In your twenties, you feel invincible. You can work a full-time job, hit the gym, and even go out with friends on just a few hours of sleep. With age, you begin to slow down. It’s a less desirable fact of life. You may feel like a lack of energy affects your ability to think properly, do what you love, or stay motivated to work.
It can feel like you’ve lost your edge, but really, you’ve just got slow cells. We’ll explain what’s going on in your diet to cause your energy to wane and what lifestyle habits could be contributing factors.
We’ll also discuss what you can do to optimize your energy, keep your focus, and renew your motivation.
What Can Cause Low Energy and Lack of Motivation?
A wide range of factors can contribute to feelings of low energy and lack of motivation — here are some possible culprits.
Getting Older
Getting older has some great benefits. With age comes wisdom, experience, and a deeper appreciation of what life has to offer. Unfortunately, loss of energy is also a hallmark of the aging process. One of the reasons is because of aging cells.
As cells age, the mitochondria inside of them begin to age too. Mitochondria are your cells' batteries, producing an important molecule called ATP to power your cells and keep you energized.
Poor Diet
Your energy levels depend heavily on your diet, even though you feel like they depend on another cup of coffee. A healthy diet is more valuable for increasing energy stores than stimulants.
If you aren’t getting the vitamins, nutrients, and minerals your body needs to thrive, you’ll end up with fatigue, illness, and an overall feeling of dysfunction. A poor diet doesn’t simply mean not eating enough — it also involves not eating the right kinds of foods.
In America, we typically get plenty of calories, but many of them lack the nutrients our bodies need to thrive while being simultaneously stuffed with excess sugar, trans fats, and additives that aren’t beneficial to us.
Mundane Routines
Nothing can sap your energy like spending time with a negative person or going to a nine-to-five you loathe. Lack of energy and mental fatigue are signs you might be ready for a change, but they can also be a sign you need to give your mental health a check-up.
Being a driven person doesn’t mean you continue doing something detrimental to your health. If it’s sucking the life out of you, kick it out of your life, or find a healthy way to cope if you can’t remove it.
Staying socially active and engaging with friends and loved ones can also help you feel energized and help break up the monotony of your routine.
Isolation
There are many reasons why we may occasionally find ourselves isolated from our peers. The majority of us experienced isolation during the recent pandemic. Elderly adults often find themselves isolated. Age-related hearing loss can cause some people to withdraw socially.
Being alone can drain our motivation and even lead to feelings of sadness. Engaging with loved ones is important for maintaining overall health and wellness.
How Can I Increase Energy and Motivation?
It might seem like bad news, but there are steps you can take to boost energy levels, enhance your wellness, and thrive. Follow along as we give you our top ten ways to support a healthy lifestyle with abundant energy.
1. Get Moving
You’ve got to expend energy to have energy. It sounds counterproductive, but it’s a scientific fact. For one, exercise increases the amount of mitochondria created inside your cells. Remember that mitochondria are the key to keeping your cells charged, and your cells are the key to keeping you charged.
Regular exercise also increases the amount of oxygen flowing throughout your body, helping your systems function properly. The rush of serotonin you get when exercising is also a natural energy booster that makes you feel motivated.
An exercise routine doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the gym or ever set foot in a gym at all. A yoga class, walk, hike, or swim can help keep you moving and help you restore your energy levels so you can feel better.
2. Don’t Miss Out on Key Nutrients
Most of us can admit our diets aren’t as nutritious as they should be. Instead of revamping your entire eating plan, taking small, sustainable steps can help you stay on track and improve your health.
One way to help fill in dietary gaps is to try a greens powder. L’Evate You Vitality Daily Greens is a whole-food solution with an impressive array of health benefits.
Inside every delicious scoop, you’ll find:
- 30 superfoods and nine greens
- A probiotic and prebiotic blend to support digestion
- Our proprietary M-charge complex to support energy at the cellular level
- Antioxidant and anti-aging compounds
- A blend of mushrooms to support healthy cholesterol and sodium levels
You’ll get plenty of B vitamins, which support energy levels, and minerals like zinc, magnesium, and iron, which your body needs to help move ATP throughout your cells. The leafy greens inside our greens powder support your body from the cells up, so you can thrive no matter your age.
Our M-Charge blend is specially formulated to help support mitochondria function, attacking your energy loss right at its source.
3. Regulate Your Sleep
Sleep routines are important. If you aren’t getting enough sleep, it can be nearly impossible to catch up. The only way to fix a lack of sleep is by getting more sleep. And not just any sleep counts. Ideally, you need quality sleep, and most adults need between seven and nine hours per night.
