Just because it’s winter doesn’t mean that you have to experience tiredness during winter. Quite a few people end up having more energy during the wintertime.

These people look forward to the winter sports, cuddling up by a cozy fireplace with their loved one, and frolicking in the snow with a big winter-loving dog.

Take the questionnaire and give your answers the consideration they need to determine what could possibly be going on with you.

Tiredness During Winter Questionnaire

1. Do you find yourself getting angry when the days become shorter and you have a lot less sunlight? Yes  No

2. If you could pinpoint a specific day when your fatigue sets in for the winter, what day would that be? _________

Is it related to the week when you have the least amount of sun? Yes  No

3. If you take a vacation to a sunny climate during the middle of the winter, does your extreme tiredness during winter lift? Yes  No

How long does it stay lifted? _________

4. Are you indoors working during the daytime with fluorescent lights? Yes  No

5. Have you ever switched the bulbs inside your home to natural sunlight bulbs which are also called full spectrum bulbs? Yes  No

If you did, what happened to your extreme tiredness during winter? _________

How long were you exposed to them each day? __________

6. In the springtime, does your extreme tiredness during winter go away? Yes  No

If you could pinpoint the lifting of the tiredness to a certain day, what day would that be? ___________

7. Have you had a vitamin D test done recently by your physician? Yes  No

What were the results? __________

8. Are you staying up very late at night? Yes  No

Comments About This Questionnaire

You may not know all the answers to these questions right now. You may want to take a winter to determine what is really happening with your health.

What you’re looking for is a seasonal variation in how you feel, which is usually based on the amount of sunlight that you receive during the day.

Melatonin And The Sunshine Cycle

The sunshine does not have to be felt on the skin but is perceived by the ganglion cells in your eyes, which register exactly how much you get.

The amount of daylight is relayed to your hypothalamus and pineal gland, which then creates melatonin in response. Artificial lighting interferes with the normal response.

The melatonin in your body sets up your circadian rhythms and tells you when to be tired and when to stay alert and awake.

If you notice sluggishness in winter, it could mean you need more melatonin or more vitamin D in your blood.

It could also mean your sleeping hours are not close to what they should be and you are staying up too late at night. Do try to go to bed by 11 p.m.

How To Find Out Where Your Levels Are

Getting checked for either vitamin D or melatonin is a relatively easy process. Simply call your doctor and ask to be checked for vitamin D and melatonin.

Both are blood tests and the answer could come back to you within a week; providing information that reduces your fatigue this winter.

If your vitamin D levels are less than 50 ug on the blood test (Normal is 30-100 ug according to the laboratory), it’s entirely possible that all the fatigue you have is related to a vitamin D deficiency.

You don’t want to be at the low end of the range.

Doctors may tell you that you need not worry about levels unless they are less than 20 ug, but this is not true. Everyone has a biochemical individuality for each of the nutrients, vitamin D included.

It’s possible you could need more and are always going to be depressed and tired unless your levels are at 65 ug.

When your levels are low, you will feel depressed, have low immune system function, and experience extreme fatigue in winter. And it’s just not worth it to go through another bad winter again.

The thing to do is get your vitamin D levels checked and if for some reason your doctor won’t run the test, run it yourself by doing the test online.

One good place to run both tests is at Life Extension Foundation.

What To Do When Levels Are Low

When vitamin D levels are low, supplementation is the answer.

Usually doctors may offer you a pill of 50,000 IU vitamin D per week, or you can take oral supplements yourself from the health food store of 10,000 IU vitamin D3 per day for three months.

As your levels rise, the extreme tiredness should start to lift. When melatonin levels are low, supplementation is needed. About 5 mg per day is usually the dosage used.

If you do either of these tests via the Life Extension Foundation, you can contact the doctors on staff there and ask them how to interpret the results.

Although they cannot function as your personal physician, they can explain a lot of the background information you may be lacking.

Don’t suffer with extreme tiredness during winter anymore. Get these two simple things evaluated and corrected and then have boundless energy! You deserve it.

If you have tiredness and fatigue and can’t seem to get a good night of sleep, it’s pretty important to consider your circadian rhythms.

Circadian rhythms is a big term if you haven’t heard it before.

This is a scientific term that means a natural rhythm occurring in your body every 24 hours.

Four Criteria For Circadian Rhythms

1. The rhythm has to repeat itself every 24 hours.

2. If you are in a new environment, the circadian rhythm must still repeat itself.

3. If you are physically located in a different place where the light and darkness cycle is different, your body’s natural rhythms will try to reset themselves.

4. No matter what the outside temperature is in the environment, your body still has these natural circadian rhythms.

The question you may be asking yourself is what is it that these rhythms are for and what do they do?

Your body can have circadian rhythms for sleeping and waking, thirst, eating (appetite), and body temperature. In other words, at a certain time of the night, you will get tired, no matter what.

