Nov. 6, 2025
Why Men Over 40 Feel Tired All the Time (and How to Fix It) - 14
Have you ever taken a weekend trip, only to come home just as tired as when you left?
You are not the only one feeling that way.
In this episode, Coach Brian talks about why quick breaks like vacations or naps do not solve long-term fatigue.
He shares the story of Andy, a 45-year-old husband, father of three, and sales manager from California who was 35 pounds overweight and dealing with high blood pressure and constant tiredness.
After years of working hard and feeling drained, Andy finally realized his problem was not a lack of discipline, but a lack of real recovery.
Coach Brian explains how chronic stress affects hormones, increases fat storage, and limits energy. He also shares how simple changes in daily habits can help you rest more effectively and feel healthy again.
In this episode, you will learn:
• Why short rest breaks do not fix long-term fatigue
• How stress hormones impact your body and energy
• The connection between recovery, fat loss, and clear thinking
• Simple ways to restore your body and mind
If you have been running on low energy for a long time, this episode will help you understand what your body truly needs to recover.
👉 Learn more and join The Call To Rise, a 100-Day Challenge for men who want to lose 20 pounds, regain energy, and take control of their health at www.thecalltorise.com
Coach Brian
Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?
Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.
Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:
To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com
Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.
- You ever take a weekend getaway and come home even more exhausted than before you left? You're supposed to feel recharged by Monday. When it hits, you can keep up, but it's like you never left. You're exhausted in short bursts of rest. Don't fix years of running on fumes, pushing your adrenals, and working overtime in your body.
- You have to find true rest to reset yourself. My name is Joe. I'm excited to make this for Brian principally because I was one of those guys that during COVID just got into that I'm a new shirt size now. Used to be a medium, now I'm a large. And I make a joke about it. you know, co kind of transformed me through and through into that new uh body type and with three kids, a joke around about the dad bot as well.
- Um, over the 2024 had some some family loss and challenge. With that came a funeral and with that funeral came not a dress shirt that fit my frame anymore. You know, sadness, downness, depression and one of the resolutions that came with this calendar year was stepping towards something different. Uh I chanced upon a Facebook post from Brandon No Brian in college.
- So I was excited to reconnect. Needed that accountability and then some. I got accountability but I also got the the skill sets to discern diet, the skill sets to discern portion sizes and when to say yes to an exciting celebration meal, but also the the rationale that that requires saying no to fluffy things throughout the course of the week as well.
- really throughout this process came to this identity shift of I'm a person that is fit and letting that be a driving face forward identity of who I am and who I want to be and continue to be. Welcome back to Driven for Health, the podcast for men over 40 who are ready to take control of their bodies, energy, and performance in all areas of life.
- Both at home for sure with your family and in your careers. I'm Coach Brian Piranha. I am a longtime certified degreed health, nutrition, fitness, wellness coach, and for over 23 years, I've been helping busy men just like you lose fat, build strength, and muscle, feel confident in a body that keeps up with your demanding life.
- In this episode, we're going to talk about rest, recovery, and what it really means to come back to a healthy state of being. Because if you're honest, you be real honest, gentlemen. Most guys today are not getting either. [laughter] If they're running businesses, staying up with their career, the list long list of demands that they have to do, raising a family. I have four kids.
- My honeydew list is never ending. And it always seems to be something I need to do for the house itself or the cars or whatever. We travel a lot for I personally travel a lot with the family, but then also I got tons of guys who travel for work and they're all just constantly living in the go mode. Even when you try to rest, you you don't really feel recovered.
- Here's some stats. The CDC says about one in three adults in the US consistently gets less than 7 hours of sleep per night. Obviously, that's an initial issue straight out of the gate because that's going to increase your fatigue levels, your overall chance and likeliness of weight gain. you're gonna have blood sugar level issues.
- Your hormones are going to be out of alignment and out of whack, trying to keep up and manage with everything. That's really important to say no and understand here. Now, as we go through this conversation today, I thought it'd be important to share story so that it hits home a little bit more. Let me tell you about a client of mine, Andy.
