Vesna: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna, and we'll talk about how to keep your energy high when you are working long hours for simple habits that'll sustain your energy levels throughout the day. So if you're finding that you're burning the candle at both ends, here are 4 simple habits that will help to keep your energy up.
So if you are working late [00:01:00] or working longer hours or there feels like there's more pressure than normal, and maybe this has gone on for a period of time, so it's longer than a couple of weeks, if it's going into a few months, then you really wanna look at supporting your body so your energy doesn't really kind of tank, and that you don't start heading towards burnout where you can't sustain this pace at all.
So there will be times when in business and in life, things get thrown your way and you'll have to do extra hours, and this is very normal, but you wanna be able to support yourself, like I said, to avoid any kind of side effects from that, but to also keep your energy high so you can, to all the tasks that you need to do.
You have the energy for the work, for the family, for everything. The other thing that I notice is that when we are working long hours or have clients that work late and have been burning the candle at both ends for a long time, they end up staying up late into the night working. They end up relying on more caffeine to keep going.
Then there's more processed [00:02:00] foods or takeaway foods or Uber Eats and sugar and alcohol. So all of that stuff can give you kind of like a quick energy hit. Very short window of energy hit, and then it drops you really low, and so you'll end up feeling like this kind of rollercoaster throughout the day for your energy, but also your productivity.
And then it also starts to have an impact on your hormones as well, which has more of a long-term effect.
So number one, really simple diet changes can have a huge difference to your energy levels throughout the day. So when you wake up in the morning, don't start your day with caffeine or coffee on empty stomach. That is going to push up cortisol levels. It's gonna. Wreak havoc on your glucose levels throughout the day.
So the best thing to do is make sure that you have a breakfast before you take your coffee in. what this will do to just give you consistent energy throughout the day, not those highs and lows. So your breakfast could be something as simple as fruit and yogurt, or a smoothie or a boiled egg on toast.
It doesn't need to be something very time consuming, but it [00:03:00] is. You'll notice a difference in your energy if you have that before you have the coffee.
The other thing I would also recommend is if you can have good, healthy snacks on hand, fruit, nuts, yogurts, any kind of snacks that you can have that are there and they're ready, so that way when you're feeling like something, you're not going for junk food or processed foods, or you're not ordering Uber Eats.
The other thing that is very protective for our energy levels and to keep stress lower and prevent us going into burnout is having home-cooked meals. Now, I know that may seem, especially when you're really busy and you're working late into the night, that may may feel really hard, but even if you can do on the weekends, pre-cook batches, big batches, put them in the freezer, and that way all you need to do is pull them out and you don't have to worry too much about cooking something fresh.
Number two is getting morning sunlight. So the morning sunshine or the sunlight or the sunrise. So the very early morning, the sun has a different spectrum of light. There's more [00:04:00] red light in that sun, and that light is. Really important for our energy levels. So that red light in the morning sunrise helps to reset our circadian rhythm, and so therefore it'll reset our sleep.
So make sure that we have proper sleep, but it resets our body. It also helps with serotonin and dopamine release. So. Everything to help us feel good and our reward hormones. So we are feeling like pleasuring what we are doing during the day. It also balances our hormone as well. And the most important thing is that it's important for the mitochondria.
So helping to produce more energy throughout the day. So if you're anything like me, you're spending a lot of time on your devices, your computer screen, your mobile phone, maybe even Netflix at night. You're getting a lot. Of junk light, okay? You're getting a lot of blue light, which means that your circadian rhythm will be thrown out.
Okay? And so therefore, the morning sunrise is super important to reset that. It's the only way you're going, to reset it, and it's just five minutes in the morning. So make that the first thing you do when you [00:05:00] wake up. You don't look at your phone, you don't look at the blue light from your phone.
so all you want to do is look towards the horizon or look towards the sun. Obviously, you wanna look in that direction. You don't wanna burn your eyes, but it is important to get the sunlight straight into your eyes. Not wearing glasses, not wearing sunglasses, nothing to obstruct. no glass windows or anything in between you and the sun. That is important to get that red light into your eyes to do all the resetting and hormone balancing.
Number three, take decompression breaks throughout the day. The amount of times that I see clients, when I look at their calendar, it is booked back to back, whether it be with meetings or whether it be with things that they need to do, and there's no decompression breaks. And what happens is when we look at our schedule, our mind can see that there's no gaps there.
There's no. Lag time, and it becomes a lot of pressure for ourselves. So there's no kind of contingency in there. There's no room in there for something runs over time, whether it be a meeting or a task. And so it, it just kind of creates this pressure throughout the day. And the other reason [00:06:00] why we want spaces in our calendar is not just for the mental thing when we see our calendar, but we want to be able to take decompression breaks throughout the day.
So if there's. Lot of pressure at the moment, and there's more stress than usual. Your stress hormones will be high, and if we don't take a break, they're not coming down. They're staying really high all day, so therefore, creating some space in your calendar where you can just decompress for 10 minutes, no phone, no devices, not at your computer.
Just go outside and get. A sun break for five minutes, 10 minutes, and then come back in. If you schedule a couple of those during the day, it allows you to have a decompression break. the other thing that you can do if you want to go outside and get some sun is also just do some deep breathing or breathing practices, or do a, a vagus nerve reset takes about 60 seconds.
You breathe in through the nose and you take a second breath in through the nose, and then you slowly exhale through the mouth. And then you do that two to three times. Okay? And that will help to [00:07:00] reset the nervous system.
And then the final thing, the number four, is on the weekend where you can get more sleep, either going to bed earlier and even, staying a little bit longer in bed. But the, the key part here is going to bed earlier because during the week, if you are working late, your circadian rhythm is off, which is going to disrupt your energy production.
And so on the weekend, do your best to catch up. So going to bed by nine 30 10:00 PM to help realign the circadian rhythm. And then do things that help to kind of decompress in a more intense way, like going out in nature, walking, along the beach or going for a hike or a bush walk. Those intense, more kind of out of your normal life, those experiences help to really reset the nervous system.
Okay, so they're the four habits you want to make. Some very simple dietary changes. You wanna see the morning sunrise, you wanna create some decompression breaks in your calendar and where you can on the weekend, catch up on sleep in the evening time as well.
So let me know in the comments below, which is the [00:08:00] first habit that you're going to implement, the most simplest one for you, that you could start even tomorrow morning. And that's probably gonna be the dietary changes, but let me know in the comment below.
