Living A Full Life

Hidden Energy Killers And The 24-Hour Reset

• Full Life Chiropractic • Season 4 • Episode 5

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Ever roll out of bed feeling like your brain battery is already at 15%? We dig into why that happens even when you “sleep enough,” tracing energy back to its real source: mitochondria working across billions of cells. From there, we unpack the five hidden energy killers—low-grade inflammation, nervous system overload, mitochondrial stressors, subconscious environmental stress, and nutrient or hormone imbalances—and turn them into clear, doable steps you can use today.

We start by reframing energy as biology, not willpower. Chronic micro-inflammation from processed food, sugar spikes, seed oils, and toxins quietly dysregulates hormones long before labs change, showing up as fog, irritability, and that heavy, unmotivated drag. You’ll hear a practical seven-day anti-inflammatory reset, why hydration needs minerals to count, and how one daily green meal can lower immune overdrive. Then we shift to the nervous system: constant notifications and noise keep you wired but tired. A two-minute vagus nerve reset, simple news and social boundaries, and morning sunlight align your circadian rhythm so sleep finally restores you.

We also protect the “battery”: reducing EMFs in your bedroom, ditching plastics for glass or steel, and breaking sedentary patterns with steps and two short HIIT sessions each week. We share targeted support like omega-3s, L-carnitine, and red light to boost mitochondrial efficiency. Subtle stressors—clutter, loud spaces, unpaid bills, blue light at night—get a ten-minute daily clean-up and a digital sunset. Finally, we fix common nutrition gaps with a protein-loaded breakfast, balanced macros, and strength training to support thyroid function and long-term metabolic health.

To make it easy, we outline a 24-hour energy reset: morning light, mineral water with a pinch of salt and lemon, 40–60g protein at breakfast, a ten-minute walk, a midday green meal, a two-minute breathing break, then an evening digital sunset, magnesium, quick tidy, low-EMF bedroom, and an earlier lights-out. Most listeners feel a difference within a day and bigger change in two to six weeks. If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who’s exhausted, and leave a quick review—what part of the reset will you try first?

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SPEAKER_00:

Did you ever wake up tired, ever after a full night's sleep, or hit that afternoon wall where your brain shuts down, but you're not even doing anything strenuous? Today we're uncovering the hidden energy killers that drain your body without you realizing it. These aren't just obvious things like bad sleep or too much caffeine. These are sneaky daily habits like toxins, foods, and stressors that are quietly shutting your energy systems down. Welcome to another episode of Living a Full Life. I'm Dr. Enrico Rolchikori. And today we're going to talk to you. You're going to walk away with a clear plan to boost your energy in 24 hours. Energy is always something people want more of. And it's the most common thing that we talk about, both in practice and on questions that we get as practitioners across all mediums of medicine. And what happens is that energy, it has to be understood of where it comes from. What is our battery pack? What is this solar pack that keeps getting recharged? And how does sleep play that role? We just know that when we sleep at night, we're supposed to get rested to be able to do the next day. And it's a little bit more than that. We have to think of ourselves as a cellular level. Remember, the entire universe was created on this vital force that was given into one cell and then multiple cell organisms, that is what we are today. And each and every cell in our body has something called the mitochondria. This is the battery pack of the entire system that we're talking about. So for right now, it's the human body. We're made up of billions of cells, and all of them have mitochondria in them. And it's the accumulation of their activity that equals our energy. And that's what energy is all about. So we have to think of mitochondrial function. Now, what affects the mitochondrial function? It's designed to just keep doing what it's doing, but what affects it both in a positive and a negative way? And that's what this episode is all about. The nervous system load is what we need to walk away with today, with this episode is how much load are we putting on our nervous system that affect or defect the effectiveness of the mitochondria themselves. And when we talk about the load, these are all the stressors that can affect our nervous system: mental, physical, chemical, and emotional. These are all the things that can affect our nervous system, both positive and negative. What it does over time is create inflammation. We understand that lack of physical movement or chronic chemical exposure or bad processed foods can create inflammation in the body. And this inflammation is what slows down all processes in the body, especially hormonal regulation. That's the first thing that ends up happening that may not give you the immediate side effect in our body from fatigue, malaise, mood disruptors, emotional disruption, function, side effects from that, like hot flashes, feeling warm, temperature control, sensation, restless leg syndrome at night. Before we get any of these symptoms, hormones start to change. And that's where inflammation plays its role. Is when it starts to dysregulate our hormone system, that's where we start to feel tired, foggy, maybe unmotivated at first, and we don't know why. Heavy, just our legs are heavy. We feel heavy, unrested, irritable. It's probably tired, foggy, and irritable. They're probably the first things that we get where our mood, we're like, oh, I'm sorry, I don't even know why I'm upset or why I got upset at that. It's because our fuse is running short because our mitochondria are not functioning as they should. And this started a while before we start to get the symptoms. So we need to just go through the hidden killers of our energy. And this is what this podcast is all about. And I've listed four or five of the top killers, and we're going to tackle them and create strategies on how to improve them. And if you do these four or five things within the next 24 hours, you're going to notice a change in your energy immediately. That's how fast this works when we start to remove the interference of what's causing decreased energy. And the number one energy thief is chronic low-level inflammation. Nobody talks about this, the low-level inflammation. We talk about inflammatory markers once they start to show up in the blood work, high cholesterol, high CRP, high blood pressure, whatever may start to happen. We talk about those, but that's it's a little too late once the physiological effects are measurable. What we're talking about is what's building up in the meantime to get to those results. And it's processed foods, sugar and insulin spikes from the consumption of sugar, seed oils, food sensitivities, and environmental toxins that we talked about in many previous episodes that could be pollution, pseudoplastics, endocrine estradiols, and estrogen disruptors, and how these things really drain our overall energy. The immune system's always working for you. And if you feel fatigued, it's because your immune system is working on overdrive. And you may not get sick or have a cold or have a runny nose or a sore throat or a fever when we think about the immune system. But the immune system's always attacking foreign invaders. And when we're chronically inflamed, the immune system's chronically active, always overactive, always attacking. And sometimes it's attacking ourselves because of the inflammation. We may get organs or glands in our body that start to get inflamed, like the thyroid, for example, and our body will start to attack it. That's what most causes of hypo or hyperthyroiditis is inflammation of the thyroid gland itself. And it's because our own body is attacking it. So, what do we need to do to really start to focus on these things? And the quick actionable steps that you can take within the next 24 hours is the seven-day anti-inflammatory reset, where you just eliminate inflammatory foods from your diet: sugars, processed foods, gluten and grains, dairy, those are the four major things. You just eliminate those, and within seven days, you're going to notice some clarity immediately. Hydration and trace minerals, these are sometimes the things that we're missing, is we're not getting enough water. And it's not just filtered water, but water and electrolytes. And electrolytes are those minerals that we're talking about, salts. And we sometimes need just a trace amount of those added to our diet, like magnesium, even sodium. So a lot of people eat low sodium diet now, uh, just because they just don't add salt to their cooking. And one green detox meal per day. A green detox meal is one dedicated meal, lunch or dinner, where you put together a variety of green leafy