Coffee first thing in the morning is one of the best of life’s good things.
I don’t care how many bio-hacking geeks hop on the anti-coffee bandwagon. They are not selling me. I don’t care about their terrible understanding of cortisol and stress. I know the ins and outs of fatigue and stress better than most anyone. In this house anti-coffee is anti-Matt.
The only thing I don’t like about coffee is how it wires me up later in the day. If I even take a sniff coffee past 3 pm, I’m going to see the sun come up. I learned awhile back that I’m one of the people who is super-sensitive to caffeine (and most any stimulant). My body doesn’t metabolize it quickly so it hangs around in my system for a long time after the fun buzz wears off.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that, if I cut off the tap before noon-ish, I can have all the sweet black nectar I want.
Learning how to work with your body’s natural rhythms and forces is a huge part of keeping on top of your energy levels.
And your energy is not all about what pills you take or what foods you eat, either. You aren’t tired because you’re getting older.
When I went a-digging into the biology of tiredness years ago, I discovered that there’s a really strange and badly-understood connection between your mind and your body.
Feeling tired does have a basis in your body.
But feeling tired is first of all a feeling.
You perceive yourself in high-energy and low-energy states.
Tiredness ain’t nearly so simple as biochemicals getting out of whack.
The Science™ in moments of lucidity will concede that they don’t really understand why this is or how it works, at all. Mind isn’t even real as far as The Science™ is concerned. Making mind into a central part of biology just doesn’t fly with them.
Getting an expert to grant this point is tricky, however, which is why I’ve learned to ignore almost all of them with their recycled nonsense about stress hormones and neurochemicals and all that junk.
To me and you, mind is the most important thing.
You can’t fix tired by taking more pills to adjust your bio-whatsits as the pill-grifters want you to think.
Tiredness is more than lacking energy to do things with your body.
The worst tiredness I experience these days has little to do with my body. It’s more like a brain fog or lethargy.
If you know how it feels to be coming down with a cold, when you aren’t quite sick, but you feel it coming, it’s that kind of feeling.
Drive for 12 hours on the interstate with as few breaks as you can stand and you’ll understand what it means.
Ask me to go do bike sprints or hit a max squat in that condition and I dial in just fine.
Tell me I have to concentrate for 90 minutes to work on an article, and I’m aiming for the couch to lie down.
That’s also an illusion, by the way. The “brain fog” leading to procrastination can be overcome by intentional action. Sit down at the keyboard, put on the headphones, cue up the playlist, set a timer, and go. Oftentimes the fog melts away once you get into motion.
The big one might be anxiety and depression. I lost a lot of years of quality life due to “the blues”. Only in the past 5 years did I learn how much of the so-called sadness could be traced to physical feelings in my chest and throat, and often cured by a well-timed 30 minute nap.
Your own attitude, be it optimistic or pessimistic, plays a major part in this, by the way, and there is a feedback effect. An optimistic soul tends to see things as beneficial, which makes them feel even better. The feedback flows in the other direction for the so-called “black pillers” who see only despair, which further drains their energies.
I am not a medical doctor or credentialized therapist expert and I make no claims of cures. I only tell you what I’ve discovered myself through observation and experimenting.
The funny thing, most of my solutions came from obscure writers, thinkers, and philosophers rather than study of biology.
The Science™ trains you to look for solutions outside yourself. Take this pill, do this technique, use this therapy.
You’ve probably never heard of them, but writers like William James, Colin Wilson, and the even lesser-known William Walker Atkinson taught that our energy is as much to do with the concentration and direction of attention as what is happening inside our living bodies.
Will and intention follow attention.
I hate that word “mindset” because it is an empty placeholder word for Law of Attraction manifestation gurus, but there real substance behind it if you look beneath the social media platitudes.
Understand this, and there is far more energy inside you than you ever realized. You are nowhere near as tired as your feelings tell you.
Biological sources of energy and attitudes about our energy are two ways of looking at the same inner principles and causes.
They’re apart and together the same way that your car’s engine and drive-train are separate parts of the same unity you call “your car”.
If you want a functioning vehicle, you take care of both.
If low energy, fatigue, tiredness, and/or lethargy are your major obstacles in getting anything done with yourself – and I believe that they are the root cause of procrastination for a whole lot of folk – that’s a lesson worth keeping in mind.
Matt Perryman