Kaizen — The Small Changes That Will Supercharge Your Energy Levels

In order to spend more time doing the things you love — and engaging in activities that will actually boost your energy further — you need to find ways to save time throughout the day. That way, you can introduce new things to your routine without feeling like you’re being pushed too far. This will also help you to recharge and relax by having some time spare, which will ultimately help you to be even more focused, productive and creative at work!

Tidy

Believe it or not, tidying your home makes a massive difference to your energy levels, your confidence and therefore your ability to stick at your training. Think of your home as an extension of your state of mind — if you’re very stressed your home is more likely to look a mess. If your home is a mess, you’ll be more stressed. So what’s the easiest way to keep your home tidier and to give yourself more mental clarity and space?

Actually it’s to get ruthless and just throw things out. Got a box of junk on the wardrobe you haven’t looked in for a year? Get rid of it. Got 20 ornaments on every surface? Throw out half of them (at least!). This may sound extreme but simply having more space, even just seeing out the corner of your eye that there’s space under the bed, can make a huge difference to your state of mind and the lack of clutter makes it easier for your mind and body to unwind.

Clutter and mess literally causes you to produce norepinephrine, cortisol and other stress hormones, so this can end up leaving you feeling completely spent unless you can do something about it. This is particularly useful when you consider that it will also make tidying up much easier in future. Now you’ll be able to clean surfaces by wiping a wet cloth, without having to remove lots of items from around your home.

Finding things will be easier and generally, you’ll find you have more time and energy as a result. Oh and when you remove 50% of your ornaments, you’ll be left with a much higher ‘average quality’ of things on display. This actually makes your home look much wealthier and more impressive, because there’s no longer the less impressive stuff to detract from the truly great stuff.

Shop Online

Most of us will do at least one — probably two — big shops every week. This involves driving to the supermarket, walking around the aisles, loading up our trolleys, wrestling with other customers and then loading up our bags and carrying them to the car. That’s a heck of a lot of effort! Not to mention the fact that when you shop like this, you have no idea of the budget or the precise amount you’re spending.

If you want to perform optimally at work the next day, then spending your evenings hunting around supermarkets with screaming kids is not the way to do it. And so it actually makes a lot more sense to shop online. Set up a selection of items that you want to buy — you can even do this on your lunch break — and then have them delivered each week with a few variations to keep your meals interesting. You just saved yourself 1–3 hours a week and those hours would have involved a lot of exertion.

Automate the Cleaning

Back to cleaning and tidying! Because even with a very well organized home and minimal clutter, you’re still going to find yourself needing to clean from time to time, meaning that you’re not either relaxing and recuperating or doing things you enjoy. But many of these types of work can be avoided or at least minimized too. For example, you could take away the need to wash up after eating by simply getting a washing machine. Sick of spending lots of time vacuuming?

Then how about getting a robotic vacuum cleaner? Ironing taking too long? Then how about getting a steam press! If you want to go even further, then you could consider ordering ready-made meal deliveries to come to your door (as long as they adhere to the diet recommendations we’re going to go into) and you could look into getting a cleaner to help you keep your home in top shape.

In short, there’s really no reason to spend your hard-earned time and energy sweeping the floor and cooking. It might seem ‘lazy’ but it really isn’t if you’re using that time to do other fun and useful things. Do you think Obama spends his time washing dishes? Richard Branson? Do you think they’d have time to run their empires if they did? Do you think they’d have the energy?

Stretching and Foam Rolling

Stretching is something I never used to bother with until I heard someone point out how much younger it made them feel once they got their flexibility back. And it makes sense — if you come home from work and covered in aches and pains — then of course you’re not going to be brimming with energy! And most of us lead lifestyles that make us all the more stiff and achy.

If you spend a huge amount of your time sitting at a desk, then this is going to do nothing short of destroying your health. Sitting for long stretches is terrible for your heart (because you’re not using it, basically), while it also causes certain muscles to shorten and tighten, while others elongate and become weaker. Among other things, this can risk causing an ‘anterior pelvic tilt’ where your pelvis is actually pulled forward at the front, making your buttocks protrude and hurting your back.

Doing everything is harder if this is the state you’re moving around in! Don’t start your workouts with stretching though — contrary to what you may have been taught in gym class, stretching actually increases your risk of injury rather than decreasing it.

Commuting

One of the most tiring parts of the day for so many of us is the commute — and there are countless reasons for this. Not only does commuting often mean you need to get up an hour or more before you would otherwise have to but it also means you need to push yourself onto a crowded bus or train with lots of other people, or sit in a traffic jam cursing.

When you’ve just spent a whole day being shouted at or dealing with work responsibilities, this can be too much for us to handle sometimes. There are plenty of solutions though. One is to look into flexi time. Ask your boss if you can come in an hour earlier and leave an hour earlier — it may mean you miss rush hour and it shouldn’t hurt your productivity.

It also means you’ll have an extra hour or so to yourself at the start of the day where you can be much more productive. Another option is to consider a car-pool. This way, you can get a lift into work every other day, making life much easier for you. The stress is now split in half, at least, as is the cost of fuel.

And if there’s nothing else you can do, then think about the ways you can make work the journey a little more relaxing and a little less stressful. This might mean reading a great book with headphones and some good music, or it might mean napping to get even more energy in!