How to perform better without feeling tired?

How to perform better without feeling tired?

Author: Mayur Bardolia

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What if we can do more things without getting tired?
We see things to do on our list but we wish we can do all those. But we rarely do all of them. Can we have the energy and time to do everything we want without getting tired?

How can we have more energy?
In this podcast we will discuss, how do we get tiredness and how can we deal with it? Also, you will find out how can we get motivated even if we are tired and feel like we can’t do more things.

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Kobe Bryant is widely regarded as one of the greatest basketball players of all times.
He won 5 NBA championships in his career. But when he was 12 years old, he had a crisis moment. Bryant’s father and uncle were both national basketball players themselves. And so, Bryant loved the game from a very early age. To develop his skills, 12-year-old Bryant enrolled in a summer basketball camp in Philadelphia.

And do you know how many points he scored in the whole camp?
Zero. He didn’t score a single basket, not even a free throw – and was about to give up on basketball! But accidentally, he read about Michael Jordan at that time. How Michael Jordan was once cut from his high school basketball team because of poor performance!

But Jordan didn’t quit.
He worked hard and became the best basketball player of all time! Kobe Bryant took inspiration from this story and decided to become the hardest working player of all time. Because he was obsessed to make his family feel proud of him. He was determined to never have a summer of zero ever again.

His conditioning coach Tim Grover tells us the story that he would actually have to ask Bryant to train less!
Kobe Bryant would call Grover to come and coach him at 3 am in the morning. You would often find Bryant starting his practice 7 hours before the whole team arrives. And yet be the last one to leave the practice sessions. He would hit the gym twice a day. And train for 16 hours on perfecting his game. He wouldn’t leave the court without downing 400 shots! Day after day. It’s this insane work ethic that put him to the top.

But how do you get the energy to work this hard?
Conventional wisdom tells us that to gain more energy, one has to: eat well, sleep more, and exercise. But if eating gives us energy, shouldn’t exercise deplete our energy? Shouldn’t effort reduce energy? But studies after studies have shown that movement and exercise, even just getting up from your desk and moving around, make you feel more energetic. A study published in Psychology Bulletin that analyzed 70 research studies involving over 6800 people showed that 90% of the people who completed any sort of exercise regime felt more energetic!

What is happening here?
Maybe we should flip the whole question: Instead of trying to learn how to gain more energy, we should focus on understanding tiredness and fatigue. So in this podcast, we will discuss 3 things.

1. What exactly is happening in our bodies to make us feel tired?
2. How to deal with tiredness?
3. What makes you start doing even if you are tired? (It’s not about diet or nutrition)

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I am not a marathon runner.
The marathon race amazes me. It’s wonderful how marathon runners don’t feel tired. Running marathons teaches us a weird thing about fatigue. Long-distance runners start with a lot of energy. And as they run further, they start feeling tired. But a funny thing happens after a while.

An out of breath runner suddenly finds the energy to push harder with less efforts.
He finds his second wind. And he keeps running. Biologically what’s happening is that as our muscles workup, it builds lactic acid. When our bodies find the proper balance of oxygen to counteract, this lactic acid buildup, we feel we can push further. Along with this, the endorphins released to give you a feeling of euphoria.

But what the runners high shows us is that it’s not the amount of work we do that drains our energy.
But the underlying chemical imbalance in our bodies. If we learn how to balance our hormones and various chemicals, we can feel energetic even after putting in a lot more effort every day!

A few years ago, I started feeling tired and lazy.
I thought it’s because I am getting older. But, things were not as good as I thought. I started paying attention to my body and I realised that the ageing process is getting faster. I had to do something about it. I hired a health coach or should I say a health scientist called Mr Gunvant Sharma.

Gunvant Sharma taught me the science of body, health and exercise.
I am not a gym person but he showed me how to control the hormones in our body. It’s a beautiful science. Gunvant guided me some of the most fascinating facts of how the changes in our hormones can affect our health, mood, mental ability and productivity. You should check out his videos on youtube. Search for the channel Urjaa Fitness and you will find really good tips. It’s in the Hindi language so I am not too sure if you can understand the Hindi language. If you understand Hindi language, then it’s a very good channel you should subscribe to. So, yes, I learned how to balance hormones and you should learn to balance your hormones and various chemical that make you feel energetic even after putting in a lot more effort every day. That takes to the second part, How to deal with tiredness?

I was reading at some blogs on productivity a few days ago.
There were a lot of comments on blogs. In many comments, people were asking for advice on how can we work harder? How can we manage time?”. Is it possible to manage the time? Well, based on some of the famous psychologists, you can’t manage the time because even if you have time, you need the energy to do the work in the time available to you. And we don’t have full energy all the time.

We run our body and mind beyond its capacity and we lose our energy.
We want to push ourselves harder and harder. And we get exhausted and burned out. How can we get less tired and have more energy? You can do a few small things but they will make a big impact on your energy level. 