At a certain time in the morning, you will want to get out of bed. At a certain time of the day, you will be hungry or thirsty.

And at a certain time of the day–two hours before you wake up–your body temperature will be the lowest it’s been all during the 24 hours of the day.

How Your Body Uses Light And Dark Cycles To Determine Circadian Rhythms

The reason why these circadian rhythms can work at all is that certain types of cells called ganglion cells in your eye are constantly detecting how much light is outside in your environment.

These ganglion cells work no matter whether you are blind or can see. The cells send a pigment called melanopsin to your hypothalamus, which then responds to the information it has received.

The hypothalamus is amazing in that it takes all the information on how many minutes of night light and daylight you get during the day and sends it off to your pineal gland. In response, the pineal gland secretes melatonin.

What Resets The Circadian Rhythms

The melatonin can help reset your circadian rhythms when they are out of whack. But even in this advanced technological age, scientists still can’t say how this is done.

More recent studies have found that lithium can help reset the genes related to circadian rhythms.

This is a particularly interesting fact since there are geographic areas in the world where high levels of lithium are found and other areas where low levels of lithium are found in the soil and the water.

For example, parts of Texas are found to have high levels of lithium and correspondingly, there are low rates of depression there. Whenever a person has depression, he or she will usually have fatigue and tiredness as well.

In Oregon in the U.S., there is a river called the Lithate River, which contains high levels of lithium in its water. People visit this river from all parts of the world to feel better.

It’s a known fact that if the hypothalamus is destroyed, you will not ever be able to set up a natural sleeping and waking cycle. But those who are fatigued don’t usually have this problem.

What Do Circadian Rhythms Have To Do With My Fatigue?

How this relates to your fatigue is in this way: If you are staying up long past 11 p.m. with artificial light on, the cells of your eyes are detecting this artificial light as light from the sun.

You may be able to stay up until 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. working but all those extra hours of work have offset your circadian rhythms. Soon it becomes difficult to adjust to normal waking hours.

Here’s an example. Pilots are in a profession where it’s quite easy for them to change time zones during one long flight. They fly long hours as well. They can experience jet lag, lots of fatigue and insomnia.

This same fatigue and insomnia can also be felt if you aren’t a pilot and are traveling outside two time zones from your origination point.

When pilots have disturbed circadian rhythms, it can be quite dangerous since no one really would want to be on a plane where the pilot is fatigued.

Reaction times would be slower than what they should be and he would not be able to make sound decisions.

Drinking several cups of coffee won’t be enough to restore the circadian rhythms; it will only lead to further adrenal exhaustion.

It’s the same thing for you. You end up with tiredness, fatigue, inability to make decisions and even personality disorders when you don’t get normal sleep cycles. All this is because your circadian rhythms need to be a certain way.

How Can You Help Your Body Reset The Circadian Rhythms?

One Harvard researcher found that the circadian rhythms really are set to a very narrow range: Your body operates on a 24 hour 11 minute cycle plus or minus 16 minutes.

Your rhythms will always fall back daily to reset themselves to the same cycle of the Earth’s rotation. That’s where they want to be and they’re quite stubborn about you trying to change them.

So the best thing you can do if your sleep cycles are off is to give yourself about three weeks to get back on track.

You could even take melatonin as a supplement (usually 2 mg to 5 mg) to try to reset the cycles faster than doing it on your own.

When your body has normal circadian cycles, it’s entirely possible that your fatigue will be gone.

Tiredness is predictable when you know what is happening inside the body and understand a little physiology.

And for that reason, it’s important to understand something called AGEs, which stands for advanced glycation endproducts.

You may not have heard them mentioned yet on Dr. Oz, but you will soon.

By knowing about something in medical science before most of the public knows about it, you actually gain credibility in the eyes of your friends and colleagues.

What Are AGEs?

AGEs are to aging as vitamins are to health. AGEs are chemical and molecular fragments from food that cause damage in the body to every cell, tissue, organ and DNA.

And it’s not just a little damage to the body that these cellular terrorists are causing – it’s a lot!

It’s as if these AGEs are calling for jihad inside your cells.

And if that’s the case, you better know where they are coming from. Advanced glycation endproducts originate from foods that are highly processed.

For example, if you compare two foods – rice grains and puffed rice, there’s a world of a difference in AGEs content of each of them.

Rice grains have a very low level of AGEs in their raw state. But puffed rice, such as that puffed for cereal, is full of AGEs.

Why AGEs Are So Bad For Your Health

What happens to the AGEs after you eat them is not pretty. The AGEs go after any weakened tissue and then combine with the nearby proteins to incapacitate them.

But they don’t stop there. While some are going to the weakened tissues of your body, such as old injured areas that never healed, other AGEs are headed for the healthy tissues. Their mission is to slowly take down the healthy tissue, one protein at a time.

