afternoon crash

Avoiding Afternoon Crash | Beaufort Health and Fitness

You have questions? Hopefully I have the answer. And today’s Q and A. I’m gonna go over ‘How to avoid that afternoon crash?’. All right. Let’s get into it. So the afternoon crash, we all know the feeling right. Usually it happens between noon at 3:00 PM after we’ve had lunch, we’re at work or just kinda lounge around the house, whatever the case may be. And we find ourselves doing this, dropping our head, closing our eyes, looking around, hoping nobody saw us, most of the time somebody did and then we feel embarrassed after. So how do we avoid this problem? The question was asked specifically, “Hey, how do I avoid this? I don’t want to continue to have to consume more caffeine or go to more sugary foods. How can I get stable balanced energy throughout this period of the day?” So there’s three things that we’re gonna wanna look at.

(1) First, we’re gonna wanna look at our sleep from the night before (2) second, we’re gonna wanna look at what we’re eating beforehand. And then (3) the third we’re gonna look at how much caffeine or other stimulants we’ve consumed prior to this point in the day, I’m gonna break all three of these down so you guys have a good takeaway when you’re done watching this video.

First thing – sleep. So sleep is the most important. If you’re not sleeping and consistently sleeping well, you may experience this and it may even come earlier in the morning. So what to do if you’re not getting consistent sleep and what does consistent sleep look like? Let’s get into that first. So consistent sleep is that I pretty much go to bed and wake up at the same time throughout the week, five to seven days a week. Okay? Sometimes on the weekends, it’ll be a little thrown off. You throw a nap in there to catch back up, but you want to make sure that it’s at least consistent in that amount. And then we want to be getting restful good sleep at least 7-9 hours a night. So if we’re not doing those things, how can we get better at it? First and where we start, all of our clients here at EarthFIT is, develop a sleep schedule, develop a sleep routine, and actually cautiously, think about it. So a quick example would be, “Hey, I drive home from work on the way home from work. I know I’m having some magnesium to kind of cool me down. Then I’m gonna turn off my phone electronics two hours before bed. I’ll unwind in bed, reading a book, making sure that if I do have to go under any lights or TVs, I have blue blocker glasses on. 

So I’m nice and kind of mellowed out before bed, that’s just an example. Your coach can kind of help you guide you along what your individual sleep routine would be. But the point is to develop a sleep routine consciously, think about it. That will automatically help you start to improve your sleep. So that’s step number one, review the sleep from the night before or the week, you know, leading up to that…

Second is gonna be, what are we consuming beforehand? Coach Eli just did an excellent video in this group on complex and simple carbohydrates that kind of illustrates this point very well. Basically, if you’re eating a lot of carbohydrates that are fast acting, really getting a lot of sugar into your bloodstream, you’re gonna experience this roller coaster right throughout the day, going up and down, we’ll feel that crash. So if you’re consuming these a lot in the morning prior to those sugary carbohydrates in the morning prior to when you’re getting the crash, or maybe it’s from lunch before you may want to consider swapping those out for a more balanced source, you can go for protein, more protein or fat. That’s gonna give you more stable energy throughout the day or a carbohydrate that is lower on the glycemic index is also a good way to do that. You just simply look up the glycemic index, look for carbohydrates that are on the lower and anything below 50 is not going to spike you up and give you a crash afterwards. So that’s a little tip on that.

And then third and final, we wanna look at what kind of stimulants or what kind of caffeine were we consuming beforehand throughout the day, similar to foods. If we are consuming high amounts of stimulants early in the morning, or before this crash happens, we’re gonna be riding a roller coaster all day, right? The more caffeine you have, the more drastic this can get. And then you’re just drinking caffeine just to feel like you could stay awake. So I would strongly recommend starting to scale back on that. If you are a heavy coffee drinker beforehand, that could be the reason for this crash. So start scaling back so we can get more stable energy throughout the day. You can look into specific supplements that include some cordyceps in there… they are great for focus, and they’re not gonna have you go up and down all over.

So that is it for how do we avoid that 1:00 PM crash, that afternoon crash that so many of us have, again, you’re gonna look at three things. We’re gonna look at the sleep. If we don’t have good sleep, we need to start developing a sleep routine right away. Second, we’re gonna look at the foods we’re consuming. Are we having high glycemic or high sugary foods that are causing us to crash? And third, we’re gonna look at the caffeine consumption. Are we bombing ourselves with 600 milligrams of caffeine in the morning? If you are, you’re probably gonna have a crash afterwards.

All right. That’s all for today’s video. I hope you guys found value in this. If you liked it, gimme a thumbs up, if you loved it, gimme a heart and as always, stay strong.

-EarthFIT Coach Sam