You know you're tired, not the "I stayed up too late last night" kind of tired, but the tiredness that follows you around regardless of how early you go to bed. You wake up feeling as though you could sleep for another three hours, and by mid-afternoon you're reaching for coffee or something sweet just to keep yourself going. Your concentration isn't what it used to be, motivation disappears and even things you normally enjoy can feel like they require more energy than you have available.
So eventually you decide to do something about it, you have some blood tests and wait for the results, convinced they'll finally explain why you feel the way you do. Then you're told: “everything's normal,” but you don't feel normal, and this is where I think we need to start asking questions rather than just leaving that surgery feeling confused.
Being within a laboratory reference range doesn't automatically mean that every possible reason for your fatigue has been investigated. Of course blood tests are incredibly useful, but they're only a snapshot of particular markers at a particular moment in time. Which tests were actually done? where within the reference range did your results sit? what does the rest of your diet, sleep, lifestyle, stress, hormones and overall health look like?
And, most importantly, what is your body actually trying to tell you?
When you receive a blood-test result, it will usually be compared with a laboratory reference range. These ranges are generally created from results seen across a reference population, and they help identify values that fall outside expected limits. They're useful, but the word normal can sometimes give people a false sense that every possible explanation has now been ruled out, when it hasn't.
You may have had a full blood count but not ferritin. Perhaps your thyroid was checked, but only certain thyroid markers. Maybe vitamin B12, folate or vitamin D weren't included at all. Perhaps low iron has raised concerns about anaemia, but was copper considered too? And even when a result falls within the laboratory reference range, that number shouldn't automatically be looked at in isolation from your symptoms, diet and the rest of your health picture.
So if you're exhausted every day, I wouldn't stop being curious simply because several numbers on a page weren't highlighted in red. The blood test is information, but so are your symptoms.
Iron is one of the first nutrients I'd think about when somebody tells me they're continually exhausted, particularly women who menstruate. Your body needs iron to make haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen around the body. Iron deficiency can eventually lead to anaemia, but your body's iron stores can become depleted before haemoglobin necessarily falls below the laboratory threshold for anaemia.
This is where ferritin becomes useful because it provides information about the iron your body has stored, and tiredness isn't the only clue. Poor exercise tolerance, breathlessness, headaches, weakness, palpitations, restless legs, feeling unusually cold and changes to hair or nails can all occur with iron deficiency, although none of these symptoms on their own proves that iron is the cause.
If your diet contains very little iron, you have heavy periods or there are other reasons you may be losing or poorly absorbing iron, that's all information worth putting alongside the numbers. And I wouldn't immediately start swallowing high-dose iron simply because you're tired, iron is something we need, but more isn't automatically better.
Your diet should be the first thing to address. If iron is low, look at how much iron-rich food you're actually eating. Red meat, particularly organic grass-fed beef and lamb, provides highly bioavailable haem iron, while organ meats such as liver are especially nutrient-dense and provide iron alongside vitamin B12, folate and copper — nutrients that are also involved in healthy blood formation. Eggs, fish and shellfish can contribute too. What you eat alongside these foods can also make a difference. Vitamin C can help increase iron absorption, whereas tea and coffee contain compounds that can reduce iron absorption when consumed around an iron-rich meal. So something as simple as having your coffee away from meals and including a vitamin-C-rich food with your iron source can help you get more from the food you're already eating.
And this is why I don't like looking at iron in isolation. Making healthy red blood cells requires more than one nutrient, so continually adding iron without considering B12, folate, copper and the wider diet can mean you're concentrating on one piece of a much bigger nutritional picture and this is an area your GP will most commonly overlook.
Vitamin B12 and folate are both involved in red blood cell formation, while B12 is also essential for normal nervous-system function. Low B12 can show itself in ways people don't always immediately connect with nutrition: fatigue, weakness, brain fog, pins and needles, numbness and problems with balance can occur.