AGEs can actually do this because they gnarl the proteins. Have you ever thought of what happens to a protein that is heated to high temperatures? It is inactivated.

Instead of having an intact structure, the high heat starts curling up the protein. At first only a few segments are curled and dysfunctional, but before long, the entire protein is worthless to the body.

If one of your organs has 100,000 proteins in it, and the AGEs attack 10% of the proteins, you’ll have 90,000 functioning proteins left.

This may not be enough damage to shut down the function of the organ, and the AGEs will attack again and again. Meanwhile, you may notice the feeling of tiredness.

AGEs Attack When You’re Healthy Or Weakened

At 60% of the function – or a higher percentage depending on the organ – you will feel symptoms.

Tiredness will be extreme – and only one of the many symptoms that occur.

At 40% of the function, you’ll start going into organ failure because of the damage to the organ.

The AGEs will continue to attack. At 40% of normal functioning, you will have massive tiredness.

After eating a highly processed food with a high level of AGEs in it, the AGEs start causing damage as soon as they enter the body. But they don’t stop.

Once they cause gnarled proteins, it’s as if other AGEs are called to the site of the attack and further damage occurs. As the AGEs are broken down, they sometimes even become more powerful, causing even more damage.

It’s as if the AGEs are like continual explosions that get worse and worse as time goes on.

What Foods Have AGEs?

Eating foods with AGEs is one of the fastest ways to age and cause yourself degenerative diseases. But the opposite can save your life.

By simply cutting out the following foods, you can stop the progression of disease in your body:

▸ Highly processed foods
▸ Luncheon meats (highly processed)
▸ Boxed cereals
▸ Pizza
▸ Hot dogs
▸ Sausages
▸ Broiled meats (very high temperatures used in cooking)
▸ Canned goods heated to high temperatures during processing
▸ Other foods cooked at high temperatures

The foods with the highest AGEs are hot dogs, pizza, condensed milk, and boxed cereals.

Can you live without them? If you can, you can eliminate an awful lot of tiredness; and bring in energy, vitality and health. It will be well worth it.

What Foods Are Low In AGEs?

What will you eat? Foods in their natural state.

Here’s a short list:

▸ Slow-cooked meats and fish
▸ Vegetables boiled, steamed or fried only for a short 3 minutes
▸ Fruits in their raw state
▸ Beans and legumes cooked slowly over several hours
▸ Nuts in their raw state
▸ Dairy products
▸ Grains cooked at low temperatures
▸ Oils that are cold pressed

Can you live on a diet like this that decreases AGEs? Try it for a week and see what happens to your tiredness.

Is your tiredness driving you nuts?

Have you been to every possible type of doctor but no one can seem to find out what’s wrong with you and why you’re tired?

Sometimes this happens because doctors only get so much training and many of them specialize in one area.

It’s time to start thinking outside the box and find some other reasons for your tiredness. Did you know there are two ways protein can cause you to have a case of serious tiredness?

1. Protein Allergy
2. Protein Deficiency

Protein Allergy Leaves You Saying, “Protein Makes Me Tired”

Well if you ever had allergies in the past, then perhaps you know that protein allergy can make you feel tiredness for seemingly no reason at all.

People are becoming easily allergic to peanut protein – and rates of this allergy are rising every year for some unknown reason.

Almost every food has proteins in it that can cause allergies. And many allergies will be associated with making a person feel tiredness from allergy.

You may have even said, “Protein makes me tired.” It’s not really the protein that makes you tired; it’s the protein allergy that makes you tired.

The allergy reaction is wearing on the body and brings you tiredness. The immune system cells are working overtime, and this is what pulls the energy from the rest of the body.

A protein allergy could be an allergy to milk, casein in the milk, eggs, beef, lamb, turkey, duck, chicken, capon, rabbit, bison, buffalo, pork, shellfish or fish.

In severely allergic people, the smell of the food cooking is enough to send symptoms. Severely allergic people could also react if a non-protein food is sautéed in a pan that previously cooked a type of protein they are allergic to.

It’s a life of walking on pins and needles because an allergic person cannot truly trust that those who don’t have allergies understand the severity of the problem.

How To Diagnose A Protein Allergy

The best way to determine whether or not you have a protein allergy is to order a test called the ALCAT test.

This test will analyze your blood for these allergies by adding the protein of hundreds of foods to the blood.

If there’s a clumping reaction in the test tube, there will be a clumping reaction in your bloodstream as well once the foods are eaten.

Once you discover what you are truly allergic to – proteins or other foods – then you can avoid the foods for a few months and see if this decreases your symptoms.

If you no longer say, “Protein makes me tired” anymore, then the break from the food helped eliminate the sensitivity.

Protein Deficiency Leaves You Tired

Protein deficiency doesn’t only happen in foreign countries where the people are impoverished. It also happens here in the U.S., in Australia, in the U.K., in Russia and even in remote island locations such as the Philippines.

