Stop saying you’re tired. If you're constantly saying that you're so tired and so fatigued and worn out, then you're going to feel more worn out. So stop saying that you're tired.

Welcome to Becoming Virtuosa, the podcast that encourages you to become your best virtuosa self. Each week Dr. Susan Crockett goes where the scalpel can't reach, exploring conversations about how to be, heal, love, give, grow, pray, and attune. For the first time ever, she's bringing the personal one on one teaching that she shares with individual patients to you on this broader platform. A weekly source of inspiration and encouragement designed to empower you.

By evolving ourselves as individuals. We influence and transform the world around us. Please help me welcome board certified OB-GYN specializing in minimally invasive GYN surgery, internationally in the top 1% of all GYN robotic surgeons, a certified life coach, and US News top doctor, your host Susan A. Crockett, MD.

All right, welcome back to The Dr. Crockett Show. I'm your host, Dr. Susan Crockett. I am an OB-GYN in San Antonio, Texas, and I specialize in minimally invasive GYN surgery. That's robotic surgery for women. But on this show, our YouTube channel, we go where the scalpel doesn't reach. And I'm bringing you all the conversations that I have one-on-one with my patients to you as a broader audience. So you get to hear all of the really fun wisdom and knowledge that we have usually in private quarters. So it's good to share with everybody.

How are y'all doing? Today's topic is five ways to have more energy and I'm not lying to y'all when I tell you it has taken me two months to get this show done. I had an idea to do it. I was gonna post it as my New Year's show and it's now into February and I have not had enough energy to shoot this dang show about energy. So I had a little bit of rest over the weekend and getting away and taking a little vacation is always helpful.

I've done a lot of traveling lately. I've been doing some teaching. I taught a resident course in Atlanta last week, and I was speaking to some doctors in Tallahassee last week, and a couple of weeks ago I was in Dallas. I've just been increasing the amount of travel that I've been doing and really enjoying getting to see other places, meet other people. And I think honestly, that's given me a little bit more energy. And that's a bonus. That's not even one of the five.

So let's get into it. Five ways that we can have more energy. Number one, stop saying you're tired. I say it all the time to myself, I'm like, I don't have any energy, I'm so tired. Your mindset is super important. How your brain goes, so goes the rest of the body. It's kind of like when you're driving and your eyes look a certain way, that's where your car's gonna go, right? So if you're constantly saying that you're so tired and so fatigued and worn out, then you're going to feel more worn out. So stop saying that you're tired. What can you replace it with?

Because I'm not asking you to be dishonest. You don't have to be like all puppies and ice cream and roses and all that. You can stop telling yourself that you're exhausted. So instead, focus on what you're enjoying. Focus on what you're doing that's bringing you joy in the moment. Take a big breath and meditate if you need to. Take a little minute to get your mind where it needs to be.

Because often when we're saying we're tired, what we're really seeing is a symptom of our sympathetic nervous system. That's our part of our autonomic nervous system. It doesn't mean having sympathy for somebody. Our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight, cortisol driven, adrenaline driven system is out of balance. We have too much sympathetic or nervous energy compared to our parasympathetic balancing Zen type of energy.

And when we have a whole lot of anxiety and stress and too much caffeine, then of course we're either going to bonk and feel tired or our body is going to run to the end of its endocrine rope and then you really are going to feel tired. So that stress and that anxiety, a lot of the management for that can be found in learning to manage your thoughts in your mind.

So number one is learn to manage your mind really. And that'll help balance out your sympathetic nervous system with your parasympathetic. Bring the parasympathetic up, drop the sympathetic down, you'll start feeling a little bit better and have a little bit more even keel energy. What we're trying to avoid are the highs and the lows, the ups and the downs, and those are the things that make us feel tired.

Okay, number two. It's not gonna be any surprise to you guys if you've watched the channel at all. It's eat your veggies! Yes, whole food, plant-based diet. So why are vegetables important for having more energy? Well, for one, they are an important supply of carbs. Not just carbs, vegetables actually have proteins and fats in them.

So if we're talking about eating a whole food plant-based diet, we're talking about eating veggies, fruits, seeds, nuts, and grains. They have varying amounts of protein and fat and carbohydrate in them, but the carbohydrates in these whole foods are unrefined and they're not combined with a whole lot of other additives that our body can't process. And so not only do they give you more energy and make you feel less bogged down than if you're eating a high animal content diet, but your mood will also be better if you're on a whole food plant-based diet.