B12 is naturally found predominantly in animal foods, including meat, fish, eggs and dairy, so somebody eating very little or no animal food needs to pay particular attention to where their B12 is coming from. Absorption is important with B12 too, you can be eating B12-rich foods and still not necessarily be absorbing and using the vitamin effectively. B12 absorption depends on several stages of digestion, including adequate stomach acid and a protein called intrinsic factor, which helps B12 to be absorbed further along the digestive tract. Certain digestive conditions, stomach or intestinal surgery and some medications can also interfere with this process.
That's something I think gets forgotten in nutrition, what you eat and what your body can actually access from what you eat aren't always the same thing. So when somebody is continually tired, looking at the quality of the diet is important, but so is asking whether the digestive system is actually able to absorb the nutrients that diet is providing.
Vitamin D is probably best known for its relationship with calcium and bone health, but it also contributes to normal muscle and immune function. Low vitamin D status can accompany fatigue and muscle weakness, although tiredness alone certainly doesn't tell you that you're deficient.
Sunlight exposure is one of the major ways our bodies produce vitamin D, which raises an obvious question: how much time are you actually spending outside? Many people go from their house to their car, from their car to an office, then back home again and spend the evening indoors. Even in sunny countries, an indoor lifestyle can mean surprisingly little meaningful sun exposure.
Food sources include oily fish, egg yolks and some fortified foods, while supplementation can be useful when intake or status is inadequate. Vitamin D is also one of those nutrients where knowing your actual situation is far more useful than blindly taking increasingly large doses because somebody online told you more must be better.
We talk constantly about eating too much, but we talk far less about people who simply aren't nourishing themselves properly. Skipping breakfast, grabbing coffee, eating something tiny at lunchtime and then wondering why you're exhausted by 3pm isn't mysterious. Your body simply requires energy, but it also needs protein, essential fats, vitamins, minerals and sufficient overall nutrition to carry out thousands of processes every day.
I'd much rather see somebody build their meals around good-quality protein such as organic grass-fed meat, eggs and fish, natural fats and nutrient-dense whole foods than spend the entire day chasing energy with coffee, biscuits, energy drinks and ultra-processed snacks.
And don't be frightened of food if you're physically active, your body can't continually perform, recover, repair tissue, regulate temperature, make hormones and support everything else you're asking of it without being adequately fuelled. Sometimes the reason you're running on empty is quite literally because you're running on empty.
If your day looks like coffee, something sweet, another coffee, a quick carbohydrate-heavy lunch, an afternoon snack and then an enormous evening meal, pay attention to how your energy changes throughout the day.
Blood glucose naturally rises and falls in response to eating, and that's normal. But the composition and timing of your meals can influence how steady your energy feels. Protein, natural fats and appropriate whole-food carbohydrate sources can make a very different meal from refined carbohydrates eaten largely on their own.
And movement is an absolute necessity. Your muscles are major users of glucose, which is another reason the muscle article we recently shared is so important. Walking after meals and regularly challenging your muscles can support glucose regulation as part of a much wider metabolic picture.
If you repeatedly crash at roughly the same point every afternoon, don't just automatically reach for caffeine, look at what happened during the hours before the crash.
Time in bed and restorative sleep aren't the same thing. We covered this in the article about waking between 2am and 4am, but it's worth repeating because poor-quality sleep is one of the most obvious reasons somebody can feel continually exhausted despite believing they're “getting enough sleep.”
Are you waking repeatedly? snoring heavily? getting too hot? Going to the toilet several times? scrolling until the moment you fall asleep? Drinking alcohol in the evening? waking with pain? Or going to bed with your brain still running at full speed?
You could technically spend eight or nine hours in bed while getting nowhere near the quality of recovery your body needs. So don't just count the hours, pay attention to how you actually sleep and how you feel when you wake.
Hormones can have a significant influence on energy in both women and men, yet they're often overlooked when somebody is trying to understand why they're continually tired. For women, energy can change across the menstrual cycle, and the hormonal shifts of perimenopause and menopause can influence sleep, mood, body composition, temperature regulation and how somebody feels physically and mentally.
Heavy periods can also affect iron stores, while disrupted sleep from night sweats or repeated waking can leave you exhausted before your day has even started. And because these changes don't necessarily arrive all at once, women can spend years treating each symptom as though it's completely unrelated. Poor sleep over here, fatigue over there, changes in mood somewhere else. And then perhaps changes in weight, periods, concentration or temperature regulation.
