Most people know the impact of the lifestyle challenges, but not what they are and how they need to deal with them.

In my own life, the hidden lifestyle challenges, one or another, sometimes a combo, have held me back or at times have driven me a little bit crazy. I don’t mean crazy, I mean, just a little bit crazy. And usually during stressful times, when stress has outpaced my ability to take care of myself, my body or matters of life better, two symptoms will show up.

1. Low energy and weight gain (of course, because I’m out of energy balance; a basic you can’t live without)
2. A negative outlook or attitude (meaning, my internal dialogue starts to fall apart, and become unsupportive as low energy leads to a very different outlook on life consumed by current circumstances.

What’s so interesting about these two outcomes, is that most people try to combat them by adjusting food intake or activity levels alone, as they deal with the consequences, and worse, they compare themselves to others when they are not in the position they want to be, and that’s about the worse thing you can do!

During these times, in what we call “The Perfect Storm”, you are in a most susceptible or vulnerable time. The reason is simple, you neither have the energy and endurance, or the right thinking to make sound decisions and move forward.

In Performance Lifestyle training, where we are essentially take healthy living to the next level so that we can achieve our goals better, we realize that there is far more to the lifestyle equation than eating better and exercising more to deal with the symptoms of our current circumstances.

We learn a broader array of lifestyle skills so that we can deal with situations and have more options available to us in any given situation to be more successful and make healthy choices.

Every lifestyle skill you learn depends on two aspects, or two themes that run through our lives. And if you want to get your lifestyle working better for you, and experience what healthy living looks and feels like at the next level beyond merely focusing on nutrition and fitness alone, then must learn how to improve…

• Your energy level
• Your understanding of how to tell stories about your life (or any aspect of it) that are supportive.

If you don’t understand how to manage your energy, and tell a supportive story, your capacity to function and perform well, diminishes in the inverse proportion to your skill.

And believe, me…

These are two skills you do no want to live without. I have bloodied my knees to learn these two skills and I must say, they present me with the biggest challenges.

I suppose there is a reason why, they everything you do and if you are going to do it well, depends on these two skills!

The most precious resource for business people is not time, but rather energy. Today’s fast-paced world often depletes our energy and wears us down, resulting in a trend that is difficult to recover from. Therefore, we need to find ways in which to better manage energy to stay healthy.

In our all-access, information age, which is biased toward constant output, productivity and achievement, it is deceptively easy to deplete our energy, our very force of life, by partaking in too many activities and subjecting ourselves to unhealthy lifestyle practices in order to deal with the stress and fatigue.

Time vs. Energy

Don’t get me wrong, time is extremely important, but time without enough personal energy is limited. Just living, being, hanging, relaxing and recuperating your energy during “downtime,” (not necessarily achieving) is not really downtime; it is preparation for productivity, especially when you proactively recuperate. This time is more productive than half-baked work time, which is perceived as wasted time in many cases, or what has come to be known as time that is not fully engaged.

Read more about this at the Web Success Team, where business owners are starting to live performance lifestyle.

You can be somewhat productive when you are half-baked but not for long. You will eventually hit the wall, leading to unhealthy lifestyle practices to deal with stress that often leaves you overweight and, eventually, with health complications.

Shawn and I have been leaders in the emerging field of lifestyle performance and I love doing events with him.

In this this insightful 5 minute interview, Shawn asked about the one thing people can do to optimize their energy right now.

I went back and listened to the 5 minute clip again this morning and I noticed a comment that he made at the end of the segment where he mentioned… (I paraphrase)  “that people are often looking for a more complicated answer to how to increase their energy, when the answer is simple“.

Now I know exactly what he meant and that he was right on. And yet, I then thought to myself, yes the answer is simple, but the truth is -  the simple answer’s are often very complex, not because they are complicated, but because you need to have a full understanding of all that goes into increasing and managing your energy, before you can do it well.

That’s the difference between a lifestyle solution and say drinking a cup of coffee. Drinking a cup of coffee to increase your energy is very simple, but the consequences of relying on stimulants to manage your energy will get very complicated. Learning how to recuperate you energy (sounds simple) but is actually pretty complex, but once you know how, it’s actually is simple.

It’s not enough to say, simply – sleep, rest, recover, (relax) and rejuvenate your energy and you’ll increase your energy; if it where that simple everyone would be doing it. Remember these are lifestyle activities and they require that you have the ability to stop yourself and those two words will reveal allot about your life. If your life is overwhelming for example, that alone will prevent you from being able to do even simple things like recuperate your energy.

So I wanted to share with you 3 steps for increasing and managing your energy.

