If you want to know how to boost energy when you’re tired, you’re in the right place.
It’s 3 p.m. You’ve read the same email four times. The coffee you had at lunch has stopped working, and the vending machine is starting to look like a reasonable life choice.
You’re not alone in this. In June 2026 the National Sleep Foundation, working with mattress maker Tempur-Pedic, reported that almost half of U.S. adults say they don’t get enough sleep, and that people average roughly 6.5 to 7 hours a night, the low end of the recommended range. (The report was industry-supported, so read it as a snapshot rather than gospel.)
The good news is that tiredness usually has more than one cause, which means you have more than one lever to pull. Some of the fixes below work in five minutes. Others take a few weeks to pay off. A couple of them are about knowing when tiredness isn’t a lifestyle problem at all.
Every item is backed by a named study, survey or report, and I’ve flagged where the evidence is small, old or only shows a correlation. Pick two or three that fit your life and start there.
1. Take a five-minute walk every hour
Sitting still for hours doesn’t save energy. It seems to drain it.
The strongest recent evidence comes from Keith Diaz and colleagues at Columbia University, who worked with NPR’s “Body Electric” challenge. Of 19,342 adults who signed up, 11,484 took five-minute walking breaks for 14 days, every 30, 60 or 120 minutes, after a week of their normal routine. Fatigue and low mood dropped in all three groups, and the more often people moved, the bigger the change. According to the BMJ Group summary of the June 2026 British Journal of Sports Medicine study, the hourly schedule hit the best balance: big enough gains to matter, easy enough to stick with. Work performance didn’t suffer either. Engagement and self-rated performance edged up slightly, by about 4 to 7% and 1 to 3%.
Two caveats. Everything was self-reported, and most participants were white, female and highly educated.
Start small: set a repeating 55-minute timer tomorrow, and when it goes off, walk for five minutes. Stairs, corridor, the block. Doesn’t matter.
2. Nap for 10 to 20 minutes, not an hour
A short nap is one of the few energy tricks with a big pile of controlled studies behind it.
A 2025 meta-analysis by researchers at South China Normal University (Qian, Ru and colleagues, published in Psychological Development and Education) pooled 42 studies with 1,751 participants. An afternoon nap had a moderate positive effect on cognitive function compared with no nap (Hedges’ g = 0.59). That’s a sizeable effect for something that costs nothing.
Length matters, though. In an older but often-cited trial, Amber Brooks and Leon Lack (Sleep, 2006) compared naps of different lengths after restricted night sleep. The 10-minute nap came out best overall, while the 30-minute nap caused a stretch of grogginess before the benefits kicked in. That grogginess is sleep inertia, and it’s why the hour-long weekend nap often leaves you feeling worse.
Picture this: you lie down at 2 p.m. “for five minutes” and wake at 3:20 with a pillow crease and no idea what day it is. That’s the deep-sleep trap a short alarm avoids.
Give it a go: set an alarm for 20 minutes, lie down somewhere dim, and get up when it rings even if you didn’t fall fully asleep. Keep naps before about 3 p.m. so they don’t eat into your night. If you want to remember more of what you learned that morning, naps pair nicely with these memory techniques.
3. Get bright light early in the day
Most offices are gloomy compared with outdoors, even when they don’t look it.
A three-week field study from Eindhoven University of Technology, published in February 2025, gave 15 office workers wearable light sensors and asked them about their mood and energy four times each workday. Higher light levels in the previous half hour were linked to more vitality, better mood and better self-rated efficiency. Light above 250 lux was the threshold that mattered for vitality and morning efficiency, and more time above it during the day was linked to falling asleep faster that night.
Fifteen people is tiny, so treat this as a pointer, not proof. The mechanism is better established. Light hitting your eyes helps set your body clock, which pushes alertness up in the day and sleepiness to the right time at night. For scale, researchers at Rensselaer’s Lighting Research Center have noted that typical office lighting delivers under 100 lux at the eye, while a sunny day outside gives 1,000 to well over 10,000.
Next time, do this: take your first coffee or your first call outside, or move your desk so you face a window for the first two hours of work.
