What Does Your Afternoon Energy Crash Have to Do With Back Pain?
It’s 3:00 in the afternoon and suddenly you’re exhausted.
You’re reaching for another cup of coffee. You want something sweet. Your brain feels foggy, and getting through the rest of the day feels harder than it should.
You probably think of that afternoon crash as just an energy problem.
But if you also have recurring back pain, I want you to pay attention to it.
Because the same habits that affect your energy — what you eat, how you sleep, how stressed you are, how much you move, and how well you recover — can also affect your back pain.
Your afternoon crash may be one more clue about what's happening in your body as a whole.
Start With Your Lunch
Imagine two different lunches.
Lunch #1: A bowl of pasta, a soda, and a cookie.
Lunch #2: Grilled chicken, roasted vegetables, quinoa, avocado, and water.
Both meals contain carbohydrates. And that's important, because carbohydrates aren't the enemy.
The difference is in what accompanies them.
A meal containing protein, fiber-rich foods, and healthy fats generally takes longer to digest than a meal dominated by highly refined carbohydrates and added sugars. Building meals with a combination of protein, fiber-rich carbohydrates, and healthy fats can help support steadier blood sugar and energy after a meal.
When you eat carbohydrates, your body breaks many of them down into glucose. That glucose enters your bloodstream, and your pancreas releases insulin to help move it into your cells, where it can be used for energy.
That's exactly what your body is supposed to do.
But the type of carbohydrates you choose, the amount you eat, and what you eat with them can all affect what happens afterward.
And you may already be noticing the difference.
Do some meals keep you satisfied and energized for several hours?
Do others leave you exhausted an hour or two later?
Are you hungry again quickly?
Do you suddenly start craving something sweet?
Are you reaching for another cup of coffee just to make it through the afternoon?
Those are patterns worth noticing.
So What Does Blood Sugar Have to Do With Back Pain?
This is where we need to stop thinking about the back as though it exists separately from the rest of the body.
Blood-sugar regulation affects much more than whether you feel energetic after lunch.
Frequent blood-sugar spikes and poor blood-sugar regulation can contribute to metabolic dysfunction and inflammatory processes in the body. And inflammation and metabolic health matter when we're talking about chronic pain, tissue health, and your body's ability to recover.
So if you're dealing with recurring back pain and regularly experiencing afternoon crashes, strong sugar cravings, getting shaky or irritable when you haven't eaten, or feeling exhausted after certain meals, I want to know about that.
Those symptoms give us information about what else may be happening in the body.
This is one of the reasons I don't only ask my clients:
“Where does it hurt?”
I also want to know:
“What else is your body telling you?”
Because your energy, metabolism, nutrition, and pain aren't occurring in separate bodies.
They're all happening in you.
Your Body Gives You Clues All Day Long
One of the things I want my clients to learn is how to notice those clues.
You don't need to obsess over every symptom.
You don't need to track every bite of food for all eternity.
And you don't need to eliminate half your diet.
Start by getting curious.
If you crash every afternoon, ask yourself:
What happened before the crash?
What did I eat?
How long ago did I eat?
Did I actually eat enough?
Did my meal contain protein?
Did I have a good source of fiber?
Was most of my meal made up of refined carbohydrates?
Am I hungry again already?
Am I craving sugar or caffeine?
And then notice something else:
What's happening with my back?
We're looking for patterns.
Maybe you start noticing that the days when your energy is all over the place are also days when your body feels worse.
Maybe there's no obvious connection at all.
Either way, you're learning something about your body instead of dismissing the signals it's giving you.
Try This for Five Days
Here's a simple experiment.
For the next five days, take a quick look at your lunch and ask yourself three questions:
Where's my protein?
Chicken, fish, eggs, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, tofu, beans, lentils — whatever works for you.
Where's my fiber?
Vegetables, fruit, beans, lentils, whole grains, nuts, and seeds.
Where's my healthy fat?
Avocado, nuts, seeds, olive oil, olives, or fatty fish.
Then go about your day.
A couple of hours later, check in with yourself.
How's your energy?
Are you hungry again?
Are you craving something sweet?
Are you reaching for caffeine?
How's your concentration?
How does your body feel?
Don't change ten other things at the same time. Just pay attention.
You might discover that when you build a more balanced lunch, you have steadier energy through the afternoon.
Maybe you're less hungry.
Maybe the sugar cravings aren't as strong.
Maybe you don't need that 3:00 cup of coffee.
And maybe you begin noticing other patterns in how your body feels, too.
That's useful information.
One Meal Isn't a Pattern
This part is important.
We're not trying to analyze every symptom after every bite of food.
We're looking for patterns that repeat over time.
If Tuesday's lunch leaves you feeling great, that's interesting.
If you eat similar lunches for a week and consistently notice better energy, fewer cravings, and a different afternoon than you normally experience, now you have a pattern worth paying attention to.
The same thing applies to your back pain.
Instead of asking yourself whether one particular meal made your back feel better or worse, zoom out.
What do you notice over several days?
What about several weeks?
When does your body tend to feel its best?
When does it feel worse?
What else is happening at those times?
Those are the questions that start giving us useful information.
This Is Why I Look Beyond Your Back
If you've been dealing with recurring back pain for a long time, you've probably spent a lot of time focusing specifically on your back.
You've stretched it.
Strengthened it.
Massaged it.
Maybe you've had physical therapy, chiropractic care, injections, imaging, or even surgery.
And yet the pain keeps coming back.
At some point, I think it's worth zooming out and asking a different question:
What else might be influencing how my body feels and functions?
That's why nutrition matters.
That's why blood-sugar regulation matters.
And that's why something as ordinary as crashing at 3:00 every afternoon is worth paying attention to.
The goal isn't to find one food to blame or one perfect diet that fixes everything.
It's to understand your own patterns well enough to make changes that support your body.
Your afternoon crash might seem completely unrelated to your recurring back pain.
But it's another signal from the same body.
Start paying attention to what happens after you eat — your energy, your hunger, your cravings, and how your body feels.
You might start noticing patterns you never knew were there.
If this resonates with you, follow along on Instagram at @alera_functional_health where I share more root-cause health and inflammation support strategies.
If you’d like a personalized plan that fits your life and helps you feel your best, I’m here to help. Interested in learning more about how you can optimize your health and finally find relief from your symptoms? Schedule a free Discovery Call with me by clicking here.
About The Author
Erin Briley is a Certified Functional Nutrition Coach and founder of Alera Functional Health. She helps people with recurring back pain look beyond the spine to identify often-overlooked factors that may be influencing how they feel, including nutrition, sleep, stress, digestion, inflammation, and recovery.
After experiencing years of chronic back pain, multiple surgeries, and a failed spinal fusion herself, Erin understands how frustrating it can be when pain continues to interfere with the things you want to do. Her approach focuses on practical, sustainable changes that support the whole body and help clients better understand their individual patterns, so they can spend less time organizing their lives around back pain.
