Where All This Energy Comes From
If you've been mentally exhausted and are looking for tips to feel better, to have more energy, and to be inspired in life, here's what works for me. You might notice I have a lot of energy consistently — enough to do a live stream for several hours each day on Twitch, and then to film and upload, while I'm live, an average of five videos a day to five different platforms. I go to yoga almost every day. I go to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings almost every day. I do additional exercise. I'm there with my kids. I've found certain things that really help me maximize my energy, because I have a lot of stuff I want to do and I hate being exhausted. So here's what works for me to have so much energy consistently.
Tip 1: Stop Sabotaging Yourself
The very first and most important thing is to not sabotage myself, because everything else I do can easily be thrown away. For example, if I take a drink of alcohol, I can sabotage everything else — my diet, my marriage, all the things that support me, my health, my exercise. It's important to not bring yourself down. What I see so many people do that takes their energy out is bring themselves down with things like alcohol, drugs, and even medications, overeating, and addictive behaviors. They can feel like a reward and they can feel like a high in the short term, but overall, they bring your energy down.
For example, when I used to drink, I would have a bunch of energy. Then I would drink and sometimes have a crazy fun night. Other times I would be really miserable and destructive. But then the next day, I would have less energy. I'd be dragged down. I'd often be depressed, have a hangover, and it would take me another day just to get back to even. I had a hard time controlling my energy levels.
If you're exhausted mentally, what makes a big difference is to take inventory of what you're doing in your life. The first thing to check for is: are you sabotaging yourself somewhere? This is the main issue I see with most people. And if you're not sure, ask other people for feedback. Ask other people if they see you doing things that are self-harming, self-destructive, or counterproductive. As for me, I'm sober nine years. I don't drink, don't smoke, don't do any medications — most days I don't even take supplements. If you're not bringing yourself down, if you're not getting in your own way, then the tips I'm about to give will be really helpful. And if you are in your own way, and some addiction or self-harm behavior of any form is bringing you down, I've got a lot of videos on Jerry Banfield Recovery that I hope will help with many of those different things I've experienced myself, like alcoholism, eating issues, and more.
Tip 2: Get Great Sleep
If you're not bringing yourself down, then you want to look at your overall life situation — just the basics. So many of us think we know this stuff, but the question is: are you doing it? First, how's your sleep? If you're getting less than seven or eight hours of good sleep every night, that's a problem. For me, to get seven or eight hours of good sleep, I actually need to be in bed eight or nine hours. So I go to bed around 10 or 10:30 p.m. most days, and I don't have to wake up until 7 or 7:30 a.m. That's anywhere from eight to nine hours I'm physically in bed, and I consistently get great sleep. One of the easiest ways to not get your full energy is to have disrupted sleep.
Things I've found that help my sleep: black out the room completely. If it's noisy, you can use something like a sound machine. I also find that sleeping in a room with other people is very supportive. My wife likes it when I'm there to fall asleep with her. Then I kind of wake up an hour or two after we go to bed, and I go sleep in the room with the kids — my daughter's seven, my son's five — and they ask me to please sleep in the room, because they sleep really well when I'm in there. I think it's natural that human beings want to have other human beings around. If you live alone, it might help to get somebody else in there. And if you have trouble sleeping, there are things you can do during the day that can help you sleep better, because your sleep and your waking activities are very related. So now I'm going to go through all the different stuff I do during the day that helps me have more energy and sets me up to get good sleep.
Tip 3: Eat Whole Plant Foods and Don't Overeat
The food I eat makes a huge difference to my body composition and how I sleep. When I used to be 80 pounds heavier than I am now, I was overweight, and I ate all kinds of food, often at night — and I didn't sleep as well. The easy fix was to change my diet: to eat first thing in the morning, to eat more toward the afternoon, and to cut back or cut out eating late. I prefer not to eat at least three hours, if not four, five, or six hours before I go to sleep, because in my experience, if I eat in proximity to going to sleep, it puts on weight and it messes up my sleep.
What helps me with my diet is eating a whole plant based diet. That means most of the foods I eat are whole plant foods — fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains, and beans that are minimally processed or not processed at all. For example, if you have soybeans, like edamame, that is a whole plant food. But if you have something like tofu, that is a processed food. It's no longer a whole plant food — it's been stripped of its whole plant form and put into a different form. I eat a lot of salads and a lot of hummus. If something's just ground up — for example, beans ground up into hummus — that would still be a whole plant food. If you want to learn more about that, read the book How Not to Diet by Dr. Michael Greger. That gave me a ton of great information about my diet. In my experience, the better you eat, the more whole plant foods you eat, and the less crap you put in your body, the easier it is to maintain a healthy weight. And at a healthy weight with a better diet, it's been much easier for me to sleep and to have more energy throughout the day.
I've noticed one of the ways I most commonly sabotage my energy is to overeat. If you overeat whole plant foods, you're not going to put on much weight, but you will get mentally exhausted. I've noticed the main time I'm mentally exhausted now is when I've eaten too much. So for me, it's a simple exercise: don't eat if you're full. I'm still a bit full now, but thankfully I did not overeat as much as I did the day before, when I had a salad that was so big — even though it was all nutritious foods that weren't going to put on weight — that I ate until I was so full I was mentally exhausted.
Tip 4: Connect with Other Human Beings
The next thing we'll move on to is connection with other human beings. I find I get a ton of energy by connecting with other people. This is why I recommend dating — find someone you can date, who can be there, who you can live with. No matter what age you are, I find dating to be an incredibly supportive part of my life. That's why I've been married 10 years and have been dating my wife 12 years. The emptiest parts of my life were when I lived alone, and the parts of my life where I've lived with others — whether it was with my family, friends, or my wife — have consistently been way better. I don't think most human beings are designed to live in isolation. That's why I recommend finding other people to live with, because we humans bounce off each other. I get energy from being around other people.