Note: unlike food and fitness where you are working with tangible items in most cases, to manage your energy you’ve got to develop a mental dashboard so you can manage something you can’t see; managing your energy is a game of pure learning and getting grounded in experience.

1. Learn the difference between vital energy and food energy
2. Learn how how to actually recuperate or “regenerate” your personal energy
3. Get grounded in experience.

After all, it’s not what you know but how you actually live that matters!

~ JAM

PS: I will be uploading content and a very special ebook on this very subject at ManageYourEnergy.com in the coming weeks, I’ll keep you posted and keep sharing some posts on this subject.

There is no force more fundamental to your sustainability and longevity than regeneration, which quite simply means your body will repair itself and recast itself and regain it’s strength when you recover or regenerate vital energy, feed your body nutrient rich foods, and activate and strengthen your body based on a rich reserve of vital energy.

And today, that means you must manage your energy better than ever before if you are going to maintain a physical position of strength, given there are so many energy drains per day (stresses) that if you are not careful you will end up in the downward energy trend.

When we press on and never slow down for yellow lights – the signs and symptoms of too much stress, or not enough energy, or the consequences of not having the right kinds and quality of energy to operate with, you drive yourself into the downward energy trend.

You literally “drive” yourself down (in some cases into the ground) and while the body is resilient it is only resilient to a certain point; which, if passed, no amount of heroic efforts at diet and exercise will turn you around as fat loss resistance and metabolic syndrome will take hold.

Regeneration is quite possibly the most powerful aspect of lifestyle and you need to know it as it is the number 1 (numero uno) consideration for (peak performance) performing at your peak there is, even before food and fitness.

This is a video from my buddy Jon Hinds of the Monkey Bar Gym on the subject as it relates to training, even though he doesn’t refer to “regeneration”.

I will be delving into that subject more at ManageYourEnergy.com, one of the key Performance Lifestyle solutions that we will go live with soon.

If you are feeling low on energy, and your training is not going so well, it’s time to start managing your energy better  by periodizing your schedule.

You can learn the ins and outs on periodization at The Lifestyle Coaching Center.

You can’t see it. It’s difficult to describe. It’s rather like being stuck in one spot. It’s a feeling of discomfort or lack of well-being. There’s a sensation of exhaustion or inadequate energy to accomplish usual activities. It’s the hidden variable that’s holding you back.

It’s called Personal Energy Debt or “DET” referring to what happens when you are in the Downward Energy Trend.

Personal energy debt or as my friend and associate Brendan Brazier calls it “biological debt” is what happens when we fail to meet the personal obligation we have to ourselves to find the space and time we need in order to replenish the vital energy that makes health and success possible.

Being in personal energy debt feels a lot like being naturally tired but with a few very important differences. When you’re in personal energy debt, your efforts to get the sleep, rest or to recuperate – even if you have a healthy eating plan and exercise plan in place – aren’t paying off for you in terms of increasing your energy.

The experience is different for everyone.  You may get exhausted very easily. You may feel like you just don’t have anything left to give to anyone or to put into your work.  If one thing happens in your day that is unexpected, you don’t have the energy to deal with it. Everything you are asked to do – even if it’s to enjoy the company of friends – feels like it’s just one more thing you don’t have the energy to do.  You may notice that you’re more irritable and sometimes you may feel more hopeless than you even did before.

If you’re experiencing these types of things – and particularly if everything you tried to improve your energy has not worked, or worked for a while but then stopped working – you are likely in personal energy debt.

What’s the most important thing to know about it?

First, it’s how to take the right steps to change your course, get out of personal energy debt, get into balance, and be released from these restraints. Energy debt is vicious. It’s like being chased by an ax murderer you can’t see. Sound bad enough? That’s what’s like, and it really helps to get it our in front of you. It’s allot easier when you can at least see your foe.

Feeling tired after a hard day’s work or even a great day of play is natural.   Feeling muscle or mental fatigue after spending a good deal of time doing the same type of activity for awhile is normal.  Your feeling naturally tired or fatigued, when it is clearly a result of your exerting yourself without rest is your body’s way of signaling to you that it’s running low on vital energy.

This type of natural tiredness and fatigue is signaling that its time to lessen your activity so that your body can “recharge” so to speak – to take in or regenerate energy without your spending it as fast as it comes in.  To do this in a natural healthy way, the smart strategy is to create space, meaning that you put distance between your activities or thoughts.  For example, you take a break, you clear your mind, or you give yourself ten minutes or more between meetings to re-set.

