Why you're tired even though you sleep enough

Over the past few years I’ve learned to pay far more attention to my energy. By nature I’m built like a diesel locomotive: I keep going and going until I’m properly empty. But with menopause I felt I no longer wanted that. I want to feel good and energetic every day and every hour of the day, not burnt out or tired. Joie de vivre, that’s my motto, and it’s what I aim for. Which is why everything to do with the body’s energy household fascinates me so much.

Whenever I’ve gone too far yet again, and that still happens regularly, I pause and look closely at what I did: what I ate, whether I slept well, whether I moved enough, how my emotions are doing and whether my goals are still aligned with my vision. And then I go deeper. A podcast I listened to this week showed me how to take that step more efficiently still.

That podcast was about the work of Dr. Martin Picard, mitochondria researcher at Columbia University. He looks at your life energy: a slow-burning fire, stoked in some 5,000 trillion mitochondria, where electrons from your food flow towards the oxygen you breathe. When that flow runs smoothly, you feel unstoppable; that’s what I call joie de vivre, and it’s what GOOD.21 is really about. When the flow falters, you feel that too, long before a blood test shows anything unusual. My diesel-locomotive days, I now realise, are faltering flow.

Your 5,000 trillion power stations: this is where your day is stoked.

Your body runs on a fixed budget

Picard describes your energy household as a budget. Only so much comes in per day, and your system distributes it along a strict hierarchy: survival first, safety next, and right at the back of the queue sits maintenance. Skin repair. Hair pigment. Nails and bones. Muscle recovery after effort. The immune system quietly doing its rounds. The clean-up crew in every cell.

Once that sinks in, you also see why it matters to stay aware of your energy through the day: the moment it runs low, you know some process has devoured too much and energy is now being pulled away elsewhere. Every time that happens, your system is out of balance. And once you know this immediately costs your maintenance system energy, you also understand why your skin, your hair and your nails, but equally your emotions, your feelings and even your thinking are directly affected.

That maintenance runs on two things: energy and building materials. Vitamins, minerals, protein; if either is missing, the crew stands there empty-handed. I top up those building materials myself with VMG+, a whole-food multivitamin.

As long as everything is calm, the whole budget gets paid out. But the moment your system spots a sabre-toothed tiger, and to your body a dragging conflict at work is every bit a sabre-toothed tiger, it switches to a wartime budget: heart, lungs and brain take priority, and maintenance is cut. First.

How concrete that is, Picard’s lab showed in grey hair. Hair grows like a logbook, centimetre by centimetre, and researchers can read life events in it like tree rings. In a study in eLife they found single hairs that were dark at the tip, white in the middle, and dark again at the root. In one participant the colour returned within a single week. You can guess what happened that week: a holiday. The moment the wartime budget is lifted, money flows back to the gloss and decoration department.

Worrying costs 60% extra

And then there’s stress. The moment your system smells danger, it releases cortisol: the signal ordering every cell to stand ready. With a real sabre-toothed tiger that’s useful, because it’s gone within minutes, and afterwards everything can return to normal.

You may not have expected it, but worrying puts your system under the same stress: your brain triggers the same hormones for imagined problems. An imaginary sabre-toothed tiger takes bites out of your energy budget too, and rather big ones at that. The difference: that alarm signal stays on for days, and standing ready costs power. Picard’s team made it measurable: they exposed cells to cortisol and energy expenditure rose by roughly 60%. 60%! Worrying is a hefty debit from your energy budget, and chronic stress turns it into a standing order.

Note the difference: acute stress isn’t the problem. From a solid workout, also stress, your capacity actually grows: in the recovery afterwards your body builds muscle tissue and creates extra mitochondria, extra power stations. The difference sits in the little word chronic. A workout ends after an hour. Worrying doesn’t.