When you think of a protein deficiency, you may think of the photos you have seen on television where the young children are very skinny and have big bellies.

This is definitely one of the signs of a protein deficiency, but it is generally a more advanced sign of protein deficiency.

With not enough protein, there isn’t enough muscle mass left on the skeleton because the muscle has been used for energy. The belly is big for two main reasons

1. The protein contains sulfur which keeps away parasites – and since the children don’t have enough protein, they get parasites. The parasites fill up their belly.

2. When the body doesn’t have enough protein, edema or swelling will set in. The edema could be in the belly or in the other parts of the body.

The one characteristic of this type of protein deficiency is extreme fatigue, extreme tiredness. Protein is necessary in the body for synthesizing enzymes essential to metabolism and all biochemical processes.

Protein is also essential for synthesizing new tissues and cells of each organ. That’s why you see wasting as a result of protein deficiency.

But in developed countries, protein deficiency may look different. The person ends up getting wider and larger. This is because he or she is eating carbohydrates and fat to make up for a lack of protein.

Fat puts on weight. Carbohydrates cause higher amounts of insulin to be produced and insulin makes the body store fat and grow wider.

More people in the U.S. and other developed countries have protein deficiency than realize it.

Quite a few are on vegetarian diets that are really nothing more than a diet of carbohydrates and fat; this is why you will see overweight vegetarians.

How To Diagnose A Protein Deficiency

The best way to find out if you have a protein deficiency is to get a laboratory test for total protein and albumin levels.

If both are low, there’s a protein deficiency. And correcting it could be the end of your tiredness.

Tiredness. You’ve looked at all the usual causes and none seem to fit.

You’re bored and don’t know why you are tired.

And that’s exactly the point. You’re tiredness could be due to a lack of new ideas.

There Are Medical Reasons For Tiredness

1. Blood Sugar Disturbances

Lack of insulin or too much insulin can cause sudden tiredness that is very difficult to beat.

2. Infection

Whenever you have an infection, your white blood cells will pump out massive quantities of a substance that forces you to slow down. The chemical makes you tired.

3. Lack Of Sleep

No matter who you are, a lack of sleep will cause tiredness.

4. Lack Of Exercise

Without moving around enough, blood stagnates. You were meant to move!

5. High Outside Temperature; Body Can’t Adjust

When it’s hot outside, even zoo animals became lazy and experience tiredness. The same is true for humans.

It’s difficult to adjust to extremes of temperature and high heat causes tiredness.

6. Low Adrenal Function

It’s common that many people have been stressed so much that there are no more reserves in the body to do anything! The result is tiredness.

7. Low Thyroid Function

Your thyroid regulates your energy levels during the day and night. If your thyroid is underactive, then you will be tired.

On the other hand, if your thyroid is overactive, you will be energetic and not want to sleep.

8. Depression

Situational depression is when you experience depression due to a loss of job, loss of relationship, family problems or a trauma. Depression can also result from vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

9. Allergies

Allergies, especially food allergies is a common cause of fatigue.

If you don’t have any of these medical reasons for tiredness, there must be another reason.

Now certainly it could be possible that you have one of the medical reasons for tiredness but haven’t had it diagnosed yet.

So going to the doctor who can rule out any of these is a good idea.

Poor Ways Of Coping With Life Include Being Stagnant In Your Own Ideas

Now that we’ve addressed all the medical and nutritional causes, it’s time to look at your mental ways of coping. Here’s a little checklist to see how mentally strong you are.

How many of these 11 statements did you answer, “Yes” to?

The more of them you answered, the less likely you are to experience boredom or a lack of new ideas.

Human Brains Need Constant Stimulation

Your brain actually thrives on new ideas. New ideas can give you a big relief from regular life.

One new idea can fuel such passion that it can change a world. Without new ideas, fatigue will set in.

Every one of the above statements contains a common way that people are motivated to pursue their dreams or just grab on to life and run with it. News and television opens up the mind to many new ideas.

Countless individuals have discovered the food channel, the history channel, the animal channel, the reality television channel, and numerous other channels that never existed before in the history of television.

Your brain needs plenty of new ideas to constantly grow. In many ways, dementia is a result of lack of new input of ideas.

Visiting friends weekly exposes you to their world so you’re not stuck inside your own. Reading books is another way to expand your world and your ideas.

Taking community offered classes exposes you to people you didn’t know before as well as the new ideas in the class.

And if you’re an expert in an area, teaching a class on your area of expertise will give you plenty of ideas for future projects.

Future projects mean you won’t be fatigued, sitting around tired. You’ll be a go-getter.

Even computers expand our brains, although we can tend to get frustrated with them. Computers open us up to the online encyclopedia of worldwide ideas.

A good cure for tiredness is to research a topic you love online for one hour. Soon one hour becomes two, which becomes three and even eight.

