Managing your energy to better manage stress

Stressful situations are constant in our lives; every stage of birth, growth, invention and development always involves high degrees of stress. Looking at stress from this perspective we can see that stress is good, necessary. But then, if stress is a part of life, how do we reconcile the proven fact that certain life-threatening diseases are caused by stress. This year alone I have heard of four people who died from stress related conditions. It should make us ask questions about how something so intricate to our growth and development as individuals, families, companies and countries can also be so detrimental.

Stress shows up through situations that make a demand on us. The situations and demands all vary from time to time and, however, a key question is, what is the demand being placed on? What is this demanding stimulus demanding? Think about it for a moment…

Your energy… Energy is the ability or capacity to do something.

Every situation that we find ourselves requires our energy, some situations demand more energy than others, however, all are demanding the same thing- our Energy.

A crying or ill child requires your energy to either feed it or care for it. Your work target requires energy from you to think creatively. Family and friends require your energy for various engagements. As we know, it’s not the time that we spend on something that helps us achieve positive results, it’s the energy we bring to it.

You can look at a crying child all day long but if you don’t engage it with your energy, you won’t achieve anything. Same thing applies to your work and everything else you need to do. Every situation, positive or negative requires our response. It requires our energy.

One of the reasons why we get stressed out or maxed out in a demanding situation is because our energy reserves are low in that we have run out of energy to respond.

Every human has four energy dimensions through which we process energy and they are, the Physical, Mental, Emotional and Spiritual- these are also our energy reserves. Our energy is stored and processed through them. Imagine a flour-mill, the grain of wheat can be converted into white flour for baking cakes, wheat flour or spaghetti. It’s all the same wheat flour now in different dimensions and when you depend on the urge you need to satisfy, any of these can be consumed.

As you can imagine, each of these energy banks have to be replenished regularly because different situations in our day pull on them in varying degrees.

Take the crying child for example. Depending on what the discomfort is about, the situation would likely pull on your mental bank where you have to process what the cause of the discomfort might be. Your physical bank (carry her, feed her, nurse her, take her to the hospital) and your emotional bank- empathy, staying calm.

Is the picture getting clearer?

If you don’t have any energy stored in your mental, for example, not able to concentrate or imagine what it wrong with the child; physical ( I don’t have the physical ability to carry, feed, change, take him to the hospital because I am so tired) or the emotional (stay calm, not be irritated, angry, panic) the situation will put you in a state where, you start to feel pressure both from inside you and outside. Your body will sense danger and in turn trigger the fight or flight mode in us, releasing hormones that help the body respond to the chosen course of action; fight or flight.

Take a minute to apply this to any situation that stresses you out. Can you see how it pulls on specific aspects of you? Your physical state, your emotions, your thought processes, and then your spiritual?

The situations may be intense, take the recent fuel scarcity and no power situation, how we respond, and how we LET the situation affect us makes the difference with if we are stressed out or not. How we respond and how the situation affects us is determined by how much energy we have in our banks to cover the situation. If you don’t have enough mental energy or even emotional strength, these situations will wear you thin.

So to manage the impacts of stress, we need to keep our energy banks full by constantly and adequately renewing it- storing energy in the bank.

You cant give what you don’t have rings very true here. If you have not put money in the bank, your ATM card is not going to give you cash.

Next time we’ll look at each of the energy banks, how they inter-relate and how we can build up our energy reserves in each of the dimensions. Until then, let’s be more conscious of the situations around us and which of our energy banks they are pulling on.
Love your body. info@bodyworksnigeria.com.

Oyinkan Talabi is a wellness and performance coach who focuses on helping individuals and organizations get the best out of themselves and their teams.