Energy Is Your Most Valuable Currency (Not Time)
For much of our lives, we are taught to manage our time. To organise it, optimise it, protect it, stretch it, and somehow squeeze more productivity out of each day. Time becomes the primary metric by which we measure success, efficiency, and even self-worth.
And while time certainly matters, I’ve come to consider that something even more fundamental sits underneath it all…
what if your energy is actually your most valuable currency?
I ponder this regularly because you can have an open calendar, a long weekend, or even a whole month off and still feel flat, disconnected, and exhausted. Without energy, time doesn’t feel spacious. It feels heavy. It feels challenging. It feels hard to access the parts of yourself that are creative, compassionate, present, and alive.
Energy is the invisible force behind how you show up in your life. It shapes the quality of your attention, the tone of your thoughts, the texture of your emotions, and the way you experience your body. It quietly determines whether life feels nourishing or draining, supportive or overwhelming, meaningful or simply something to endure and get through.
And yet, most of us have never been taught how to consciously relate to our energy.
We were taught how to push. How to persevere. How to override discomfort. How to adapt to systems that move faster than human nervous systems were ever designed to move. Very few of us were taught how to listen inwardly, how to notice subtle signals, or how to work with our natural rhythms rather than against them.
So it makes sense that so many capable, caring, sensitive people, just like you and I, feel tired.
Not because we are doing life wrong…
But because we are doing life in a way that rarely honours our human limits.
Why So Many People Feel Burned Out and Exhausted
As a Keynote Speaker and Corporate Wellbeing Consultant, the bulk of my enquiries centre around burnout, disengagement and employees physical and emotional energy management at work. People want to do better but they are exhausted. Too drained to do more, be productive get creative or hold their focus. To understand and express their emotions in a safe and effective way. Employers always want to see more engagement and productivity - but guess what - that takes energy and effort to do! Many people more generally search for answers to burnout, chronic stress, and low energy. Why? Because they sense something deeper is happening. They don’t just want productivity tips. They want to understand why they feel depleted and how to restore their energy in a way that actually lasts.
Burnout is rarely just about workload. It’s often about long-term emotional exhaustion, nervous system overload, and the quiet accumulation of pressure over time. It’s about spending energy faster than we can replenish it, often without realising we’re doing so or having the skills to address it effectively before it really takes a toll.
This is your invitation into a more compassionate, nervous-system-informed approach to sustainable energy instead.
A Gentle Explainer: What Do We Mean by “Energy”?
When I speak about energy, I’m not only talking about physical stamina, although that’s part of it. I’m also not only speaking in a spiritual sense, although that matters too. I’m speaking about the total available capacity of your system — body, mind, emotions, and nervous system — to meet life as it is.
It’s your physiological energy (sleep, nutrition, movement, health).
Your mental energy (focus, cognitive load, decision fatigue).
Your emotional energy (capacity to feel, process, and relate).
Your nervous system energy (whether you feel safe, settled, and regulated).
All of these layers are in constant conversation with each other.
This is why someone can be sleeping eight hours a night and still feel exhausted. Or eating well and exercising, yet feeling flat. Or loving their work, yet quietly wondering why they have low energy and feel tired all the time.
You see, energy is not a single switch. It’s an ecosystem.
And like any ecosystem, it thrives when it’s tended to with care.
Ancient Wisdom and Modern Forgetting
Across many ancient traditions, energy has always been considered precious. Life force has been understood as something to protect, cultivate, and move with, rather than override. Rest, ritual, rhythm, and relationship were not luxuries, they were foundations.
Modern culture, however, has largely replaced this wisdom with a productivity-first worldview. We are encouraged to treat ourselves like machines rather than living systems. We override fatigue with caffeine, distraction, and discipline. We normalise functioning in a semi-exhausted state and call it adulthood.
It’s not surprising that burnout has become so common. And to be clear, this is not because humans are weak. It’s because we are asking human nervous systems to survive in inhuman conditions. We’re overloaded and underresourced. Let’s unpack that …
When Life Starts Costing More Than We’re Earning
Imagine if you never looked at your bank balance. You swipe, spend, subscribe, and commit without ever checking what’s coming in or going out. Eventually, you’d find yourself in debt, right? Not because you’re irresponsible or broken, but because you were never taught how to track, value, and steward your resources.
This is what I see happening with energy all the time.
We spend energy on our work, our families, our relationships, our inner worlds, our responsibilities, our hopes, our fears, and our attempts to be good humans in a complex world.
Spend, spend, spend.
We are spending constantly.
And very often, we are spending more than we are replenishing.
Until we’re spent.
Burnout rarely arrives as a sudden collapse. More often, it arrives as a quiet accumulation of energetic debt. This adds up as the tiny withdrawals made day after day, without enough meaningful deposits.
One day you realise you don’t quite feel like yourself anymore.
You’re still functioning. Still showing up. Still doing what needs to be done.
… But the colour has faded.
I’ve been there more than once, and that moment can feel unsettling.
