Your Three Rechargeable Batteries
Everything we do - all of our actions - requires energy.
Simple enough of a concept, right? But what does it mean to practice protecting, managing, and activating our energy? That might feel much more difficult to figure out these days.
I wish energy management was a course taught. If you’re in service to others, if you care about making life better, if you want to help or fix or change, chances are you are generous and giving of your time (last post) and energy.
Giving away your energy without regular recharging is a critical contributor to the overing pattern. Overing comes in many flavors: overworrying, overthinking, overanalyzing, overexercising, overnumbing, overplanning, overscheduling, and on and on.
Here’s some hard hitting truth.
Overing is not superior. Nor is it a calling. Self-sacrificing your life is not noble. It’s playing small in your own life. It’s hiding from living.
It’s avoidance of stepping into the deep messiness of your inner big work of spending your energy cultivating what you love and what is yours to do to make this world less of the shitshow that we humans have created.
And all that overing comes at a big cost and usually with tons of regret and grief. One client expressed such anger and grief when realizing how much of her life has been spent supporting the dreams and work of others rather than her own dreams and work. How much of her mental, physical, and emotional energy AND time that she had given away. These realizations can be really painful - I know they were for me too. And also, there’s great power in them so that you can take your power and energy back.
So. Think of your energy as rechargeable batteries, which likely have been drained since before the pandemic and now may even be a bit rusted.
Your 3 batteries are: your body, your thoughts, and your emotions.
Body as a battery is more tangible. It may be easier for you to feel and see when you are drained physically. It’s common in society to talk about sleep, exercise, and food all as resources for recharging the body. All three of those are important, but we are oversimplifying the needs of the body without considering how we ground ourselves, how we reconnect to Nature, how we create an awareness of being in our body, and how we protect our energy yet remain open. I get so many initial responses where folks think that boundaries shut them off to serving others, but actually they are a main way we protect our energy in order to better serve others.
Gauging our thoughts and emotions batteries is trickier in part because our brains have so many ways to convince us we have more in the tank than we actually do. Pair that reality with the stories we tell ourselves about what’s expected of us–and add in society’s hustle, pull yourself up culture–and yeah, that shit is hard to get perspective on!
Our thoughts and emotions can mislead us into crisis response mode when we are out of balance and disconnected. Instead we can cultivate a true kind of knowing, which actually happens in the body first. Our emotions and thoughts are literally afterthoughts to embodied responses. All this to say, we can work to cultivate an awareness, a witnessing of thoughts and emotions that is true.
What we spend our energy on is what gets magnified in our life. And many of us spend a ton of mental and emotional energy on shit that isn’t ours and that makes us feel guilty, anxious, overwhelmed, disconnected.
Take what this one workshop participant said after she did my Overing inventory:
“I spend 50% of my time thinking and stressing. 30% working and doing. 20% ‘fun’ but still stressing about work.”
No surprise then that when our lives and worth revolve around our work or career that our thoughts are filtered through that lens. When we spend our energy thinking about work, worrying about work, sitting at the computer, on the phone with work, we live work. We look through a lens of work which then makes it hard to see other ways possible and rather perpetuates that same overing loop.
When I was in academia, my overing and avoiding showed up as overscheduling and overanalyzing. And everything else in my life revolved around work because work was my lens. I would say yes to tons of shit because I thought busy was a badge of worthiness. I thought if I stayed busy I wouldn’t have to deal with my own gremlins or emotional suffering. I also thought the overing hustle was what it meant to be ambitious and hard-working.
And then I would overanalyze every email, interaction, or conversation to death in my head. In the evening I would be too emotionally and mentally exhausted to meaningfully connect within myself let alone with others so my relationships suffered and some of them failed. Instead I would numb out with social media, binge watching, wine and popcorn until I fell asleep for another not super restful night.
What about you? How does your overing show up? Where does your energy go?
Take a few moments to do a quick check-in on each of your three batteries (body, thoughts, and emotions):
What are you spending each of your batteries on? (Where are you spending your physical, mental, and emotional energy?)
What takes up the most of your energy for each of these?
Here’s a hard one: WHO takes up most of your energy for each of these?
If you find that you are regularly in the red, low zone or just depleted in any one of those, sign up for April’s Grow Boldly Workshop Series where we will explore your boundaries, routines, and tools that get you out of overing and into more intentional, purposeful living and working.
We will explore more of how you can keep each battery in the green recharged level. You can learn what recharges you physically, mentally, and emotionally.