5 Lifestyle Changes To Increase Energy
Energy is the ‘secret sauce’ that makes a happy and productive life possible. When you have copious amounts of sweet energy, life can be a real blast and it can feel like anything is possible! The great news is that how much energy you have is hugely affected by how you live your life. Everything from the time you go to bed, to how you spend your spare time, to the foods and drinks you consume can increase energy – or decrease it.
Even if you have a medical condition that hampers your energy levels to the point where you require a disabled driving permit, you can still make lifestyle improvements that will increase your energy, and make life much more enjoyable.
Here are five lifestyle changes you can make that will increase your energy levels.
Sleep Better
Good quality sleep is absolutely key for preserving and increasing energy. After eight unbroken hours you feel alert, joyous, and ready to rock! After six hours of tossing and turning you feel irritable, more susceptible to worry, and low on energy. Sleep is when the body rejuvenates itself, so people with health problems who perhaps use handicap permits need as much sleep as possible. Sleep is also when the brain organizes and sorts information, so when you don’t get enough sleep and you feel like your mind is ‘foggy’, there is a very real reason for that: your brain has not had a chance to properly organize and order itself. Having a regular sleep pattern is important. If you go to bed and rise at similar times each day, you are giving your body a rhythm that it can rely on, and this makes getting good quality sleep much more likely. So prioritize sleep, and reap the rewards of increased energy.
Get Off Social Media
Modern technology is a blessing in so many ways. For example, super-fast broadband is making telemedicine and disabled parking space applications more straightforward than ever before. But a phenomenon that goes hand-in-hand with modern communications technology is social media. Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are designed to be highly captivating, and they have a tendency to addict their users (often in an extreme way). Many people spend endless hours each day glued to social media, checking and refreshing again and again and again, craving the dopamine hit of new messages, comments, and ‘likes’. This constant spiking and dropping of dopamine is draining and energy-sapping. When people reduce their usage of social media they report large increases in their overall alertness, as well as an increased desire to involve themselves in the real world. The face-to-face social interactions that then occur will energize you even further, and an upward spiral of rejuvenation, healing, and increased energy will ensue. So give it a try – unplug and see what happens!
Meditate
Chronic rumination and worry can really sap you of energy. A mind that rattles relentlessly with thoughts that we feel completely attached to leaves little room for rest. And for people who have health issues that require the use of telemedicine services or a handicap parking space, worries can be particularly intense and bothersome. A great way to gain some perspective and see your thoughts for the random, involuntary ‘brain-farts’ that they are is to meditate. If you spend some time each day watching your thoughts dispassionately, you will soon notice their haphazard and ridiculously repetitive nature! Seeing this reality helps you to gain an understanding of the fact that your thoughts are not you. Your thoughts are merely generated at random and ‘you’ are the entity (the consciousness) that watches the thoughts. This understanding provides relief from worry, stills the mind (sometimes), and provides a more accurate perspective. This improvement in your mental state will have a lasting effect and increase energy greatly.
Get Regular Exercise
It may sound counter-intuitive, but the more energy you expend through exercise, the more energy you get back! Whatever level of exercise is appropriate for you – whether it’s walking from your disabled parking spot to the mall or running ultramarathons – if you push yourself just a little bit out of your immediate comfort zone a few times a week, you will reap some serious rewards and increase energy. You can find whatever type of exercise works for you. What do you enjoy? Make it fun! Ideally you want your exercise routine to involve some cardiovascular, flexibility, and resistance work in order to get the most benefit. So get to work – the more you put in, the more you’ll get out!
Improve Your Diet
An extremely effective way to increase energy is to improve your diet. Cutting out sugar and simple carbs will increase your energy levels and make them much more consistent throughout the day (by allowing you to avoid the dreaded and real ‘carb crash’ that leaves people comatose on the sofa an hour after eating a heavy dose of simple carbs). Being dehydrated is also a major energy drain, so drinking plenty of water is crucial and energizing. Fresh vegetable juice (containing lots of cruciferous greens such as kale and spinach) will give you a mega-dose of nutrients that will super-charge your energy levels. You are what you eat – so eat for energy!
