No Time for Creative Practice? Learn to Listen to Your Energy Cues

Most of us have an energy problem, not a time problem

The major reason we don’t get around to our creative projects isn’t that we’re too busy. Most of us have the time somewhere in the day, even if it’s just twenty minutes. And that is absolutely enough daily time for a solid and rewarding creative practice. The problem is that when that twenty minutes shows up in our schedule, we either don’t notice, are too revved up to sit down and be creative on cue, or are too exhausted to do anything but collapse on the sofa and catch an episode of 30 Rock on Netflix. But by doing a little energy magic, we can open up more energetic space in our lives that we can fill with creative practice – and other stuff!

We need a framework to understand energy before we can start to work our magic, and this article in the Harvard Business Review provides a good one. It divides energy into four categories: physical, emotional, mental, and spirit-sustaining. The trick is to figure out what activities in these four categories give you energy rather than drain you. The best way to do this is to simply pay attention to the activities you are already doing throughout the day. Chances are you’re already working some energy magic without realizing it.

Physical energy is the one we tend to be most cognizant of in our health-obsessed culture. Often just that act of moving through the day is physically draining for most of us. Getting out of bed, going to work, doing chores…these activities are usually not generative in terms of physical energy. But exercise often is. Many people use exercise as a way of counterintuitively generating more energy. It may tire them out, but it also releases endorphins, which are both calming and energizing. Now, I don’t like exercise. But I do like talking walks. That counts! Maybe for you it’s gardening, yoga, jumping rope, or wiggling. Move your body in a way that renews you.

Emotional renewal usually comes in the form of interactions with others. For sensitive creative types, interactions can often be draining, but if you pay attention, you’ll find that there are certain types that give you a burst of energy. For me it’s often a simple, low-pressure exchange with a check-out person in a store. It’s brief, usually friendly, just a perfect type of interaction for me. The HBR article suggests practicing expressing appreciation for others, which I think is brilliant. It also points out that we often feel emotionally drained when we feel like victims of circumstance. Learning how to examine our assumptions objectively can help us move past that mindset and reconnect with our personal power.

Mental exhaustion is perhaps the most common type we deal with in our productivity-centered culture. The truth is we just don’t have as much capacity to focus and get stuff done as we think we do. In the course of the day we have one, maybe two 90-minute windows to concentrate on challenging tasks before we’re drained. This is called our ultradian rhythm, and understanding it can be life-changing. I’ll be writing a separate post on this in the near future, but to start working with this rhythm the first thing to understand is that pushing yourself past it results in rapidly depleting energy and quality of work. You can learn to recognize your own ultradian time period by paying attention to when you reach that point where you are having to really force yourself to concentrate. You may hit it sooner or later on any given day. That’s your natural stopping point. Give the task a rest and come back to it later, preferably the next day.

Spirit-sustaining energy is the one we often stumble on the most, and it’s the one most important to creative practice or any activity that’s closely connected to what we would call our heart or soul. When we feel our lives lack purpose and meaning (an extremely common affliction in our culture), we lack this energy and everything else gets harder. But here’s where us creative folks have a leg up: for us, creative practice can give our lives a feeling of purpose and meaning. It really can be that simple. We have a magical energy-generating engine inside of us: our urge to create. Uncovering it and keeping it running through creative practice can permeate all other areas of our lives with clarity and vitality.

If you learn to recognize your energy cues throughout each day, you can gradually make changes that will open up that energetic space you need for your creative work.