What I've Been Thinking About
⚡ Energy and Burnout
Time is often cited as our most valuable resource, sometimes attention, but I think it boils down to energy. We can only take advantage of our time through an expenditure of energy. If I think about the last time I was sick with the flu and had all of my energy sapped, much of the joy is sucked out of life. Our quality of life boils down to our energy management.
I think the way we experience burnout is through repeatedly hitting empty on our energy reserves day in and day out.
Just like how we can "hit the wall" or "bonk" in a race if we don't pace ourselves properly, we can have a similar experience in our days if we mismanage our energy expenditure. If we view the day as a marathon, with 50% of the race taking place during work and 50% after work, if we over-spend our energy and hit empty by the time work ends, we're going to be pretty miserable the rest of the day. We'll arrive home and not have the energy to do any of those things we had planned for ourselves at the beginning of the day.
Hitting this energy wall at any point in the day leads us in a downward spiral. Because counterintuitively, recovery activities require a non-trivial upfront expenditure of energy.
There are two general types of recovery activities. Ones that increase our energy for the same day we do them, and ones that increase our energy for tomorrow. Realistically, most recovery activities will fall somewhere on the spectrum between the two. A healthy meal will not only provide us with more energy an hour or two from now but also set us up with a higher total energy reserve for the next day.
If we get home from work and we don't have the energy to cook a healthy meal, exercise, read or stimulate our mind, do our evening routine, etc. we're actually reducing the total energy at our disposal for tomorrow.
We can get into a vicious cycle whereby running out of energy early in the day, we can't do the required actions that would give us more energy the next day. Instead, we're left with a smaller and smaller reserve of energy each subsequent day. Even as our total energy reserves dwindle, we still try to do as much as we did the day before. This leads us to draw down our energy reserves and exhaust them quicker and more regularly.
When we experience burnout, our options are limited. We're confined to only doing activities that are passive, like streaming Netflix and grabbing takeout.
The problem with this activity is that while it doesn't really require any energy, it's not a "recovery" activity. Just sitting and watching TV isn't going to give us more energy later in the day, nor the next day.
Just like the saying, "you have to spend money to make money," the same is true for energy, you have to spend energy to make energy.
If we don't budget some amount of our daily energy for "recovery" activities, we'll slowly dwindle and limit our daily usable energy and make burnout a way of life. If we live this lifestyle long enough, it can turn ugly and be tremendously difficult to get out of.
This is how we can have people who essentially live day to day on a shoestring budget of energy. If anything new or unexpected happens in the day, they become irritable and unable to cope with it. They simply lack the energy to do anything except getting through the day. Their entire day is made up of a string of passive activities, yet they still feel too drained to do anything else.
We should reflect on our own energy budget and our daily energy expenditure. Any given day/week/month/year, we're either increasing our total amount of energy or we're reducing our total amount of energy. What does our typical day look like? Is it sustainable? Or are we headed towards energy bankruptcy?
"If we get home from work and we don't have the energy to cook a healthy meal, exercise, read or stimulate our mind, do our evening routine, etc. we're actually reducing the total energy at our disposal for tomorrow." -> This really resonated with me. So true, yet so easy to forget or postpone. Thanks for sharing it Bryan!