3 Ways to Improve Your Energy During the Day

Tags

alarm, cortisol, energy, habits, sleep, snooze, stress hormone, wake

Ever felt that 3 PM crash? Do you feel tired even when you got 8-hours of sleep the night before? One of the best way to avoid groggy and tiredness is to improve your sleep and wake up habits. Below are 3 key habits that impact how much energy you have for the day.

1. Wake up without your alarm clock. The key to avoid that groggy morning feeling is to wake up naturally so you can avoids being jerked out of deep sleep. When you sleep, most people cycle through 5 stages of sleep throughout the night. The lightest stage is called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep, which is the last stage before you wake up, and also the stage where you dream. When you wake up from REM sleep stage, you wake up feeling well rested. However, when you wake up during non-REM sleep stage, (such as from the interruption of your alarm clock) you feel groggy and tired. Studies have even shown that waking up during deep sleep can negatively affected short-term memory and cognitive abilities!
2. Avoid the snooze button. Do you sometimes find yourself waking up before the alarm? When you know what time you need to wake up the next day, your body will naturally prepare for the set wake up time by releasing the stress hormone hours prior so you will wake up naturally. If you try to go back to sleep, your body releases the opposing hormones that helps you sleep, counteracting with the hormones that wakes you. Result: you feel groggier and more confused.
3. Avoid the morning rush by getting ready the night before. Morning rush can increase the stress hormone, leading to an adrenaline-inducing energy jolt that will lead to a crash later in the day. Pre-plan your morning and prepare as much as you can (lay out your clothes, pack up your bag night before, etc.) so you can avoid the unnecessary stress that can drain your energy.

-NZ

Creating a Mindset for Successful Weight Loss: Tackling Your Failure Through Behavior Change

Tags

Behavior change, behavioral change, eating, habits, lifestyle, quitting, smoking, weight loss

Lifestyle changes are hard and require continuous committment. While there is a whole field on how to effectively change your lifestyle and “bad habits” using behavioral change there is a common issue I often see in my patients that I would like to share with you.

This is not a moral issue: It is a fact of life that priorities shift from week to week. Having an “I just need to get my act together” view only allows for short term gain because it makes you think of the lapse/relapse as attributed to personal weakness. In reality, unhealthy behaviors are a part of our lives for several reasons, of which determination and personal discipline are a very small part. Having a resolve is only the first step! A time will come (often sooner than you expect) when you will have a crisis (perhaps at work) and find yourself at that familiar “forbidden” place (If your goal is to eat healthy, perhaps you buy yourself a slice of pizza). Now, this is a critical moment. What do you tell yourself during this moment of relapse?

• Scenario 1: you tell yourself “well, I already had one slice, might as well just have 2 more. And oh yeah, I’m clearly not cut out to be a skinny person.” Then followed by the fateful look at yourself in the mirror the next morning. The self-hatred, and the cycle continues. Your exciting journey full of hope just came to a crashing halt.
• Scenario 2: you say, “well one slice isn’t too bad…everything in moderation right?” Believe it or not, this is a hotly debated word. Some might argue that one slice of pizza causes physiologic changes that cause you to crave and eat more and more. Just ask award winning journalist Michael Moss: how much of an addictive substance are you allowed to have? Regardless of how you feel about the issue, you just lost this opportunity to find a way to resolve your craving.

A helpful way to tackle the above scenario is to use Failure as a Problem Solving Opportunity. This is what health coaches do with their clients. As a health coach myself, I have seen this work over and over again. Think about the process. What led you to pick up that slice of pizza? Was it an emotion? Can you think of other ways to deal with that emotion? Do you find that each time you are in a similar situation (maybe it is that damn TPS report), you have to eat pizza to comfort yourself? Is there a way to improve your current situation? Perhaps changing your work space will help to cut the pizza eating cycle.

Remember that failure is part of the process. Tobacco is one of the most addictive substances in the world. To quit, it often takes an individual 7-10 attempts. The key is to realize that every attempt at quitting brings you closer.

– DS