Published studies on the things people try first · Read this before you spend another six weeks pushing harder
No new plan. No extra discipline. A free five-minute check that shows which signals in your own answers speak loudest.
"I do everything right and I am still tired."
Perhaps you know that, or recognise something similar. Waking up tired after seven hours of sleep.
That hour after lunch when your head goes foggy. Reading the same paragraph twice. Being too tired at half past seven in the evening for the thing you were looking forward to. Legs like lead on a flat street. Losing your patience over something small. Cancelling on people and feeling bad about it.
I am Jesse van der Velde. Not a guru and not a doctor. I study and share what published research says about how a body ages. I have been testing that on myself and with the people I guide for more than fourteen years.
What I hear a lot of people say is "then I need to try harder". That is not true.
Because the things you have already tried have been tested in studies, and what came out of them is more specific than the advice you were given.
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Many people try one piece of advice after another, when it comes to their food, their health, getting their energy back. But each time they do not get the result.
Then they try again. Try harder. Apply it even more consistently. But nothing helps.
The things you tried were not foolish. Several of them have been through randomised studies. And in those studies the outcomes are more precise than "do more".
In 2008, Timothy Puetz, Sara Flowers and Patrick O'Connor published a randomised study in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.¹
What was studied: what six weeks of fitness training does to the feeling of energy and to the feeling of fatigue, in people who are tired but not ill.
How: 36 healthy young adults who described themselves as getting little exercise and who reported persistent fatigue. Important: these were people without a defined medical condition, who also did not meet the criteria for an unexplained fatigue syndrome. They were split by drawing lots into moderately intensive exercise, lightly intensive exercise, or no treatment, and the two exercising groups came to the laboratory three days a week for six weeks, 18 visits in total. Energy and fatigue were scored every week at the beginning of the third session, and fitness was measured at the outset and once again at the end.
The findings, in two halves. For the feeling of energy, both the light and the moderate group improved, by about the same amount. For the feeling of fatigue, the effect depended on the intensity, and the most favourable outcome came with the light exercise.
And then the finding that changes what you do with this. The changes in energy and fatigue were independent of the changes in fitness.
Read that again. Getting fitter was not the mechanism. In this study, six weeks of gentle work shifted fatigue, and that did not happen because anyone became fitter.
Now the second study, which says something about where an effect becomes visible at all.
In 2010, Crystal Haskell and colleagues published a randomised, double blind and placebo controlled study in Human Psychopharmacology.²
What was studied: whether a multivitamin with minerals changes the thinking work and the fatigue of healthy women.
How: 216 women aged 25 to 50 took either one branded product with many ingredients or a placebo for nine weeks. They came to the laboratory at the start and again at the end, and at both visits they did two separate blocks of 20 minutes with a multitasking assignment of four modules, a heavy task built precisely to wear people down.
The findings: in the group with the supplement, the dip in mood and fatigue that normally comes with such a long task was smaller. Accuracy across all tasks went up, and on two separate tasks, mental arithmetic and the Stroop task, the answers were both faster and more accurate. In a subgroup of 102 women, homocysteine in the blood went down.
And then what that study cannot say, because that is the interesting part. One product with many ingredients was tested, so no single vitamin or mineral in it can take the credit. And the effect became visible under load, during a long, demanding task. A study that had let people sit quietly would have found less.
So two published outcomes, pointing the same way: the answer is not always more, and what you find depends entirely on when you look.
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18 sessions, six weeks, and the lighter group did better on fatigue. That is the study above, in 36 young adults who moved little and had persistent fatigue.¹ Small, short and in a narrow group, so read it as a direction and not as a dose for you.
216 women, nine weeks, and the effect showed up during the demanding task. That is the second study, and the shape of that finding is the point: the difference was in how far mood and fatigue sank during prolonged multitasking.²
10 out of 49. In 2004 Laura Juliano and Roland Griffiths published a critical review article in Psychopharmacology. They searched the literature and found 57 experimental and 9 questionnaire studies on caffeine withdrawal that met their criteria. Across those studies together, 49 different symptom categories had been reported. Ten of them passed their test of validity, among them headache, fatigue, less energy and activity, lower alertness, drowsiness, difficulty concentrating, irritability, and a foggy head.³
Read that list again slowly. It is almost exactly the list you would write down if someone asked why you are tired.
You know your own version of this. Mine is a period in which I trained four times a week, ate properly, went to bed on time, and in week three was more tired than when I started.
I read that as evidence about myself. Not disciplined enough. Not fit enough. Push through.