vegetables as the base of your meal. Typically, we call these things salads, and you throw some meat on top. Great. Call whatever you want, but that's the key to a green detox meal every day. So you want to add that to the seven-day reset. You can make this creative on your own as long as you follow the base four steps that we talked about, eliminating sugar, processed foods, gluten, and grains altogether, and dairy. Dairy being milk, cheese, cottage cheese, sour cream, all anything dairy-based. They're typically inflammatory. And within 24 hours, you're going to notice some changes, but within the seven days, you get a detox effect where chronic inflammation drops significantly there. Then you can uncover secondary and tertiary effects of this onion of inflammation, where you can dig dig deeper and start to think, okay, well, listen, my my heart, I'm still fatigued, I'm still feeling a little tired, my gut feels better, I feel less foggy, but the my I'm still tired. Then you can start to dig into the hormonal factors on that. So, number two, hidden energy killer. Number two, nervous system overload. Your stress is playing the overall effect on all of this. And life is stressful. Your nervous system was designed for survival, not constant notification, news articles, noise, and urgency. This high-paced life that we live, where we're getting notified with information all the time, and then always feeling like we're in a rush to get to the next thing the baseball practice, waking up to get the kids to school. Uh, we're just in a rush to get things done. Even in traffic, to get home and do dinner, we're in a rush to get there because time is a factor. And this constant overload overloads our nervous system. We're always on fight or flight. So we're wired, but we're tired. We're we have a racing mind at night because we didn't take a few moments during the day to think and clear the mind. So we finally put our heads down on our bed and we wonder why our mind is racing, is because we didn't take time during the day to reflect. We have difficulty relaxing and we feel tense or on edge quite often. And this is how all that drains our energy. It causes us to live in sympathetic dominance. So we get hormone deregulation and then poor sleep cycles because of that. And we've talked about the circadian rhythm and hormone cycles in other episodes. So, some quick fixes to this is the two-minute vagus nerve reset. And you can do this using different methods, but I like breath work where you stop in a seated position or even lying down and you focus on your breath. Just if you've never done this before, you just focus on breathing. It's as easy as it sounds, where you breathe in and you breathe out. And then you can make these deeper breaths where you hold longer and breathe out for longer, meaning you breathe in slower and you breathe out slower. And you can time it in your mind just on a one, two, three, four count. One, two, three, four count. And you repeat this. It can be 40 seconds, it can be two minutes of breathing, it can be all the way up to five minutes of breathing, whatever you want. But if you do this within two minutes, you'll reset the vagal tone in your nervous system, which helps the nervous system calm down and slide away from sympathetic dominance, which calms the entire system. News and social media boundaries, you have to set these to yourself. Having these notifications pop up, turn off all those notifications on your phone. If you need to look into the news, dedicate time for that where you actively go into the apps and look at your news. But having these notifications pop up, trust me, if it's an emergency, the Amber alert will come up telling you about, you know, the child that was abducted or whatever, something serious in your neighborhood or in your community that needs to pop up. Other than that, you really don't need the notifications. Turn them all off and seek the news when you need the news. And then another thing is magnesium and sunlight. We work indoors, we avoid the sun, like the plague. And this catches up to us. Sunlight is really important. Getting it directly on our skin, directly in our eyes is really important. You can wear sunglasses, you don't want to stare directly at the sun. That's all I'm saying. But being outside and getting that sunshine directly at us, those photons hitting us, plays a huge role in our circadian rhythm and our hormonal system as well. So the nervous system overload epidemic is very true, especially in Western cultures, especially in American culture. So we need to be mindful of that and why we maybe feel tired or groggy. Hidden energy killer number three. The mitochondria are under attack. So your mitochondria are your body's battery pack. They work together a billion at a time, all those cells in our body, billions. All work together doing their own thing, but that energy that they produce is our overall energy source. So when they're damaged, no amount of caffeine or any monster drink or caffeinated drink or energy drink is going to save you. So what really causes the slowdown in our mitochondria? There's a lot of different research on that and many different things that do it, but all the theories stack on one another. There's no one direct answer, but all of them do play a role. Like EMF exposure from Wi-Fi, uh, electrical fields, all these things play a role. They're not voodoo or voodoo. It's really true that we should protect ourselves from the radiation that comes off of a lot of our wireless devices. So I like to make the bedroom the solace of tranquility when it comes to resting and healing. And if you're truly going to do that, you're going to keep wireless devices out of there. You're going to be mindful of where the router is placed in your in your home and where a lot of your electronics are. Getting these EMF measurers on Amazon, you can just walk around your house and see where EMF is coming from. Your bedroom should win and be as close to zero as possible. That's that's where you truly heal. So as long as you did that, that's a huge win. Then in other parts of your house, it may go up as closer as you get to the laptops and computers and Wi-Fi devices and charge ports. But that plays a big role in there and you should be mindful of it. That's the point of this few seconds on this podcast. The next is plastics and chemicals. Reusing plastic containers and drinking from them and eating from them puts in microtoxins into our body. So we have to be careful with plastics and the chemicals that they emit. Lack of movement overall. How are we going to flush our lymphatic system to get these things? Our lymphatic system, our circulatory system, our