Spiritual matters also are a haven against tiredness. Honoring God and serving Him is a great way to get rejuvenated – and it happens in sometimes an instant.

So now considering this information, is lack of new ideas a part of the reasons for your tiredness?

Tiredness or sleepiness. Which one do you have? Do you know the difference?

Here’s a way that you can tell the difference.

Think about the topic for a moment from a situational perspective. If you had a rough day at work, how do you feel when you come home? Are you tired or sleepy?

Let’s say you had a very difficult workout. How do you feel? Are you experiencing tiredness or sleepiness?

You’d feel tiredness.

And what about a time when you are traveling and your plane doesn’t arrive until 11:30 p.m. at night. How do you feel?

You’d feel tired from all the travel – and sleepy because you were up all day and night.

Are you starting to see the difference?

How You Can Be Sleepy When Your Body Isn’t Tired

The big question is this: if your body has nothing to be tired about, can you feel sleepy? Yes, of course you could.

Sleepiness can result from blood sugar fluctuations. In fact, you might feel so sleepy that you take a nap in the middle of the day.

However, have you ever noticed that these naps from high blood sugar or low blood sugar don’t often last too long?

For example, if your blood sugar level is high and you take a nap, you’ll wake up when your blood sugar returns to a lower level. This may only take 30 minutes.

Compare this to a nap because of tiredness, where you sleep for 90 minutes, 3 hours or even longer. Do you see the difference?

If your body’s muscles are tired, you need more time than 30 minutes to recuperate than you would from a nap because of high blood sugar.

Your muscles have to reoxygenate themselves. The oxygen has been used in the muscles in a process called oxidation. Oxidation uses up antioxidants.

It takes awhile for your body to replenish the antioxidants that are used up during oxidation. For example, vitamin E replenishes vitamin A. Vitamin C replenishes vitamin E.

This is what is happening when you nap after being tired due to exercising.

How Do You Shake Off The Tiredness That You Feel After Working Out?

This antioxidant replenishment that happens in the body gives you a clue of what the answer is to speed up your recovery and shake off the tiredness. The solution comes from the field of nutrition.

The answer is to increase your antioxidants: vitamin E, vitamin C and vitamin A. By taking antioxidants, you create a rush of the supplemental vitamins to the areas in the body where they have been depleted.

If you ate too much food, there is a way to shake off the tiredness in another way, this time using herbs. Every country on earth has herbs that will lower blood sugar in exactly this situation.

In India, the herb is Gymnema sylvestris. In Sri Lanka, the herb is cinnamon. In the Philippines, the herb is bitter melon.

In Brazil, the herb is Stevia rebaudiana. In American Indian tribes, the herb is golden seal root. In other South American tribes, the herb is banaba.

One to two capsules of the herb after eating a heavy meal will result in a lowering of the blood sugar levels, reducing it closer to the normal blood sugar zone. This takes between 30 minutes and 60 minutes.

How Blood Sugar Level Is Connected To Tiredness/Sleepiness

When your blood sugar level is in the normal zone, you aren’t tired. But when your blood sugar level is in the high zone or in the low zone, you will be tired.

Now that you know what to do when you are tired due to high blood sugar, it’s time to discuss what to do when your blood sugar level is low. How can you deal with this?

This answer also comes from the field of nutrition. When your blood sugar is low and you are tired and weak, you must open your mouth and eat something. It’s that simple.

How To Know Where Your Blood Sugar Level Is

The next question people ask is how do they know what their blood sugar level is during the day?

For this, you can get a diabetic blood sugar level testing kit. You don’t have to be a diabetic to test your blood sugar level during the day.

The best time to test blood sugar is when you first wake up in the morning and an hour after a meal. Of course, you wouldn’t do this after every meal; only the ones that bring on sleepiness.

Now that you know a primary cause of sleepiness and tiredness, it’s up to you to take care of it! By watching for episodes of blood sugar fluctuations, you can decrease tiredness and sleepiness as it happens.

Too much compassion? Someone could have too much compassion?

Sure. It happens all the time, mostly in women. Women who have too much compassion may love people too much.

You’ve heard of women who love too much, as discussed by psychologists in their popular press books.

Oh, it’s bad to love too much, they say. You could “smother” those around you, loving them too much.

I mean really, all these women were doing were loving others.

You know what is said about those who attack others, don’t you? They are usually trying to hide something, some sin of their own.

Is it possible that maybe psychologists are trying to judge others too much – and everyone else – and not loving enough? Maybe that is the root problem of all this.

Researchers Start Studying Compassion Fatigue

Well, a research study was reported in a Chinese medical journal in June 2012 about compassion and coping strategies of hospital nurses in Taiwan.

These researchers must have picked up the same frequency as the psychologists about the idea of compassion.

They applied the theory of women who love too much to what was happening there in Taiwan and observed that it was possible for nurses to love too much – and develop compassion fatigue.

