15 How Do I Manage My Energy?
Norm had reached his limit, yet again. He’d been doing that a lot lately. Day after day, Norm would find himself taxed beyond exhaustion, to the point of mental numbness. By early afternoon, he already felt like a walking dead man, inside and out. That feeling was itself bad enough. But the strange thing for Norm was that he had no one or nothing in particular to blame, other than himself. Norm wanted to chalk it up to his poor home life or harried worklife, but he knew that doing so wouldn’t be true. His home life could be better but was good enough, and work wasn’t that bad either. No, Norm suspected that his absolute exhaustion was his own fault. He just didn’t know what to do.
Energy
Life takes a lot of energy. You may have noticed how various challenges can seem to tax you to the last, especially when you’re managing those challenges poorly. How we allocate that energy has a lot to do with how well we manage in our spirit, soul, and psyche. Our thinking, our consciousness and cognitive activity, can alone take a tremendous amount of our energy. And what our psyche has us doing takes even more energy, indeed often our very last. Pushing oneself to the limit in a rigorous physical or mental test can be satisfying and strengthening. Try training for a marathon for a physical test and law school or medical school for a mental test. But when our circumstances instead do the pushing, and we aren’t mentally prepared to manage those circumstances, hitting one’s limit isn’t so satisfying. It may also produce mental and physical crises rather than strengthening your mind and body. Managing your energies can help give you the vitality to work on your spirit, soul, and psyche. Consider how to preserve and improve your mental energy.
Exhaustion
If you’ve ever felt drained simply by your thinking, then you know the issue. You can spend a day of vigorous physical exercise and feel nothing but refreshed. Yet you can spend a day struggling with mental gymnastics and feel completely exhausted. You can go to bed at night with your mind racing and get up the next morning more tired than the night before. You likely know the signs and symptoms of mental exhaustion. Beyond the general sense of fatigue, distance, and emotional numbness, you may exhibit irritability and mood swings, feel anxious and overwhelmed, have trouble concentrating and making decisions, and lose interest in activities you usually enjoy. Mental exhaustion can also produce physical symptoms like headache, muscle ache, nausea, and sleep disruption including sleepiness when up and sleeplessness when trying to rest. These symptoms can cause you to neglect self-care, shirk home and work responsibilities, withdraw socially, abuse substances, overeat or fail to get adequate nutrition, and manage your time poorly. Exhaustion isn’t a pretty picture. Monitor yourself for these and other signs, and take appropriate action when you notice them.
Drain
When noticing your mental exhaustion, or even before you do so, examine your mental and social activities for energy drains. A frank review of a full day’s thinking might reveal that fifty percent, sixty percent, or even ninety percent of it is unnecessary, failing to contribute in any significant way. We can think pretty much constantly, without significant restful breaks. Some days, we can act as if we are thinking machines more than human beings. Our minds whir through the day’s activities, spinning off in every direction. When we are doing one thing, we may be thinking about other things. We are in that respect like a computer constantly running programs in the background, draining the computer’s battery and slowing its speed. At times throughout the day and into the evening, we may get especially worked up over this issue or that issue, again not just as we confront things through the day but also odd subjects deep inside in our ongoing ruminations. As we go through our day, we relive aggravating events, experiencing again the negative feelings they produced. We argue in our minds with individuals who are not present and we may not see again for days or weeks. Identify your drains, and begin to cut them off.
Media
We also deliberately engage media, especially the news, sports, and social feeds that we carry on devices in our pockets, purse, or bag. Through these devices, we seek even greater mental stimulation, while using that stimulation to quiet our own mind. We substitute, in other words, the stimulative thinking and doing of others for our own mental activity, letting other sources drain our mental energy. And then, we ruminate over what we just watched or heard. These highly directed feeds are in no sense innocent in their intentions. They instead monitor our every word and track our every glance, with their whole purpose to get us to consume more of their images, no matter the deleterious effect. And the deleterious effects, psychologically, spiritually, socially, and morally, are instant, deep, and vast. The consumption they promote and produce has deliberately reprogrammed our minds in an intentional contagion and delusion. Don’t underestimate the drain that digital media induces. Monitor and limit it. Turn your screen to greyscale, and you’ll instantly reduce its power and drain. Turn devices off and put them away to conserve the energy you need for better things.