But from lived experience I can also share - it can also be the beginning of a much kinder way of living, too.
What It Means to Treat Energy as Currency
When you start to see energy as currency, something subtle but powerful shifts. You begin to ask where your energy is actually going, what consistently drains you, what quietly nourishes you, and what feels like an investment rather than a cost.
Energy, like money, can be spent consciously or unconsciously. It can be invested wisely or leaked slowly. It can be grown, protected, squandered, or saved.
This isn’t about becoming rigid or hyper-controlled. It’s about becoming more lovingly intentional.
It’s about building a relationship with yourself that’s based on listening rather than forcing, curiosity rather than criticism, and care rather than constant correction.
The Three Ways We Spend Energy
Over time, I’ve noticed most energy spending falls into three broad categories: intentional, neutral, and leaky.
Intentional spending is energy placed into things that feel aligned, meaningful, and life-giving, even when they stretch us. Purposeful work, creative expression, nourishing movement, time in nature, deep conversations, and practices that reconnect us to ourselves. These things might use energy, but they often give something back too. You may feel tired afterwards, but it’s usually a clean, satisfied kind of tired.
Neutral spending is the necessary maintenance of everyday life: think emails, admin, errands, logistics. Not particularly nourishing, not particularly depleting, but part of being human.
Leaky spending is where many of us unknowingly lose the most energy: overthinking, people-pleasing, poor boundaries, perfectionism, constant context-switching, emotional over-responsibility, and carrying what isn’t ours to carry. These drains often operate quietly in the background, which is why they’re so easy to overlook.
Burnout often comes less from doing too much, and more from leaking energy in too many places.
Why Rest Alone Doesn’t Fix Low Energy
Rest matters. Sleep matters. Time away matters. But if the way we are spending energy remains unchanged, rest alone rarely creates lasting change. It’s like pouring water into a bucket with holes. Helpful in the moment, but not fundamentally resolving the pattern.
Many people say to me, “I’m resting, but I still feel tired,” or “I’m doing all the right things and I still have low energy.” What they’re often sensing isn’t a lack of rest. It’s a nervous system that has been living in survival mode for a long time.
When a nervous system doesn’t feel safe, it doesn’t truly rest, even when we stop moving. This is why sustainable energy isn’t just about sleep.It’s about regulation. It’s about safety. It’s about feeling supported inside your own body. It’s also about gently unlearning the belief that your worth is tied to your productivity.
You are valuable because you exist.
Not because of what you produce.
Re-read that, let it really sink in.
Burnout Recovery Starts With the Nervous System
Burnout recovery isn’t just about taking time off. It’s about helping your nervous system shift out of chronic stress and into a state of safety. When your body feels safer, energy becomes more available. Focus improves. Emotional resilience grows. The fog begins to lift. This is why nervous system regulation is at the heart of sustainable energy. It’s not a quick fix (but you know I’m not about those anyway!). It’s a gentle retraining of your system back towards balance.
How to Restore Your Energy in a Sustainable Way
When we approach energy gently and intentionally, a simple pathway begins to emerge. Not a hustle-based overhaul. Not a “fix yourself” project. More like a remembering.
I often work with this four-part flow:
First, we audit — noticing where energy is currently going, without judgement.
Then we stabilise — supporting the nervous system to come out of constant fight-or-flight.
Next, we reclaim — reducing leaks, strengthening boundaries, simplifying where possible.
Finally, we reinvest — intentionally placing energy into what matters most.
Small shifts here create profound ripple effects.
This is how people move from energetic debt, to energetic steadiness, to energetic wealth.
Gradually, kindly, and sustainably, topping ourselves back up.
What Energetic Wealth Feels Like
To be clear - energetic wealth doesn’t mean endless motivation or constant high vibes. It looks more like an easier wake and steadier energy across the day, a calmer baseline, clearer decision-making, less reactivity, more presence, and a quiet sense of enoughness. It’s the kind of wealth that allows you to build, lead, love, and live in ways that are sustainable. It’s subtle, grounded and it’s deeply life-giving.
SOME Common Questions About Burnout and Low Energy
Why am I tired all the time?
Often it’s a combination of chronic stress, emotional load, nervous system overload, and long-term overgiving. It is not a personal failure.
How long does burnout recovery take?
There’s no universal timeline. Recovery tends to happen in layers. Small, consistent nervous-system-supporting practices create the deepest and most lasting change.
Can you have burnout even if you love your job?
Yes. Loving your work doesn’t protect you from overextension or depletion. Believe me - I’ve been there!
Your TOOLKIT AWAITS
If something in this article is resonating, I want you to know that you don’t need to become a different person. You don’t need to work harder. You don’t need to push through. You simply get to start relating to your energy with more care, respect, and curiosity.
I’ve been quietly creating a new offering designed to support exactly this. It’s a practical, nurturing reset for your nervous system, your energy patterns, and your daily life. It’s called The Reset Toolkit and it’s launching soon. If you’d like to be the first to hear when it opens, email hello@thewellbeingcollective.com and I’ll add you to the waitlist.
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