The Energy Boost You Didn't Know You Needed

At an event last week I heard NYU professor Dr. Wendy Suzuki speak, and there was one thing she shared that both blew my mind and wasn’t surprising at all.

She demonstrated it through a really compelling experience where she ran an experiment in real-time. She had us all report how we felt via an online form, led us through 2 minutes of high-positivity movement and dancing, and then at the end had us report how we felt again.

As you can imagine, the results were starkly different. It’s remarkable what just a few minutes of movement can do for your attitude.

But the thing that I didn’t expect… The #1 most common answer that people put before we did the movement, by a wide margin, is that they felt “tired”. 

What this affirms is how chronically under-slept our society is, and how we’re unknowingly deprioritizing taking care of ourselves to accommodate whatever else life wants from us.

The reason tiredness is so pervasive is because we’ve acclimated to it. We forgot what it’s like to not be tired, so feeling tired has just become our normal. In our mind it’s not something we need to fix because we aren’t even aware that it’s broken.

And beyond just getting enough hours of sleep, it’s harder to have quality sleep than ever. Screens are offsetting our circadian rhythm… Snacking and having dinner late in the day spikes our heart rate… Social media and news use fear to stimulate a survival response… All of it makes us physiologically dysregulated and unprepared to actually get the rest we need.

And when we’re tired, we don’t have our best to offer. The quality of our work goes down so we’re forced to spend more time doing it. We’re less present when we’re around others so our relationships suffer. We have less emotional control and make worse choices in our diet. 

All of it adds to this chronic problem of having too much to do, and too much being compromised, fueling the cycle over and over again.

I used to be this way. I’d get midday brain fog, fight off the need for a nap and power through my day with less to show for it than I’d like to admit. I tried everything, but it all changed when I started getting 7.5 hours of sleep consistently.

It’s ironic, but I say that the most disciplined thing you can do is go to bed on time. Give it a try for a week or two and I can almost promise that you’ll feel like a new person.

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