Three Things Stealing Your Energy

All right, and welcome back. So, been a little bit since my last episode, excited to have welcomed a new son into the world, which has been taking up a lot of my time and actually has a lot to do with the theme of today's episode, which is three things that are stealing your energy as a man.

The first one I want to dive into is pretty foundational, and it might sound easy, but it's one a lot of us men really struggle with. And quite simply, it's not nourishing our bodies. So this just means getting enough sleep, eating good food, working out, and in particular, taking time to rest and recharge.

So many men I work with and myself at different points in life, we try to hit it all the time, pedal to the metal, and we'll often just keep grinding through our lives, not really fully taking care of our bodies. This one also extends to being proactive about our health, right? Actually going to the doctor, getting checkups, following up on things that are hurting or feel a little off or different.

Nourishing our bodies as men is so important, and if we're not, it makes everything else a lot more challenging. Sleep's a big one. Many men I know struggle with. And it's a process, right? We call it sleep hygiene these days, which are what are the things we need to do really throughout our day, starting from the moment we wake up to the moment we fall asleep to to ensure that we get good, deep and restorative sleep.

There's lots of things here related to our food, related to our technology use, to our environment. Lighting, supplements. I'm not going to go through them all today, but it's something you can really move the needle on pretty fast. I've talked about before. I wear one of these fancy rings, helps me track, just gives me an overview of how much sleep am I getting, how quality is it? Lo and behold, since newborn, it's been pretty low, but that's just a normal phase of life.

Nourishing our bodies, right, also includes eating good food, meaning whole foods, not just processed foods that work with our constitution. For some, that's going to be vegetarianism, keto, vegan, carnivore, you know, whatever it is, it's what leaves you mostly nourished and with a Lot of available energy. That's the key thing to really dialing in our diet. Relaxing our bodies is the other really big one.

This means, yeah, we can hit it hard, we can work out, we can exercise, which are all things we need to do. But we also need to unwind, to get massages, to get in cold plunges, to use saunas, to rest. Restoring our bodies as men is so key to being effective masculine leaders in the world. And I often call this one the kind of unsexy shit work of life, right?

This is the stuff that guys want to come to me, make shifts in their relationship or their dating or their careers or purpose. And. And lo and behold, this is often where you got to start. This is just as important part to making sure that you have energy in your body to be able to be present throughout your life. So the second really big energy suck for us men, first being not nourishing our bodies, second, is holding emotions in our system.

So I've talked about this a lot. There's a bit of kind of emotional constipation that often accumulates in us men when we're not given the tools, support and community for learning what we're feeling and how to process it. There's more and more research coming out all the time about the different ways that emotional content gets stored in our body. A lot of it points to the fascia, right? The tissue that connects our bones and muscles all together.

But the most important thing here is the idea is emotion, right? I've talked about this a lot. Energy and motion. Emotion is a call to action. It's a response to some kind of stimulus in our relationships or environment that something needs to happen right now. When that doesn't get felt, we hold it in our nervous systems. So right now. You know, I use this example all the time. If you imagine you were bawling or saw a young boy totally crying and you just walked up to him, or someone walked up to you and said, stop crying right now.

Immediate demand. The way we do that is we stop breathing, we tighten up our bodies, and we literally hold that emotional energy in our musculature. So it's not a passive thing, it's an active thing that when we do it long enough, we. We lose touch with the fact that it's happening, right? We kind of get numb to it. Now why is that a big deal? Well, here's the experiment I've been giving guys. Right now. You can go ahead and flex all the muscles in your body, just tighten them up.

So I'm Tightening up my biceps, my neck, my shoulders, my quads, my legs, just flexing them in place. Not too big a deal, right? Now hold it. Imagine I asked you to hold it for the next 30 minutes, 2 hours, 7 days. Gets exhausting pretty fast. You can go ahead and release that, but that's happening all the time with emotional content we're holding on to that we haven't processed and released.

