Finding what gives you energy
For a long time, I thought I was doing rest wrong.
I was trying all the things you're supposed to try. Taking a long weekend when I could, having an early night, getting outside for walks, catching up with friends. And I'd come back to my usual routine, work, life, everything, feeling more or less the same. Still running on fumes. Still waiting to feel like myself again. I started to wonder if something was just a bit broken in me, like maybe I had forgotten what I needed to allow myself to recharge.
It took me longer than I'd like to admit to realise the problem wasn't something fundamentally wrong with me. It was that I was borrowing someone else's answers to a question I hadn't really asked myself yet. There's a specific kind of depletion that hits when your work is taking more than it gives, when you're not quite sure who you're becoming yet and when the life you're living feels slightly out of sync with the one you actually want. That kind of tired isn't fixed by getting more sleep alone (although a good sleep is a bit of a miracle cure for a lot of things!). It runs deeper than that. And I think a lot of us spend years in that place without understanding why we're still so exhausted despite doing all the right things.
What I've come to believe, rather slowly and imperfectly, is that energy is far more personal than we're led to think. What restores you might leave someone else cold. What fills me up might be exactly what wears you out. And until you find your specific energy sources, the activities, the people, the environments, the moments that actually light something back up inside you, you'll keep reaching for solutions that were never really meant for you.
Finding Your Energy Givers
I don't know about you, but I am a bit of a sofa gremlin. I can spend hours, days, even, lying on my sofa with not much going on, and it took me way too long to figure out that this specific type of rest does not apply to all seasons of my life.
It was only relatively recently, after a long period of doing not much outside of lounging around, that I realised I wasn't feeling any better or more like myself for it. In fact, I was feeling worse. The rest hadn't given me energy, and, if anything, I felt more depleted than ever. And that's what finally got me thinking about the times I had genuinely felt energised or inspired. What had I actually been doing?
There were the times spent with my nearest and dearest, a great workout at the gym, an hour sat at my piano or a good stint of writing at my desk. When I reflected on these things, none of them were the traditional idea of rest or recovery, some of them were decidedly the complete opposite (hello, metric half marathon). But I felt so energised after doing them. More than that, I either felt more like myself, or I lost track of time entirely because I was so immersed in what I was doing.
That realisation shifted something for me. These weren't just hobbies or nice-to-haves. They were the things quietly keeping me afloat, and I'd been chronically under-prioritising them because they didn't look like rest on the surface.
Building an Energy Practice Around Real Life
Knowing what gives you energy is one thing. Actually fitting it into your life is another.
A lot of the things that genuinely restore us take time, and that time doesn't always exist in the way we'd like it to. Whether it's work, caring for dependants, or just the general weight of a packed schedule, it can be hard to carve out an hour for piano practice or make a 9.00am Pilates class when you have a school run to navigate.
And if you're also in the middle of a career transition, pushing through burnout, or navigating a big life shift, your energy reserves are already running low before you've even started.
Speaking for myself, I've really struggled to integrate fitness into my current work life during winter. With cold, dark, rainy mornings and evenings, the thought of getting outside for a walk has been pretty unbearable. And, this might sound slightly ridiculous, but it being so cold has even taken the joy out of sitting at my piano. Having to warm my hands up for ten minutes before I even start my actual warm-ups doesn't exactly work well with a tight schedule. What this taught me, though, is that an energy practice has to be adaptable. If the conditions aren't right for your usual thing, the answer isn't to abandon it, it's to find a version that works for where you actually are right now.
Something I've started building into my life is what I think of as energy pockets. Short, intentional moments in the day to do the things that restore me. A 15-minute piano session. A 30-minute walk at lunch. An hour of writing in the evening if I have the time, or an earlier night with a book if I don't. The key for me has been trying to weave these into the week rather than saving them all for the weekend.
It's easy to fall into the trap of just getting through the week and living for the weekend, especially if you're in a job that's draining you or your schedule is relentless. But when you do that, you end up loading an enormous amount of pressure onto those weekend activities. You're expecting them to reset everything, and what happens when you inevitably have a busy weekend? Suddenly you've gone two weeks without a single energy pocket, and that's a pretty reliable route to burnout.
How to Start Finding What Works for You
When you're experimenting with what gives you energy, start with observation. Spend a week or two just noticing, what activities genuinely lift you up, and what quietly depletes you. No judgement or agenda, just paying attention to how you feel.
Once you've started to identify those things, experiment with your own energy pockets. They don't have to be long, 15 to 30 minutes is a great place to start, though give them as much or as little time as you realistically have. The purpose isn't to build a perfect routine overnight. It's to figure out what actually works for you, and to give yourself permission to let go of what doesn't.
If everyone you know raves about lunchtime walks but they leave you wanting to immediately lie down, or you live somewhere perpetually grey and rainy for half of the year like me, you're allowed to do a 15-minute YouTube dance class instead. Seriously. Some of my favourites have completely turned a flat afternoon around. The point is that these things have to be personal and tailored to you. That's the only way they actually work.
I spent a long time waiting to feel like myself again, not realising that the path back wasn't through rest in the traditional sense, it was through paying attention. Attention to what lit me up, what wore me out, and what I'd been quietly ignoring because it didn't look like recovery on the surface. Your energy practice won't look like mine. It won't look like anyone else's either, and that's exactly the point. Start small, stay curious, and give yourself permission to find what actually works for you. That's where the real restoration begins.