You’ve been living and working in an English speaking environment for a good few years. You are constantly grinding and hustling to make the most out of your life. And you are tired, oh boy how tired you are! All the duties and responsibilities weigh heavily on your shoulders. When the evening comes on a typical working day, you just don’t have any energy left to play with your kids, or show affection to your wife. All you want is to be left alone, and watch some Netflix before falling asleep…
Here are 13 things that are constantly burning your energy reserves. It is slowly, but surely leading you down the path which you are dreading – being old, sick and overweight.
So, in no particular order, let’s get started!
Old grudges you hold against people. You might not be actively thinking about them all the time, but they are still there, on the back burner. Every so often, you remember what someone did to you back in your home country, and you get emotional. And these emotions drain your energy.
Being homesick. You are away from your old friends and family. This melancholic state doesn’t allow you to live life to the fullest. The nostalgia that you experience thinking about your home results in you having less energy to live right now.
Guilt. Guilt for having left your parents and extended family. You send money back home, but the guilt is always there, no matter how much money you give. And speaking of how much energy is drained by guilt – oh man, that is a lot!
Constantly being triggered by toxic people in your work environment. When your focus is on those other people, instead of you being focused on your internal emotional world, you are allowing them to drain your energy which you burn by being angry, shocked, afraid and frustrated.
Inability to resolve problems in your life. You cannot draw the boundaries, say no people, and you always have this internal conflict and struggle which is a massive energy consumer.
Living in the flight or fight mode most of the time. If your nervous system is in survival mode, and a veil of anxiety and stress constantly is in the background, it is consuming enormous amounts of energy.
Unresolved known traumas – the moment you think about specific moments from your past, you actively FEEL emotions – relive the same old pain, resentment, hurt. And every such time it happens, you are losing a certain amount of life force that could be otherwise used for living here and now.
Unresolved UNKNOWN traumas – stuff you are not even aware of in your day-to-day life! Things that happened to you when you were 0 – 7 years old, stuff you have no active recollection of. And it is these traumas that are responsible for a lot of your subconscious beliefs and notions about the word. Also, a lot of the related emotions, that haven’t been fully integrated and understood, keep coming back, and burning your energy now – 40 years later.
Constantly trying to control things. At some point in the distant past you learned that if you try to control, it gives you a sense of security. You learned to control instead of trusting and relying upon something. This burns a massive amount of energy.
Paying attention to feeds, scrolling, pointless social media – all of that is sucking the precious life force out of you.
Constantly being stimulated by caffeine, sugar, nicotine, and numbed by alcohol. All these chemical substances give you the energy (or an illusion of energy) when you use them, only to feel the crash a while later. If your nervous system is already on high alert, these substances don’t allow you to calm down which results in a vicious cycle that can ultimately drain a ton of energy.
Not being here and now. When you are constantly planning for the future, or reminiscing about past events, you are not present. Again, you are expending extra energy while your body is running on autopilot, and your mind needs to be working on this additional layer of thinking, planning and reminiscing.
Feeling like an impostor. When you feel inferior to your work colleagues, this sensation of never enough is like an additional energy suction device attached to your body.