That’s a fancy term for fatigue because someone gives out too much compassion.

Their theory was that if nurses were exposed to trauma cases for long periods of time, they could easily get involved far too much in the patients’ lives. They would reach their tipping point by overextending their caring.

If they did this, it was possible that they would become unable to adapt and cope and their lives would go down the tubes as they began to suffer psychologically and physically. And then what would happen to the hospital?

Here’s What The Researchers Proposed For A Theory

The researchers projected that the nurses who cared too much would reduce their own quality of care they gave patients.

Next medical care costs would rise due to mistakes. And in the long run, nurses would leave the profession.

The researchers were really just spouting off in the research paper, discussing their opinions on the matter, and no actual research was started or completed.

That just means that you can expect research to occur in the next ten years.

They mentioned that the topic was already something accepted by the profession. Nurses themselves believed that it was possible to care too much for their patients.

Here’s What Nurses Do When They Care Too Much

Surprisingly, the nurses knew what compassion fatigue was and already had a strategy for it:

1. See what exactly is occurring in the nurse’s situation and evaluate it.

2. Talk with the nurse and have her adjust her attitude (a fancy way of saying stop caring).

3. Hold training sessions on the topic.

4. Increase support systems for the nurses who care too much.

But the nurses never addressed the physical and psychological consequences of the compassion fatigue. In fact, no one really has.

So no one really knows for sure that humans can truly care too much!

How To Determine Whether Or Not Compassion Fatigue Is Legitimate

It turns out that this is one of those topics that you really have to think through to see if it’s legitimate. Here’s one list of potential ways to think it through:

1. What else happens when someone spends time caring for another human being? What thoughts go through their mind? What feelings do they feel?

2. If someone has the potential to feel another person’s pain, then what becomes of that pain?

Does it get “stuck in the body” and block up the energy channels, causing fatigue? How could this be tested?

3. How can anyone draw the line and say, “You’re too compassionate! You must stop caring for the patients!”?

Who would be the judge of whether or not someone has no compassion, just enough compassion, or too much compassion?

4. What happens to a nurse’s heart and soul once she stops caring so much? Does a part of her die and her heart becomes hardened?

5. Are there spiritual reasons for not even thinking that compassion fatigue is an issue? Does the Bible say that we are to share each others’ pain and what exactly does that mean?

What do you notice in your own life? Have you cared too much for someone or your patients if you’re in the healthcare profession? Did you have to stop caring to continue on with your job?

Have you ever loved someone so much that it hurt when they passed away? Is this an instance of caring too much?

Certainly grief brings with it fatigue, thus compassion fatigue might be the label according to the psychologists.

Lots of questions. No answers. Time to decide for yourself on this topic of compassion fatigue. Is it real or not?

Do you have a diagnosis of chronic fatigue?

Or do you believe that if you went to the doctor, you would get a diagnosis of chronic fatigue?

If so, you know how easy it is to drag yourself from one activity to the next with no hope of ever improving.

Life seems to be in black and white and everyone else is having all the fun, not you. It can be difficult to muster up the strength to do required things, let alone the things that you used to do both in your daily activities and for fun.

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland released the results of their study on chronic fatigue syndrome and the risk of cancer in the elderly in May 2012 with information that you may want to pay attention to.

They start out the study with the fact that the cause of chronic fatigue syndrome is unknown but thought to be associated with immune abnormalities or infection.

In natural healing, there are many causes of chronic fatigue:

1. Epstein-Barr viral infection

2. Lyme’s disease (you were bitten by an infected tick)

3. Exposure to harmful chemicals

4. Exposure to radiation

5. Vitamin deficiencies

6. Mineral deficiencies

7. Blood sugar abnormalities

8. Infection of another type, possibly fungal or yeast

9. Tooth infection or mercury leaking from tooth

10. Heavy metal poisoning

When you have an infection, your white blood cells release chemicals that slow you down and create fatigue.

The purpose of this is to get you off the Energizer Bunny track of go-go-go and allow your body to heal. Your body seems to respond by MAKING you slow down, and it does this with fatigue.

The National Institute of Cancer researchers wanted to see if there was a correlation between cancer and the elderly and chronic fatigue syndrome. They examined 1.2 million cases of cancer in people over the age of 66 from between 1992 and 2005.

That’s a lot of records to go through!

They were looking for chronic fatigue syndrome to be identified in the medical records and their search went back to more than one year prior to the diagnosis.

They did find a link. It was less than 1% (only 0.5%) but nevertheless there was a link.

The people who had cancer and chronic fatigue up to one year before diagnosis were mainly those with non-Hodgkin lymphoma. (Source: Cancer May 30, 2012)

What Is Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma?

Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is a cancer of the B lymphocytes. You have two types of lymphocytes – or white blood cells – in your body.

These are the B lymphocytes and the T lymphocytes. Your while blood cells help your body prevent infections.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma usually shows up in adults, not children. It’s found especially in those with weakened immune systems.

