What to Do When Your Energy Feels Scattered

when you feel scattered
gather up your energy
bring all your parts home

If you’ve ever had all day free but gotten nothing done because you felt too tired or scattered, you know that productivity is not a function of time. When it comes to doing your best work, no resource is more important than your energy.

Among people who understand the importance of energy, a common piece of advice is to focus on activities and people that fuel you and stay away from those that drain you.

In theory, this is sound advice. If you were designing an “ideal” or “dream” life you’d fill it with only activities and people who fueled you.

But life isn’t lived in theory.

In reality, it often happens that some activities and people both fill you and drain you at the same time.

Nowhere is this more true than with family.

I love my family. My five nieces and nephews — 3 boys aged 14, 12, and 7; and twin girls who are 10 going on 15 — are amazing. I’m grateful that they live close, that I have good relationships with my siblings and their partners, and that I can be an active and participatory aunt.

And… spending time with all of them at once, especially when you add in my siblings, their partners/spouses, my parents, and the family dynamics that surface in the group setting, can be draining.

It often leaves me tired in my bones.

Sharing this in public by no means diminishes the love I feel for all of them, individually and collectively.

Nor does it diminish the joy I often feel at and after these family gatherings. These family gatherings often produce the magic moments by which I measure meaning — the moments I’ll look back on at the end of my life and remember with warmth and appreciation.

And this is the challenge of real life: we can feel energized and depleted by the same things.

The way I feel after a few hours of family time is similar to how I feel after working intensely on a project. My energy feels scattered, and I feel as if my brain is a device with too many apps open.

Processing speeds slow down. I don’t want to think, let alone do anything involving my mind. I just want to be.

My body and my mind need a recharge.

Identifying when we need to recharge, ideally before we become fully depleted, is essential to maintaining the capacity to do our best work.

How to Restore Your Energy

Avoiding the drain would mean avoiding the joy, and I’m not willing to give that up. So I’ve had to find practices that help me restore my energy before I turn my attention to other things.

When it comes to restoring energy that feels scattered, I have found it most helpful to focus on practices that get me back into my body.

Some activities that I have found particularly helpful for calling my energy back include:

• exercise
• mind/body practices like yoga, especially more restorative types of yoga
• focused breathwork
• dancing
• listening to music
• simply sitting and being
• meditation

What activities help you call your energy back after it’s been depleted?