It’s the end of February. Are you still feeling as strong as you were when you were inspired at the start of the year, or are you starting to feel tired and off your best?
Your best, meaning, your best energy, given the cycles or periods of your routine.
Perhaps you’re just starting to feel stronger after a slow build up of momentum through January and February. Potential sickness aside (as none of us can really predict when nature will do her housecleaning), here in February, usually one of these two scenario’s is true.
- You are tired from overexertion at the start of the year
- You didn’t over exert and are living a performance lifestyle, performing at your best.
The thing is, the primary answer to the above question of whether you are feeling strong, or feeling fatigued, which is reflective in your motivation, and attitude, emotions, and momentum, is found in your lifestyle; in particular, whether you’ve been subjected to excess stress, and poor lifestyle habits to cope with that stress and whether or not you’ve made the key changes to resolve it all. Yes, ALL.
It’s far less about your motivation, momentum and emotions and more about whether you are living with optimal energy levels or trying to perform at peak all week and hitting the wall feeling “weak.”
To take that to the core; how much energy you’ve generated and then regenerated? That is the question. Shakespeare would be proud!
For instance, “I’m not motivated,” “I just can’t get myself going,” or “I’m not sure why I’m not performing at the level I could be, it’s only February!” These are things we may be thinking if we personalize a problem that is not a psychological problem but rather a physical one; a problem of depleted energy, which is both an effect of a larger set of circumstances and a cause of diminished health and performance once it’s in play.
Energy? I’m a high achiever, I don’t have an energy problem. Well, yes, you likely do and largely because you are a high achiever. This potential problem is a byproduct of your ambitions.
More on that later.
For now, it’s safe to say, move over nutrition and fitness; there’s an even bigger player far more responsible for how you live and perform, look and feel. It rarely got noticed in the past, because you couldn’t see it and only at night fell the pressure of not having enough of it, but everyone else was feeling the same thing, and so, you just went to bed. But what we’re speaking about here is different, it’s happening during the day and throughout the week and you can feel it.
It’s your energy and today we’re overspending it, overstressing and therefore not producing enough of it, or recovering from it, and it’s what often happens at the start of a new year when we are the most motivated.
You haven’t paid much attention to energy for probably most of your life because you just took it for granted until you noticed it’s diminishing effects on your body—increased inflammation, weight, and pain in your joints like back pain.
It’s all the impact of excess stress, of doing too much too fast, dealing with distressful circumstances, and of course, spending more energy than you are regenerating during sleep and to boot, not getting enough sleep!
Mix the excess stress, with less sleep and your body is producing less energy. Add the poor lifestyle habits that usually follow when you are tired all the time or at least feeling off your peak and now responding to stress in ways that create more stress is making you even more tired as you face each new day with trailing energy debt.
For many of us, that’s what’s happening as early as February in a new year; we are suffering from depleted energy and wondering why are resolve is waning.
Your energy, unlike the “boiling frog fable,” where a frog is put in tepid water, which is then brought to a boil slowly, and, it’s stated the frog will not perceive the danger and then be cooked to death (which is not true, as according to contemporary biologists the premise is false: a frog that is gradually heated will jump out); depleting energy, while it may not cook you to death will catch up on you. And you will often only realize it when you are fatigued. Sometimes seriously fatigued.
That’s why people say “I’m cooked.”
So if this is you, what do you do? That’s what this post is about and if you apply what you learn here it can change your life for the better for ever as you proactively unlock your innate capacity to regenerate.
In other words, you will experience a transformation that can deliver as nothing else can, even if you are dealing with some pretty tough or intense circumstances.
First, take “you” out of it, meaning your psychology, the stories in your head that are defining you like this or that as a result of being fatigued; and accept that while you are responsible for your recovery, there is nothing wrong with you in that you are feeling depleted and “emotional.”
Your body is overspent and it will not function and perform well until you allow your body and brain to regenerate.
Are you ready to change that?
Instead of putting the petal to do the metal and driving yourself to generate even more energy, make a regeneration transformation to look, feel and perform better.
This something far more powerful than most of us has ever considered, and because we’re so conditioned to keep on keeping on that we simply can’t stop ourselves. We tell ourselves stories about why we just have to to keep going and it’s the curse of the capable person.
A Regeneration Transformation, which is a period of time, say here in the 4th week of February, that you will…
1. Change your story and don’t compare yourself to others so that you don’t keep driving yourself to perform when you need to regenerate your life force energy.
2. Embrace your fatigue, as the very thing you are running away from is the very thing saving you and enabling you to be
3. Reduce all unnecessary stress; key word being ALL.
4. Prioritize your sleep more than anything else.
5. If you can access red light therapy (red and near infrared) or what’s more accurately known as photobiomodulation, PBM Therapy, you can help your body recover from the cell danger response to stress and begin producing more energy again, bioelectrical, and biochemical, like ATP.
6. Start optimizing your lifestyle so that you are managing your energy better than ever before.
7. Build your life around your performance lifestyle, not the other way around.
There’s a lot to know about all the above and when you are living a Performance Lifestyle you can call your own, these steps will make all the difference in the world to living life at your best, energy, instead of a life of coping trying to do your best with excess stress and not enough energy.
You can learn more here.