- and he's 45, married, lives in Northern California with his wife, three kids with two boys, and a daughter, middle school and high school age. He manages regional sales team and like many men he works with is on the go. He's successful in his career and it comes at a cost. I see this all the time with my guys. They're they are so focused, so hard driven.
- But it does show up in their waistline, shows up in bad blood panels from the doctor, shows up in pictures, shows up in that subtle lack of confidence when you get dressed in the morning, and just not sure why you feel that. He said, "When we first started grind, I feel like I'm running on E. Fumes, no any energy in the battery.
- I'm always doing something. It's always juggling this or that with work, family, travel, but I can't remember the last time I actually felt rested and rejuvenated." That sounds familiar. Stay with me because today we're going to unpack why short bursts of in quotations rest don't actually restore you, refuel you, replenish you.
- And what you can do instead to finally get that energy, get that motivation, that willpower, that that power, strength back in your body. The illusion of rest. Have you ever noticed how you can take a weekend getaway and and come back tired? You need to vacation from a vacation, right? That's that saying. And honestly, do you end up doing? It depends on what type of vacation.
- The piranhas love doing go vacations. We go from one place to the next, really trying to maximize and explore the experiences that are offered. And then occasionally, but very rarely at this point in time, we go sit on a beach for a couple of days. Our family, unfortunately, just gets bored at this point.
- We've gone to so many beaches. Uh it's fun, but we need that adventure. We want the thrill, the the adventure seeking. My family is full of dopamine seekers. They just want to to live fast and wild and free in a sense and experience cool things. So, going back to Andy, this story, every summer he he drives up to Lake Tahoe. It's a quick weekend getaway.
- They do it every year. It's beautiful up there, of course, right? Clear blue water, tall pines, paddle boards on the lake, kayaks, hikes with the family, dinner on the patio watching the sunsets. It sounds amazing and perfect. But Annie said that by the time they packed the car, drove four hours home, unpacked, settled into the cabin there, it was already time for dinner.
- This is when he was getting there. They came one full day of fun. Paddle board in the morning, hiking after lunch, roasting marshmallows by a warm campfire, right? Very serene and perfect. Before you knew it, it was Sunday. Time flies when you're having fun. They load the car up, they drove home, and by the time they impact, it was back to Monday meetings again. He told me, "It's crazy.
- We were at one of the most peaceful places in the world, but I came back feeling like I never took a break." He was he was right. Totally right. Because the short bursts of recovery don't recharge your system that just doesn't have any gas left in it. The American Journal of Medicine has reported that fatigue is now the number one reason adults visit their doctor.
- They say, "I don't have any energy, tired all the time. I don't want to do anything because of it." That tells you that this is not just a personal issue. That it's not just an individual person. This is a society, a culture, a capitalistic viewpoint on go, you must work. It's amazing that Andy was able to not get on his phone or laptop while he was away and use cabin Wi-Fi or something.
- Honestly, we want to unplug, as they say, when we go away to truly decompress from all of it. You've been sprinting through your days. There's calls, meetings, errands, family obligations. Even tonight, it's Thursday. As of recording this, we have to go to our kids middle school for an afterchool open house and the whole family's going.
- That's going to be a 2-hour event which takes up the majority of the evening and then it comes home to try to get the kids to bed on time and figure out how to get myself in bed as well. the second shift. Andy's life looked like a lot of men I coach. He go from a packed workday straight into his second shift.
- Uh making dinner, cleaning up after the kids, getting kids in and out of their sporting practices or after school events. Our kids are in theater. They've been in dance. There's swim, soccer. We've done baseball. We've done lacrosse. there's been art or theater. There's all sorts of different things going on. And and also you're you're also trying to be a good husband and father in between all that.
- By the time Andy gets home, he sits down at night. His idea of rest, or at least this is what it was, was scrolling through his phone or flipping through working mouse just to in quotations get ahead for tomorrow. That's not rest. That's by definition more work. And this is where he and so many other get stuck.
