Understanding Your Energy: Why Rest Isn’t Always the Answer

In this episode, we’re looking at energy and why you can feel tired even when you’re getting enough rest.

We explore how fatigue isn’t always about needing more sleep. Sometimes it’s about how your energy is moving, or not moving, in the body, and learning how to better understand what your system actually needs.

In This Episode:

• Why you can feel tired even when you’re getting enough sleep
• A different way to understand energy and fatigue
• What it means when energy feels “stuck”
• How to tell if you need rest or movement
• The role of emotional and environmental factors in your energy
• Why noticing patterns matters more than assuming
• Understanding natural ebbs and flows in energy

PODCAST INFO:
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Tao of Humaning. I'm your host, Dr. Christine, and I'm so happy that you've joined us today. In today's episode, we're going to be talking about energy and the reasons why we feel tired might surprise you. We're going to be looking at why rest is not always the answer when we feel fatigued. I don't know about you, but I know that sometimes I've gotten caught in these loops of feeling fatigued, resting, and then feeling like I'm never quite getting enough. Some of that, caveat, can be life, right? Like we do go through seasons of life where rest is a bit elusive, right? If you have children, you know what I'm talking about. Um, but even if you don't have children, there are times in life when we just have a lot going on and a lot in our minds, and rest is a little bit more elusive, right? Normal. Normal humaning experience. But what I want to focus on today is those times when we feel like we are resting and we are not getting rested. So what I mean by that is kind of that rabbit hole, not rabbit hole, that cycle of sleeping, waking up, feeling kind of slow to start, reaching for the caffeine, and then throughout the day not really feeling like we have that get up and go and sort of continually searching for like when can I get more rest? When can I take a nap? I need to go to bed earlier, like rest, rest, rest, rest, rest. I need more rest, right? Like we get um we can get a little bit caught in those cycles of not feeling rested when we're resting. This can be so frustrating. And I hear from patients all the time, they're like, it just doesn't make any sense. Like I'm getting plenty of sleep and I'm still tired. And I think a really important thing that we don't talk about enough is this idea that sometimes we feel tired because things are stuck. And Chinese medicine is such a beautiful lens. I will say that over and over again. I really do think it is. Um, it's it looks at energy a little bit differently. So let's talk about it. When I think about energy, um, in my world, we call that qi. And qi can be thought of as your life force or your vitality, basically how you're showing up for life in any given day. Okay. Your qi um is a complex topic. So I we're gonna distill kind of uh um the pieces that are useful for this conversation, okay. So when I think about energy, I'm thinking about it in terms of is there enough, right? Is if there's a lack of energy, then we might need to add more rest. Okay. If someone is feeling depleted, resting can be the right answer. There's also situations where there can be too much energy, and there's also situations where the energy can be stuck, and especially this one of feeling stuck can also manifest as feeling fatigued. And it's not a fatigue of needing more quiet, more meditation, more sleep, more quiescence. It's a fatigue of needing to like not being able to pivot into those parts of ourselves that are more action-oriented. So the stuckness is like the energy wants to move and flow, and there's something blocking that. Okay. The way that I often describe qi and the flow in the body to people is by using the metaphor of a garden hose. It's a little oversimplified and also kind of perfect. So if we think about if you have a garden or you've, you know, you know what a garden is, right? Everybody knows what a garden hose is. If you imagine going out to the garden with your garden hose and you're going to water the garden, right? This is like the meridians in the body that this energy flows through. So you go out to the garden, you're watering the garden, and then all of a sudden you notice that there's a kink in the hose. Now, sometimes it can be a small kink, and there's still like a trickle of water coming out the hose. In that case, there's still like a little bit of nourishment energy flowing to the areas that need it, right? Same in the body. We can get these little kinks, like maybe a crook in our neck or something, right? And the energy isn't flowing quite as it should or as it could through that area, and that can cause a little bit of tightness, discomfort, maybe a little pain. It talks to us, right? Tells us, hey, there's something going on right here. Okay. If that kink in the hose is larger, then it completely stops the flow of water. Right. So