But men shouldn't ignore hormones either. Testosterone naturally changes across adulthood, and lower testosterone can be associated with fatigue, reduced muscle mass and strength, changes in mood, reduced libido and poorer concentration. But those symptoms aren't specific to testosterone, and sleep, nutrition, stress, body composition, alcohol, certain medications and underlying health problems can all influence both energy levels and hormone function.
This is why I don't like taking one symptom and immediately attaching one explanation to it. If your energy has changed, look at what else has changed alongside it. We must learn to stop separating every symptom and look at what changed across the whole body.
Thyroid hormones have an enormous influence on metabolism, so thyroid function is understandably considered when somebody experiences persistent fatigue. But tiredness is extremely non-specific, feeling exhausted doesn't automatically mean you have a thyroid problem. This is why you need to look at the wider pattern.
Changes in temperature tolerance, bowel habits, weight, skin, hair, heart rate, menstrual cycle and energy can all provide additional information. And if you've previously had thyroid blood work, look at what was actually measured rather than simply remembering that you were told “thyroid normal.”
The point isn't to convince yourself that you have an undiagnosed thyroid condition, it's to stop treating one word — normal — as though it answers every question.
Even mild dehydration can affect the way you feel physically and mentally, but hydration isn't simply about forcing litres of plain water into yourself. Fluid balance involves water and electrolytes, including sodium and potassium. Magnesium also plays important roles throughout the body, including normal energy-yielding metabolism and muscle and nervous-system function.
I like adding a small pinch of a good-quality mineral-rich salt, such as Celtic sea salt or Himalayan salt, to water. Some people prefer putting a few crystals on or under the tongue before drinking their water.
Of course your individual needs will vary according to climate, activity, sweating, diet and health, and anyone who has specifically been advised to restrict salt or fluid needs to take that into account. But if you're exercising, sweating heavily, living somewhere hot or simply forgetting to drink for half the day, you could be surprised by how much your hydration is affecting your energy levels.
Magnesium participates in hundreds of biochemical reactions and contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism, muscle function and nervous-system function. Yet many people immediately think of magnesium purely as something to take before bed.
Food sources include nuts, seeds, cacao, avocado, fish and other whole foods, and supplementation can be useful where appropriate. But just like everything else in this article, magnesium shouldn't become another magic answer.
If you're under-eating, sleeping badly, living on caffeine and spending your entire day under pressure, taking a magnesium capsule at night doesn't erase the neglect.
We've already talked about how tiredness isn't always about one single nutrient, and why continually buying another individual supplement isn't necessarily the answer, because your body relies on a whole range of vitamins and minerals working together.
Our Pure Himalayan Shilajit Resin contains more than 85 naturally occurring minerals and trace elements, alongside fulvic acid and other naturally occurring compounds. That's one of the reasons I personally like taking Shilajit so much, rather than looking at nutrition as though magnesium, zinc, selenium, iron and every other mineral exist separately from one another, you're introducing a naturally mineral-rich substance containing a broad spectrum of trace minerals.
Of course, that doesn't replace a nutrient-dense diet, and if you have a specific deficiency that needs addressing, you still need to understand what is causing it and what your body needs. But for somebody looking at their nutrition more broadly, Shilajit can be a really useful way of providing multiple naturally occurring minerals rather than simply reaching for another isolated supplement every time a new symptom appears.
Shilajit has also been used for centuries in Ayurvedic practice, particularly in relation to vitality, strength and general wellbeing, which is why its modern popularity around energy isn't actually anything new. At My Way CBD, our Pure Himalayan Shilajit Resin is something people incorporate into their everyday routine alongside proper nutrition, hydration, movement and sleep.
Shilajit is not something to artificially stimulate an exhausted body, it's a great a way of giving the body a much broader range of nutritional support.
CBD isn't an energy stimulant, and I would never present it as one, but where it can become relevant is when you look at why somebody is exhausted. If you're continually stressed, sleeping poorly, uncomfortable at night or struggling to properly switch off, addressing the wider systems involved may indirectly change how you feel during the day.