4. Drink water before you reach for anything else
Here the mechanism is clearer than the everyday effect size, so let’s walk through it.
When you’re short on fluid, the concentration of your blood (its osmolality) rises. Your brain detects that, ramps up thirst and releases more vasopressin, a hormone that tells your kidneys to hold onto water. That signalling doesn’t stay neatly in its lane. HyunGyu Suh, Stavros Kavouras and colleagues tested this directly in a 2021 trial in the British Journal of Nutrition. They gave 49 adults a salty infusion that pulled water out of their cells, without exercise or heat to muddy things, and compared it with a neutral infusion. Plasma osmolality climbed from 285 to 305 mmol/kg in the dehydrating condition, and scores for fatigue, confusion and low mood went up. The effect was mainly seen in women, possibly because their thirst and vasopressin responses were stronger.
So the link is causal in a lab. How much a mild shortfall at your desk matters is less certain. The study is also over five years old; I didn’t find a newer controlled trial that isolates dehydration this cleanly.
A quick experiment: next time a slump hits, drink a full glass of water and wait 15 minutes before deciding whether you need caffeine.
5. Put on music when your brain feels fried
Mental fatigue is a specific kind of tired. Your body’s fine, but your focus has gone to mush after hours of concentrated work.
A January 2025 systematic review in PLOS ONE by Cong Ding and colleagues gathered nine studies that tested music against mental fatigue. Relaxing music, upbeat music and people’s own favourite tracks all reduced how mentally tired participants felt, and some studies also found smaller drops in performance. Upbeat music did better than calm music overall. For work you’re doing while listening, the review points to music without lyrics.
Nine studies is not a huge base, and they were mostly small. Still, it’s cheap, fast and pleasant, which counts for a lot when you’re running on empty.
Your move: build a short playlist of lyric-free, upbeat tracks for the hard afternoon block, and another of songs you love for the break after it. If music helps you settle into deep work, these ways to get into a flow state build on the same idea.
6. Treat exercise as a bigger battery, not a quick charge
Think of your daily energy like a phone battery. Coffee and snacks are a quick top-up. Regular exercise is more like swapping in a battery with more capacity, so the same day drains a smaller share of it.
The analogy holds in one important way: the benefit comes from training over weeks, not from one session. A 2022 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Psychology by Carly Wender, Mika Manninen and Patrick O’Connor pooled 81 randomised trials with 7,050 people. Exercise programmes reduced feelings of fatigue (g = -0.37), raised feelings of energy (g = 0.42) and boosted vitality (g = 0.54). The authors’ conclusion refers to moderate-intensity programmes.
Where the analogy breaks: a real battery doesn’t get bigger when you drain it, and a body pushed too hard without recovery gets more tired, not less. The meta-analysis is also over four years old; I kept it because it’s the largest synthesis of randomised trials on exactly this outcome that I found.
Test it this week: book three 30-minute moderate sessions (brisk walk, easy cycle, swim) into your calendar like meetings. If “I’m too tired to exercise” is the voice that wins every time, this guide to procrastination and laziness is worth a read.
7. Use cold water for stress, not as a magic energy shot
Cold showers have a loud fan club. The evidence is quieter.
Tara Cain and colleagues at the University of South Australia published the most thorough review so far in PLOS ONE in January 2025: 11 randomised studies, 3,177 healthy adults, water at 15°C or colder for at least 30 seconds. Stress dropped, but only at the 12-hour mark, not immediately. Sleep quality and quality of life improved in some studies. Mood didn’t. One included study found that people taking regular cold showers had 29% less sickness absence. The review also looked for effects on energy and fatigue, and nothing clear came out on those. There was a temporary spike in inflammation right after immersion, which is why the authors told people with health conditions to take care.
So if your tiredness is tangled up with stress and poor sleep, cold water might help indirectly. As a 3 p.m. pick-me-up, the science doesn’t back it yet.
Here’s a simple way in: finish your morning shower with 30 seconds of cold water for two weeks, and note how you sleep. Skip it if you have a heart condition, unless your doctor says otherwise.