Yeah, that's right. Eating a whole food plant-based diet and decreasing the amount of animal product that you're eating to less than 10%, if you can, actually will increase your mood, give you a little bit more sustained energy, and what you won't have are, again, the glucose chip up from eating a starchy carbohydrate like bread or crackers or white rice. What that does is it raises your glucose levels, which makes your insulin level rise. And what does insulin do? It takes that extra sugar that's running in your bloodstream and it puts it right into fat. That's what it does.

And so one way that we can manage our energy level as well as our weight is to lean more towards a whole food plant-based diet, then you get a nice even release of glucose into your bloodstream or a more even release of glucose. It's easier for your body to handle, your pancreas will secrete less insulin, and you will have less fat accumulation.

All right, so I'm gonna take a little break here. I'm introducing something new to the show and that is our recipes. So one of the things we do before the show every time we air is whether I have a guest or not, we have food in the kitchen together and I cook and I've started this huge recipe collection and I keep getting asked when you actually going to post your recipes. Yes, Dr. Crockett, when are you going to do this?

So this is the first episode. So we've got a brand new year in 2025, and we have a new recipe site. You can go to drcrockett.com/recipes, and that link will be down below.

Also if you stay tuned till the end of the show I will share a link with you for a PDF about the five ways to have more energy and you can go on drcrockett.com and download that PDF for yourself so don't feel like you have to take notes today.

One of the things I wanted to mention to you guys today is that we officially have two sponsors. Not just one, we have two. Our first sponsor today is St. John Knits. St. John Women's Wear is a quality product line that I have worn for well over a decade. I love their fabrics for their longevity. These pieces are investment pieces. I'm actually wearing St. John today. I love that this tweed it's nice and springy heading into spring without being too chilly because we still have a little bit more cool weather to get through.

I really love St. John for their classic wardrobe pieces, their classic wardrobe staples. We talk about using their pieces as a capsule wardrobe. I use them when I travel. They're easy to dress up or to dress down. And you can find the St. John Outlet in San Antonio on Broadway. So if you live locally or you're coming to visit, check out the St. John Outlet on Broadway. Thank you for your sponsorship.

Okay, this show is also sponsored today by Virtuoso Vitamins, which is leading into our third way to have more energy. The third way to have more energy is to take your vitamins and your supplements. Duh, right? So that seems kind of basic.

There are all these vitamin companies, all these supplement companies around, and on our show, what we actually teach is eat your whole food plant-based diet and get a variety of the nutrients that you need from your food and only supplement what you're not getting from your food or what you need. So most of us are not eating a really well-balanced, healthy diet. We're on the go, we're eating fast food. Not me, I never eat fast food. Yeah, right. Not very often, not as often as I used to. But what I do take are my daily supplements.

So Virtuosa Vitamins is one of our sponsors for today. This is the world's first curated boutique vitamin line. It's only 12 products and they are the 12 products that I personally have used the most and recommended to my patients throughout the last, I don't know, 15, 20 years.

There are two things that my patients ask me when they're looking for a vitamin supplement. The two things that they are questioning all the time are, number one, how do I know that I'm getting a high-quality vitamin supplement? And the second one is, how do I know I'm getting the right amounts and not duplicating what I'm taking in my vitamin supplements.

In fact, one of my favorite patient stories is about my friend who came into the office and she was going through menopause and she had this huge bag of vitamins and supplements and she was just feeling all awful and jittery and I'm like, you know, this is, you know, not a surgery kind of question. This is not in my wheelhouse, but I'll take a crack at it.

So we had her line up all of the bottles that she had from all these different vitamin companies on the exam table and they took up almost the whole exam table and then I started sorting them and I put my arm down in between them I kind of split it like the Red Sea and I was like you see all of these? These are all stimulants. She had half of the bottles that she had containing stimulants like green tea and all kinds of caffeine and all kinds of stuff and I'm like honey no wonder you're feeling bad. So that is a really difficult thing to figure out what you're supposed to be taking. So Virtuoso Vitamins makes it super easy.

Number one, they're high quality, pharmaceutical grade manufacturing process guarantees that you've got the purity and the right amount of ingredients that you need. And then the second thing is we're calling this a curated vitamin line, which means you can mix and match them, all 12 products. So we don't have a thousand of these vitamins. We only have 12 of my favorite products and you can mix and match them and if you happen to have something that has a duplicate the website will actually tell you that you don't need to double order it because you've got a duplicate and so you can be confident in your dosing and in the supplements you're taking.

