Although it may be easy to blame your tiredness on a poor night’s sleep or staying up on your phone too late, it may actually be for an entirely different reason.
If you often find yourself struggling to stay awake during the day alongside dwindling energy levels, it may be you have a vitamin deficiency.
There are all sorts of vitamins and minerals people need to include in their diet to stay in tip top shape, but it can be easy to let some slide. If you’re feeling sleepy a lot of the time, or struggle to focus, this might be due to a lack of vitamin B12.
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Vitamin B12 is a key nutrient that your body needs but cannot produce. It can help with healthy red blood cell formation, boosting energy levels, improving your memory, helping prevent heart disease and maintaining a normal nervous system. It also helps to reduce tiredness and fatigue.
According to the National Institutes of Health, vitamin B12 is a “nutrient that helps keep your body’s blood and nerve cells healthy and helps make DNA, the genetic material in all of your cells. Vitamin B12 also helps prevent megaloblastic anaemia, a blood condition that makes people tired and weak.”
Your body stores 1,000 to 2,000 times as much vitamin B12 as you’d typically eat in a day, so the symptoms of vitamin B12 deficiency can take several years to appear. Other than feeling tired or weak, a vitamin B12 deficiency may present itself in other ways, including pale skin, heart palpitations, loss of appetite, weight loss, and infertility.
Your hands and feet might also become numb or tingly, a sign of nerve problems. Other symptoms could involve problems with balance, depression, confusion, dementia, poor memory and soreness of the mouth or tongue.
You can grab yourself a tub of 180 vitamin B12 tablets for £7.60 at Boots, which when broken down, will only cost you 4p per pill. Besides Boots, there are plenty of other retailers selling vitamin B12 supplements, including Holland and Barrett, Amazon and Superdrug, to name a few.
You don’t have to rely on just supplements however to get your vitamin B12 fix, there are various foods that contain the vitamin, such as: fish, meat, poultry, eggs, milk, clams, oysters, beef liver, nutritional yeasts and other food products are fortified with vitamin B12.
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Sarah Carter is a health and wellness expert residing in the UK. With a background in healthcare, she offers evidence-based advice on fitness, nutrition, and mental well-being, promoting healthier living for readers.