blood system, everything that pulls through and filters out of our system, kidneys, liver, all of these things that help us to filter toxins out of our body. What are we going to do to help move those circulatory processes better? It's movement, it's exercise, it's going for a walk every day, it's moving your body. It's amazing how many Americans sit all day and don't do much. They look at their steps on their phone and they did 1,900 steps for the day. That's going to the bathroom a few times and just taking out the trash. It's not that much. So we are a sedentary culture. So we need to get up there. The 10,000 steps is a nice rule. I like it. Nutrition, uh, nutrient deficiencies. We're just not eating a well-balanced diet, a well-rounded diet, and we need that. Carbs, fats, and protein is so important in our in our diet, but also the micro things. And then poor sleep. So many people are okay thinking that with four or five hours of sleep that they're doing okay, but they're actually not. Poor sleep is exponentially builds up the negativity in our mitochondria and our function and our energy as the years go by. So the longer we go with poor sleep, the more exponential it affects us later in life. That's why people later in life start to feel more fatigued and more tired. It's because they've been doing that on overdrive for a long period of time. Here are some fixes for all this: light exposure in the morning and evening, being mindful of both. When you first wake up, trying to get that natural light as soon as possible to start to diminish the cortisol response in our circadian rhythm. L-carnitine and omega-3. So those are like fish oils, but these are things you can add to your diet and try L-carnitine plus omega-3s or fish oil to connect your your to connect to your content. So what that means is getting a little bit of a reset through the proper nutrition in our body. We just don't get omega-3s, the good fatty acids, because we don't eat a lot of those sources of coconut oil, olive oil, avocado oil, fish um oils that we get from there. So taking those as a supplement on a daily basis can play a huge role. High interval training, high interval intensity training can also help boost mitochondrial function. It's been shown in exercise physiology that people that do hit twice a week, even 15 minutes, had a substantial increase in their mitochondrial function and energy output because that starts to spark a lot more aerobic activity in the body. And hit means taking uh like a short sprint for 15 seconds and then walking for a minute and then sprinting for 15 seconds and walking for a minute, or doing that on your stationary bike, or going for a swim in the pool uh and just quickly doing 15 seconds of a butterfly or quick um front stroke or whatever it is, and then slowing down, just paddling around. Doing bursts of these exercises play a huge role in our mitochondria. They help light them up. And then red light, red light exposure has been fantastic. You've seen all the red light devices. We have a red light bed in our office. Red light can also stimulate mitochondrial function as well. So a lot of quick fixes that you can use and add to your lifestyle to help boost your mitochondrial function. Hidden energy killer number four, subconscious stress from your environment. The things you're not really thinking of, but people love this one because it's surprising. Some examples of this are clutter, overcommitment, loud environments, chronic noise, blue light at night, workload overwhelm, micro stresses like unpaid bills, messy counters, and always walking into those same environments. These are the subconscious things that we really don't talk about much. And that's the issue with all that. Some fixes that we can do for that is 10-minute daily resets where we take 10 minutes and either clean up one small area of a counter and just organize it. Or 10 minutes to just calm ourselves down, or 10 minutes to be in peace and quiet, just quiet. Even noise-canceling headphones where you sit there, you're not staring at a screen. You just you can read something if you want, and that's about it. Digital, um, your digital sunset at night, where you give yourself the one hour before bedtime where you're not looking at digital screens, and simplifying your schedule at least at some point during the week. Weekends are a great rule for many of you that work nine to five Monday through Friday jobs. Those are great as well. Where you can use maybe a weekend or a weekend afternoon, like a Saturday morning or Saturday afternoon, where you just simplify your schedule to not do much and just do stuff for yourself if possible. And the last one, hidden energy killer number five, nutrient and hormone imbalances. You can be eating healthy, but still be underfueled at the cellular level. So the big ones that people don't do is they think they're eating three square meals a day, they think they're eating healthy, avoiding processed foods, and that's great. You're doing a great job if you're if you're that conscious. But one of the big things that are being missed is the protein amount. So they're low protein, they're undereating, they're low carbs for active people. They're just eating low carbs and being super active. That can be very stressful on the system. Thyroid sluggishness, um, you know, you don't we don't want to diagnose that as sluggish thyroid because you need blood work for that. But a thyroid sluggishness is where. Fatigue can underwhelm everything. And it's because of eating low calorie for long periods of time, low carb for long periods of time, maybe ketogenic for long periods of time, can slow down and make the thyroid more sluggish, more resistant to our metabolic pathways. Low magnesium, believe it or not, people don't take a daily magnesium pill. And just by doing that, can be a huge improvement to overall function. B vitamins, we can dig into that. We spoke about omega-3s as well. Those can play a role in that as well. But some quick fixes to that, to just having the nutrient and hormone imbalances, is your anti-inflammatory meal plan that we spoke about with number one. Just focusing on an anti-inflammatory meal plan and sticking to that for a certain amount of time. Seven days is a good start. It's a win. If you can make it seven days and eat clean, that is amazing. Balancing your macros, strategic refeed days, where if you're eating well continuously, it's part of your lifestyle. You have a day a week or maybe a day every other week where you refeed. You increase the protein, the carbs, and the fats on one day, just a day where you kind of let loose and eat a little bit more to refeed the body so that we're not