- We don't realize that the way we in quotation dress these days in our current society is just really an extension of the very stress we're trying to get away from. Who here can say that they're relaxed and decompressed after scrolling for 20 minutes? You're not. You're you're you're bypassing a 100 plus inputs that are fast that are trying to grab your attention, stimulate you in all sorts of different ways, and your dopamine is just crashing out.
- As Levi would say, crash out. He's my oldest. You can't expect your body to recover if your mind never stops going. Now, in fact, in 2022, study in current biology found that prolonged mental effort builds up fatigue chemicals in the brain such as glutamate, which causes mental fog and physical exhaustion.
- Okay? Your mind is doing mental back flips all day long trying to keep up with the flow there in lies mental exhaustion. How many people get to the end of the day and say, "I'm tired." Yet, they haven't moved all day long. They're mentally exhausted, not physically. They're probably emotionally exhausted, too. So, even if you sit down all day, you can still burn out your body through just constantly thinking, problem solving, troubleshooting, and not having any time out.
- the day he ran out of gas. One day Andy hit a wall as so many of us do. He said, "I literally fell asleep at my desk in the middle of the afternoon. My body and brain just quit." He woke up with keyboard marks on his forehead and the truth really sunk in there just like that the the letter M did on his forehead. He was depleted.
- He was exhausted. He was drained. He was also 35 lbs overweight. And his doctor had the last two or three said, "Hey, you need to lose some weight. You go on a diet. You need to get some help with this." And he Andy really started becoming a lot more worried about blood pressure and cholesterol issues and not getting put onto medicine.
- No man wants to be on medicine. At the very least, that's a a definitive sign that there's weakness in your body that you have taken medicine to overcome the challenges in the situation that you are dealing with. So, he's exhausted physically, mentally, emotionally. The World Health Organization now defines burnout as a physical condition, a state of chronic exhaustion caused by unmanaged stress.
- That means your body isn't just tired or or running low on energy. It's trapped in a stress cycle that never resets. If you want to pause here and think of a simple question that I always ask people that I find that are overwhelmed with stress and work and just constant on the go is this simple question. Are you living in a stress response? I'll say it one more time.
- Are you living in a stress response? If you let that sink in and slowly analyze your day-to-day ongoings, you might see that you actually are that there's a lot of mental and emotional strain going into work, going into family, going into bills, going into, you know, even two weeks ago my well pump broke. Okay, cool.
- Now, this was a really great thing that happened. I called someone up. They came within 30 minutes. And I have a new well pump and water in the house in under 30 minutes. Whereas I'd been dealing with this from the night prior. Very cool. It did cost 2K, which wasn't the exciting part. And I've watched the guy do the thing, meaning replace the pump and put it back down there and get it going again.
- I just thought to myself, "Oh my gosh, I totally could have done this. I'm a a pretty capable person. My dad unfortunately hasn't been is very involved in the last say 20 years of my life. I've had to do a lot of YouTube university to to do things and figure stuff out. I could have figured this out. I definitely know next time and hopefully over 10 years the pump should run or at least 10 years and I will then replace the thing myself because it really wasn't that hard.
- It might have taken me actually an hour or two total. But if I got my son out there, no big deal. We'd pull the thing out of the ground, swap out the pumps, run new wiring, make sure we tested it and primed the pump and the hose line, the 100 plus feet of it, and we'd be good to go. Water in the house, no problem.
- Now, most guys overlook their their fatigue, their mental exhaustion, and just push it off of just like, ah, I'll I'll tough through it. I'll I'll push through it. But your your body does pay the price. and the the visible body, your weight, your waistline, how you fit in clothes, how you feel about yourself, what is in your blood panels and under the hood, so to speak, is a direct sign of what's actually happening in your day-to-day life.