Performance
We also drain ourselves in keeping up appearances, both to ourselves and for others. You’ve already seen in an earlier chapter how we construct and project personas, both to give ourselves a sense of identity and to impress and control others. Keeping up those personas can take enormous amounts of energy. From the moment we meet someone familiar, we begin summoning the energy to put on the display that both we and the other person expect of us. We begin performing ourselves or, more accurately, our latest and greatest persona. And when the performance ends with the parting, you can feel the drain in yourself, like an actor collapsing in the dressing room backstage. The drain from performing doesn’t even depend on some form of social engagement. We also perform for ourselves, keeping up appearances to ourselves. Our personas get us out of bed in the morning and immediately begin to dictate what to think and do. We turn ourselves over to our ego to march us through the day on assignment after assignment until the mental and physical activity has exhausted us. Beware the lure of performance. Watch out for the drain on your time, energy, and attention. You won’t entirely stop performing, but you may be able to reduce its frequency and costs.
Interest
In your engagement with others, watch in particular for your intoxicating need to maintain social interest. Society is essential for our health. We crave social interaction and benefit from it. You should spend time with others. But that time shouldn’t be exhausting you in your constant effort to maintain the other’s interest. You don’t need to be a stimulant for the other. You’re not competing to be the world’s most interesting person. Your insights and revelations the other may appreciate. But they shouldn’t be necessary for society and companionship. Indeed, the opposite is more true: society and companionship arise through presence, not performance. The energy you expend trying to entertain your companions with interesting stories and insights may be interfering with the sense of your genuine presence. Others want to feel your heart, not have your grand intellect constantly pique and titillate their curiosity. Monitor your social engagement. If you find yourself exaggerating small details in accounts that you share of yourself, you know that you are seeking to maintain interest. Beware doing so. You may only be costing both you and your companions a genuine sense of your presence. You may also be draining your energy bank better reserved for deeper thoughts.
Surface
The surface nature of interesting but taxing performances and displays is a big part of their problem, beyond the drain that they produce on your mental energies and physical resources. Trying to keep up the interest of another, and putting on performances to do so, keeps you and others from deeper reflection. Surfaces can be attractive, all shiny and with their entertaining features. But they’re only surfaces, things to attract attention but not the substance of what’s beneath. Subjects and objects have both breadth and depth. It’s fine for a while to be topical, skipping along on the surface of things. But to remain at the surface all the time, both with others and when alone, is to miss the opportunity to engage and explore the substance, richness, resonance, and structure of things. Staying at the surface, especially because of a compulsion to entertain and be entertained, can also drain your energies, when a deeper exploration of things might do the opposite, giving you a new well of energy and new space for quiet reflection that don’t deplete but instead restore.
Boring
You can help yourself avoid depleting yourself and others with constant surface entertainment, by seeing the contrary value of being boring. Boring is the last thing many of us want to be in an age of consumptive entertainment. We want social-media friends, followers, views, clicks, and likes just like everyone else. Yet that’s exactly the point of being boring, to counteract that surface economy with something that instead offers stability, richness, and depth. Study who are truly successful, not measured by clicks but instead in deep and lasting relationships, in creating original things of lasting value, and in building enduring things of great value, and you may find them to have been quite boring. The word boring, after all, has two meanings, both to stultify on the one hand and to dig deep on the other hand. The tedious and restrictive routines that make one boring are often the ones that preserve the greatest energy for the deeper digging task, reaching the greatest depth and building things on the most-solid foundation. Let a little boring into your life, and see where its tedium leads you. It may take you deeper, where you need to go to uncover your hidden self, the one who resides in the transcendent creator’s consciousness.
