Personal energy is a commodity just like electricity or gasoline. It needs to be managed in much the same way. Sometimes it can be bought or sold. You may give or receive it as a gift. Personal energy is harder to measure. It takes an awareness of oneself that most people don’t have. Those who have that understanding of themselves will tell you that their energy levels become more manageable as they become more self aware.
I have discovered four kinds of personal energy within myself. This doesn’t mean there aren’t others or that my list is universal for all people. It’s my experience. They are: mental energy, emotional energy, physical energy, and social energy. Mental energy is my ability to focus or concentrate on something. I expend emotional energy to process my feelings and reactions to things. Physical energy is self explanatory, it’s the energy I use to make my body do things. Social is about community. It’s what connects me to others. I expend social energy to build, strengthen, and let go of connections to people.
My Experience
For most of my life, I believed I was broken because I couldn’t understand why sometimes I could do an activity for hours and other days I had virtually no interest in participating in it. Other times I would be invited to some kind of function, but the idea of going made me feel exhausted, yet I would often spend hours doing something else instead. When these things happened, it caused me to examine my motivations or believe there was something wrong with me. It almost always caused me and those around me to view me as selfish.
What I didn’t know is that my life contains various kinds of energy. Each one influences the others, but regenerating one does not increase the rest. Each needs to be nurtured and managed individually. I’ve tried for many years to heal my physical body. And at one point, I realized I needed to work on my mental health too. I didn’t learn how to improve both at the same time until very recently. When I did learn that us guys need to give as much attention to our mental health as our physical, I started to see that I had other kinds of energy that didn’t come under those two categories.
I first learned about social energy in a book about ADD. In it he talks about a person’s need for human interaction and relationships and how that leads many people to search for those things in some type of faith based life style. He says that social energy isn’t a mythical energy that originates from some mysterious deity or all powerful force, but it comes from within ourselves and from positive relationships. It’s the energy we use to decide when and how to interact with other people. We spend it on enriching the lives of those around us. Managing it is about learning to limit our interactions that consume our social energy, spending more time with others that feed and regenerate our energy, and being by ourselves to let it slowly regenerate on its own.
Emotional energy is one that I had a tough time believing in. Even once I was convinced of its authenticity, it took me too long to understand its relevance to my masculinity. I consume it by feeling both positive and negative emotions. I’ve discovered that my depression was a result of an empty tank of this kind energy. Emotional energy is the strangest of all the energy pools because it’s built by feeling emotions, but only by specific ones. Confidence in oneself is the easiest way to increase it. Forgiveness is another way to recover it. The only way I know of to increase your capacity for emotional energy is by loving others unconditionally. Loving others is one of the biggest uses of this energy, but loving someone unconditionally actually increases the size of the pool I can draw from.
Mental energy is one of the fastest growing areas of interest on my Facebook feed right now. A lot of people are learning for the first time that it is separate from physical energy and needs to be managed separately too. This is the brain power that contributes to many of us not being able to sleep at night even when we feel physically exhausted. If I haven’t done much that was mentally challenging that day, I might have a surplus when I try to sleep at night and brain wants to use some of it before it will let me go to sleep. At other times, I have used up my pool of mental energy when there is still a lot of day left. On those days, I like to go out and do something purely social and/or physical; dancing, wondering the mall, or walking my dog are all activities that use less of my mental energy.
Physical energy is one of the easiest for us guys to understand and manage. Not all of us know how to do those things though. Eating healthy and proper exercise are obvious to most of us. But regular checkups aren’t so easy to keep up with. Good rest is also important here. But so are limiting our exposure to addictive substances and practices. Most of us can agree that too much alcohol or street drugs will have harmful effects on our bodies. Did you know that food addictions or consistent use of pornography can too? There are a lot of things to keep in mind if we want to manage our physical energy.
The fun parts for me have been identifying situations that might need more than one kind of energy. Witty jokes require just the right mixture of mental and social energy. Sports use social and physical, sometime with some mental energy thrown into the mix. Sex uses the emotional and physical varieties. Family needs emotional and social. And the hardest for most of us, trying to stop being single uses both social and emotional energy topped off with a good helping of mental energy. I have decided to reserve that last activity for when I have learned to manage all my energy levels adequately.
A good, wholesome, restful sleep will regenerate all my energy pools. I have had 3 different naps while writing this article because I used up a lot of them last weekend. It’s taken me a few days to recover enough of it to finish this project. Now that I’m learning to understand my abilities and limitations surrounding my energy pools, I find my moods far easier to regulate.
If this is you
Maybe you are having difficulty trying to understand why you want to do things sometimes and other times just don’t feel like participating in those same experiences. Learning what kinds of energy you use and in what ways you use them will probably help you manage these things better and give you a greater sense of control in your life. You might have the same types of energy that I have, or you may have other ways to divvy up your pools of energy. The important part, though, is knowing that there are different pools of energy for doing different things in your life. Learn what yours are, and learn to manage them. When you do, you will find yourself better able to do the things you want and avoid the things that suck your energy dry.
If This is Someone You Know
You know that guy that you just can’t figure out what he likes and doesn’t like? There’s a good chance the same thing confuses and frustrates him too. Try understanding that he has different pools of energy to do different things. They might not be the same pools of energy that you see in your life. He might really like hanging out with you at the pool hall, but if he’s had very socially heavy day, he may not feel like it this time. Or maybe he has a pool of energy dedicated to drinking booze. If his boss or a client has just spent the whole day treating him to various fine restaurants and pubs, he may have used up his booze reserves. Whatever the situation, you don’t know what is in his head or how much of which types of energy he has left, so please be kind with your judgments. Hell, he might not even know he has pools of energy. To a lot of guys, the word energy means oil & gas or electricity. Just because he might not understand his own pools, does not mean that he doesn’t have them. In fact, it probably means he’s kind of crappy at managing them in the first place. Give him the space to say yes or no and let him know that either answer is OK. It’ll help him feel like his feelings or at least his decisions matter to you.
What is means
Personal energy comes in all shapes and sizes. It has all kinds of uses. Some of us know what ours are, but most of us don’t. Most guys I know understand the idea of personal energy, but would look at you as though you wore a pink elephant on your nose if you told them he could use one type energy instead of another one. Mine are physical, mental, social, and emotional. Some of you might find my types of energy make sense to you. If they help you understand yourself better and manage the things you want to do and limit the things you can’t do then your world will be a better place for it. The most useful this information has been for me is when I have to explain to someone why I can’t do something I have enjoyed in the past and might still enjoy. I tell them that I want to do those things but I have to manage that type of energy. When I figure out how to do that, I’ll probably return to those activities with gusto. I’m learning new ways of understanding my energy levels every day.
If this or any article on my blog hit a cord with you, drop me a line and join the conversation.
Andy Lidstone 