If you happened to have an organ transplant and are taking drugs that suppress the immune system, you are also at risk.

Having Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma differs from having chronic fatigue syndrome by itself. Here are a few symptoms associated with this type of cancer:

• Itching

• Swollen lymph nodes throughout the entire body

• Loss of weight

• Fever and chills from time to time

• Sweating episodes at night where you are soaked with sweat – even though the bedroom is not hot

There can be other signs and symptoms if the cancer has affected the lymph nodes in the lungs or brain cells.

Chemotherapy helps in cases of fast-growing non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma but in the slow-growing ones, it isn’t of much help

What Does This Information Tell You?

This study done at the National Cancer Institute tells us just how important it is to keep our immune system cells healthy and happy.

Usually we don’t even give our immune system cells much thought about how to keep them healthy.

We think about what to do to keep our feet happy, our stomach happy, our body and what it looks like . . . but who thinks about feeding the immune system cells every day? Not many people.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Decrease sugar in your diet. Sugar paralyzes the white blood cells so they can’t work and engulf bacteria, viruses, molds, and fungi.

2. Eat plenty of protein, including meat.

Meat keeps you strong because of the iron content – and most people have been brainwashed to believe that iron is bad for them.

Iron is essential to good immunity and its main source is red meat.

3. The protein from other non-red meat sources strengthens the immune system by giving it the ability to create antibodies.

Eat non-red meat sources of complete protein such as dairy products, eggs, fish, turkey and chicken.

4. Include herbs and spices in your diet. The innumerable medicinal constituents they contain add up and provide anti-cancer substances.

Just by doing these four things, you will even notice a big improvement in your chronic fatigue. Try it and see for yourself.

No one really knows why if you’re searching for a herb for fatigue, you’d have to exert some energy and go up to the mountains to find this one.

It’s official name is Rhodiola rosea.

You can find it in the Alps. In the mountains of Great Britain and Ireland.

Everywhere you go you’ll find the same plant with yellow flowers in mountains up to an elevation of 2280 meters. The plant is also called Golden Root.

An Herb For Fatigue May Be An Adaptogen

Rhodiola rosea is one of a number of plant adaptogens that helps the body adapt in situations where the best action is to normalize body functions.

For example, if the blood sugar is a wee bit too high, an adaptogen could help bring the blood sugar back into the normal zone temporarily.

If the blood pressure is a wee bit too low, an adaptogen could help bring the pressure up and normalize it temporarily.

If the body is too cold – as it might be in Iceland, Scandinavia, or other mountain climates, it’s good to know that there’s an herb for fatigue that will also help you warm up. That’s how an adaptogen acts.

Generally speaking, an adaptogenic herb is an herb for fatigue. For example, Siberian ginseng, Chinese ginseng, Brazilian ginseng – and other ginsengs of other countries are always known as an herbs for fatigue.

Medicinal Constituents Of Golden Root

But today’s women and men want to know more than just that Rhodiola rosea is just an adaptogen. They want to know the medicinal constituents inside the plant that do something specifically for fatigue and tiredness.

Some of the other medicinal constituents inside this herb for fatigue include:

1. Rosaridin

This inhibits monoamine oxidase (MAO) A and B.

When this enzyme is inhibited it’s possible that issues such as depression may improve. And everyone knows that when someone is depressed, you can always expect tiredness and fatigue.

One clinical trial showed significant improvement for those with depression with a few capsules a day.

2. Rhodioloside, Rosin, And Rosarin

A polyphenol not yet connected with the prevention of disease or health benefit. However, many polyphenols are linked to reducing effects of free radicals and only time will tell us what these do.

3. Proanthocyanidins

This is a strong antioxidant found to be 50 times more effective than vitamin C. When you can quench free radicals you can expect at least a little bit more energy. This explains part of the anti-fatigue effect.

4. Quercetin And Kaempferol Ingredients

These can have positive effects on the immune system.

Let’s Do A Review Study, Say Modern Day Scientists

But as always, don’t expect scientists to agree with you that Rhodiola rosea is an herb for fatigue.

In one review study in May 2012, scientists wanted to give their verdict on this herb that many cultures have used for thousands of years.

This is the latest trend in medical science. Since there are thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of studies on almost any known medical topic, university scientists think that someone should evaluate all of them on a topic.

They felt the need to act as the ultimate say-so and tell everyone that what the peoples of all these mountainous cultures were doing for thousands of years was either right or wrong.

I don’t know about you, but to me this seems quite a bit haughty with a big dose of pride. If a culture found an herb beneficial over the years, they would keep using it.

On the other hand, if they didn’t find an herb beneficial over time, they would stop using it.

It’s really a simple process.

What The Researchers Discovered About The Herb For Fatigue

They found 206 research studies in the medical literature on this herb for fatigue.