then now we have a situation where energy is not get or water is not getting to the plants that we're wanting to nourish, right? And there's also a backup behind on the other side of that kink in the hose where there's too much water. Okay. Similar action or mechanism in the body. There can be areas where there's not enough, and then there can be areas where there's a backlog or too much energy. And oftentimes there's this kink in the hose that if you can find that kink and unkink it, which is how I describe as like what we're doing in acupuncture, um, then that that water, that energy flow can be restored to its full optimal flow. Okay. So if we're thinking about energy in our body, I guess maybe it's a good time to say what can cause those kinks. So in traditional Chinese medicine, it's a little bit different. We look at physical causes of disease. So if I get hit in the shoulder with a baseball, I'm gonna have a bruise, right? Or something, it's gonna hurt. That can cause a localized kink in the area. And then that can cause some of the upstream to upstream, downstream manifestations of things, depending on what channels are affected. Also, we look at environmental causes of disease, which can be a little bit more abstract for people who are new newer to this way of thinking. Um, but if you think about environmental things like heat or cold, sometimes those are the easiest to understand. Because if you have cold, you understand if you've ever, you know, most of us have been hot or cold. If you if you have been cold, you know that it causes you to constrict, right? You constrict your body, you try to warm up, right? You try to restore balance so that you're going more toward a state of equilibrium, right? Our bodies are designed to do this, and that's also something that I think we tend to forget in modern day is that our bodies want to be in balance. And our body, when given the right circumstances, is gonna try to move towards healing, right? If you look at a simple thing of like slicing your finger and you have a cut, right, the body responds immediately, right? It doesn't look like it on the outside because we can't see all of the clotting factors and things that are like gathering, right? And they're coming together and they're like, all right, we have a cut, let's go. They start, they start that healing process as soon as that level of imbalance is presented to the body, right? So that eventually the skin heals and as much flow as is possible as is restored, right? Depending on the depth of the cut and the severity, we might have a scar or something like that, right? Similar ideas when we look at the causes of disease in Chinese medicine or the cause of these kinks that can make our energy levels higher or lower, right? If we're sticking to the topic today, uh sort of mental reminder to myself, don't go too off track. Um, but our body wants to be in a state of balance, our body will move towards healing as best it can. And I think that is completely miraculous and something that we sometimes forget. Also, I think it's important to note that our bodies are not intended to get to this place of balance and stay there. Our human body, our experience here is dynamic and changing all the time. Sometimes little bits, sometimes big bits. Okay. I don't, I can't think of anyone who is like in this complete state of equilibrium in all of their systems, right? Which is why when people talk about coming to acupuncture, I'm like, well, everyone could benefit on some level, right? Like there's gonna be something somewhere that we could help unkink or restore some balance to. Anyway, I digress a little bit. If we're thinking of our energy levels and why we feel tired, right, we have to first understand why or what it is that's normal, right? We'll get there in just a minute. But also what are the factors that are influencing our energy level? We can have a lot of conversations about this. But for today, I want to introduce this idea of in Chinese medicine, we look at these kind of three areas, right? There's physical impacts, there's environmental impacts, and that doesn't necessarily mean like smog levels or exposure to toxins or things like that. It can. Um, but it can also just be too much hot, too much cold, too much damp, too much wind. Um, and then the third area that we look at is emotions. So very much um Chinese medicine looks at emotional wellness and our mental health as equally part of our well-being and health as a physical trauma. Okay. I think that's significant to think about because sometimes we feel tired because we are emotionally exhausted, right? And sometimes that can feel like a need for sleep. I really want to invite you, listening today, to leave when we leave this conversation to go and fine-tune your noticing machine. We're gonna turn up the volume on our noticing. And you want to see when it is that you're feeling fatigued. You want to look at the actual amount of rest that you're getting. Like, are you getting, you know, seven, eight hours of sleep a night and still feeling