- And if you're not looking healthy and fit or feeling that way, you need an alignment. the science of stress. Let's break down what's really happening inside your body when this kind of stress builds up over time. Now, I know you've heard cortisol. It's your main stress hormone. It's what happens when your body releases what it senses, which is danger.
- It tells your liver to release glucose, which is sugar. It releases into your bloodstream. So your muscles can run or fight the fight or flight. That system was designed to save your life millions of years ago, right? We are trying to run from a tiger, a lion, a waring neighboring tribe or something like that.
- But today stress isn't coming from lions. It comes from traffic, deadlines, bills, never- ending notifications, constantly getting marketed and advertised to the list of demands coming in your email in terms of I know my wife right now with our swimming that we have the kids in, there's this constant amount of you need to do this for swim, you need to do that for swim, you need we need parent volunteers for this thing and that thing and the other thing you know it's going cost an extra whatever to do this thing and that's exhausting as a parent.
- Now your body reacts the exact same way with stress every single time cortisol rises, blood sugar releases and goes your your sugar glue the glucose releases and your blood sugar rises up. But the problem is you're you're not using that increase in blood sugar to run or fight. You're just sitting in your car or on a Zoom call stressing about whatever your boss wants or the impending traffic jam that you're sitting in that feels never ending.
- I just even the other day I had someone turn into my lane and I was acute enough to pay attention to realize that they were they were turning in. They were going to sandwich me between the curb and their car. Now, I ain't reacting road rage or anything. I just don't think that's a good response either way. I just honked my horn.
- They continued to drive and I was pretty happy they didn't smash my car because that is more cortisol, more stress and more harm internally because now I have to take all this time, energy, effort and money to get the car fixed which would not be fun. So these elevated blood sugar, remember cortisol rises, blood gets sugar gets released into the blood.
- The blood sugars go up, they stay up and your body releases insulin to move that sugar into the cells. Insulin is a storing hormone. Insulin is good if we're working out really hard and we're going to eat something that has simple carbohydrates in it. And that rise in blood sugar in your blood can then get shuttled to your muscles to help with recovery and replenishing them.
- But if you haven't moved all day, that's just going to your your waist to your belly. Now, a review in the journal of clinical endocrinology and metabolism 2020 said chronic stress can keep cortisol levels elevated all day long. Of course, it increases belly fat, but it also disrupts your sleep, lowers testosterone, and even starts to create insulin resistance.
- And then Chicago, the University of Chicago found that just four nights of restricted sleep, meaning under five hours can cause 25% drop in insulin sensitivity in healthy men, which means you have to release more insulin to get the same output. You do not want to be in that state. Say if you had to release 10 units of insulin just as an example to get an outcome of lowering your blood sugar, you become insulin resistant, you need 20 units of insulin being released from your body to get the same response that it once had with 10. That means
- your body, your liver, your everything is working way harder and you're ultimately getting sick. If you've been sleeping poorly for years, your metabolism has definitely been under stress for far longer than you realize. And science studies show again and again that under six hours of sleep, you are not only going to have a harder time losing weight, but you're going to struggle in a lot of other areas as well as just having healthy levels of testosterone, having a healthy metabolism, even having energy to deal
- with the daily demands that call your attention. That's why you gain weight, feel tired, sluggish at various times of the day. You definitely have no motivation or willpower and we're just really dealing with burnout. What real recovery looks like. Here's what we did. When Annie joined the call to rise, my 100 day fat loss challenge.
- We didn't do crazy hard workouts. We most definitely didn't cut out everything in the kitchen and throw stuff away and just eat chicken, broccoli, and rice on repeat. We focus on recovery before the intensity. We focus on getting his activity up. We focus on getting him a bedtime routine. Not just weird things that you find on YouTube or whatever, but literally just, hey, when we go to bed, we need to go to bed at this time.
- And when we're in bed, we don't have screens in the bed because the bedroom guys should only be for two S's. And screens aren't one of them, if you know what I mean, right? You might actually connect with the person laying beside you and things might go better for your sleep as you know. What else we do? We we focus on getting 100 ounces of water.
