Get Enough to Eat and Drink, But Not Too Much

Let’s start with nutrition, since food is the primary source of energy. Just eating is not enough. In order to function well on a daily basis, you need to choose food that produces stable blood sugar and provides vital nutrients throughout the day. Eating a healthy breakfast is important to your energy as well as keeping your weight in check. A mix of protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates low on the glycemic scale will help you to start your day alert and will keep you energized until lunch. Hydration is also necessary in maintaining healthy circulation and normal brain function.

In many health care settings, there are days when you will have little or no time for lunch. A supply of low-glycemic snacks stashed away in your purse or backpack may come in handy on these days. Nuts, dried fruit, or energy bars are easy to store and eat whenever you have a spare moment or need to energize yourself.

Get Active

It may seem like a paradox, but exercise is energizing. Physical activity that gets you moving will increase your energy. Many people think exercise will tire them out, and it’s true that too much exercise can tire you out. Many jobs require a person to sit all day, often staring at a computer screen. This will make anyone tired. If your job is sedentary, you should plan activity throughout the day. Maybe a trip to the gym before work is your style. Maybe walking works for you, whether it’s a long walk or a few quick laps around the parking lot. Taking the stairs, volunteering for errands, or checking on patients will all keep you moving and keep your energy up.

Get Enough Sleep

Neuroscientists still have much to learn about sleep. It seems that the body uses sleep to repair cells, and the brain uses sleep to cement memories and integrate experience and learning in the form of building neural connections. Your body needs a minimum amount of sleep in order to perform these functions. The necessary amount varies, but it is usually between six and eight hours. Adolescents may need at least ten hours of sleep to thrive, and infants may need at least sixteen.

Who hasn’t had the experience of going to bed so tired that you cannot imagine ever recovering, and then waking up eight hours later feeling refreshed? Clearly, something quite restorative happens during sleep.

By the same token, the consequences of too little sleep, especially on a prolonged basis, can be devastating to your state of mind and energy level. Your critical thinking skills deteriorate, leading to poor decisions and bad judgment. Your alertness is submerged, leading you to overlook important cues when communicating and treating patients. Your mood and emotions may be brittle, causing you to experience anger, depression, or frustration you would normally move past. Somebody who is sleep-deprived is in no condition to be at work.

Find Work You Love

As a health professional, you have chosen work that is meaningful and socially proactive, so you have already made a good choice in finding engaging work. Health professions are a unique blend of novel challenges such as physical activity, demanding thinking, social connection, and spiritual meaning. The more skilled and intuitive you become, the more engaged you can be as your interest and energy levels increase.

Still, even engaged professionals have to constantly renew their engagement at work. For one thing, even the most interesting work can lose its appeal if it becomes routine. To combat this tendency, you can reframe your view of your role. You can recognize that you are a big help to many people every day, even people you may not know such as family members of your patients. You may be an inspiration to others. Even if your job seems routine, take pride in the skills you worked so long to develop.

Besides adjusting your attitude, you can also adjust your routine. Introduce yourself to co-workers you don’t know, or learn more about those you don’t know well. Have lunch with different people. Learn a new skill. Research a health issue you encounter frequently. Drive to work by a different route. Every novel change can renew interests you once treasured.

Connect With People

Human beings are wired to interact with other people, and health professionals have a particularly strong need to relate to people. Take advantage of this human need to create and build energy. A conversation, a discussion, a sharing of interests, the solving of a problem, a group decision, a feeling of connection in a crisis—these are all energy-building experiences because they fulfill our need for social connection.

Activity Tools

Use quick bursts of movement and activity to raise your energy. For instance, if you practice yoga, self-defense, aerobics, or dance, you can take a moment to perform a favorite exercise to increase your heart rate and circulation. Other activity tools include:

Nutritional Tools

Fatigue is a symptom of dehydration. Your body is 60% to 70% water and water mediates virtually all of your bodily functions, including your brain function and energy systems, depending on your age, weight, and gender. You need water to keep you on the go all day long. Make plans to keep yourself well hydrated. Other nutritional tools include:

Refreshment Tools

Try the following strategies for an energy boost:

Other unconventional ideas are included in Box 3-1.

Socialization Tools

Few things restore energy faster than a good laugh, especially if you can share it with a co-worker. A short social conversation with a co-worker who’s good at putting things in perspective will be a pick-me-up, especially if you do it while helping her in some way.

Finally, in your quest for an energy boost, take it easy on yourself so your stress doesn’t act as a barrier to your refreshment.

Lose Weight

If you suddenly had to carry around a 20-pound sack of flour strapped to your abdomen, you would definitely notice the load, and the energy that it took to carry it. If you are overweight, you probably put the weight on gradually. You adjusted to the stress it placed on your bones and muscles, so you hardly noticed the energy your excess weight robbed from you over time.

Almost without exception, people who lose significant weight are amazed at their newfound supply of energy. Losing weight is a difficult challenge requiring strong motivation and perseverance. Only you can motivate yourself to rise to the challenge, but regaining your lost energy might be part of that motivation. Even while you are losing weight, though, the exercise that is part of most weight-loss plans will begin restoring your energy right away. Try to include exercise as part of your weight-loss plan.

Evaluate Your Diet

If you are chronically tired, you may not be eating the right kind of diet. Heavy meals can make you feel lethargic as your blood is diverted from nourishing your brain to digesting your food. Foods high in sugar can spike your blood sugar, creating a short burst of energy followed by a long crash. Ideally, you want a consistent supply of nutrients that keeps your blood sugar steady and your brain supplied with glucose—the only substance it can burn—all day long.

Breakfast is an important part of such a program because it “breaks” the “fast” of sleeping all night, giving your body a much needed injection of blood sugar to start your day off right. After that, select protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates that are low on the glycemic index and full of soluble and insoluble fiber (Box 3-2). Low-glycemic carbohydrates release sugars slowly and promote a feeling of fullness. Adding these foods to your diet will help to prevent blood sugar spikes and insulin surges that deplete sugars from the blood and prepare them for storage as fat.

Lower Stress

Providing health care is stressful work, and stress produces many negative effects besides lower energy. It can impair your judgment, reduce your happiness, and cause insomnia. In contrast, reduced stress leads to higher energy. Managing stress is discussed later in this chapter.

Sleep Well

If you don’t sleep well, find out why and make adjustments. Most of the time, it is just a matter of going to bed earlier. In some cases, you may have to make a few more alterations such as cutting out late-night TV or eating earlier in the evening. Making your bedroom dark, quiet, and cool can help optimize the brain’s ability to sleep. Develop a routine by waking up at the same time every day, going for a run, showering, and eating breakfast before going to work.

If you snore, wake up with headaches, or feel exhausted despite sleeping all night, you might have sleep apnea. People who suffer from sleep apnea frequently stop breathing during the night, which deprives the brain of oxygen and stresses the heart. Seek help at a sleep clinic, where the clinician may recommend a polysomnograph (sleep study) and possibly prescribe a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) device. In rare cases, you may have a thyroid test to make sure you don’t have hypothyroidism, which can cause fatigue.

Finally, if stress and anxiety are giving you insomnia, pursue some of the remedies discussed later in this chapter.

Seek Happiness

A final long-term strategy for increasing energy in your life is to make time to engage in activities that make you happy. Happiness is a natural energy boost. This can be as simple as spending more time socializing with friends, co-workers, or family. Maybe activities that feed your spirituality bring you a great deal of joy. Perhaps you are engrossed in a hobby such as swimming, pottery, or playing a musical instrument. Pursuing activities improves your brain waves and makes problems more manageable so they don’t sap your energy.