 Energy drinks are garbage. Now look, I know many of us when we're tired or when we're having a slow day, go do an energy drink or for some people coffee. But I think for many of us, these do more harm than good. Now in this video, I want to share a why and some other things and substitutions you can use. Hey guys, I'm Dr. Alex Hein, author of the health book, Master of the Day, doctor of acupuncture and Chinese medicine. So before we jump into this video, there are two very important links right below the video. The first is if you'd like to become a patient of mine in Los Angeles or virtually via telemedicine, you can reach out to my private practice and contact it there below. The second is I put together a free guide, which is for daily rituals that could potentially help you add years to your life with traditional Chinese medicine, and that is the first download right below this video. So first of all, I want to throw out this philosophical point here, which is that where does energy come from? Like what makes someone fundamentally feel energized or feel tired on a daily basis? And let's go back all the way through evolution just for a second. Imagine if we were genetically wired to be exhausted all the time. That was our template from nature to have no energy whatsoever. Clearly, this is antithetical to evolution because a person that's exhausted can't forge for food, can't defend themselves, can't hunt, can't protect their spouse, can't raise offspring. All of this is antithetical to surviving and to evolution. So first and foremost, being energized is our natural, healthy, balanced state, right? My very first point is that to have energy is the fundamental base state of good health and it means that you're doing something right. Now if you don't have energy, it doesn't necessarily mean you're doing something wrong, but first and foremost, trying to out optimize what has been optimizing for tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions of years is stupid. So the biggest aspect of energy is always going to be good health, no matter what you do. So people are always trying to find a way to optimize or increase the amount of energy. But what I'm trying to suggest is that when you look at people who have very strong resources, Chinese medicine calls this yang. If you have strong yang, look for example at children who have so much yang, so many resources, run around all day, scream all day and it's unbelievable the amount of energy they have. According to that to a 90 year old grandma and who can barely make eye contact, slow the process, move slow, loses her appetite, our fundamental state is being energized. So if you are doing things like taking energy drinks or multiple cups of coffee, thinking that it's going to give you something other than what a healthy body has for energy, you're wrong. For me, energy drinks are like antidepressants for most people. I don't think the average person that has mild to moderate depression really needs an antidepressant to get through their hard phase of life. Just my two cents. I think they help some people, but I think for a lot of people, going through mild anxiety or depression, put on an antidepressant and then they stay on it for years, which commonly happens, is doing more harm than good. So for many people, reflexively reaching for an energy drink or coffee or something else like that is like reaching for a donut just because you're starving and you haven't eaten since you woke up and it's now 2pm. So there's nothing inherently wrong with having an energy drink, but the fact is they're filled with all kinds of things that most people can't even pronounce. Most of the time we're grabbing them reflexively and we're not thinking that is this going to help me a week from now, a month from now, a year from now not have this issue. And on top of that, that's assuming that they don't do any harm, right, which I think frankly for a lot of people they do. But in terms of pragmatism, fundamentally, low energy in some ways is both a symptom and a cause. And figuring out why that is will prevent you from needing energy drinks or five cups of coffee in the first place. Now one final example here. For so many people I know that are entrepreneurs like me, they will try to sleep five or six hours a night to gain two more hours in a day and then rely on coffee all day long thinking that the loss of two hours is somehow made up by the three cups of coffee they consume to be more productive. Now this is a very short lived promise because talk to that entrepreneur in six months or a year or three years when suddenly their health is much, much worse and they're riddled with acid reflux and they're not sleeping well and they realize that they haven't felt rested in three years and you're going to realize why this is a very false form of energy and it's not something real and sustainable. So I want to give three alternatives to energy drinks. The first is the substitution ritual. So for many people like myself I have coffee from time to time a few times a week and trying to quit it completely has been very difficult. So for a month what I did was habit substitution. It was the ritual of leaving my apartment at 7.30 in the morning every day and walking down to my really quaint neighborhood and getting a cup of coffee that I craved more than the cup of coffee itself. So for me trying to stop that ritual was very difficult. So instead I kept the same habit, the routine and the ritual but instead of buying a cup of coffee I got matcha instead. So the first is if you have some kind of ritual you use an energy drink before studying or before work or before a certain time a sports game. Try swapping it with the exact same ritual you just drink something else and that way your body isn't going through a sense of what like a habit withdrawal so to speak where it's so used to this thing that makes you feel good in the morning and you just go cold turkey which doesn't tend to work. The second thing that I would say that I've seen is using Chinese formulas. That's personally what I do a lot of the time when I'm having low energy. So again for a lot of people low energy can in some ways be both a symptom and a cause right for some people they sleep eight hours but they have very low energy in which case the sleep is probably not the cause of their low energy. So for myself and within my clinical practice we utilize these Chinese formulas to fix whatever organs are not functioning properly. For some people it's digestion that's the cause of the low energy. For others it's the stress response or the adrenals like people like to think of it. That is the cause of the low energy. So we utilize these formulas to adjust the functioning of those organs that are causing the fatigue so that's really the underlying cause. Now the third is really actual substitution of coffee. So for some people if the ritual isn't important to you it's the warm earthy beverage in the morning. So three of the substitutes I recommend for coffee are dandelion blend which is a mix of dandelion and chicory and some barley I believe. Tastes very similar to coffee and you could put milk in it. Oat milk tastes almost exactly identical. Second is tachino and the third not due to taste but just the ritual is matcha. So a lot of people get matcha lattes instead of regular coffee lattes. That's a good substitution as well. So these are three things you can swap out for energy drinks or for coffee that will still give you the ritual and the sensation without some of the downsides as well. So that's my two cents on energy drinks and to a certain extent coffee but we'll talk about that in another video. Before you guys go check out those links right below this video and I have two other related videos for you right there.