By John Allen Mollenhauer and Catherine Pastille PhD
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.