always living in a calorie deficit. Strength training consistently, twice a week, three times a week, four times a week, whatever your schedule allows, but being consistent. That was the key in that sentence there. Strength training, yes, but consistently. Putting those time in per week and focusing on muscle resistance plays a huge role in balancing our hormone system. So the 24-hour energy reset protocol is something I'd love to see you guys do today or soon within the next few days. And here's what you need to focus on in the next 24 hours. Makes it super easy. You don't even have to jot down any notes. Is in the morning, we want to get direct sunlight. So that's either outside or even through a window. Hydrate with minerals. So try adding a pinch of Himalayan sea salt or just pink salt or Celtic salt or something to your water, a pinch. We're not enough to make it salty. Just a pinch into your water, your eight-ounce glass of water. Drink that water in the morning. You can even squeeze a little bit of a lemon in it. Those are all hydration and electrolytes that you're putting into your water. So once you do that, you start off the day wonderfully. So you're gonna the hydrate with minerals, you're gonna add protein with your breakfasts. A lot of the American breakfasts, if you look at them, don't have protein in them. Waffles, pancakes, um cereals, milk, muffins, bagels, toast, everything I just said is carbohydrates. Uh, you may add some butter to it, you may add, you know, fats to it, peanut butter, a little bit of protein there, but there's not much protein in there. So adding eggs and meats and turkey and chicken sausage and things in the morning to beef up the protein is absolutely a fantastic way to start your day. Loading your mornings with the most amount of protein possible is setting you up for success for the rest of the day. Having 40, 50, 60, 70 grams of protein in the morning, try this. Um, just sets you up for success for the rest of the day. In case you have a heavy carb lunch or a low protein dinner, you set yourself up well with your morning breakfast, which is absolutely fantastic. And then a 10-minute walk. 10 minutes, that's all we're asking. 10 minutes in the morning. Don't walk straight to your car, go check the mail, or walk down the block five, five minutes and walk back, and then get in your car and drive to work or whatever it is you're doing. Adding that to or take the dog for a 10-minute walk before you go. Starting your day like that sets up your mitochondria for success. Then in the middle of the day, we want to add one green meal that we talked about for not just detoxification, but also just sustenance, just filling the body with good nutrition, avoiding the sugar crash, meaning we're not going to eat sugar over the noon hours so that we don't have the delayed afternoon crash. So we're gonna just eat sugars or carbohydrates either in the morning or save them for a little bit at the end of the day, like a potato or anything that you're adding to your dinner, to avoid the sugar crash, and then having the two-minute vagus reset that we talked about, breath work that can be done in the evening or anytime during the day, really, and resetting our vagus nerve. Our evening ritual should be a digital sunset, meaning that we're focused on digital time that we have in screens, television counts, computer screens, laptops, our iPhones, our smartphones, our devices, our iPads, all the things are digital screens, or even our Apple Watches. So just an hour before bed, not staring at them. Adding magnesium to your nighttime routine can help with sleep. 10-minute cleanup to reduce environmental stresses, just focusing on your bedroom, the light, the EMF exposure, the things we talked about in this podcast, and having an early bedtime, meaning setting, resetting your bedtime to make sure that you're getting seven or eight hours of nighttime sleep so that by the time you wake up in the morning, you're giving your chance, you're giving your body a chance for a full reset and a full energy battery pack reset. So, some patients that we help with, you know, this is what spurred, this comes up all the time. My energy, my energy, my energy. And we always give these quick fixes to our patients, these same things we said in this episode, both virtually through functional medicine and in person in our in our practice. And almost everyone comes back and says, that worked. It really helped them. So the calls to action that we gave you today in this episode, all you have to do is just implement them. People know this. I see them almost on a weekly basis or at least a monthly basis. So by the time they come in again, they're already saying that they've done two or three of the things and they do feel better. And it kind of can bring up other and surface other things that we can help dive deeper into, or they truly did help them and they're just sleeping better. So people that are exhausted drink a lot of coffee, they they try, they feel like they need to take naps, uh, they try all the different supplements, uh, but it's typically the low protein diet and the chronic stress that most people fit into that bucket about just life is stressful and their meals are not full rounded with protein, and that creates a lot of inflammation. And a lot of people, not only in 24 hours, but in two to six weeks, see huge changes in their energy. And you can too. If this episode helped you in any way with some tips, share it with someone who's been struggling with their energy. And then you can DM me on find us on social media, both at Full Life Chiropractic, Living a Full Life Podcast, Enrico Dolchori. I'm on Facebook, Instagram, I'm I'm everywhere. And DM me saying, Hey, I listen to your podcast, energy. Or if you just say energy, I know that you listen to the podcast, and I'll send you a free resource, a PDF that everything that we talked about today on here. Your body isn't tired because it's broken. I want you to remember that. You're not broken, and our bodies don't get broken. What is happening is it's tired because it's overwhelmed from everything physical, mental, and emotional stresses. When you remove the hidden drains, your energy comes back faster than you think. You don't need magic pills or remedies or that magic workout or join that 30 day boot camp or program to get your energy back. So if you want the hidden energy killers, just reach out to us. Be more than happy to share that with you. Stay well, stay healthy, and boost your energy naturally.

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Dr. Enrico Dolcecore

Host
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Dr. Christine Hafer

Co-host