By Stephanie Schorow, Special to Lifescript It’s 4 p.m. and you’ve hit the wall. You can’t concentrate and your zip is zapped. But hold off on that Snickers fix. Find out what’s draining your energy and learn how to put more pep in your step… You haven’t been getting enough sleep lately, but could that be all that’s zapping your energy? Constant weariness may stem from more than a few late-night parties. Some culprits? Disease or heavy bleeding, for example. Or it could be your couch-potato habits and poor diet.Whatever its cause, ongoing fatigue can leave you vulnerable to infections, according to a Carnegie Mellon University study published in 2009 in the Archives of Internal Medicine. Of 153 healthy men and women aged 21-55, those who got less than seven hours of sleep were almost three times more likely to catch a cold than those who slept eight hours or more. But fatigue isn’t just triggered by physical causes, says Lilian Cheung, R.D., a Harvard University lecturer and director of health promotion and communication at the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Nutrition. It’s mental too. Being stressed out or working too hard – even thinking too much – saps energy levels, she says. “The mind needs to rest.”Sometimes an underlying medical condition – diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, fibromyalgia – drains your get-up-and-go and you’ll need a doctor’s help to treat or manage symptoms. But we can be our own energy-s…[...]

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No Energy? 8 Ways to Get from Slow to Go