8. Stop using your phone once you’re in bed
You probably saw this one coming. The numbers are still worth seeing.
A March 2025 study in Frontiers in Psychiatry by Gunnhild Johnsen Hjetland and colleagues at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health used the 2022 national student health survey, covering 45,202 students aged 18 to 28. Each extra hour of screen time after getting into bed was linked to 59% higher odds of insomnia symptoms and 24 minutes less sleep. Surprisingly, it didn’t matter much whether people were scrolling social media, watching shows or gaming. Total time was the problem. The authors’ best guess is displacement: screen time simply replaces sleep time.
It’s a cross-sectional survey, so it can’t prove the phone causes the bad sleep. People who can’t sleep may reach for their phones more. Hjetland’s own practical advice is to stop screens 30 to 60 minutes before sleep and turn off notifications.
Try this tomorrow: charge your phone outside the bedroom and buy a cheap alarm clock. If the bigger habit needs work, digital minimalism is a good place to start.
9. Time your caffeine by the dose, not the clock
“No coffee after 2 p.m.” is a decent rule of thumb, but it ignores the size of the cup.
Carissa Gardiner and colleagues at Australian Catholic University ran a randomised crossover trial, published in SLEEP in 2025 (online since October 2024), testing a typical dose (100 mg, roughly a small coffee) and a high dose (400 mg, a large coffee shop drink or some energy drinks) at 12, 8 and 4 hours before bed. They measured sleep at home with partial polysomnography and sleep diaries.
| Dose | Taken before bed | What happened to sleep |
|---|---|---|
| 100 mg | 4, 8 or 12 hours | No significant effect at any timing |
| 400 mg | 12 hours | Slower to fall asleep, altered sleep structure |
| 400 mg | 8 hours | More fragmented sleep |
| 400 mg | 4 hours | Perceived sleep quality down about 34% |
The catch: participants often didn’t notice the disruption at 8 or 12 hours, even when the instruments did. It’s one trial, so treat the hours as a guide.
One small step: check the caffeine content of your usual drinks, keep big doses to the morning, and save any afternoon caffeine for a small cup.
10. Go to bed and get up at the same times
How regular your sleep is may matter almost as much as how long it lasts.
In July 2025, a team led by Shengfeng Wang at Peking University published one of the biggest studies of this in Health Data Science. They used wrist-worn activity trackers from 88,461 UK Biobank adults and followed their health records for an average of 6.8 years. Sleep traits were linked to 172 diseases. Sleep rhythm, meaning how stable and consistent your daily sleep-wake pattern is, showed links to nearly half of them, about three times as many as sleep duration. One more surprise: 21.67% of people who said they were “long sleepers” actually slept less than six hours. They were spending long hours in bed, not sleeping long hours.
This is correlation, and the participants averaged about 62 years old. It doesn’t prove that fixing your schedule prevents disease. But it fits what’s known about body clocks, and a regular schedule is one of the easiest things to change.
This week: pick a wake-up time you can hit seven days a week, including Saturday, and keep it within about an hour.
11. Ditch the snooze button
Rebecca Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, puts it bluntly: snoozing interrupts some of the most important stages of sleep and mostly hands you light, broken sleep between alarms. Her advice is to set the alarm for the latest time you can actually get up, then commit to rising on the first ring.
Her May 2025 study in Scientific Reports shows how common the habit is. Using data from more than 21,000 users of the Sleep Cycle app and over 3 million nights, the team found that about 56% of sleep sessions ended with a snooze, with an average of 11 minutes spent snoozing. Around 45% of users were “heavy snoozers” who hit the button on more than 80% of mornings, losing about 20 minutes a day to it. Heavy snoozers also had more erratic sleep schedules.
Two limits. App users aren’t a random sample of the population, and the app company co-authored the paper.
Tonight: move your alarm across the room and set it 10 minutes later than usual. No snooze allowed.
12. Give yourself a real seven-hour sleep window
If you’re tired every single day, the boring answer is often the right one: you may not be giving sleep enough room.