Right there you know that if the herb was studied 206 times, the herb had quite a bit of value to the different cultures.

The scientists decided that most of these 206 articles didn’t meet their high standards. They discounted 195 of them.

Of the remaining 11 trials, two used healthy individuals and gave them the herb to see what would happen. The volunteers felt an improvement in physical fatigue.

Three other studies showed the herb effective for mental fatigue. But of course the haughty scientists warn that all these studies are biased.

After all, all the thousands of people who used this herb for fatigue over the centuries were living in a dreamland, you know?

You can read more about the scientists’ bias and their conclusions in the journal BMC Complement Altern Med, May 29, 2012.

If you’ve been searching for a solution for tiredness, you might want to check out the End Tiredness Program.

It’s a guide put together to increase your energy day by day.

Before you find out about tiredness in those with breast cancer, it’s interesting to read some of the most recent statistics on the topic.

Breast cancer now affects 1 of every 8 women in the U.S., which is about 12 percent of women.

Every year there are an estimated 230,480 new cases.

Although there are genes for breast cancer called BRCA1 and BRCA2, only 15 percent of all breast cancers are due to this gene. The remaining 85 percent of all breast cancers are not linked to gene mutations or heredity.

There are now more than 2.6 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S.

Although women are primarily the ones who get breast cancer, men can get it, too.There are many reasons for tiredness during the time period that a woman has breast cancer.

Here’s a short list of them:

1. Lowered Immunity

The lowered immune system function results in dysfunctional white blood cells that cannot keep up with infections.

Whenever there’s an infection, you can expect to be tired because the white blood cells produce chemicals that slow you down and increase your sense of tiredness. These chemicals are called cytokines.

2. Diet Deficiencies

It is estimated by health experts that 80 percent of cancers are related to diet deficiencies.

One of the most common vitamin deficiencies is vitamin D deficiency, which has been found connected to the turning on of oncogenes (cancer-causing genes). Another vitamin deficiency is Vitamin C, which supports the immune system.

Two prime examples of mineral deficiencies that can cause cancer are selenium deficiency and zinc deficiency. A selenium deficiency is a causal factor in breast cancer and one of its symptoms is tiredness.

Tiredness is a primary symptom of a zinc deficiency as well.

3. High Sugar Diet

A high sugar diet is also linked with cancer because sugar paralyzes the white blood cells and makes them unable to engulf cancer cells.

4. High Fat Diet

A high fat diet has been linked with cancer, especially of the breast. A high fat diet produces more free radicals which slow you down and increase tiredness.

And all these causes of tiredness are just ones that happen before treatment of cancer. Once the cancer is treated, there’s a whole new set of reasons why people could experience tiredness.

Tiredness After Cancer

Some of these include:

1. Treatment-Induced Effects

Effects of the cancer treatments themselves, such as chemotherapy and radiation.

2. The Body’s Need To Recover

After any major illness you will feel tiredness and this will allow you to slow down. It’s a survival mechanism that your body uses to insure that you will recover.

Doctors at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine and the University of Georgia wanted to find out what the reason was for the tiredness in breast cancer survivors.

They called the women’s tiredness a term called perceived fatigue.

Their suspicion was that it was diet but not body composition – being fat or skinny – that contributed to the tiredness.

They followed 42 breast cancer survivors and asked them to exercise, monitoring their fatigue levels. The women’s body mass index and percent body fat as well as calories consumed were also registered.

Guess who had the most fatigue.

It was the women who ate the lowest amount of fiber in their diet and the most fat. The more fiber the women ate and the less fat they ate, the more energy they had.

The women who ate the most fiber and the lowest fat percentage in their diet had the least amount of tiredness. (Source: European Journal Cancer Care, June 5, 2012 )

How To Prevent Tiredness After Breast Cancer

If you have had breast cancer, this research makes it pretty clear that there are dietary modifications you can make to stop tiredness. Here are a few of them:

1. More Vegetables For Fiber

Many people believe that the best source for fiber is grains, but if you look at the label for grains, you’ll see that one serving often doesn’t provide more than 2-5 grams fiber.

On the other hand, vegetables and some fruits provide nice amounts of fiber. For example, one half cup of beans can provide up to 8 grams fiber.

That’s practically double the amount found in grains. One pear has 4 grams fiber.

Study the fiber charts and look for the foods that hide fiber from the vegetable and fruit categories.

2. Trimming Fat Off Meats

This one speaks for itself. Just trim off the fat on meats; don’t eat it. You just don’t need the calories.

3. Using Less Oils And Margarines

Stop using oils unless you absolutely have to. The other day, I visited friends and caught them frying chicken cilantro-packed corn tortillas in three fourths of a cup of oil.

This is far too much! Every woman in that household was grossly obese.

When you lose the tiredness, you’ll see amazing new things that you can do in your life and with your life. Get started and find your solution. Check out the End Tiredness Program today.