When the pressure gets too high

Picard describes illness as “energy resistance”: a jam in the flow. Diabetes he calls a disease of too much pressure. When too much glucose keeps being pushed into the system while little is being used, cells shut the floodgates to protect their mitochondria; in that lens, insulin resistance is self-protection against a flood.

And this is where you have to step up yourself, high time too, if you want to grow older vital, strong and healthy: eat glucose-aware. Fibre before your carbohydrates, the right order on your plate, a walk around the block after eating; everything that takes the spikes out of the intake takes pressure off the system. That’s exactly why I wrote GOOD.21: a 21-day training around glucose-aware eating. You start with your own body and work out what you actually burn, with the GOOD. Recovery Test alongside. You cook from the GOOD. recipes, the flex allowance keeps it sustainable, and for days when life runs differently there’s the extra burner. The energy budget of your mitochondria even has its own chapter in the book.

Housekeeping grinds to a halt

Because what ís that maintenance that gets cut first? A good part of it is literally cleaning. Your liver processes all day long what comes in and what your metabolism itself produces as leftovers, and it works in phases: first converting, then tagging, then clearing out through bile, kidneys and gut. You carry a complete municipal service for it in your belly: waste processing and collection in one.

In that first step, the converting, free radicals are released: unstable molecules missing an electron, trying to steal one wherever they can, from your cell membranes to your DNA. In small amounts they’re part of the job. Let them pile up and they damage the workshop itself, and you notice: damaged membranes make sluggish cells, damaged mitochondria deliver less energy, and DNA damage needs repairing, which pulls yet more energy from your budget. That’s how oxidative stress speeds up exactly the ageing you’re trying to slow down. Which is why serious clean-up work always comes with antioxidant protection.

Burning without clearing out doesn’t exist. Whoever only wants more (more focus, more strength, more muscle) and forgets the clearing builds the pressure Picard calls “energy resistance”. And whoever tries to force the clearing with a crash cleanse (a juice week or a purification retreat) mainly pushes that first phase, without the protection and the clearing behind it, and makes life harder for the liver rather than easier.

Daily support instead of the big clean

So the logic flips: a little room for the housekeeping every day, instead of one big cleanse that supposedly resets everything:

• Remove the sabre-toothed tiger where you can. Rest is the moment your body redistributes the budget towards repair. The holiday hair proves it.
• Build muscle. Moving is a start, but the real result comes from building muscle: more muscle tissue means more mitochondria, so more capacity.
• Eat fibre. The clearing ends in your gut; fibre keeps that final station moving. Part of what the liver clears through bile can be reabsorbed in the gut when transit is slow, and heads straight back to the liver, the so-called enterohepatic loop; fibre binds that waste and keeps the pace up.
• Give the clean-up work an anchor. One fixed moment a day where maintenance runs along without you having to think about it. Below you’ll read what that looks like for me.

My anchor is called RevitaZen

This summer doTERRA launched the successor to its classic detox line, and it fits this story seamlessly. The RevitaZen blend consists of six essential oils, each with its own role in the clean-up work: tangerine brings limonene, a compound that feeds your body’s own antioxidant system, ginger supports the gut lining, juniper berry is the classic kidney herb, and rosemary, geranium and cilantro complete the blend. One drop in your first glass of water of the day is 100% enough; more isn’t needed.

RevitaZen+, the capsules, do what a drop can’t. It’s a capsule inside a capsule: botanical powder in the inner chamber (milk thistle for the liver, artichoke for bile flow), the liquid blend in the outer one, with black cumin and vitamin E as antioxidant cover for that work. Everything supports what your body already does, at the pace of every day. I take those capsules with dinner myself, next to my probiotics.

The anchor: what sits next to dinner doesn’t get forgotten.

That’s how “detox” suddenly becomes a boring word, and that’s the idea. The exciting work your body does itself, night after night. You make sure your budget allows it: less time your body has to get through on a wartime budget, and a daily anchor at a fixed moment, so maintenance runs along by itself and costs you no mental capacity.