And according to this poll, around 50% of people would prefer an extra hour of sleep than to be given £20.

Now, obviously, nothing beats a good night's sleep for feeling more energised, but sometimes our schedules just don't allow for it, and we need some other hacks or methods to feel less tired.

So, in this video, we're going to be looking at four things that you can do to boost your energy throughout the day.

Oh, and by the way, if you're new here, hello, my name is Ali.

I'm a doctor turned entrepreneur, and I'm the author of the book Feel Good Productivity, which is about how to be more productive in a way that feels good.

And on this channel, I've been making videos for the last seven years that explore ideas and books and tools and strategies that we can use to help build a life that we love.

Anyway, let's go on to tip number one for boosting your energy, which is to cut the caffeine.

Now, based on nutrition surveys in the US, we know that just under 90% of adults consume caffeine every single day.

Caffeine is found naturally in things like tea and coffee and chocolate.

It's added to drinks like Coke and energy drinks and workout supplements, and most people caffeinate themselves every single day, including myself, to feel more awake and energized.

But I'm not sure if you've ever found yourself in this cycle where, firstly, you wake up feeling tired, and so you drink tea or you have a coffee.

Now, this might stop you feeling tired during that moment, but it can often be a struggle then to sleep at night.

And then you wake up feeling even more tired the next day, and you consume even more caffeine.

So one reason why you might be feeling tired a lot is because you're consuming too much caffeine or potentially even taking it at the wrong time.

And to solve this problem, we need to understand how caffeine works in our bodies.

So the reason why caffeine makes you feel more awake is because it blocks adenosine receptors.

Normally, adenosine, which is a chemical in our bodies, binds to adenosine receptors, and it makes us feel tired.

And adenosine builds up in our bodies during the day so that in the evening, we feel tired and we can fall asleep.

But because caffeine is a very similar shape to adenosine, it also binds to those adenosine receptors.

This then blocks the adenosine receptor, and so now adenosine can't make us feel sleepy, and instead we feel more alert and awake.

Now, you might've heard the stat that it takes about five hours for caffeine to be cleared from the body.

But what most people don't realise about that stat is that that's actually the average half-life of caffeine.

So this means that after five hours, the level of caffeine in your body will be reduced by half.

After 10 hours, it'll be down to 25%, and then 15 hours later, it'll be at 12.5%.

And this is actually crucially not zero.

So if you consume caffeine in the morning, then you'll probably fall asleep okay, because most of it will have been cleared from your body by the time you go to bed.

But caffeine later in the day is not ideal, because you'll still have a lot of caffeine in your body by the time you're trying to go to sleep.

And this is gonna stop adenosine from binding to the receptors, which means the adenosine can't help you fall asleep.

So all of this to say, if you're gonna drink caffeine, the best time to drink caffeine is ideally before or during lunch.

And actually drinking caffeine at any time in the afternoon is probably a bit late, and it does put your sleep at risk.

Now, unfortunately, on top of that, you probably don't wanna drink caffeine immediately upon waking up either.

And we're gonna cite Andrew Huberman here.

You wake up in the morning and your adenosine levels are low, but they're not zero.

And if you didn't sleep that well or deeply enough the night before, you're going to have more adenosine in your system.

You might think the logical thing to do is therefore to drink caffeine and to block the adenosine that's there.

But what happens if you do that is there's an accumulation, a sort of glut of adenosine that hangs around.

And then in the afternoon, when the effects of that caffeine start to wear off, you will experience the so-called afternoon crash.

So what Dr. Huberman recommends is waiting 90 minutes to two hours after waking up to drink your first hit of caffeine.

But another key reason why you might be feeling tired is related to your emotional wellbeing and mental health.

And one way of improving that is with therapy provided by BetterHelp, who are very kindly the paid partner of this video.

Now, I actually used BetterHelp last year when I was experiencing various bits of stress in my life, some of which I talked about on this YouTube channel.

And the sessions I had with the BetterHelp therapist were actually really helpful.