So go check out Virtuosa Vitamins. If you don't have a good daily vitamin, I'm gonna recommend our Daily Essentials. This is awesome because it also combines your probiotic, your omega, your vitamin D, and your multivitamin. So all five of them, because we're combining them into one product, it's less expensive than what you would buy for the same quality of vitamins if you were buying them individually. And I'll put the link down below for you.

Today we're offering you 10% off with the discount code VIRTUOSA10. That's a discount code Virtuosa10. If you put it in at checkout, you can get 10% off of your order. Thank you.

All right, so number four on how to have more energy is sleep. Oh man, I'm such a good sleeper. I would stay in bed all day if I could, I think sometimes. So eight hours of quality sleep. Now, one of the things that I've noticed, because I'm wearing a Garmin, I have a little Garmin watch that I wear, my Garmin has a bunch of biometric scores on it. And I'm really into tracking my data.

And one thing that it tells me is my sleep score. So, I can tell whether I got enough REM sleep, which is where my brain's really resting and processing, or if I got enough sleep, how much I was awake and restlessness and all of that. So I'm tracking my sleep score on a regular basis. And one thing that I've noticed is if I have a little bit of red wine before I go to bed, even just a little bit, really, really disrupts my sleep.

So one of the things that you can do to get a better night's sleep is lay off the alcohol, which is really counterintuitive. Is that the word? Yeah. Counterintuitive. Because a lot of times we think of using alcohol like a sedative. A lot of people want to do a wind down when they come home or use it to help go to sleep, but it's actually very, very disruptive to your sleep pattern and you will wake up less refreshed than if you refrain from the alcohol.

So the other things that you can do to get a good night's sleep are don't eat or drink after about 5 or 6 in the evening. You want to give your body and your gut time to settle down so that you're not getting up all the time in the middle of the night. You want your gut to be resting so that your body can rest also.

Another thing that you can do is refrain from blue light like TVs and your phone, your laptops, and if you want to read something in the evening getting ready for bed, turn off the TVs and the electronics, pick up an actual book with white paper and print, or a Kindle that's got the lighting that's not blue lighting, or a magazine or something like that, you'll have a much better night's sleep if you get the blue light out of your eyes a little bit earlier.

Also, excellent temperature, 65 to 68 degrees. I like having my room at about that temperature with a nice heavy blanket. I like a weighted blanket, which makes a really cozy bed and the other thing you can do is make sure it's dark. So dark out, blackout curtains or dark curtains if you want to use a mask, just all things that'll help with your nighttime routine to help you get that eight hours of sleep.

The other thing that's really important is for you to actually engineer when you go to bed. I feel like I'm talking to my kids. Why do I feel like I'm talking to my grown children? If you have to get up at 6:00 in the morning and you need eight hours of sleep that means you need to go to bed by 10:00 at night, right? So don't shorten your sleep because you're staying up and binge watching Matlock on TV or playing video games. Make sure that you are settling into a nice bedtime routine and getting to bed at a reasonable hour.

Okay, we're up to number five now. Number five is exercise. Exercise, why does that help you have more energy? It seems like that would wear you out. Well, actually the opposite is true. A good regular exercise regimen, getting 30 minutes of cardio and weight training a day, five days a week, actually has been shown to improve your energy level. It helps your mitochondria, it helps your muscles feel stronger, and helps your flexibility, and gets you feeling more mobile and better and actually will boost your energy.

You get those endorphins going that the runners always talk about, the runner's high, and that will go back to number one and help you not feel so tired. So even if you have had a long day, I find it helpful to just go for a little 15 or 20 minute walk. You'll feel better if you do. Don't neglect your exercise.

All right, so those are the five ways to have more energy. Number one, mindfulness. Stop saying you're tired. Number two, whole food plant-based diet. Number three, take your supplements. Number four, get strong eight hours of sleep. Number five, exercise.

So I thank you for joining me for this week's show. I look forward to seeing you next week on the Dr. Sue Crockett show. Don't forget. I told you at the beginning. I was gonna leave you a link to the PDF on the show. It's called How to Have 5 More Energies. It's called 5 Ways to Have More Energy and you can find it at drcrockett.com, links below. Go ahead and sign up and download that PDF and I hope you have a wonderful week with lots more energy.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Becoming Virtuosa. To learn more, come visit us at DrCrockett.com, or find us on YouTube for the Dr. Crockett Show. If you found this episode helpful or think it might help someone else, please like, subscribe, and share. This is how we grow together. Thanks, and I'll see you next week. Love always, Sue.