Conservation
When you are not using your mental resources to dig deep, to lay your psyche’s foundation around refreshing wells, think about how you can conserve your mental resources for the day-to-day demands on your attention. Be mindful of the quiet task at hand. Don’t waste your mental energies pursuing abstract thoughts when you have an embodied task at hand. If you’re gardening, think of your best gardening. If you’re working, think of your most-excellent work. If you’re housecleaning, think of your best housecleaning. If you’re fixing dinner, think of making your best meal. And if you’re taking a walk, breathe the air deeply while feeling the activity of your limbs and beating of your heart, and surveying your surroundings for their wonders. For things you do every day, establish, simplify, and follow routines, and take pleasure in those routines. For episodic activities, choose thoughtfully those in which to engage, while being conscious that for every choice you are depleting your energy for other and perhaps better things. Respect requests that others make of you while resisting letting those tasks deplete energies you should have reserved for higher-priority tasks. Give yourself permission to consider your mental capacities when taking on projects and tasks.
Rest
Your biggest challenge with preserving and restoring your mental energy may be getting adequate rest. Regular deep sleep is especially important to mental health and recovery. We barely understand the value of sleep, which we suspect includes cleansing the brain of toxic waste, restoring the capacity for attention, regulating the emotions, deep problem solving of some subconscious form, and preserving, condensing, and reorganizing memory. Maintain consistent sleep schedules if at all possible. Every sleep disruption may be a brain drain. Prepare for sleep with proper nutrition and hydration, quiet time, and a dark, comforting, quiet, and secure place. Short of outright sleep, take frequent breaks from whatever you are doing or thinking about, for mental recovery and rest. Simply getting up from your seat and moving about for a couple of minutes, perhaps to attend briefly to a simple physical chore, can preserve, refresh, and restore mental energy, allowing for longer periods of concentration. Stopping your mental effort just before exhaustion, and then returning promptly after a brief break, may also keep you refreshed.
Discipline
Self-discipline can also contribute to better mental energy. Some of the bigger drains of mental energy are those obsessive thoughts over whatever issue seems to most roil your consciousness. Deep and concentrated thought about a troubling issue can lead to insights, breakthroughs, and creative and stable resolutions. Yet when you find yourself returning repeatedly to an issue without any progress toward a resolution, and while disturbing your psyche and exhausting your mental energy, you may need to discipline yourself to stop mulling the subject. You can build your mental discipline. Your first attempts may be weak and mostly unavailing. Your mind may promptly return to the same issue, thinking about it along the same exhausting lines. Yet on the next occasion, and the next occasion after that, give it a little more discipline. Develop a go-to mental tool, like mentally reciting a particular passage of scripture or reproducing another comforting, guiding, and uplifting thought. In time, you should find an increased ability to control your thoughts, to stop your exhaustion.
Reflection
On a scale from one to ten, how mentally exhausted do you usually find yourself? Do you have frequent occasions where you know that you’ve used up nearly all your mental energies and are struggling with your awareness and thoughts as a consequence? Do you wake up mentally refreshed or still exhausted? Do you have regular sleep hours and show reasonable discipline in maintaining them? Do you have an appropriate place for sleep? Do you require frequent stimulants to maintain your mental focus? Do distractions deplete your mental energy? Does overthinking or obsessive thinking deplete your mental energy? How disciplined do you believe yourself to be to avoid obsessive thoughts? Do you have a go-to construct or memory aid to help you stop obsessive thoughts? Do you spend a lot of energy entertaining yourself and others, putting on displays and performances? Do you find yourself exhausted after meeting with an acquaintance whom you know? Are you trying to always be interesting? How comfortable are you with being boring?
Key Points
Adequate mental energy can be important to a strong psyche.
Mental exhaustion can bring cognitive, emotional, and physical harm.
Monitor the drain of mental energies by overthinking and distraction.
Limit or eliminate mentally draining media designed to hold attention.
Stop performing for you and others, to preserve energy for better acts.
Don’t expect yourself to always entertain the interest of others.
Don’t exhaust mental energies with surface things grabbing attention.
Let yourself be boring, devoting yourself to focused, deeper things.
Learn to conserve your energy by focusing on embodied tasks at hand.
Safeguard your sleep and take frequent rest and recovery breaks.
Develop your discipline to control and eliminate overthinking.