And all that energy that goes into holding again, it's an active thing, is energy that is then not free for use in our system for the things we want to use it for. Takes a lot of metabolic resource to hold emotional content. So that's two so far. Not nourishing our bodies that'll steal energy from you, and holding emotions that'll also steal energy from you. Nourishment number three.

Guess where we're gonna go. We're in the body, we did the heart, now we're going to the head. And this is rumination. So rumination is just the process of mentally looping thoughts over and over in our head again, right? It's the hamster wheel of thinking. And right there in that image you can see, right, a lot of energy is being used, but nowhere. But we're not actually moving anywhere. There's no progress. We're just running in place. And our brains are incredibly metabolically resource heavy, right?

We have huge brains compared to all other animals on the planet, and they use a lot of our calories to process. So if we're stuck up in our heads, we're actually spending a lot of time in the most, so to speak, expensive part of our nervous system. Calorically takes a lot of energy to be up in our brains, and that energy, again, is not then freely available to the rest of our system to move forward in life. And I often talk about how rumination up here is actually deeply related to what's going down in our going on down in our heart and what's going on in our body.

So I like to use this analogy of the old pinball machine, right? So you imagine you're at a bar playing pinball, got the little ball at the bottom, you pull the thing, it shoots way up to the top. And then the whole point of the game is to keep jamming the paddles to keep the ball up there and not falling through the hole. So rumination thought is a way to keep things up here, keeps our attention up here. Because what happens when we stop thinking or ruminating often is we start to fall down.

We fall down into our hearts and Feeling and we fall down into our bodies. Now, why would we want to keep ruminating up here if it's so intense and uses so much energy and is often actually quite painful for a lot of men? Because our attention is not free, we're stuck looping on something. Well, as long as we're up here, we're not having to feel what's here and here. And when we drop out of our heads often, we have to feel emotionally what's happening for us, and we have to feel what the actual sensations in our body are, which might be burnout, fatigue, pain, soreness, you name it.

Us men will eject from that by going up here into our heads and ruminating. And that rumination takes a profound amount of energy. And when you couple that with, with your ruminating up here, you're holding emotion in your heart, in your emotional body. And your physical body is in tension, in stress, because it's undernourished. That's taken up pretty much all of your life force as a man. And lo and behold, what happens when men get older, we feel tired and burdened all the time.

It's one of the main issues I see with guys as we age. We hit our mid-30s and 40s and beyond, and energy management becomes a huge part of our lives. There's so much we want to do, but we don't have the energy to do it, or we feel totally overwhelmed by our task lists, our families, whatever that might be. These three things that are sucking your energy, they're preventing you from fully being in your life and actively engaging in the ways you want. As you learn to nourish your body, as you.

As you learn to express and feel your emotions, and as you learn to not have to ruminate because you're not afraid of being in your emotions, you're not afraid of taking care of your body. You can actually relax into it. Suddenly, it's like a well of life force. A nuclear reactor comes back online. And as I often say, life doesn't get easier, but it gets way better because suddenly we have more energy to meet the stresses of life. So these three things, not nourishing your body, holding emotions in your heart, and ruminating in your head, they are stealing your energy.

And you need to do something about it if you want to get that energy back. If you want to reclaim your vitality, there's lots of ways to do it. One of the ways I specialize is in doing shadow work with men, which helps us remove all the blockages to feeling right here. And often brings us right into our body. When we're in our body and we're not holding emotions it's often very sobering of wow I'm burnt out or all this drinking isn't working for me, can't keep doing this in my job and suddenly we take action to change our lives in pretty profound ways.

So you can sign up and do some of that work with me one on one or in particular. I'm gonna point you to my heart of shadow program. It's a shadow work men's group I do twice a year co facilitated by my main man and amazing doctor of Chinese medicine doctor Luke Adler. And this works right? When we do deep shadow work what we see on the other end is reclaimed energy and vitality for men. So you can always check that [email protected] all right, that's it for now.

Until next time. If you're interested in working with me around dating relationships or your masculine presence in the world, just go to Evolutionary Men Apply.