Poor sleep adds up, and you’ll experience tiredness the next day, even if you can squeeze in a power nap. Do your best to support a healthy sleep routine by:
- Unplugging from electronics at least an hour before bed
- Sleeping in a cool, comfortable room
- Avoiding exercise too close to bedtime (within three hours)
No matter how healthy your diet or how much caffeine you consume, you can’t fix your sleep deprivation problem unless you dedicate more time to sleep.
4. Change Up Your Routine
Maybe you’re stuck in a job you don’t love or surrounded by people who aren’t healthy for you. It could be that you’ve been in the same routine for so long you feel immobilized. If this sounds relatable, change it up.
If you can’t get out of the job or away from certain people that bring you down, consider adding in a new, fun physical activity or taking up a new hobby. Think about ways to create differences in your day-to-day so that you don’t risk burnout.
5. Capitalize on Your Productivity
A morning person isn’t going to thrive while responding to work emails at night, and a night owl won’t feel fully present at a 6:00 a.m. Zoom meeting. Capitalizing on your productivity means knowing your strengths and using them to your benefit.
Knowing your weak spots is also helpful because you can format your lifestyle to compensate. If you have trouble staying focused with background noise, plan to bring headphones with you or complete tasks when others won’t be around to chat.
6. Spend More Quality Time With Loved Ones
Social engagement is vitally important, especially as we age. Leaving room for social activities should be at the top of your to-do list to help foster a better overall sense of well-being and to help you feel energized.
Being around your peers can also help you normalize how you feel, share your life experiences, and find other useful hacks to beat the aging system and promote longevity.
7. Take Time To Do the Things You Enjoy
You love hiking, but your hiking boots haven’t seen a trail in a year. Your love of the ocean runs deep, but your surfboard is collecting dust.
Sometimes our lives are so busy we forget to make time to do the things that make life enjoyable. If all our hard work only leads to more hard work, we risk feeling tired, unmotivated, and even depressed.
In simpler times, it might’ve been easy for you to take an entire Saturday to go fishing or curl up with a good book. With kids and schedules, it becomes more difficult. The key is to put the time on your schedule. Carve it out like you would a doctor’s appointment, and promise yourself you’ll keep the appointment.
8. Try Meditation
Managing stress levels is important for staying healthy, energized, and motivated. Long-term, chronic stress can lead to health problems like high blood pressure and a higher risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
Consider giving meditation a try. It can help reduce your stress levels and help you feel more balanced, relaxed, and calm. That can lead to deeper sleep, better energy levels, and an increase in your overall health.
9. Push Yourself
Most of us know when we’re just coasting by. Whether you’re lifting a little less weight than you could be lifting during a workout or you’re just doing the bare minimum at work, you’ve lost your drive to do more and do better.
The problem is that when we get too comfortable, we miss out on other opportunities. Whether it’s an opportunity to advance, try something new, or educate yourself, getting out of your comfort zone helps you get out of your own way.
Doing less than our best cheats us out of experiences we might love. If you think you’re in this situation, develop a challenging mindset. Create daily goals for yourself, write them down, and give yourself the ability to feel accomplished when you check them off the list. Reward yourself with experiences, so you can look forward to completing the challenge.
10. Stay Hydrated
One of the symptoms of dehydration is fatigue, so it would make sense that if you aren’t drinking enough water, you’ll feel tired. You know you need to drink water, but that doesn’t mean you need to drink 1,000 glasses of water per day.
Water intake also includes water from other fluids, like coffee and tea, and even the water contained in fruits and vegetables. An easy way to get an extra boost of hydration and nutrition when you need it?
L’Evate You Vitality Daily Greens. Just one scoop per day can help support your hydration and health goals by giving you the vitamins, nutrients, and nutrition you need to round out your diet.
The Bottom Line
Your energy sources might feel like they are waning as you age, but you don’t have to settle for it. Hack the system by adopting new lifestyle habits that work to increase energy and help refocus your motivation.
If you find it difficult to stay engaged with new health-related changes, that’s okay. The most effective habits begin small. A ten-minute walk, a quick phone call to a friend, or a scoop of greens powder can help dial in your lifestyle.
These small changes add up, and you’ll reap more benefits from these small investments than you will from short-lived crash diets or exercise plans that leave you feeling fatigued.
You’ve got this one life, and you want to live it fully. Elevate your life, optimize your health, and reclaim the life you love.
Sources:
The Mitochondrial Basis of Aging | PMC
Loneliness and Social Isolation — Tips for Staying Connected | National Institute on Aging
Does Exercise Really Boost Energy Levels? | Health.Harvard.edu