Energy In: Why We Have Forgotten How to Restore Ourselves

We don’t always think about what it takes to keep going. The daily expenditure of energy on our work, relationships, parenting, managing a household, being a person in the world with responsibilities and demands and people who need things from you. A lot of that is energy going out.

Now think about what you do to recover, recuperate, and reenergise. When we examine these themes honestly, we often find that our responses are less detailed than we would hope. Sleep (if we are getting enough of it). A holiday once or twice a year. Maybe a gym session - though if that gym session is high impact stress on the body, and focuses on performance metrics or aesthetic goals, it may be energy out in disguise.

We are living in a cultural moment that is almost entirely organised around energy out. Do more. Be more. Optimise. Fill your diary. And the consequence is: burnout rates at record levels, exhaustion and busyness being normalised or celebrated, people on sick leave in numbers that should alarm us on a societal level. However this isn’t a great mystery. It is the consequence of output chronically exceeding input, and nobody quite seems to notices until our physical systems fail.

You cannot keep exhaling

The simplest way to understand this is through breathing. You cannot keep exhaling. At some point, the body insists on an inhale. Not as a reward for having exhaled sufficiently, not as something to be earned, but as a biological necessity. The inhale is not optional. Without it, the exhale becomes impossible.

Most of us understand this intuitively about breath, while failing to apply it to the rest of our lives. We treat genuine restoration as something to be fitted in around the edges of everything else, if there is time, which there usually is not. We know that a long journey requires an electrical charge a full tank of petrol. However we fail to apply the same logic to ourselves and our lives. We keep ‘driving’ and we are surprised when the 'car' eventually splutters to a halt.

What energy in actually looks like

Energy in is not the same as doing nothing, although it might well be. It is not about slowing down, switching off, or achieving a particular meditative state. It is about the personal quality of your experience rather than the pace or content of it. The question is not about the specific activity that you are performing. Instead it is about the relationship that you have with the activity. Are you doing it to prove something, achieve something, or tick something off? Or are you doing it because it genuinely replenishes you?

A person who walks and listens to a podcast they love, is not being unproductive. They are restoring. The step count is a happy accident. The cardiovascular benefit is real and present. But neither of those things is why they participate in the activity and that distinction matters hugely. The same walk, approached as a step-count target to be met, is a task. The internal experience of the two walks is entirely different, even if they look identical from outside.

Energy in can look like movement, connection, creativity, nature, stillness, music, cooking, gardening, baking, reading for pleasure, being with people whose company genuinely nourishes rather than depletes. It can be vigorous or gentle, noisy or quiet. What energy in involves is a particular quality. We tend to arrive at the end of it a more energised version of ourselves than when we started.

The optimisation trap

One of the more subtle features of today’s popular culture is the way it has taken over the ideas of rest and recreation. Hobbies have become side hustles. Exercise has become about a performance metrics and wearables data. Holidays pictures are for social media rather than true memories. Even meditation apps track streaks and send notifications. The framework of productivity and achievement has extended into all spaces, and the result is that many of us have very few experiences in our week that are genuinely free from measures of output and improvement.

If your hobbies are primarily achievement-focused (the sport organised around competition and winning, the gym organised around aesthetics and numbers, the reading organised around the books you can say or post that you have read) they may be producing satisfaction without producing restoration. Satisfaction and restoration are not quite the same thing. You can feel accomplished and still be running on empty. You may never truly activate your 'rest and digest' parasympathetic nervous system.

Why 50:50 is aspirational

The ideal life may be one where energy out and energy in exist in some version of balance. While this is a worthy aim, it might not quite be realistic or achievable for most people in most seasons of modern life.

We may dream of a life where energy is spent and replenished as effortlessly as the tide coming in and going out. The busy parent, the person managing a demanding career alongside significant family responsibilities. The sandwich generation trying our best to prioritise everyone else's needs simultaneously. We cannot simply redistribute our time in the direction of restoration. The demands we face are real, and they do not pause to check in on our wellbeing while managing them.

The point is not to find the perfect 'energy in-energy out' balance. Rather the aspiration is to shift one's ratio in the direction of a little more energy coming in, to avoid us running on empty indefinitely. Even small, increments of genuine energy in, can change our experiences of energy going out. The changes do not eliminate the demands. However, they can change the resources that we have available for meeting them.

What gets in the way

For many of us, the obstacle to energy in is not time alone. It is the internal relationship that we have with rest itself. Rest can feel like laziness. Downtime can produces guilt. Our still minds often start to generate lists of things that should be happening instead. These are not character flaws - they may be indicative of deeper difficulties.

When we have been oriented towards pushing forward, building, achieving, ticking adulting checklist boxes, or climbing the corporate ladder, we often lose sight of what genuinely restores us. We often find that we have forgotten to ask ourselves what we actually enjoy.

What therapy can offer

Therapy is in itself can be a form of energy in. It provides a space that belongs entirely to you. Therapy centres your experiences rather than anyone else’s needs. It can be a space where you can examine your relationship with rest, understand what gets in the way of genuine restoration, and to begin to develop a different relationship with the energy in.

If you feel that your ratio of energy out vs energy in requires attention, and you are trying to carve out spaces in which you get to truly exhale, therapy may be worth exploring.

Dr Erin Reid is a counselling psychologist offering online therapy to individuals, couples, adolescents, and families across the UK and internationally, and 'Walk and Talk' therapy in Northwest London green spaces. Visit drerinreid.com to find out more.