Master Your Energy (Part 1 - Your 4 Batteries)

Energy is defined as the capacity for doing work. What kind of work? Physical, emotional, mental. Moving, digesting, thinking, laughing, creating, speaking, listening. To live, you need energy. To live fully, you need full of energy (or is it that living fully gives you lots of energy?). The more energy you have, the more capacity you have and the more resilient you are.

If time is finite, energy is not. Quantum physicists studying matter and energy particles and spiritual leaders studying human consciousness share the understanding that everything is energy. Energy is everywhere, connects everything and makes up everything that exits. This means that whatever way you look at what exist, energy is at the core, including yourself. This makes understanding how your energy works essential if you want to take the lead of your life and harness your energy for things that matter to you.

I will not pretend here that I know everything about energy and how it works. However, I am offering you some ideas and analogies that I hope will help you conceptualize how your energy works in a way that empowers you. This post is the first of a series of posts on energy. In future posts, I will cover your natural energy cycles and provide practical tips on how to optimize each of the energy pillars describe below.

Your 4 health and energy pillars

When you think of energy, I am guessing you think of the energy you have in your body. When you have lots of physical energy, you probably feel like running up the hill (at least I do!) or do something with it (like kids who spontaneously start to tease their siblings just for the sake of doing something). What do you do when you feel tired? You give your body what it needs: sleep, food, water, and exercise. However, taking care of our body is often not enough. You also need to nourish your heart, mind, and soul to feel alive and at your best.

Robin Sharma coaches high performing clients to care for their 4 interior empires: mindset, heartset, healthset, and soulset. Tony Schwartz encourages you to manage your energy, not your time. For him, “energy comes from four main wellsprings in human beings: the body, emotions, mind, and spirit.” When you think of your energy from this perspective, it gives you more power to tap into 4 energy sources to live your life fully and show up at your best.

Body

Let’s look at these four energy pillars more closely. The first energy pillar represents your physical health and the overall quantity of energy you have. To have capacity to do anything, your body needs to function properly so that you can transform energy into what you need. Although this analogy is simplistic, think of your body like a car. Your car needs fuel (food and nutrients), but it also needs the engine (your heart and lungs) to be strong and well maintained to transform that fuel into power and movement. Your car needs the mechanics to work smoothly (your mobility), enough fluids (water), and appropriate and regular use (exercise) to avoid unnecessary wear and tear. One key difference between your body and a car though is that your engine and your entire system can get stronger with proper training and recovery without having to replace parts.

Emotions

The second energy pillar is your emotional health which represents the quality of your energy. The emotions of joy and love do not have the same energy quality than anger, guilt, or shame. Emotions labelled as more ‘positive’ are lighter and bring harmony and flow. The ‘negative’ ones feel heavy and bring chaos. When you can tap into higher frequency emotions, your sense of energy expands rather than contracts, you feel high rather than low.

Mind

The third energy pillar is your mental health. This represents your mindset and the focus of your energy. Where you put your attention is where your energy flows. The less clear and focus you are, the more your energy will be lost in meaningless activities and thoughts and the more drained you will feel. The more mental energy you have, the more you can tap into your higher functions (thinking brain, capacity to act intentionally) as opposed to be reactive, driven by your reptilian brain and limbic system (impulsive, survival mode). Think of your focus as a headlamp. The narrower the light beam, the more intense the light is and the more clearly you see in front of you. If you widen the beam, the light intensity diminishes. Although you can see more shapes around you, you don’t see the details as clearly.

Spirit

And finally, the last energy pillar is your spiritual health. This one speaks to the alignment of your energy with your values and with a sense of purpose or meaning. In other words, it represents the level to which your energy flows between you, your higher self, others, and nature. The more connected and aligned you are, the more the energy flows freely and is not lost in invisible battles. Think of it as the water that flows down the stream. The riverbed and gravity direct it down so it can gain speed and power. Put a dam on it or add multiple junctions and the water will stop its flow or be weakened by splitting into many streams.

Activate and recharge your batteries

I invite you to think of your energy as 4 interconnected batteries representing the 4 pillars of your energy, health and well-being. All 4 of your batteries need to be activated and recharged regularly to give you the right energy quantity, quality, focus, and alignment.

Like a batterie, if you don’t fully recharge before demanding more from yourself, your capacity will diminish (batterie C in the figure below). And if you totally drain your batteries, it will take more time to recharge and be able to function again (batterie D). Have you noticed that you can use your phone while it is charging, but if you have left it drain completely, you have to wait for the battery to recharge a bit before using it? And if the power goes too low, your phone goes on battery saving mode? It is the same for you and your energy. And this phone analogy works also for all the apps running in the background. The more thoughts and emotions you have running unchecked, the more this will drain your vitality.

The good news is that one fully charged battery or pillar can help feed another one that has been more taxed. For example, a strong sense of purpose and emotional balance can help sustain mental focus despite feeling a bit tired because we were up all night to care for your child. The same goes the other way around: if you run empty in one pillar, this pillar will drain energy from the others. Work too hard for too long and you will feel irritable and disconnected. When you are running out of energy, you feel heavy and more irritable, you are less focused, and you tend to disengage and feel more negative.

As I mentioned above, unlike a car, your capacity can adapt to what you need. You don’t have a fixed energy budget. This means two important things. One, by taping into your 4 energy pillars and recharging them fully, you can increase your overall capacity (batterie A). In other words, by embracing discomfort and pushing your limits just enough, you can get stronger. Two, if you don’t invest in and use your full capacity regularly in any pillar, your potential will diminish (batterie B). You probably know that as it relates to your physical fitness. The more you run, the more capable you become at it. But stop running for a while, and you will lose that gain. Same goes for our emotional, mental, and spiritual energy. If you feel purposeless and bored, your physical energy will remain untapped and diminish over time. You can only count on your full potential if you regularly tap into and nourish these four dimensions. To harness your emotional, mental, and spiritual energy, you need to invest in developing your potential.

Beware of your energy exchange

To master your energy, start by becoming more aware of the energy exchange between you, others, and your environment. We are all connected, so energy is contagious!

Start by paying attention to the flow of energy within yourself. Where do you feel blocked in your body? Are you in your head too much? Then be curious about how you feel in your relationship with different contexts, situations, people, food, activities. What are you sensing in your body in these different moments? What emotions are you experiencing?

To improve your overall energy, use that increasing awareness to identify what drains your energy and what fills up each of the four pillars. Decide to make time for those activities, places, people, and habits that fill you up. Try to reduce or eliminate what drains you or learn to establish healthy boundaries to protect your energy.

I also invite you to be more intentional with how you invest your energy and nourish yourself. Look ahead at your schedule and plan time for nourishing your body, heart, mind, and soul. Ask yourself if that food or activity is truly nourishing you or simply providing a short-term pleasure that will leave you feeling depleted or low after the initial high.

In future posts in this series on energy, I will cover in more details each pillar and provide practical tips on how to leverage and recharge them. But next, you will learn how to leverage your natural energy cycles.