The National Sleep Foundation’s 2025 Sleep in America Poll asked U.S. adults about their sleep and how they were doing in life. Among people satisfied with their sleep, 88% were “flourishing”, a measure that covers happiness, productivity at home and work, goals and relationships. Among people unhappy with their sleep, only 47% were. That’s a correlation from one survey, and flourishing could also make sleep easier. Even so, a gap that wide is hard to ignore. And remember the 2026 NSF figure from the intro: the average American is already at the bottom of the recommended range.
Make it concrete: work backwards from your fixed wake time. If you get up at 6:30, lights out by 11 at the latest, which means winding down from about 10:30. Write that bedtime on a sticky note.
13. Skip the nightcap
Alcohol feels like a sleep aid. It works more like a loan with a nasty interest rate.
The chain goes like this. Alcohol boosts inhibitory signalling in the brain (through GABA, glutamate and adenosine systems), so you feel sleepy and may nod off faster. Then your liver gets to work. As your blood alcohol falls through the night, that sedation wears off, and sleep in the second half of the night becomes lighter and more broken. You wake up feeling like you slept, but the sleep you got was thinner.
The research backs this up. A meta-analysis by Carissa Gardiner and colleagues in Sleep Medicine Reviews (April 2025) pooled controlled studies of healthy adults drinking before bed. Alcohol delayed the start of REM sleep and cut REM duration, with bigger effects at bigger doses. High doses did shorten the time to fall asleep, but the authors say that likely makes the later REM disruption worse. The effects on total sleep time were too uncertain to call.
For your next evening in: if you drink, have it with dinner rather than right before bed, and notice how you feel at 10 the next morning.
14. Don’t trust the “sugar rush”
The idea that sugar gives you a lift is so common that it’s surprising how badly it holds up.
Konstantinos Mantantzis and colleagues at Humboldt University of Berlin and the universities of Warwick and Lancaster reviewed the evidence in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in 2019. Across 31 studies, 1,259 participants and 176 effect sizes, carbohydrates didn’t improve any aspect of mood at any point after people ate them. Worse, within the first hour, people who’d had the carbs felt more tired and less alert than people given a placebo.
This study is old by the standards I’ve used here. I kept it because it’s the most complete synthesis on this exact question, and my search didn’t turn up a newer meta-analysis that overturns it.
Picture this: the 4 p.m. office cake appears, you have a slice “for energy”, and by 5 you’re flatter than before. That pattern is exactly what the meta-analysis would predict.
Next time, do this: when you need a snack, pair something with protein or fat (nuts, yoghurt, cheese) with fruit, rather than going for sweets on their own.
15. Take loud snoring seriously
Some tiredness has nothing to do with habits. Sleep apnoea, where breathing repeatedly stops during sleep, wrecks sleep quality without you knowing.
In March 2025 the National Sleep Foundation released its Understanding Sleep Apnea Survey of 1,015 U.S. adults, drawn from a nationally representative panel. Nearly 4 in 10 adults (38%) were at increased risk of sleep apnoea. Among people already diagnosed, 31% weren’t getting treatment. And when asked whether they’d want to know if they had symptoms, only about half said a definite yes. The survey was funded by a company that makes an apnoea treatment device, though NSF says it ran the research independently.
If someone has told you that you snore loudly, gasp or stop breathing at night, or you feel unrefreshed no matter how long you sleep, this belongs on your list.
Give it a go: ask your partner or housemate whether you snore or pause breathing, or record yourself overnight with a free app, and take the results to your doctor.
16. Try five minutes of slow, exhale-heavy breathing
Sometimes what feels like tiredness is really wired-and-tired: stressed, tense and drained at the same time.
A remote randomised trial from Stanford, published in Cell Reports Medicine in January 2023 by Melis Yilmaz Balban, David Spiegel, Andrew Huberman and colleagues, compared three daily five-minute breathing practices with five minutes of mindfulness meditation over a month. Everyone improved. The breathing groups, especially “cyclic sighing” (a slow inhale, a second short inhale to top up the lungs, then a long, slow exhale), showed bigger gains in positive mood and a larger drop in breathing rate than meditation.