Even if you think you're an introvert, consider this: I'm actually more of an introvert than an extrovert. I know it doesn't look like it, but I don't like being in social situations. I hate going to parties. I find it awkward to talk to more than one person at a time. I actually am more introverted than extroverted, which is why I like doing videos alone in my studio — I'm not actually talking to anybody in here. I'm just talking to myself.
Tip 5: Move Your Body and Live with Purpose
I find that doing things like going to yoga and getting physical exercise is very supportive for me having energy. I get exhausted mentally at some point — often right after I wake up, trying to plan my day — and one of the ways I consistently feel better is going to yoga. Going to yoga cycles the energy around in the body, and going to yoga in person, with all the other energy of the people there, stirs up my energy. I notice the people who tend to be the most sick tend to move their bodies the least, tend to be the least connected with other human beings, tend to have the worst diets, and tend to get the worst sleep. The great news is that if you can improve any single area, it makes it easier to improve every other area. If you eat better, it'll make it easier to improve your sleep. If you can improve your sleep, it's easier to exercise and move your body. And if you eat well, get good sleep, and exercise and move your body, it makes connecting and being around other people easier.
I love going to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. Going somewhere for the purpose of helping somebody, trying to make somebody else's life better, is powerful. Alcoholics Anonymous, after nine years sober, is very much like volunteering to me on most days. I'm mostly going there to support someone else who's struggling, because most days I'm not alone and I'm not struggling. Most days, life is easy. Most days, I'm there essentially to volunteer my time, listen to other people, and try to help other people get their lives together. And in doing so, that helps me. Having a purpose in your life can be achieved through connecting with other people and taking some time to volunteer to help out — whether it's a support group, a recovery group, a church group, a sports team, whatever it is. Being with other people in a supportive environment where you're all trying to help each other gives me a ton of energy.
Bonus: Do Work That Energizes You
The last thing we'll go into is work. What are you doing for work? For me, as a live streamer on Twitch, a YouTuber, and a creative entrepreneur online, my work gives me a lot of energy. I get excited about doing my work. I feel motivated and inspired to take care of myself because I want to do my work, and it's very tied into my life's purpose.
Taking a Deep Dive Into Why You Are Here
It can help to take a deep dive and inventory into yourself and think about why are you here? What are you doing on this planet? Reading books can be a very supportive way to get deeper into yourself and to listen to other people's stories. I love reading people's autobiographies and memoirs to hear what they've been through. I love reading books — I've even got a reading list I share. I love reading inspirational and self-help books to dive into what is my purpose here? Who am I really? When I've struggled the most in the last few years has been when I've been most off track doing my work.
The Negative Feedback Loop of Working Just for Money
What I've noticed a lot of people do that gets them exhausted, especially mentally, is they do jobs just to make money. And it sets up this environment where they have an entire cycle of addiction in the rest of their life. They get stuck in what to me looks like a chosen negative feedback loop. For example, I know a guy who wants to have enough money to do all these other things in his life. So he works this job full time, which drains him mentally. And then when he's drained mentally, he seeks a reward, which then drains him financially — and often drains him physically, because he gets into this addiction. And then he's stuck. He pisses all the money he makes from his job away on his addiction. I've suggested to him: just quit that job and focus on finding your mission. Do something you love for work. Refuse to work just to make money.
This is something I'm essentially volunteering to do in this life. I made this just because it's the best thing I can think to do right now to make a difference in your life — to help people and give the gifts I have to give in a way that I'm equipped to give them. This is my genius zone: learning things and then teaching them, interacting with the audience live, filming videos. I'm doing work I love. And in my experience, when you do work you love, it does not exhaust you mentally. But when you show up to a job just to get a paycheck, it will suck your energy out mentally, and it creates this negative feedback loop where you're drained mentally, you go home, and you start going for instant gratification behaviors like overeating, alcohol, drugs, porn, addictive negative relationships, shopping. It creates this cycle of abuse where you do this work you don't really like just to get this money that you feel you need. And then you're stuck in this rut where you feel like you're in a rat race where no matter how hard you work, you never seem to get ahead.
Begin With the End in Mind
To solve this, think about your life and where it's going. Begin with the end in mind. Can you afford to waste time doing a job you don't really care about just to try and survive, when you know the end is going to be complete annihilation? I think about that a lot. I know where I'm going, and where I'm going is complete annihilation. In some ways, just fighting for survival is kind of pointless, because eventually the game's up. So I want to really enjoy the game, enjoy the experience, get into the day-to-day experience, and help other people as much as I can.
Fixing the Causes of Mental Exhaustion
I used to struggle a lot with being mentally exhausted, and then I would do all these things to try and cope with that instead of fixing the underlying causes. So what I've done is go through and fix the causes of mental exhaustion in my life: lack of sleep, a diet filled with unnutritious foods that poisoned my body, things like alcohol and drugs that poisoned my body but that I really was using to try and numb the pain — and to feel connected with other people, to date, to have family, to have friends, to have a community.
I'm really grateful — thanks for asking this question. If you want more of this and you want to be part of what I'm doing today, the best way to get the full Jerry Banfield experience now is to join the Jerry Banfield Family, where we have our community together and you can talk with me directly.
And if you want all the videos like this — everything about living your best life, spiritual development, and freedom from alcoholism and addiction — check out my Life playlist on YouTube. My reading list and everything else I'm doing are on my website. Thank you for being here with me today.