CBD interacts with the body's endocannabinoid system, which is involved in regulating processes including stress responses, mood, sleep-wake signalling and pain. This is why I always come back to the same point: don't choose something simply because the symptom on the front of the bottle sounds like your symptom, understand what may be happening underneath it.
This one doesn't come with a blood marker, some people are tired because their lives are exhausting. They're working, parenting, answering messages, worrying about money, managing businesses, caring for relatives, exercising, cooking, cleaning, trying to maintain relationships and somehow expecting their bodies to perform at exactly the same level every day.
Then when they're tired, they treat the tiredness as another problem to overcome, with more coffee, more supplements, more productivity hacks and ultimately more pressure.
But your body needs moments when it isn't being asked to perform, respond, process or produce. When those moments come, embrace them wholeheartedly instead of feeling guilty for doing nothing. Rest isn't laziness, sometimes it's exactly what your body has been asking you for.
If you're tired all the time, start looking at everything. What are you eating? Are you eating enough? Where is your protein coming from? How are you sleeping? Are you waking refreshed? Are you constantly stressed? How much caffeine are you relying on? Are you hydrated? Are you moving your body? Are your periods heavy? Have your hormones changed? What nutrients could you be lacking? What did your blood tests actually include?
And perhaps most importantly,when did you last feel genuinely energetic, and what has changed since then?
Your blood results are useful information, but they aren't the only information you have, we tend to forget that our appetite is information, our sleep is information, our menstrual cycle is information, our digestion is information, our energy throughout the day is information. And all the symptoms are information too.
Taking responsibility for your own health doesn't mean diagnosing yourself with everything you read about online. It means paying attention, asking questions, understanding your own patterns and making changes instead of accepting feeling exhausted as your new normal. Because if your blood tests say you're “normal” but you're dragging yourself through every day feeling anything but normal, perhaps the question isn't simply whether your results fall inside a specific reference range. Perhaps it's whether you're actually giving your body what it needs to thrive.
Written by Dee Mani
A: There are many possible reasons. Standard blood tests don't necessarily look at every nutrient or every possible cause of fatigue, and being within a laboratory reference range doesn't automatically explain how you're feeling. Your sleep, diet, iron stores, copper, B12, folate, vitamin D, thyroid function, hormones, hydration, blood sugar patterns, stress and activity levels can all be worth looking at as part of the wider picture.
A: Yes. Your iron stores can become depleted before haemoglobin falls low enough to meet the definition of anaemia. Ferritin is commonly used to assess stored iron, which is why looking only at haemoglobin doesn't necessarily give you the complete iron picture.
A: Iron, copper, vitamin B12, folate and vitamin D are among the nutrients commonly considered when somebody is experiencing persistent fatigue. Magnesium also contributes to normal energy-yielding metabolism. Rather than automatically supplementing everything, look at what you're actually eating, what may be missing and whether you're absorbing those nutrients properly.
A: Yes. Hormonal changes throughout the menstrual cycle and during perimenopause and menopause can affect sleep, mood, temperature regulation and energy. Heavy periods can also contribute to iron loss, so sometimes several things are happening at the same time rather than there being one single explanation.
A: Because eight hours in bed doesn't necessarily mean eight hours of restorative sleep. Repeated waking, snoring, pain, alcohol, temperature, stress and other disturbances can affect sleep quality. How you feel when you wake can tell you far more than simply counting the hours you spent in bed.
A: Yes. Not drinking enough can contribute to tiredness, headaches and difficulty concentrating. Your fluid requirements can also increase with exercise, heavy sweating and hot weather, so it's worth paying attention to both how much you're drinking and how you're feeling throughout the day.
A: Shilajit has a long history of traditional use in Ayurveda and has become particularly popular for energy and vitality. I prefer to see it as part of a wider approach to supporting the body nutritionally rather than something used to artificially stimulate energy. Good food, hydration, movement, sleep and recovery still need to form the foundation.
A: CBD isn't an energy stimulant. Where it may fit in is when poor sleep, stress or discomfort are contributing to how exhausted you feel. Rather than using CBD simply because you're tired, look at why you're tired in the first place.
Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended to replace individual medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.
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