- He started managing his nutrition in the call to rise. The huge huge focus on nutrition around what to eat, when to eat, why you're eating it, and how to make it easy and sustainable for you every day through finding balanced meals. It helps keep his energy stable. It keeps him fully enough. It keeps cravings going away.
- And we're not doing anything weird. We're just eating some lean proteins, vegetables, some fruit, a little bit of starch, and some healthy fat. And if you want to go to episode five, episode 5 talks about calories that you should eat. Episode six talks about macronutrients, and episode 11 talks about the behavior and lifestyle changes you need to make for long-term success.
- So, a lot of conversation I've already had on how to set that up. So you get them dialed in with no screens after nine, no emails after dinner. You can actually sit and engage. Unless you're making millions of dollars a year or you're the business owner yourself and it does matter that you are answering emails after dinner time, you shouldn't do it.
- You're probably not getting paid to do so. Now he can actually take a breath, decompress, spend time with his family, engage, do things. Uh, last night we played a game. We played uno flip. This game seemed to go on. We We like to stack in our family. Stacking means, okay, if I do a plus two and the next person has a plus two, they can stack it and then they don't actually have to take two, but the next person will take four.
- if they don't have a plus two. And if they do have a plus two, then the next person is liable for plus six. It's fun way to play, but it does extend the game of Uno quite a bit. Risk tickets ride sequence life occasionally Monopoly. We got to watch my wife Amber. She's made our older boys cry from Monopoly. [laughter] A short story here.
- She they she was bartering with them. They wanted some of her properties and she made a deal. She negotiated, okay, I'll sell you these properties if I don't have to pay rent when I land on them. And the kids are super excited. This is when they were say eight and 10ish. Levi and Ever, they were so excited to be able to get the property.
- But about five times later, as she'd land on that property two, three times and never have to pay, they realized that this wasn't fair anymore. [laughter] Well, it's fair because they negotiated the deal with her and accepted. They just didn't realize what they were accepting as the deal. Just as like a lot of guys don't realize the deal they're accepting with just constantly grinding is actually way worse health on many fronts.
- your wife starts saying, "Hey, you're laughing. You're more playful." The kids are, "Hey, you're not a grumpy dad anymore." There's actually science behind this. The National Institute of Health shows that morning sunlight exposure combined with light physical movement actually helps regulate cortisol levels and start to restore that body's process, especially in the morning.
- We've all heard Andrew Huberman talk a lot about that of get outside, get grounding, get eyeballs, get that sun in the eyeballs, right? And that'll start waking you up. And then delay caffeine 30 minutes or so or even longer, 30 minutes, you know, 1 2 3 hours. And then your body will be a lot more receptive to having caffeine, say going at from 9 10:00 in the morning instead of 600, 7 or 8 in the morning.
- And then therefore you need one cup of coffee to get you through the halfife is of roughly 6ish hours. If you take it at 10:00 and then you have it done at 6 hours from there would be 400 p.m. Then you get home and you start to enjoy your evening time and then move your body with your family or exercise.
- Then when it's 9:00 you're actually ready for bed and you're not having a 2 p.m. coffee break and struggling to go to sleep. the challenge for you. Let me ask you, when was the last time you felt truly restored? Not just caught up on your chores or emails and full energy, your focus, you can think clearly. That type of restored.
- If you can't remember, it's probably time to start changing that now. You're not going to ever be able to perform at your best if your nervous system never gets a break. You're never going to be able to fully show for your family, your business, if the battery is on empty. Andy learned a hard lesson, especially when he woke up from his keyboard nap.
- And he is now in control. He's down weight. He's got energy. and he feels a lot more aligned. He's going to go into his 50th year on this earth in better health, better shape than he did in the first half of his 40s, which is encouraging. I hope you enjoyed Andy's story there about rest, restoration, about becoming back to yourself because it's a it's a real story that so many men live every single day.