tired? Okay, that's information, right? Doesn't mean that anything is terribly wrong. It's data, right? So really looking at fine-tuning this noticing machine and starting to play around with these different ideas of okay, maybe it's not a lack of rest, maybe it's a lack of movement, maybe there's a kink in a hose somewhere that could benefit from being unblocked, right? Acupuncture obviously is one way that I'm a fan of, but honestly, just standing up, if you notice that you're tired, before you go take a nap, you want to ask yourself, am I really needing rest? And one way to test that was taught to me by Kimberly Ann Johnson. And she does a lot of work around uh nervous system, particularly female nervous system, which we're gonna talk about in the next episode. Um for women especially, we can get stuck in freeze or you know, stuck in too much rest. And what she taught and I've implemented since taking her course, which has been so helpful, is when I feel tired and I think, oh, I had a good night's sleep last night. I'm not actually like it's interesting that I'm tired. Maybe I well, first I check if I've eaten because I tend to forget to eat sometimes. Especially if I'm excited and like doing something, I just get going. Um, so first I check if I've eaten. Second, I will stand up and I will do nine body squats wherever I am. And then I check in with my body and my system, and I say, I look for did that turn me online? Like, did I go from like sleepy? Oh, I should totally take a nap, to like, oh, okay, I feel pretty good. Or I feel better, right? If it, if it pivoted me in the direction of better, that's my flag for myself of okay, I'm I'm not needing more rest, I'm needing more movement, right? Sometimes the nine squats is enough to kind of turn me back online, and then I can go about whatever it was that I was doing. Sometimes it's an invitation for more. And so if, you know, maybe you've try that, and then you might go for a walk after, be like, okay, this is my sign. I really do actually need movement. So going for the walk around your building at work, you know, it doesn't have to be a long time, it has to be movement and activation. Okay. You can go do a big workout later, whatever. It doesn't really matter, but the check-in is the big part. So not assuming when we feel tired and oh my gosh, I think I need a nap, not necessarily following that blindly, right? That's a great check-in for people. And I think especially Chinese medicine, it's like we always look, you know, there's kind of a saying if if I have three people come in to see me for hypertension, for example, I may do the evaluation and from a Chinese medicine lens, give them three different pattern diagnoses, meaning that I would do different sets of points. I would recommend different herbs or nutritional supplements for them. Um, the way that I would suggest that they go about healing and working with this hypertension project in their body would be different. And that's a really unusual or different way of looking at the body for a Western mind. And honestly, going through school and doing that training that was probably the part that took the longest was to really look at everything is gonna be, everything could be a different pattern, right? We we could have a situation where there's a deficiency, we could have a situation where there's too much energy in different areas, and then we could have a situation where some things are stuck. Clinically, sometimes you get a mix of those patterns, right? Um, but one way that we can start to play with this is through asking and looking in our day-to-day lives, you know, where's my energy feeling today, right? Every time you go see an acupuncturist, they're gonna ask you, how is your energy great, feeling good? Okay, how is it throughout the day? Does it stay kind of the same? Oh, okay, I get tired around, you know, three o'clock. I feel a little lower energy. I will usually dive into that a little bit more to find out, like, are they tired and like exhausted and really having to push through the rest of the day? That gives me a different answer than like, oh, I just feel a little bit of a dip in my energy, which is kind of normal for that time of day. Um yeah. So going back to normal, let's pick up on that. So, what is normal? I say this with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek because normal, in my view, can have a bit of range to it. Um, in terms of our energy throughout the day, I think one of the biggest things is that you want to feel rested when you've been resting. That's a great check-in. I think normal is, you know, similar to like I tell parents who have kids going into preschool, right? They're like, oh my god, my kid is sick. Every, you know, two weeks they've got a different like sniffles, their nose is always running, they're coughing, they're, you know, fever, all the things, right? That's not, I mean, while it is unpleasant, it is not unhealthy necessarily. Kids need to be exposed to different things. School is like the biggest one that they