WARNING: If you are smirking at that “ten minute” break as some cute little healthy living idea, then the time you will need to get out of personal energy debt if you are overspending will only increase.

Creating space in your schedule and in your mind gives your body a chance to “re-store” your vital energy reserves, and to build-up the vital energy you need to invest in your activities with a little left over so that you can flexibly adapt to the unexpected events that happen throughout your days.

You can’t get this energy with raw eating, eating healthy food, eating better, eating healthier, better eating choices… we are not talking about food energy here. I am referring to vital energy and you can only get it when you recuperate it.

In effect, creating space really means that you purposely, proactively and periodically lower your activity level to the point where you’re absorbing more energy than you are using for the purpose of restoring and building energy for effective action.

The idea of creating space is attractive to many of us; but for many of us the idea of creating space also translates into thinking about the time it takes to re-store our energy as being “unproductive”.  The tradeoff between creating the space we know we need and the time it will take us to restore our energy can create a real dilemma for us.  We may start to think “I can’t get everything I have to do, done as it is.  If I add in “space”,  it’ll be even worse!”

Many of us feel like we have to make a choice between creating space in our mind and schedule to re-store our energy and using our time productively and effectively.  This is a false choice.  Creating the space you need is how you stay productive and effective!

One of the ways that you move passed this roadblock to managing your energy is to translate your concern about time into some useful knowledge about your energy system that will help you make smart decisions about how to keep yourself feeling energized.

JAM and Rosie in San Diego - Biking at Dr Fuhrman's Health Getaway

JAM here,

I am here in San Diego taking a quarterly vacation, that is “much needed” to say the least. On day one, it felt like I was withdrawing from crystal meth, as I started to pay back my accumulated energy debt from prior months and the past couple weeks.

Paying back energy debt and knowing how to do it is a key lifestyle concept you need to know if you are going to manage your energy well.

Whew! It’s no surprise to me why most of us eat our way through the day most of the time to stimulate ourselves for vital energy.  On Friday night all I wanted to do was eat to buffer the feeling of fatigue which was more extreme than usual because of my travels last week, where I virtually missed an entire night sleep.

The combination end-of-quarter fatigue, the missed night sleep and the intensity of launching the new NutrientRich.com (Tuesday the 13th) all played into a very tough Friday which took experience and fortitude to handle right.

That feeling of extreme fatigue is nothing new for most people especially people who like to be peak performers whether they say that or not. You know, we all need to be peak performers in today’s performance culture whether you’re a soccer mom or a CEO, or both.  It’s just the way it is these days. We know we can’t live at peak all the time, but to be at peak when we need to, you need to know how to manage your energy.

It’s why most people will tell you that they need a few days to wind down before they can actually get into a vacation. The key is to handle energy debt (fatigue) right and plan to handle it ahead of time, if not you end up needing a vacation after your vacation.

Unlike my trip to New Orleans two weeks ago where one decision ended up having a profound impact on my energy for the week; this go around, we ( my business partner and dear friend Rosie Battista and I) left 2 full days before the start of the conference we are attending  – Dr Fuhrman’s Health Getaway here at the Rancho Benardo Resort in San Diego, which is going to be a very relaxing yet chock full week.

My priority is getting out of energy debt and fast not only for the start of the conference, but so that when I come back from the conference, I’m powered up with reserves for the next quarter which I will need.

The only way to do that is to do what we call “facing your true condition“. It’s the process of embracing fatigue for what it is, the process of getting your energy back, by engaging in a focused period of rejuvenation.

If you are new to facing your true condition, it can be  one of the most challenging situations to be in and it requires some real understanding of physiology and energy management; if, you want to get back to your peak performing position sooner than later.

I just faced it on Friday as I arrived and all through Saturday and I’m still working on it today. Actually I will be rejuvenating all week, but the worst is over. As I said earlier it was like withdrawal. But here is Sunday and I already feel like a different person.

The ultimate secret to peak performance, is knowing how to get your energy back either proactively or re-actively given your circumstances.

I’m feeling really good about my tact these past couple days. Today I’m near ready to begin the conference starting tonight and I just finished a great workout down at the spa.

Quick Story: I was on the elliptical while listening to Meeting of the Minds on The Future of Technology, and I looked into the TV glare and saw a great reflection of the shirt I was wearing. It was my friend Shawn Phillips’ T-Shirt for Strength for Life, and on the front it says “Time for Change”. I thought to myself, “yeah it is” and proceeded to think about the changes ahead for me. It’s all a matter of lifestyle; a Performance Lifestyle that is. 

Now kicking my feet up and watching the second half of the World Cup Final.