Why am I Feeling tired?
Checklist for managing your energy not your time to change your life
We all have 4 sources of energy that we can tap into in order to refuel and live our best lives and realize our potential each day before falling asleep again. This post can act as a checklist for you to see where you might be going wrong with managing your energy.
These are:
- physical energy — the quantity of our energy.
- emotional — the quality of our energy.
- mental — the focus of energy.
- spiritual energy — energy derived from a purpose.
None of these are sufficient on their own and they all influence one another.
A key point with energy is that it’s like airplane oxygen masks — unless you take care of yourself, you won’t be able to take care of others and meet external demands.
2 Key components to managing your energy
All change starts from awareness as Muhammad Ali said you can’t hit what you can’t see. This means starting to pay attention to what’s going on inside of you and your energy levels.
After you’re aware of what’s going on now you can start adopting strategies for higher performance by understanding all of the sources for your energy better and what fuels them.
Physical energy
As we live in times of constant demands, our lives have become overwhelming and the to-do list seems to be never-ending and you can never seem to get enough done.
The keys to physical energy are VERY basic but FEW of us have made these priorities:
Sleep
This is the absolute foundation of your physical energy, a recommended 7 to 8 hours should be a daily priority.
Nutrition
There’s much research done on this topic and much confusion but there’s one thing that constantly shows up when talking about nutrition and negative effects — SUGAR. Try to avoid sugar as much as possible as it creates inflammation
Another thing to notice with your nutrition is which foods leave you feeling energized and which seem to have a draining effect after consuming? Increase and decrease.
Fitness
Exercise is all about more effective oxygen transportation in your body. The fitter your body the better for the brain and your cells with a number of proven research.
Micro-rest
Taking time during the day to charge your batteries is not something that our productivity hungry culture gives any praise to, aside from this it is essential to give yourself low-energy downtime and avoid working for any longer than 90 minutes at a time as our bodies work in waves. A more effective prooven way is the Pomodoro technique if you’d like to check it out where you work in 30-minute blocks followed by 5 minutes of downtime and repeat it. A key point to remember that it’s all about the quality of the downtime not the quantity.
Emotional energy
It has been shown by numerous studies that how we feel tends to determine how we perform and behave. So it makes sense that to perform at our best we need to be feeling at our best but we often don’t so this shows in the behaviors that we act on and the results we therefore get. Tony Schwartz from The Energy Project has illustrated well that during a day there are 4 zones we can be with our emotional energy.
Survival zone
Located in the upper-right corner is the zone for high negative energy. This means that we are in a constant reactive state of fight or flight and feeling stressed because of being ready to threats in the environment and can get out of our control by depleting MASSIVE AMOUNTS of energy and eventually taking us to the feared burnout zone.
Burnout zone
This is the place where you don’t want to be because this is something similar to what happens to a balloon after it pops. You’re negative, you’re low energy and you can’t get anything done well. This can last for a long time if you don’t take care of your emotional energy with this one tip.
Performance zone
Now this is where you want to be to perform at your best, having everything come easy and feel exciting.
If you only take away one thing from this whole post then I want it to be this as it might change your life forever for the better. The solution to successful emotional energy management is to DELIBERATELY move vertically between the Performance Zone and the Recovery Zone. The key here is proactivity, doing things on your own terms to not fall into reactivity. So how do you do this? Every time after performing give yourself recovery time — even before you’re really tired so you avoid falling to the negative side of not having enough recovery time. It’s like with drinking water — when you feel thirsty YOU’RE ALREADY dehydrated. Be proactive with ur energy and give yourself time to recover even when still feeling fine.
Mental energy
If your energy is spread too thin then you can have any amount of energy but you just aren’t able to use it effectively. This is why it’s important to narrow in your energy like a laser beam for its maximum effect.
The key to improving your mental energy is to build into your day periods where you can be 100% immersed into one thing. No distractions, no hopping between things. A useful trick for this is to designate a start and a stop time as it will take away the anxiety of being absorbed indefinitely.
Another way to build mental energy is meditation. In its essence, all it is is an attention control practice to laser beam the focus and avoiding it being spread too thin on many things all at once.
The key to training attention is deliberate repeated practice. The same way you don’t get fat eating one burger or don’t build muscle with one workout but many consecutive ones.
As a side tip, waking up and doing the most important thing for the day first for not more than 90 minutes before taking a break in one go will bring amazing results as you avoid the negative emotional energy zones.
And don’t forget that success comes best by biting off a little piece at a time — the same way you wouldn’t try to eat an elephant by putting it all in your mouth at once but rather taking small mouth-sized pieces is how you eventually down it, figuratively speaking.
Spiritual energy
This is the huge source of energy that each of us can tap into from their sense of purpose. Meaning that what you do matters and has meaning. We are teleological creatures as humans and we are thirsty for meaning. As if our brain is always asking “WHY??”.
Ways to create this energy is to help others and add value to the world — essentially being useful and in service as we feel a part of something beyond ourselves. Another way is to seek understanding and learn, especially when combined with serving others with knowledge. Lastly, creating something beyond ourselves and doing it as well as we can.
Your takeaways
I want you to be at your best and realize your potential as much as possible. As time management is talked about often, energy management is mostly ignored. Important to remember that all change starts from awareness as we might not often even realize how bad we feel as it might feel “normal” and have no idea how good we can possibly feel when we do all of this.
Take care of your physical energy by focusing on your sleep, nutrition, exercise, and taking micro-breaks for yourself during the day.
Take care of your emotional energy by having awareness of your emotional state and charging your battery proactively.
Take care of your mental energy by giving your attention the ability to completely immerse yourself and focus on one thing by having start and end times to your activities and having an attention control practice whether that’s meditation or something else.
Take care of your spiritual energy by serving beyond yourself and learning about the world and not forgetting to create to enjoy a sense of meaning and answering that big “why?” question even if it might seem something really small. You’re worth it.
Don’t forget — The more we do something the more part of our natural selves they become and get automated so do these as repetitions and you will soon start noticing the growth. Stay consistent and I wish you all the best!
