Feeling persistently tired in your 60s, 70s, or beyond isn’t just “getting old.” While your body does produce energy less efficiently with age, most of the fatigue older adults experience comes from fixable problems: poor sleep quality, nutritional gaps, dehydration, medication side effects, or too little physical activity. Addressing even one or two of these can make a noticeable difference in how you feel day to day.
Why Your Body Makes Less Energy With Age
Your cells produce energy in tiny structures called mitochondria. As you age, these power plants become less efficient. They generate less of the fuel your cells run on while producing more waste products called free radicals. Those free radicals damage the mitochondria themselves, creating a cycle: damaged mitochondria work even worse, produce more waste, and decline further. This is one reason fatigue feels more persistent in later decades than it did at 40 or 50.
You can’t reverse this process entirely, but you can slow it down and compensate for it. Exercise, nutrition, better sleep, and staying hydrated all support mitochondrial function or reduce the burden on your energy systems. The rest of this article covers what actually works.
Build Strength to Fight Fatigue
Resistance training is one of the most effective tools for improving energy in older adults, and it’s consistently underused. Lifting weights or working against resistance builds muscle mass, which directly counters sarcopenia (the gradual muscle loss that accelerates after 65). Less muscle means your body works harder to do basic tasks like climbing stairs or carrying groceries, which makes everything feel exhausting. Rebuilding that muscle reverses the equation.
You don’t need to spend hours in a gym. Two to three sessions per week, with at least one rest day between sessions that target the same muscle groups, is enough. Start with weights you can lift for 5 to 10 repetitions, and increase the weight once that becomes easy. The key is progressive overload: gradually asking your muscles to do a little more over time. Bodyweight exercises, resistance bands, and machines all count.
Walking and other aerobic activity matter too, but for the specific problem of age-related fatigue, strength training delivers outsized results. It improves circulation, supports better sleep, and helps your body use insulin more efficiently, all of which feed back into higher energy levels throughout the day.
Eat Enough Protein (Most Older Adults Don’t)
Researchers recommend that adults over 65 consume 1 to 1.2 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight daily. For a 160-pound person, that’s roughly 73 to 87 grams of protein per day. Most older adults fall well short of this, partly because appetite naturally decreases with age and partly because meals tend to become lighter and more carbohydrate-heavy.
Protein is the raw material your body uses to maintain and repair muscle. Without enough of it, muscle loss accelerates regardless of how active you are, and that loss directly contributes to weakness and fatigue. Spreading protein intake across all three meals tends to work better than loading it into dinner alone. Eggs at breakfast, legumes or chicken at lunch, and fish at dinner is a practical pattern that gets most people close to the target without dramatic dietary changes.
Check for Vitamin B12 and Iron Deficiency
Vitamin B12 deficiency affects roughly 9% of older adults, and the symptoms are easy to miss. Fatigue, brain fog, mood changes, and general weakness can all stem from low B12, but these overlap with so many other conditions that the deficiency often goes undiagnosed for months or years. Your body’s ability to absorb B12 from food declines with age, so even a diet that includes meat and dairy may not provide enough.
Anemia is another common and underrecognized cause of persistent tiredness. It’s diagnosed when hemoglobin drops below 13 g/dL in men or 12 g/dL in women. In older adults, anemia often develops slowly, so you may adapt to the fatigue without realizing how much energy you’ve lost. A simple blood test can identify both B12 deficiency and anemia, and both are treatable once detected. If your energy has dropped gradually over months without a clear explanation, these are worth investigating.
Fix Your Sleep (It’s Not Just About Hours)
Older adults spend less time in deep sleep, the most restorative stage of the sleep cycle. This means you wake up more often during the night and feel less rested in the morning, even when your total hours of sleep haven’t changed much. The perception of poor sleep is real: lighter sleep genuinely restores less energy.
A few adjustments can improve deep sleep quality. Keeping a consistent wake time (even on weekends) helps anchor your circadian rhythm, which tends to shift earlier with age. Limiting naps to 20 minutes or less before mid-afternoon prevents them from stealing deep sleep from the night. Physical activity during the day, especially resistance training, promotes deeper sleep. Reducing light exposure from screens in the hour before bed also helps, because bright light suppresses the hormone that signals your brain to transition into sleep.
If you’re sleeping seven or eight hours and still waking up exhausted, the issue is almost certainly sleep quality rather than quantity. Sleep apnea is common in older adults and frequently goes undiagnosed. Snoring, gasping during sleep, or waking with a dry mouth and headache are signs worth mentioning to your doctor.
Drink More Water Than You Think You Need
Dehydration is a surprisingly common cause of fatigue in older adults, and it’s sneaky. As you age, your body carries less water overall, and your thirst signals become less reliable. By the time you feel thirsty, you’re already mildly dehydrated, which can cause fatigue, dizziness, lightheadedness, and difficulty concentrating.
The fix sounds simple, but it requires a deliberate habit. Drinking water on a schedule rather than waiting for thirst works better for most people over 65. Keep a water bottle visible. Have a glass with each meal and between meals. Dark-colored urine is a reliable signal that you need more fluids. If plain water feels unappealing, herbal tea, broth, and water-rich foods like cucumbers and watermelon all contribute to your daily intake.
Review Your Medications
Several drug classes commonly prescribed to older adults list fatigue, drowsiness, or grogginess as side effects. Muscle relaxants can leave you feeling foggy and confused well into the next day. Anti-anxiety medications and sleep aids, particularly benzodiazepines and common prescription sleeping pills, take longer for older bodies to metabolize, so their sedating effects can linger through the following morning and afternoon.
Blood pressure medications, antihistamines, and certain antidepressants can also contribute to persistent low energy. If you take multiple medications (which is common after 65), the combined sedating effect can be greater than any single drug would cause on its own. This doesn’t mean you should stop taking anything, but it does mean a medication review with your pharmacist or doctor could reveal a surprising source of your fatigue. Sometimes switching to a different drug in the same class, adjusting the timing of a dose, or eliminating a medication that’s no longer necessary makes a meaningful difference.
Hormonal Changes and What They Mean
Levels of DHEA, a hormone involved in energy and mood regulation, peak in your 20s and decline steadily from there. This decline has been linked to reduced cognition, lower mood, and shorter lifespan. It’s tempting to assume that replacing the hormone would restore youthful energy, and DHEA supplements are widely marketed for exactly that purpose.
The evidence doesn’t support it. According to a comprehensive review of the research, DHEA supplementation has not been shown to improve muscle strength, physical performance, or cognitive function in older adults. The same pattern holds for most “anti-aging” hormone supplements: the decline is real, but replacing the hormone in pill form doesn’t reverse the effects of aging in the way the marketing suggests. Your effort is better spent on the interventions that do have strong evidence behind them, particularly strength training, adequate protein, and addressing sleep quality.
Putting It Together Practically
If your energy has been declining and you’re not sure where to start, a blood test for B12, iron, and thyroid function is a reasonable first step because it can reveal problems that no amount of lifestyle change will fix on its own. At the same time, adding two days per week of simple resistance exercises and increasing your daily protein and water intake are low-risk changes that most older adults benefit from within a few weeks.
Energy in older age rarely comes down to one single fix. It’s usually a combination of factors, each stealing a little vitality. Addressing several of them simultaneously tends to produce results that feel disproportionately large, because the improvements compound. You may not feel 30 again, but feeling meaningfully better than you do right now is a realistic and achievable goal.