When I first started developing a Performance Lifestyle, I wrote a short book, called Beat Fatigue Now. It was based on an early understanding of energy, and mostly about sleep. What was most prominent about that book was the title itself. It was based on the premise that you can actually “beat fatigue.”
You can’t really.
Now, I know what I meant when I wrote it, but today I would have written that book differently. It sent the wrong message about fatigue in my present view.
Fatigue is both an effect and the bodies solution to exertion and overexertion. It’s what recovery feels like. If you are tired all the time you are therefore chronically overexerted and under recovered. Being tired all the time is the bodies only recourse as it tries to recover.
Hence, chronic overexertion leads to chronic tiredness, exhaustion, and fatigue because people never quite get the recovery they need.
A second wind during a state of exhaustion and fatigue equates to debit from your longevity. (Way more to that story) That’s why it’s not a good idea to cover up fatigue. It’s not going away until you resolve it.
Mastery of human energy for health and performance starts with understanding fatigue.
Fatigue and our discussions around energy are at the core of a Performance Lifestyle for those reasons. You wake up to be successful every day, not balanced and healthy, so in order to perform at the level you need to sustain and succeed; you need a lot of energy.
That requires the right balance of lifestyle skills to increase your energy, manage your energy, and recovery your energy; so you know what to do, why to do it and how, at the right level, intensity and consistency for you to achieve your goals without tiring out prematurely. Let alone, burning out and wearing out, which compromise your health.
That is the basis of what it means to achieve even your most ambitious goals while living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind.
“Performance Lifestyle” is not simply called a healthy lifestyle because to achieve your real goals in life, business, sport, and potentially creative pursuits, only a performance lifestyle has that breadth and depth of lifestyle skills. Skills that include, but go beyond the more common emphasis on sleep, nutrition, and fitness alone.
There is simply way more to the whole idea of a lifestyle, which is essential energy management, than sleeping, eating and moving. Other lifestyle skills make even those core aspects of lifestyle possible. And all of the essential skills are needed if you’re going to master the strategies of healthy, high achieving people who thrive.
This is the only place worldwide where you’ll get that breadth and depth on the subject that is so central to your life (your lifestyle). Everything you do and if you are going to do it well, let alone all of your results, depend on it.
So stop trying to beat fatigue. You earned that fatigue. What you want to learn is how to minimize its duration and any negative impact it has in your life. To do that, you need to master the strategies of healthy, high achieving people who thrive.
Healthy high-achieving people who thrive know you can’t beat fatigue.