encounter, all these different microbiomes and things. Um, they're going to catch colds, right? That's, in my opinion, normal. What we want to look at is the severity of how frequently are they, or no, sorry, how sick are they getting? How long is it staying there? And is it fully resolving? Sometimes kids will get these colds that just kind of linger at a low level for months, right? That's something that we could help with. We could work on that, right? Ideally, you want to have our noticing turned up to the level where we notice when things are smaller kinks in our hoses. Okay. We want to have those kinks be um less long. That's not the right word. We want them to be more short-lived, and we want them to ideally self-resolve when they can. And what I mean by that is generally I want to have as little intervention as is possible. Even when people come see me in clinic, a lot of a lot of times I'll do um acupuncture on its own for the first visit because I want to see how their body responds to that invitation for balance or movement or nourishment on its own without an added input, right? Too many inputs. We talk about this a lot. Without the added inputs of like herbs and supplements and you know, da-da-da-da-da. It's like I want to see kind of the lowest therapeutic dosage of things. That's how I work. Um, I think knowing in terms of normal that there are natural ebbs and flows to energy, even throughout the day for women, especially cycling women, um shifts and ebbs and flows throughout the month, really normal. And learning what those are for you and how to support your body through those different ebbs and flows is one of my most favorite things to talk about. We'll do a conversation about that here soon. Um, but understanding their ebbs and flows. If we look to nature, right, if we bring in our Taoist hats, right, we're looking to nature. There is nothing in nature that is in constant bloom. Anything that is blooming is going to go through periods of quiescence and then slowing growth, right? And then rapid growth and bloom. And then the blooms start to quiet, and then it goes through that cycle again, right? We are also part of nature, and I think that we forget that sometimes. Like we want to distance ourselves somehow from our humanness. Um, but as humans, we are part of nature, and it's normal for us to go through ebbs and flows in life, right? We're gonna have seasons where we have tons of energy and we're doing all the things, and then we're gonna have times in our life when we are more inward-focused and more quiescent, and those are not pathological, they're not, there's nothing wrong necessarily with that happening, right? Part of it is seeing and being able to recognize what stage of life we're in and then being able to support ourselves in the best way possible, right? Yes. All right. So if you are noticing that you are resting and not feeling rested, what my invitation for you is, is to start looking at is did you eat? I invite you to take that also. A lot of moms tend to do similar patterns. Um, have you eaten? Have you nourished yourself? And then try the movement and see how that fits for you. And then also, if you want a little extra credit homework, extra credit for yourself, um, looking at some other common ways that we drain our energy and we sometimes overlook. So having really permeable boundaries can be one way in Chinese medicine that we look at being able to hold our energy. And I don't mean boundaries in a sense of like protection or like that's another conversation too, but I mean boundaries in the sense of, you know, are you holding space for your rest time? Are you, you know, keeping people in your life that you feel inspired by, right? Boundaries in the sense of what you are taking in for information through your eyeballs and your ears. Um, a lot, I have a lot of conversations with patients about the news and about scrolling and about having some kind of intentionality with our media. And I think for everyone, it's going to be a little bit different in terms of what feels nourishing and supportive, and what feels like too much. And I think, you know, social media and things is it's part of our modern world. I don't think necessarily that we're meant to like go live on a mountaintop and meditate all day, although that does sound lovely at times. I think that we're meant to be here in this world and engaging in life and being intentional about how we're doing that and making sure that we're balancing out things that maybe are hard with things that are nourishing and inspiring. For example, social media, there are some incredible creators out there who are putting beautiful content out into the world. Are you finding those people? Right? Are you sprinkling that into your feed or are you sitting and doom scrolling? I talk to my patients going through um IVF a lot about Googling. And, you know, it it's a balance between wanting to find answers. We have this amazing resource at our fingertips of being able to look things up, right? And being able to hear other people's