel tired, there can be two reasons for that.
Maybe you’re doing too much exercise or maybe you’re just moving during a small
period of time.
If you’re being too hard on yourself, try to do lighter exercise during these days.
However, if you move yourself only during the periods devoted to exercise, during these
three days try to move your body among those intervals as well.
For example, let’s say that you do some kind of exercise like bodybuilding, running
or swimming for forty minutes every morning.
And you spend the rest of the day working in front of the computer.
In that case, try standing up at least once every hour.
Do some stretching, walk a bit, fix your posture.
If you don’t have the possibility to stop working and walk for a while, try to at least
work standing for a couple of minutes.
Simple attitudes like this one will give you more energy to accomplish your daily tasks.
Spend three days without consuming sugar, wheat and trans fats.
Instead of that, eat minimally processed food.
The products we consume are directly linked to our energy levels.
A malnourished person is hardly going to maintain high levels of energy to complete their tasks,
because their body and brain will both get tired much sooner.
The best way to have a well-balanced diet is consulting a food specialist.
Having medical examinations done to verify your body levels, following a diet that has
been prescribed by a competent professional and taking supplements or medicines if they’ve
been prescribed.
But for this experiment of just three days I’ll suggest something simpler.
My suggestion is that you spend three days eating only food that has been minimally processed
by avoiding completely three ingredients: sugar, wheat and trans fats.
Minimally processed foods are those you can find in nature: meat, eggs, fruits, vegetables,
seeds and oilseeds.
A good tip to know whether or not a product has been heavily processed is reading its
list of ingredients.
Natural food doesn’t have boxes, signs or lists of ingredients.
An orange is an orange, salmon is salmon, an almond is an almond.
If the product comes in a package and it has a long list of ingredients, it’s not a natural
product.
If you do that, you’ll probably stay away from sugar, wheat and trans fats.
You can manage to spend three days away from sweets, bread, pasta, margarine and vegetable
oils.
During this experiment, remember to drink a lot of water, too.
Even a small deficit of 2% in your hydration can cause mental tiredness [source: https://arata.se/source-h0t2].
So, don’t let the lack of water spoil your three-day challenge.
If it’s possible, try to leave a period of at least twelve hours between your last
meal of the day and the first meal of the next day.
For example, if you had dinner at eight in the evening, wait to have breakfast until
eight in the morning.
Reduce your stimuli to give your brain a break.
Sleeping well, moving your body and eating natural food are the three essential steps
to regain your energy levels and fight physical tiredness.
The fourth and last step of our challenge will help us fight mental tiredness.
And this step consists in reducing the quantity of stimuli you receive per day.
For most people, this means reducing how much they use the Internet.
Try to spend these three days limiting as much as possible the use of social media,
news websites and even videos and streaming services.
Instead of doing all that, use that time to complete the tasks you’re procrastinating
or to do some relaxing activities, such as reading a book, making crafts or practicing
your favourite hobby.
Ever since smartphones and high speed Internet became omnipresent, we have been giving too
little rest to our brains.
During breaks at work, instead of resting, we are constantly hyperstimulating our senses
with messages, audio messages, photos, videos and a feed of news without end.
This behaviour is highly addictive and you can find it difficult to completely stop using
your smartphone for three days.
But you are completely able to reduce the use of your phone a little.
Try to see for yourself if that makes a difference in the way you’re feeling.
You can restore your energy levels and stop feeling always tired in only three days.
Let’s remember the four steps you need to take in order to fulfil our three-day challenge
to regain your energy:
Spend three good nights of sleep Move your body
Don’t consume sugar, wheat or trans fats for three days
Reduce stimuli
You don’t need to be absolutely perfect during those three days.
Just do your best to take these four steps and watch the effect they will have on your
physical and mental state.
Write down how you feel before you start the challenge and then compare it to how you are
feeling after the three days.
The three-day period is not random.
That’s the time it takes, more or less, for you to experience the positive effect
of all those changes.
But you’ll probably start feeling a reduction in your tiredness on your second day.
In fact, if those changes brought you positive effects and you don’t feel as tired as you
used to anymore, then you can think about adopting these new habits as a lifestyle.
Extreme and constant tiredness has become an epidemic all around the globe, to such
an extent that we find it normal to feel tired all the time.
But that’s not normal and you can reduce that feeling of tiredness a lot by fighting
the main evils that suck your energy: lack of sleep, sedentarism, malnourishment and
excess of stimuli.
With your energy recovered, you can devote yourself to fulfill your tasks, achieve your
goals, run after your dreams.
In order to do that in the most efficient way possible, you can take a look at our course
Productivity Ninja.
This course has a special free class that you can watch right now by accessing https://arata.se/timemanagement