- And you do not have to live that. You that does not have to be your daily existence. Let's move on to the fast five. First thing, first question. What's one thing you personally do every day to recharge your energy? Well, for me, Amber and I and our dog Huga, he's a threeyear-old Newfoundland. He's 130 lbs and stands six foot on his own leg. He's a big boy.
- We walk, no phone. We just get out to I actually leave my phone in the car. I've actually learned that because I would take my phone with me and it'd be binging and zinging and vibrating and all this stuff and be disrupted to our time together which then would cause stress between my wife and I and I don't need random buzzes and bings and email notifications taking away from our time.
- We go out and walk, get some sunlight, get some wind, get some fresh air. It's a great reset. Question number two. When you start to feel drained during the week, what's the first sign you notice? For me, my patience drops. I'm a little shorter on my responses. A little more hot short fuse, hot temper.
- And I mean, and when I say hot temper, I I don't mean yelling. I don't mean I just get annoyed. Hey kids, the dishes need done. You've been home for three hours. Why are the dishes not done yet? Things like that. Hey, the cat litter needs. We have four kitties. They need taken care of every single day.
- They're your cats because of COVID support animals. That's why we got them. And and that that usually is what happens. My patience wears thin and I I can say react in a different way than it normally would. Question three. If you could remove one daily habit that steals my energy, what would it be? For me or even my see more importantly my coaching, this has had a profound impact on my day-to-day life.
- Late night screen time for myself, but also my clients. I really get on them about that is that there just doesn't again the bedroom has only room for two S's and it's not screens. Okay. by getting off, shutting down, and having hard cut off. So, you put the phone down. I actually put my phone in another room to help buffer this so that I don't just pick it up randomly or in the middle of night.
- I'm not missing anything. I can get up and manage it all in the next day. So, there you go. Get away from the screen at night in your bed, guys. What's your go-to meal or snack when you need a steady energy boost without crashing later? I love my protein powder. It's usually vanilla or chocolate. I do some other ones occasionally, but mixed with cottage cheese with berries and whipped cream.
- Ah, it's a protein bomb. Tastes so good. Or sometimes I'll do chocolate protein powder, cottage cheese, powdered peanut butter, and I will have a chocolate peanut butter bomb with some whipped cream on it. So good. It'll have 50 60 grams of protein in it. It's filling. It's tasty to me. I really enjoy it.
- I'd recommend trying it out if you haven't. If you love cottage cheese, you will absolutely love this. Question five. If you could give one piece of advice to a man who feels burned out and unmotivated, what would it be? Stop relying on motivation, willpower. They will never be there. You have to move your body, drink water, get to sleep on time, and all your systems start recharging itself.
- The energy, the motivation, all that stuff will come after you take those definitive first steps. So, wrapping it up with our episode here, guys. When was the last time you felt truly rested? Not just that you finish your to-do list, but actually rested in a way your body, your mind, your energy, your emotional body, your everything about you is feeling restored again.
- If that hasn't been in a long while, it's definitely time to look uh how you recover and and manage your time and stress in your day-to-day life. You're not going to ever do your best work. Never going to be fully present at work or with your family. You're not going to do your best fathering or husbanding in a sense or with your partner taking care of them if you're a quarter tank of gas.
- Andy learned through experience. And oftentimes, unfortunately, a lot of guys show up, they've experienced some form of a doctor saying, "Hey, you don't you have bad blood bad blood panels. I've been telling you for years to lose weight." All these things start really showing up for guys. We don't need it.
- All right, skip that. Now, this is exactly what I do in the call to rise, the 100 day fat loss challenge created for men who want to lose 20 plus pounds, regain their energy in the day, understand nutrition, fitness, how it fits into a healthy lifestyle. So, they take control of their health without losing the time or sacrifice of their family or their work career situation.
- And again, if you've been tired for a long time and waiting for motivation, it's not coming. Motivation follows energy. That's what happens. And motivation and energy follows speed. Have to take action.
