Far and away the biggest problem I encounter daily in my practice is fatigue and lack of energy. If that’s your problem, what may benefit you is attention to your diet, your digestion and the essential nutrients your body needs for energy and to help your cells replicate; these include vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and protein. Then you need to ensure your hormones are serving you in a balanced way.

If you’re not on the diet that’s appropriate for you and you are suffering from food allergies or intolerances, that will compromise your digestive process, which will make it difficult for you to extract the nutrients you need from your food. A digestive system that’s not providing you with the digestive juices you need to break down the food you eat and the supplements you take will make it even more difficult to obtain essential nutrients.

Once you are on the right diet and your digestive fluids are flowing, you need to ensure you are getting the vitamins, minerals, fatty acids and proteins your body needs for cellular energy and to manufacture hormones. Only then will your hormones be able to kick into gear. You need nutrients to manufacture hormones and you also need nutrients for your hormones to work. Nutrients help you make what is called ATP, which is the fuel, or energy, that powers your cells. Hormones use ATP to execute their activities, to help you think and remember and to enable you to move through your working day, exercise your body and enjoy your sexual vitality. You also need ATP to build hormones.

If you are complaining of fatigue and your health practitioner doesn’t examine your diet, evaluate your digestive process, assess your nutrient status and only then measure your hormones and identify whether they are working for you in a balanced fashion, you won’t have your fatigue dealt with in a comprehensive fashion. With regard to energy, the most important hormones that power you through the day are cortisol and thyroid hormones; then there’s the female hormone, oestrogen.

Cortisol and energy

Cortisol is actually the primary energy hormone — the one that prods you out of bed in the morning. Cortisol allows you to rise and shine by breaking down a substance called glycogen, the form in which glucose is stored in your body, thereby providing you with the substrate your body uses to make ATP. If you are tired in the morning and struggling to get going, it’s highly likely you are not adequately served by cortisol. Light-headedness, moodiness, feeling depressed and agitated and needing to argue constantly are further pointers to an inadequate production of cortisol.

Cortisol stimulates the brain waves that allow you to focus and pay attention as well those brain waves that are switched on when you meditate. This hormone will also encourage your stomach to produce hydrochloric acid, a critical component of your digestive process. You need hydrochloric acid to digest protein, which suggests that, without cortisol, you will not obtain the protein you need to look after your DNA.

It’s also possible your body is not producing cortisol in a balanced fashion. Because the demands of the work environment are so excessive and exacting in the 21st century, you might find you need to stay up late. To cope with these unnatural requirements, your body might produce extra amounts of cortisol at night when it normally would turn off production of this hormone and you might then find it difficult to get to sleep or discover you are waking up in the early hours of the morning, then battling to get back to sleep.

Your body should be producing maximal amounts of cortisol in the morning with a gradual decline as the day progresses, so that as evening approaches, your body is starting to put the brakes on cortisol production so you can have a peaceful night’s rest. Often, you’ll find the opposite taking place: your morning cortisol is basement low, while your evening cortisol production is peaking. This will lead to carbohydrate craving in the form of something sweet together with your caffeine fix just to get you going, while at night you will be over-hyped.

During restful sleep, your body repairs and regenerates damaged cells and produces hormones such as melatonin, which has the potential to protect you against cancer, and growth hormone, which helps with the growth and repair process and preserves your muscle and bone mass while safeguarding your immune system. None of this will happen in a satisfactory fashion if you are producing excessive quantities of cortisol at night. The danger is that these are silent events. You won’t know that your cells aren’t being repaired adequately, that your immune system is compromised and that your bones are crumbling, possibly until it’s too late to reverse the damage.