Where Your Energy Actually Goes

Many people believe they feel tired because they are busy. They look at the number of things they have to do and assume the tiredness comes from the workload. Life feels full. There are jobs to complete, people to respond to and situations to deal with. When everything is like that it seems obvious that being busy must be the reason you feel drained by the end of the day.

Sometimes that is true. Work does take energy and there are times when life genuinely demands a lot from you. But often the tiredness people feel is not only coming from the work itself. It is also coming from everything that happens around the work.

Energy is used in many small moments that most people barely notice at the time. It is used when you explain something again so a conversation feels easier. It is used when someone reacts to a decision and you start working out how to help them understand it. It is used when you become involved in solving a situation because you know how to deal with it. Each of these moments may only last a few minutes but they are happening repeatedly throughout the day.

Because these moments look ordinary they rarely get questioned. They look like helping. They look like responsibility. They look like being the capable person in the room. Most people see them as part of being reliable and getting things done.

Over time though they add up. A conversation where you explain yourself for longer than necessary uses energy. A situation where you feel responsible for how someone else reacts uses energy. Getting involved in something that was not actually yours to deal with uses energy as well. None of these things seem significant on their own but together they can take far more energy than the work you were originally doing.

For a long time I believed I was tired because I worked hard. I assumed the long hours were the reason I felt drained. Looking back now I can see something different. The work itself was not always the part that used the most energy. What used the most energy were the situations surrounding it.

It was the conversations where I felt the need to justify a decision. Someone might question what I had decided to do and before I had even thought about it I would start explaining why. I believed that if the other person understood my reasoning the conversation would become easier. It was also the moments where someone else’s mood changed and I immediately tried to work out what had caused it. If someone seemed upset I would look for what I might have done wrong. If someone was frustrated I would try to find a way to improve the situation.

None of those moments looked unusual from the outside. They looked like responsibility and capability. They looked like being the person who could handle things. But they were using energy all the time, often without me realising it.

When people begin looking at boundaries they often assume the focus will be on saying no to someone else. What many people discover instead is that boundaries also show them where their energy has been going. Once you begin paying attention you start to notice the conversations where you automatically explain yourself. You start to notice the moments where you feel responsible for how someone else reacts. You begin to see the situations where you become involved even though the situation did not begin with you.

That awareness changes how you understand tiredness. It becomes clear that the energy you use each day does not only go into completing tasks. A large amount of it can also go into managing conversations, managing reactions and keeping situations running smoothly.

Once you can see that clearly something else becomes obvious as well. Not every situation needs your energy. Not every conversation needs explaining and not every reaction needs solving. Recognising that does not mean you stop caring about people or situations. It simply means you begin to see that your energy has limits and where it goes matters.

That recognition is important because boundaries are not only about what you say to other people. They are also about where your energy goes. When you start noticing where that energy is being used you begin to understand how closely boundaries and energy are connected.

Understanding that connection is where the next part of this conversation begins. In the next blog we will look more closely at one of the places this happens most often, which is the role many people fall into of being the person everyone relies on.