Note what was measured: mood and arousal, not energy. And the study is more than two years old; I didn’t find a newer large replication. So this is a tool for the stressed kind of tired, not a fix for sleep debt.
A five-minute version: sit down, set a timer, breathe in slowly, take a second short sip of air on top, then breathe out as slowly as you can. Repeat until the timer ends. It pairs well with these tactics for breaking a rumination loop when your mind won’t switch off.
17. Check whether you’re tired or stressed
Stress and fatigue feel alike from the inside, and they often travel together. Treating them as the same thing means you may sleep more and still feel flat.
Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report, published in April 2026 with data collected through 2025, found that 40% of employees worldwide experienced a lot of stress during the previous day. That’s up from 31% in 2009 and still above pre-pandemic levels. In the same data, only 20% of employees were engaged at work, the lowest level since 2020. These are survey snapshots, not a measure of fatigue, but they suggest a lot of “tired” at work may be stress wearing a disguise.
The practical difference: tiredness usually lifts with rest. Stress-driven exhaustion often doesn’t, because your mind keeps running even when your body stops.
Do this: next time you feel drained, ask yourself whether a nap would fix it or whether you’d lie there thinking about work. If it’s the second, deal with the worry first. These steps to stop catastrophizing are a good start.
18. Take real micro-breaks, away from the screen
Not every break needs to be a walk. Even a short pause from the task helps.
In 2022, Patricia Albulescu and colleagues at the West University of Timișoara published a meta-analysis in PLOS ONE covering 22 studies on micro-breaks, defined as stopping a task for 10 minutes or less. Micro-breaks were linked to more vigour and less fatigue, a small but significant effect. They didn’t reliably improve task performance overall, though longer breaks helped more on creative or clerical work. For very demanding mental work, the authors suggest you may need a longer break than 10 minutes.
The paper is now four years old; I haven’t found a newer synthesis on micro-breaks and energy specifically.
Before your next break: decide what it will be. Look out of a window, stretch, refill your water. Then actually leave the screen, because swapping work tabs for social media doesn’t count as a pause. If your day is too chaotic to fit breaks in, these organizing tips for work can free up some room.
19. Stop treating breaks as slacking
Plenty of people know breaks help. They just don’t take them, because they worry how it looks.
Keith Diaz, the Columbia University exercise physiologist who led the walking-break study in item 1, told BBC News in June 2026 that this worry is common: in his research, some employees hesitated to leave their desks because of what colleagues or managers might think. His view is that movement breaks can improve work performance, helping with attention, memory and executive function, and that you can build movement into work through walking meetings or pacing during phone calls. Emily McGrath, a senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation, welcomed the findings but pointed out that the research was short and self-reported, so longer studies are still needed.
Say you have a one-to-one with your manager on Thursday. Suggesting “shall we do this one walking?” turns a break into part of the job, and nobody has to watch you leave your desk.
Practical version: propose one walking meeting this week, or take your next phone call on your feet. For the meetings you can’t walk, these ways to run more effective meetings can at least make them shorter. And if your fear is what your boss will think, earning real respect at work has much more to do with results than with hours spent visibly at your desk.
20. Learn from a company that scheduled breaks for everyone
Breaks work best when you choose them. One real workplace experiment shows why.
In 2019 an insurance administration company with offices in Tokyo and Osaka introduced “Kenkatsu Time”, a programme of short active breaks built into the work schedule. The goal was about 10 minutes of standing or moving per workday. One department, for example, did five minutes of stretching or walking between 10 and 11 a.m. and five minutes of light aerobic exercise at 2 p.m. The CEO encouraged it, and each department had leaders who designed and ran its own version. Naruki Kitano, Yuko Kai and colleagues at the Meiji Yasuda Life Foundation tracked 172 workers with accelerometers for a year and compared them with 323 workers from the same company group. Their results appeared in the Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health in April 2025.
The movement goals worked. Sitting during work hours fell by about 24 minutes per eight-hour day, steps rose by nearly 1,200, and two thirds of workers were still taking part almost every time after 12 months. But psychological distress went up and work engagement dipped slightly in the break group. The authors think the company’s busy season and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic may explain it, and the study wasn’t randomised, so nobody can be sure. It’s a useful reminder that scheduled breaks can feel like one more obligation if people don’t get a say.
