Do you always feel tired?  
by Nigel Lee

If you always feel tired then it's no doubt frustrating, however, you can relax safe in the knowledge that you're not the only person suffering from this condition. I have suffered from fatigue for years. Tiredness affects many people in today's modern society in every country in the world and I often hear my mates complaining about being tired.

Most people use stimulants to give themselves an energy boost. Many people use energy drinks, caffeinated and sugary drinks as they feeling it gives them a boost. Coffee is by far the most popular stimulant in use at fighting tiredness. As a student my liquid intake consisted mostly of coffee (and a little alcohol of course!).

If you are tired in the morning, then a cup of coffee might be enough to motivate you. However, if you are always tired then stimulants are unlikely to work, they can actually cause you to be more tired because you are forcing your body to work harder. If you are tired all of the time then you need to treat the condition rather than the symptom.

Coffee is thought to relieve the tiredness symptoms, right? So why would it cause more tiredness? Even if you know that you're tired, a cup of coffee will force your body into working more. Caffeine triggers a type of gland, the adrenal gland, to produce adrenalin. The effects of this release of adrenalin are short lived, they won't last long. They will help you to feel better for a little while. After the effects have worn off you will feel worse than before as your body is even more exhausted. When you feel tired you may feel the need to enjoy another cup of coffee, you see it's a vicious circle!

It's easy to get caught up in the coffee drinking cycle, thinking it will make you feel better. Everybody at work does it. You can see the queue forming in the kitchen prior to a long meeting to ensure they get their caffeine fix. However, as a result of your coffee addiction it will make you feel worse, also the coffee can make you irritable and cause you to endure headaches.

If you're always tired then coffee won't help you, it only works as a temporary pick me up. Stimulants only mask the symptoms of the tiredness, they do not actually treat the condition at the root of the problem. And so even though the symptoms are being treated, it won't help you.

Stimulants will cause you to continue pushing your body too hard, it just can't continue doing what it's doing at the moment and so you will be left suffering from chronic tiredness.

If you're always tired then it's important to stop doing whatever you're doing to make yourself tired. You should stop drinking coffee! Of course you should probably try to wean yourself off the coffee rather than quitting cold turkey.

If you can't give up coffee completely then you should at least cut down the amount you drink. Try to reduce the amount that you drink every day. Of course few people actually want to do this for one reason or another. Drinking coffee becomes a sociable habit which you partake in with work colleagues, friends and family.

If you're not willing to cut down on your coffee intake then you should at least drink your coffee at the same time each day. This really does make a difference, as your body will get used to this. Your body knows when it will be getting its coffee fix, and so adapts and is ready to accept this. This reduces some of the negative effects caused by coffee.

Now if you need an extra incentive to cut out your coffee then here goes...If you drink too much coffee then it can actually cause an iron deficiency known as anemia, vitamin deficiencies, or adrenal exhaustion. None of those really sound like a walk in the park now do they?!

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