stories who have gone through similar things to us. Like that's amazing, right? But you need to understand where your energy is at on a given day and what's going to be supportive of that, right? If you're using the IVF example, if you're really in the thick of it and you've had failed IVFs and you're on your, you know, or God forbid you've had losses in your pregnancy journey, and you're now pregnant, right? And now you're like happy and excited, but you're also terrified that it's gonna happen again and it's not gonna work out, and all you want is to bring this baby home, and you're like just feeling really tender and in it. Going sometimes to informational forums and hearing other people's stories sets us up so that we are gonna unknowingly or unpreparedly, unexpectedly hear someone's story that's gonna keep us in that fear place that we're already kind of teetering on, right? Not that I think sitting with the fear is bad. I actually think it giving it a voice can be really healthy and beneficial, but with the right parameters, with those boundaries, right? So knowing like some days you're gonna feel fantastic and be like, yes, let's go look at all of the things and gather the information and you know, talk to people about what happened with them and you feel good. That's the time to go do that, right? There's gonna be other days where the better choice is to put your phone away. Or what I say is Google in the right direction. So look for success if that's what you're needing. Be intentional about how you're asking your questions in whatever search engine you're using or asking chat now, it's like a whole other thing. Um, but being mindful of you know, what are you taking in for information? And then looking to make sure overthinking in Chinese medicine is a really uh common and often overlooked way that we deplete our energy. So ruminating, thinking about things, thinking about things, thinking about things. Um one teacher was helping me work on this at one point, and he suggested that I I was waking up and I was getting all of it, I was having a hard time going back to sleep, and I was just thinking, thinking, thinking, thinking. And he was like, okay, that's not necessarily bad, but something's trying to like get out. So give it away out. And the way that I did that was to write it down in a journal or notebook or whatever, physically get up, write it down, and then close that notebook and then put it in the drawer and then go back to sleep. So I made a very dedicated like, okay, this is your time. Get out all the dots, whatever time it is, and then I close it, go back to bed, right? Watching for the overthinking is a really way, really practical, easy way, actually, that we can help support our energy levels. And um what was the other thing I was gonna say? Looking at common energy drains, overthinking, context switching. That's another one that is really common to see nowadays, especially. We've got, you know, our phones open and our computers open, and we're talking with someone in the room, and we're watching the kids in the background, you know, there's multiple things going on. And sometimes that's life, and sometimes there's some control there. So when there is choice in those moments, focusing in on like, okay, I'm just gonna finish my phone activities and then I'm gonna switch gears and like go play with the kids with no devices, and then I'm gonna come back and finish up work, right? Being mindful of when we're switching gears really fast, because that is really tiring to a lot of our systems, actually. I think the biggest things that I wanted to share today, I have shared, but I I want to really reiterate this idea that resting is a verb, and sometimes it is necessary to block out time or prioritize rest over, you know, doing the dishes or you know, something else. We need to actually pull that rest time from something else in our schedules, but resting is really important. If you are noticing that you are resting and still not feeling rested, that's when you want to start looking in these other areas. And the the squats, the body squats one really has just been so awesome. I feel like I have a lot better um barometer, barometer of um how my what my energy needs are in that moment. And I can do it fast and then have immediate information of like, okay, yeah, no, I just needed some movement. I'm good. Keep going, do the things, go rest, make resting one of the things. If I were to have one wish, it would be for all of you to have rest as one of your things, and also know that movement is equally important. And we're gonna talk about that in our next episode. Um, but for today, if anything has resonated with you, I would love to hear in the comments. And if you have questions, also put them there. I will see them. And yeah, just work on playing with your noticing machines and that developing that skill of listening to your body and seeing, you know, what stage of blooming are we in? Is this a quieter time and it just needs to be a little quieter? Do I need a little bit more of something?