The Therapy Edit - On how to get more energy

Episode Date: March 27, 2023

We all want MORE of ourselves. More energy so that we can enjoy life to the max. Or sometimes, simply have enough energy to just Get. Through. The. Day.And though we might think that the secret to more energy lies in better sleep or squeezing the most out of slow moments or eating certain foods or exercising, it's actually far more basic than that.Listen in to this solo episode of The Therapy Edit for Anna's fresh take on how to get more energy.This ones a goody. Enjoy!

Hello and welcome to the Therapy Edit podcast with me, psychotherapist Anna Martha. I'll be bringing you weekly 10 minute episodes to encourage and support your emotional well-being. Hi, welcome to today's solo episode of The Therapy Edit. Today I want to talk about how to get more energy because we all want more of ourselves, right? We want more of ourselves to give, to do, to get things done. efficiency is so praised in our culture. And often it's the getting stuff done that finds us justifying a rest or a slower pace or some time on the sofa. It's that we need the energy to get stuff done so that we can justify the rest. Now, you know I have so much to say about rest

and how we shouldn't need to justify it because it is a very basic human need. But I want to talk about how to get more energy and it's not going to be in the way that you think this isn't about tips for sleep or squeezing the rest out of slow moments but it's about this to get more energy we really need to start respecting the fact that we have different resources every single day and the more that we can acknowledge this fact the more energy we will end up having Now let me explain. I used to have, like many of you, an Apple Watch. I literally loved closing the rings.

It gave me great, great thrills at the end of the day to have closed those rings. So for those of you who don't know, the Apple Watch has this kind of metric of these three rings. And one of them is movement. How much have you moved throughout the day? How much energy have you expended on moving? another one is how many times have you stood up per hour no how many hours have you stood up per day and then another one is how many kind of minutes have you done per day of kind of moving more so exercise in a sense and you can change where you set them but once you once you set these

goals that's what comes up every day and you can move towards closing these little wings and throughout the day you can see where they are and I just like loved it. I just love closing those rings. These little visual reminders to move, to stand, to exercise, but they were literally the same every single day. Now, I at points, and I know I'm not alone in this, would overlook my body's cries to rest. Maybe I wasn't feeling 100%. Maybe I'd had a really busy day the day before and I could have just done with totally ignoring the fact these silly rings even existed. You know, I might be found stomping around or brushing my teeth in the bedroom to get the steps in. I might be found doing a workout and kind of going for a walk

at the end of the day when actually I could have probably have done with sitting on the sofa. Now, I just love the data. I just, I'm such a geek. I just absolutely love health data. But these rings made out that we have the same resources available to us every single day, regardless on how well you are, how well you slept, what you're carrying, what stresses you're enduring, what's going on in your life. It's a call to spend the same thing of yourself every single day, regardless of what is essentially your humanness. Now we see it in our children, don't we? Sometimes they, they wake up on the wrong side of the bed. We know what that feels like. And they're just not able maybe to fulfill some of the requests

that we chuck at them. You know, they just want to flop on the sofa. They just want to zone out. They just want to slow down. And we know that we can't demand the same of them everyday. Life does in some ways. Life demands certain things from us that we have to do, some basics that we have to meet every single day but we see in our children they are so much more responsive and so much more obvious about what they have in the tank the thing is with these rings that I was being ruled by and I just loved it and hated it the same time I found it very hard just to take the flipping watch off you know it was demanding the same thing every single day from me totally regardless of how I was or who I was that day. Anyway, my husband before Christmas started

marathon training and he bought a watch and it had, it was very different. There were no rings on this watch. There was no one size fits all demand. No, you know, one day you just have to tap this information in and that's what you're living by every single day. Instead it told you about your body battery. This is what I want to draw on today. Because it's been amazing. It's been amazing thinking about it like this. Every morning he wakes up and it gives him a little indicator

because obviously it's not wholly accurate. I think he's wholly accurate. But a bit of an indicator on how much fuel he has in the tank according to certain data points around sleep and heart rate variability, which is simply put around how hard your body is working to keep you in a state of homeostasis. to keep you, to keep you okay, basically. Now, I'm not telling you to go out and to buy a watch.

I think it would be amazing personally if I hadn't been taught over my life to override my own body and energy levels, to ignore my own needs for so many years that I'm at a point where I turn to this digital information to tell me how I am. I think we should be working on if I'm I'm honest, and I know you'll agree with me, that we should be working on becoming sensitive to how we are, so that we're not needing to look for pixels to tell us what we need and how we are. However, what I want you to take from this is, is that like that body battery that I've got this whipping watch, because honestly, it just, I love it, I love it. And when you have a rough night's sleep, you wake up and you've got less in the tank and it's got a number and it gives

me, what am I on right now? I slept terribly last night at 43. And it tells you, take it easy. Don't do a, don't do a full on workout today. Don't do it. Because you can see that your body, you know, your body is stressed when tired and things feel more stressful more quickly. Now, I just love this instead of keeping our goals every day the same, keeping our standards in the same place every day, it's more about thinking you are a battery. You have a battery in your body. And it's true, isn't it?

We know that certain things energizes us, good sleep energizes us. Nutricious food energizes us, rest and slowness energizes us so that we have more in the tank to spend. So if you're waking up in the morning and you're thinking, I need to do and meet the same goals as yesterday, be it with concentration at work, be it with patients with the kids, be it with the amount of energy that you approach things with, it's a huge ask. In fact, it is overlooking your humanness. Instead, think of yourselves like a battery. You're not going to start the same this morning, then you might. have done yesterday. Perhaps you've had a hard day. Perhaps yesterday was exhausting. Perhaps you're

just feeling really hormonal or emotional or tired or hungry. All of these things impact what you've got in the tank. And some of these things are inside your control. Some of these things we can do something about. We can get an early night like I'm going to do tonight. I can control what time I go to bed. I can't necessarily control how I sleep when I'm in bed. there are things that I can do around it. I know that I've not got much in the tank today. So I'm going to bear that in mind with how I move my body. We're just going to go for a walk.

I'm not going to do high intensity anything today. Now, if you're like me, we can fear that if we take the pressure off ourselves, we'll flop into a heap or we'll let our standards drop to the floor forever and ever. But actually the opposite happens when we begin to trust that what we might, might not be able to face today, we might be able to face tomorrow if we respect where we're at. That by removing the pressure off ourselves when we need it most, we will be able to power on full cylinders sooner rather than later. You know it when you'll run down and when you're ill. If you keep pushing on and pushing on, you're going to be ill for longer. This is that whole idea of looking

at yourself as a battery instead of a line on a graph that just bobbles along on the same level the whole time so start asking yourself how you are start thinking

where are your energy levels where is your battery at today what do you need to do in order to reserve or spend that energy wisely perhaps you've got a busy day tomorrow and you know that you're going to need more in the tank

how might you do think accordingly in line with your humanness. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Therapy Edit. If you enjoyed it, please do share, subscribe or review because it makes a massive difference to how many people it can reach. You can find more from me on Instagram at Anna Martha. You might like to check out my three books, Mind Oath and Mother, Know Your Worth, and my new book,

The Little Book of Calm for New Mums, grounding words for the highs, and the moments in between. It's a little book. You don't need to read it from front to back. You just pick whatever emotion resonates to find a mantra, a tip and some supportive words to bring comfort and clarity. You can also find all my resources, guides and videos

all with the sole focus of supporting your emotional and mental well-being as a month. They are all £12 and you can find them on anamatha.com. I look forward to speaking with you soon. Thank you.