So when I first got started, I filled out a few questions and they matched me with a credentialed therapist.

But the nice thing is that if you don't vibe with your therapist for whatever reason, you can switch to a completely different one free of charge.

Then you can talk to your therapist however you feel comfortable, whether it's via message or chat or phone or video call.

In my case, I chose to have video calls with my therapist because it's just nicer vibes.

And the therapist I spoke to was super supportive and friendly and actually knew what they were doing.

Various of my stresses that we were talking about were related specifically to the business.

And even though the therapist wasn't an experienced business coach or anything like that, the fact that he was a qualified therapist meant that he was able to get to the underlying emotional core of what I thought were business strategy problems, but actually what was going on was far more like emotional deep inner work underneath all that.

With BetterHelp, you can tap into a network of credentialed and experienced therapists who can help you with a wide range of issues all remotely.

And regardless of whether you have a clinical mental health issue like depression or anxiety, or if you are merely a human being who lives through the world and who's going through a hard time, therapy can give you the tools to approach your life or in my case, business in a very different way.

So if you're struggling and think you'd benefit from a therapy session, then you can check out the link in the video description, or you could go to betterhelp.com slash Ali Abdaal and that will get you 10% off your first month of therapy.

So thank you so much BetterHelp for being the paid partner on this video.

Let's now talk about strategy number two for staying more energized and less tired during the day.

Now, the idea here is a key core concept that I talk about in my book, Feel Good Productivity, which is that when we can find a way to make our work feel good, to make our work enjoyable, that is a massive source of energy.

When you're feeling good and generating positive emotions related to work or anything else you're doing, that causes you to be more productive.

It causes you to be more creative.

It causes you to be less stressed, but it also generates energy that we can then give to the other important areas of our life.

And you've probably experienced this, right?

Like if you're at work and you're doing something that you feel is absorbing you in like a good way, it's sufficiently challenging.

Maybe you're in the flow state.

Maybe you're sort of approaching it with a healthy amount of lightness and ease.

Doing the work can actually be quite energizing.

Yes, you're using mental effort and you might even be doing something physical, so you'd be using energy, but you'd be getting energy in return.

But we've all had those experiences where you're working on something that is so mind-numbingly tedious and boring that it seems to suck away our energy, even though maybe it just involves typing on a keyboard or something.

It doesn't actually use that much energy like physically, but it sucks away our motivational energy, our vigour, our zest.

These are all different terms that scientists use to describe this sort of mental energy that we're talking about generally when we say that we feel very tired.

Now, when it comes to enjoying our work, there are sort of two axes upon which this can work.

Firstly, there's choosing to do things that are inherently enjoyable, which actually is quite a privileged position.

Most of us probably aren't in the position where the work we happen to be doing also happens to be really fun.

If you're in that position, then you're very lucky.

And so there's another axis that we can work on, which is finding a way to enjoy the things that we happen to be doing.

Now, I really like the story from my friend Matthew Dix here.

He used to work at McDonald's when he was younger and he was working at the McDonald's drive-through and he found ways to make the process feel more like a game.

So for example, he would decide that on a Monday was barbecue sauce day and on a Tuesday was sweet and sour sauce day.

And so on a Monday, what he would do is that whenever a customer would go through the drive-through, they would order their order from whatever burger, fries, blah, blah, blah.

And then he would ask them, would you like barbecue sauce with that?

And they might say no.

And then he would kind of insist.

He'd say, hey, you sure about that?

The barbecue sauce is really tasty.

You know, my last customer said that she didn't want the barbecue sauce and then she tried it and she was really happy.

And so he made it a bit of a challenge to himself to upsell his customers on barbecue sauce on a Monday, sweet and sour sauce on a Tuesday, mayonnaise on a Wednesday, whatever the thing might be.

He found a way to add this arbitrary challenge a little bit of a game into his otherwise mind-numbingly tedious and boring job.

And if this guy can do this at something like working on a McDonald's drive-through, you can probably find a way to do that with your job.

If you're watching this channel, you're probably some kind of knowledge worker.