Here’s how to use that: if you’re setting up breaks for a team, let people choose the timing and type, and ask how people feel about them as well as counting who turned up. These ideas on collaborating more effectively can help you design it with your team rather than for them.
21. Ask your doctor to check your iron
You can be low in iron without being anaemic, and a standard blood count may not catch it.
A study published in JAMA Network Open in September 2024 by Yahya Tawfik, Leo Buckley and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital analysed national health survey data from 8,021 U.S. adults collected between 2017 and 2020. An estimated 14% had absolute iron deficiency (low iron stores), and another 15% had functional iron deficiency (enough stored iron but trouble using it). Even among adults without anaemia, heart failure, kidney disease or pregnancy, the figures were 11% and 15%. Absolute deficiency was most common in younger women.
Andrew Eisenberger, an associate professor of medicine at Columbia University, told NBC News that doctors often screen for anaemia, but people can have normal red blood cells and still have iron deficiency that causes symptoms. That’s the gap this study points at.
Two notes. The data is from before 2021 and the paper just passes the two-year mark, so I’ve flagged it. And don’t start iron supplements on a hunch, because too much iron is harmful too.
One request to make: if you’ve been tired for weeks, ask your doctor specifically about ferritin (iron stores) alongside the usual blood count.
22. Know when to stop self-helping and see a doctor
Everything above assumes your tiredness has an ordinary cause. Sometimes it doesn’t.
The NHS guidance on tiredness and fatigue, in the version on the NHS Wales 111 site last updated in July 2026, is clear about when to get help: see a GP if you’ve been feeling tired for a few weeks and don’t know why, or if the tiredness is affecting your daily life. You may need blood tests to check for anaemia, diabetes or thyroid problems. The NHS also lists conditions such as iron deficiency anaemia, diabetes, an overactive thyroid and ME/CFS, and warns against self-diagnosing, because the symptoms overlap.
If you’ve been sleeping well, moving, eating reasonably and drinking water for a month and you’re still exhausted, that’s useful information for your doctor rather than a personal failure.
Book the appointment if this sounds like you. Bring a two-week note of your sleep, energy and anything unusual, like thirst, weight change or low mood.
What to do when you slip
You will slip. Late nights happen, deadlines happen, and some weeks the snooze button wins every morning.
That’s normal, and it’s built into how habits form. In December 2024, Ben Singh and colleagues at the University of South Australia published a systematic review in Healthcare covering 20 studies and 2,601 adults. The popular “21 days to a habit” claim didn’t survive: the studies that measured timing found median times of 59 to 66 days, with individual estimates ranging from 4 to 335 days. Habits practised in the morning and habits people chose and enjoyed tended to be stronger. Only four of the studies measured timing directly, so the exact numbers are rough. The direction is clear, though. If you’re three weeks in and it still feels effortful, nothing has gone wrong.
A few ways to get back on track:
- Restart with the smallest version of the habit. One five-minute walk, not eight.
- Anchor it to the morning if you can, since morning habits showed up as stronger in Singh’s review.
- Drop the habits you hate and keep the ones you don’t mind. Enjoyment predicted success.
- Judge the week, not the day. One bad night doesn’t erase the pattern.
Say you were out late on Friday and slept until noon on Saturday. The worst move is to write off the whole plan. The best is to get up at your usual time on Sunday, get outside early, and keep the nap short. If the whole day feels like a write-off, these steps for turning a bad day around can help, and this list of good habits to build is a reminder of where you’re heading.
Conclusion
There’s no single trick that fixes tiredness, and anyone who sells you one is guessing. What the evidence does support is a handful of unglamorous moves: get up and walk every hour, see daylight early, keep naps short, watch the size and timing of your coffee, give sleep a regular, phone-free window, and get checked if none of that makes a dent.
Pick two items from this list. Do them for the next two weeks. Then add one more.
For more practical, research-backed ways to feel and work better, browse the Self Improvement section of Perfect 24 Hours.