Look at what was really going on. Six weeks of harder work is the arm of that study that did worse on fatigue.¹ I did not fail at the plan. I did the version of it that was tested and came second.
A judgement about your character gets you nowhere. Nothing constructive comes out of it. You cannot try harder to be a different person.
A week you have never measured does have a next step. You can put it next to the published research.
1. Train harder.
Whether you train hard is of course up to you, and there are plenty of good reasons to do it.
But realise what harder does and does not do for fatigue. In the study above, the feeling of energy went up at both intensities, and the most favourable outcome on fatigue came with the lighter one.¹ And neither outcome ran through fitness, because the changes were independent of the change in fitness.
You were not lazy. You chose the arm of the study that did worse on precisely the thing you wanted to solve.
2. Another coffee, and the one after that.
How you use caffeine is of course up to you.
But realise what caffeine does and does not do here. The review article found that fatigue, less energy and activity, less alertness and difficulty concentrating are validated withdrawal symptoms, that in experimental studies headache occurred in 50 per cent, that complaints usually start 12 to 24 hours after stopping, peak at 20 to 51 hours, and last 2 to 9 days, and that even stopping at doses from 100 milligrams a day produced complaints.³
The authors also report that it becomes more frequent and more severe as the daily dose goes higher. So the middle of your afternoon is not a fixed fact about you. Part of it moves along with a habit, and that habit is one you can take a look at yourself.
3. Pushing through until Friday.
What it does: you make it to Friday. What it does not do: measure anything. The week ends, the fatigue does not, and you start the next one with exactly the same unread pattern.
4. Deciding that this is your character.
This is the one that costs the most, and there is a published instrument that has something to say against it.
In 2003, Helen Michielsen, Jolanda De Vries and Guus Van Heck published a validation study in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research.⁴ Fatigue can be measured with a short self-report list, it behaves as one coherent dimension, and in their factor analysis it emerged as a separate construct, apart from the mood questionnaire alongside it.
So fatigue is something in its own right, something you can measure. And not a judgement about what kind of person you are.
Four moves, one shared problem: none of them starts with what is actually going on with you.
The advice failed here, and it was the sensible sounding kind. You did nothing wrong. It can be different.
This is the essence of it. If fatigue is a measurable dimension in its own right, then the useful first step is not another attempt. It is a measurement.
That is what the 2003 validation study makes available. Ten questions, filled in by the person themselves, a high internal consistency, strong correlations with four other fatigue scales, and of all five questionnaires the highest loading on one clear factor. Eight of the ten questions were free of gender bias, and two showed a uniform bias that the authors say does not stand in the way of using the scale.⁴
The BioProfile energy scan is derived from that instrument. And one thing belongs with it out loud, because that is the honest limit: our scan takes over only part of those ten questions and adds questions of its own, so the published cut-off value of the original scale does not carry over to it. Your score is a profile of your own answers, and never a clinical category.
And that is exactly what makes it useful in the way that counts here. It shows you which of your own signals are the strong ones, before you put another six weeks into an approach that was built for someone else.
On one condition. That analysis has to be about you: your energy through the day, your dips, your own answers, question by question, set beside what published research describes. A general list of energy tips does not tell you which signals in your week are the hard ones.
BioProfile has built that first step. A scientifically validated questionnaire, five minutes, free and with no account.
You answer questions about your energy through the day and about your daily life. After that you see which signals in your profile speak loudest, and what the research says about them. Not a medical examination. An analysis of your own answers. You use the outcome yourself, or you put it on the table with your doctor or your coach.
Then the daily side. What I put into it myself every morning is a glass: Green Juice, a plant-based all-in-one daily drink mix with more than 44 ingredients, including vitamins, minerals, herbs, grasses, fruit, vegetables, algae, probiotics and digestive enzymes. The B vitamins in it and minerals such as chromium and potassium contribute to a normal energy-yielding metabolism and to the reduction of tiredness and fatigue through the day. One glass, every day, as a steady base.
And to say it plainly: this is a daily nutritional base. The pattern of your own week is still yours to map. That is what those five minutes are for.
You do the free check. Five minutes, no account, and there is nothing to buy.
Even if you do nothing with it, you have traded "then I need to try harder" for an analysis of your own answers. That trade is worth five minutes.
And the next time someone tells you to push through, you will know which signals in your own profile speak loudest.
Do it while this page is still open. Another six weeks of trying harder is the expensive alternative.
Our scientifically validated questionnaire gives you answers
The scan is not a medical examination. It is an analysis of your own answers. If complaints persist, consult your doctor.