You probably use your brain to create value in some sort of way.

Maybe you might be a student, which involves a lot of brain power to sort of memorize things.

There are always ways to make whatever we're doing just 10% more enjoyable.

If you're interested, this is literally what my entire book is about.

We've got the three Ps, play, power, and people.

Firstly, we find a way to bring play into whatever we're doing, approaching it with more of a sense of lightness and ease.

And there's a bunch of strategies for that.

Secondly, we try and approach it with a sense of power.

So actually taking ownership and responsibility for the thing.

We've all had the experience that when you're being micromanaged by a boss or something like that, like it sort of sucks a bit of the energy out of doing the work.

Whereas when it's your own project and you're feeling like you can take the initiative and you really own the thing, even if the thing is really hard, it can be a source of energy.

And the third P is for people.

We are social creatures.

All of us, even the most introverted amongst us and being surrounded by other people, finding a way to help out the people around us, finding a way to connect our work to some sort of purpose beyond ourselves.

All of that makes the work a lot more energizing.

And so my whole point with this is that if you're feeling like you're tired all the time, or most of the time, if you're feeling like your job sucks and sucks your energy away, yeah, one option is quit your job, follow your passion, become a YouTuber for goodness sake.

That's one option.

But if, you know, in most realistic scenarios that might not be possible, at least right now.

And so the alternative is to take the thing that you have already, that thing, that job that you already have and find a way to make it a little bit more enjoyable.

It might sound too good to be true.

People are always like, well, screw you, you're a YouTuber.

You can't tell me I can make my job more fun, et cetera, et cetera.

I would say like, there's loads of evidence around this.

Psychologists and scientists have done research on this.

There are reliably ways to increase the amount of enjoyment you're getting from whatever you're doing.

But here's a little soundbite from a conversation I had with psychologist Julie Smith about this exact topic.

In reality, most people have a job that they didn't dream of or wouldn't choose if they could choose any job in the world, right?

They're just, they're trying to feed their families and keep a roof over their heads and this is where they've landed.

And rather than that kind of, you've got to leave your job and feel the risk and create, you know, your own company and all of these things that in reality are really far from where most people are able to get to because of life's limitations.

Actually, it doesn't mean then you've got to just endure hardship and awfulness if you hate your job.

You can work on improving what is, even if you have, you know, ambitions of doing other things, that's not the only way.

Yeah, and I guess with any job, however difficult or kind of emotionally taxing it is, there's always something to be grateful for or something to find in it that we feel thankful for or find even the slightest pleasure in.

So the key takeaway here is to try your best to turn your work into a source of energy by making it fun.

Make it more enjoyable.

If it's enjoyable, it's energizing.

Something that my friend and executive coach Joe Hudson says is enjoyment equals efficiency.

The more you're able to find enjoyment in whatever you're doing, the more energy you're gonna derive from it and therefore you won't be so tired all the time.

Let's move on to strategy number three.

So a lot of us are familiar with cortisol, which is the stress hormone, and it is true that high levels of cortisol over long periods of time can be pretty bad for our health.

But we shouldn't forget that cortisol is actually really important in helping us wake up and go to sleep at night.

And cortisol essentially does the opposite of adenosine.

So we talked about how adenosine levels rise during the day and this creates what we call sleep pressure and so we fall asleep at night.

But cortisol levels actually peak right in the morning within the first hour after we wake up and we want cortisol to be low by the time we go to bed.

Now this morning spike in cortisol is what we call the cortisol awakening response, the CAR, and we help reinforce this if we move our body first thing in the morning because exercise also temporarily increases our cortisol.

Now this was a pretty interesting study and it looked to see how exercise affects what we call sleep inertia, which is that very relatable feeling of grogginess when you first wake up.

And apparently this feeling can actually last for up to three hours.

But this is what happened in the experiment.

So a bunch of people had to stay awake all night, but they took a two hour nap at midnight.

When they woke up, they had to do 30 seconds of high intensity cycling on a stationary bike and then the researchers took a load of different measurements.