Understanding Your Energy Drains and Gains
A nonprofit executive—let’s call her Maya—took two weeks off last summer. No laptop or email and a cottage with a very poor cell signal. She came home rested, able to sleep well for the first few nights, and felt almost like herself again. By the second week back at work, she was flat and deflated, as if the vacation never happened.
If you’ve had a version of Maya’s experience, this might help to reframe your experience: energy is not one large cup that sleep and time off can refill on their own. It is five separate cups, and most of us are only aware of one or two of them.
Last month, we looked at the six drivers of burnout: workload, control, recognition, fairness, community, and meaning. These are the organizational conditions that create energy drains in the first place.
This month, we are looking through a different lens: the five types of energy that, when depleted, lead to burnout and what it takes to replenish each one.
Five energies, not one
Dr. Neha Sangwan, the physician and burnout specialist whose work informs this series, identifies five distinct energies that, together, determine how resourced we feel: physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual. Each is drained and replenished independently so that replenishing one does not automatically resolve deficits in any of the others. This is why a two- week vacation can leave someone feeling physically rested but not 100 percent.
Physical energy is our body’s vitality: the capacity that comes from sleep, movement, and nutrition. You empty this cup with chronic overwork, poor sleep and sitting still under stress for hours at a time. It is replenished by seven to eight hours of sleep, movement or exercise, and a healthy diet. While vacations and long weekends help, your physical self needs ongoing healthy routines.
Mental energy is our focus and our capacity to make incisive creative decisions. In the nonprofit sector, it is depleted quickly by impossible job portfolios, complex challenges with few available resources, and a never-ending series of crises. For all of which multi-tasking becomes the default and rapidly drains this cup. Our mental energies are refilled by deep work blocks, genuine single-tasking, and real cognitive rest such as creative play and being in nature.
Emotional energy is our capacity to feel, regulate, and express what we feel. It is depleted by constant demands on our empathy, by swallowing our difficult feelings to “be professional,” and by absorbing the distress of the people around us. Recognizing and naming what we feel, finding safe spaces to process our emotions, and being met with validation from others are gains that fill our cup.
Social energy is the energy of belonging and connecting. It is drained by isolation, unresolved conflict, and feeling that we must hide our true being. This cup is refilled by genuine connection and being seen, known, and accepted as our multifaceted selves.
Spiritual energy is our connection to meaning and purpose. This energy is depleted by mission drift, by the frustration or disappointment of finding yourself a cog rather than a leader, and by feeling stuck when you realize your path is pointing you in a different direction than your current situation allows. Replenishing spiritual energy occurs when you reconnect meaningfully to the aspects of your work that brought you to the nonprofit sector in the first place or recommit to expressing your values and goals in your personal life.
The leader’s role
As with avoiding the six drivers of burnout, it’s vital to situate protection of the five energies inside a healthy system that supports us and the people we work with. Leaders set the systemic conditions that make replenishment possible or impossible. For example, by building real recovery time into workplans, modeling healthy work/life boundaries rather than being that leader who never takes a day off, and including oversight on more than just output, you manage the energy capacity of an entire team. This empowers individuals to identify where they are feeling drained and to tend to their own energy levels.
Reflection: Which of your five cups is running lowest right now, and what is one realistic way you, or your organization, could begin to refill it this week?
This article is the third in a four-part series on burnout in the nonprofit and charitable sector. Next month: we close the series with the role of boundaries in protecting all five energies from depletion.
Lucy White is a certified coach specializing in burnout recovery and mental fitness for nonprofit and charitable sector professionals, and a skilled nonprofit executive with over thirty years’ experience leading associations and other nonprofit organizations. Lucy is a Certified Positive Intelligence Coach and a Certified Burnout Coach. She completed the Positive Intelligence Mastery Program and is a member of the International Coach Federation. She can be reached at lucy@lucywhite.ca or www.lucywhite.ca