First of all, A good night’s sleep makes us feel more energetic because sleep helps us out to  flush all the toxins from our system. Secondly,Sugar makes you feel lazy and trans-fats makes you irritable because they affect the chemicals in your body. Even though food gives us energy, overeating makes us feel lethargic because it creates a chemical imbalance. Eat clean and eat less.

Doing a small workout will make a huge difference.
Exercise produces energy in our body more efficiently. Samantha Heller, a dietician and physiologist explains: the more you exercise, the more mitochondria your body makes to produce energy. Mitochondria are the part of your cells that oxidizes glucose to generate energy.

You are not aiming to be muscular, instead, do the small workout to feel energetic.
Also, a better more efficient oxidizing of glucose makes you feel energetic. Which is where breathing comes into play. The better you breathe in oxygen, the more efficient your energy usage.

Wim Hof is known as the iceman.
He ran a marathon without wearing shoes in Arctic snow. Climbed Mount Kilimanjaro wearing shorts. And stood bare feet in ice for 112 minutes. Otto Musik, a paediatrician at Wayne State University put Wim Hof in an MRI machine to figure out what’s going on. And found that the breathing exercise that Wim Hof does helps saturate his blood with oxygen and helps release high levels of dopamine and serotonin – that makes him feel euphoric. Hof’s breathing and meditation also help him activate a part of his brain that releases cannabinoids that inhibit feeling pain or cold.

The Wim Hof breathing method is simple:
Inhale deeply through the nose and exhale freely through the mouth. Repeat it 30-40 times in short powerful bursts till you experience lightheadedness. People who exercise have experienced that they can double the number of pushups they normally do after trying the Wim Hof breathing technique.

You can do pranayama.
Pranayama is a whole section of yoga that is all about practising breath control. It is proven to help people feel more energetic, become better with focus and concentration, and even things like reducing stress. Proper breathing can help you unlock your potential energy. These are things you should do and you will surely feel more energetic. But there is a big factor that can boost your energy and we are going to discuss it in the next part. So, let’s dive in. 

I first read Viktor E. Frankel’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’ 10 years ago.
I had found this book impactful. Viktor Frankl was an Austrian, Jewish psychiatrist who focused on finding meaning in life. At the eve of World War II, Frankl was offered a visa to move to the United States by the U.S. Embassy in Vienna, but he turned down this opportunity in order to care for his parents. In 1944, Frankl was transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp (and other successive camps), where he endured a harrowing and unspeakable experience. In 1945, Frankl’s camp was liberated by American soldiers, and Frankl returned to his native Vienna, where he engaged in groundbreaking research on logotherapy and gained international fame for his teachings on finding meaning in life.

Man’s Search for Meaning is a two-part account:
The first half discusses Frankl’s experience at the concentration camps, and the second half is comprised of universally applicable lessons gleaned from Frank’s struggle.

Frankl implicitly asks, throughout the book, what we have in our own life if we have nothing of the world.
Who are we if we do not have our degrees, our family, our home, our name? If some or all of this is taken from us, what defines us? What keeps us going? And why?

In Frankl’s experience at Auschwitz, he saw two types of men.
The first type were those who one day came to the conclusion that waking up every day just to submit to hard labour and scrape by when death was so certain meant that life was useless and they might as well give up. The second type of individual insisted on striving despite all the heartless challenges, the utter, absolute hopelessness of it all. Frankl said that the distinguishing factor was one’s ability to find meaning, and teaches everyone that our ability to find and pursue meaning will strengthen us in any trial, big or small.

Victor Frankl explains what motivates people to get out of a miserable life no matter how hard it is.
Fortunately, we are living in a world and time where We are not living in a concentration camp. Yet, we create a miserable life. We give up after some time and get tired too soon.  In the last part, We have found out some tips to deal with tiredness. Let’s discuss the most powerful thing you need to perform better.

And it’s a weird one.
Its called purpose. Just as Victor Frankl said in his book ‘Man’s search for meaning’, having a purpose in life makes you feel more energetic. A strong purpose makes it easy to wake up in the morning and push yourself.

It’s what allowed Kobe Bryant to put in the hard hours and long days practising.
Purpose and meaning help reduce stress and increase energy. Find the purpose behind what you do. Find out why do you do what you are doing.  The reason I release podcast almost every single week for the last 10 years, created books, creating products and conducting training programs is because I know the purpose behind everything I do. Do I get tired? Yes, it’s bound to happen. But I just do what I am supposed to do no matter what. That takes us to the end of the podcast.

 Let’s summarise what we have covered in this podcast.
We discussed how to deal with tiredness and perform better. What exactly is happening in our bodies that makes us feel tired? Energy is not related to effort. You can gain more energy by putting in the correct kind of effort.

Then we talked about how to deal with tiredness.
You need to sleep well, eat clean, consume less sugar, do small exercise, and focus on better breathing to keep your chemicals in balance. Finally, when you have the purpose to live, you don’t have to seek motivation.

Find your purpose and you will be able to push yourself to achieve greatness.

 

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Next: You should not pay complete attention to your business for success.

Find out, Why always focusing on success can make you unsuccessful?