Understanding Your Energy & Calm Levels
The following is an excerpt from Module 2 of our digital course. Learn more about the full course and get started now.
In our last blog post, we gave a brief overview of the five factors of personal health and performance. In this post, we’ll be taking a closer look at the first two factors: energy and calm.
Think back over your last couple of months. We’re going to go through each of these worksheets. We are going to go through one worksheet for each of the five factors, one at a time, and we’re going to rate ourselves to see how we’ve done on average over the last 90 days.
First, we’ll discuss the energy scale.
The energy scale goes from 1 to 10. On the 10 side you are full of energy, and on the empty side at 1 you have barely enough energy to get out of bed. We typically think about energy as what moves our bodies, but it also runs our brains. Your job as founder of your company doesn’t likely require you to move heavy items around or doesn’t have much to do with how much pain you can endure or how physically strong you are, but your job probably does require immense brain power. Energy is needed for intelligence, patience, focus, and even intuition.
When your energy comes from anxiety and adrenaline, it eventually craters. You experience those peaks and valleys we talked about. Consistently high energy numbers from day to day mean you’re running on clean, calm energy.
If your energy is full, you’re probably feeling ready to tackle the day’s challenges when you wake up in the morning, you have a strong ability to concentrate, and you have an ability to focus on the present. You also have patience, and you find that you’re not irritable with people when they present you with difficult conversations or if they need things from you that are difficult to provide.
If you’re out of energy, you’re feeling fatigue, you may have trouble concentrating, you may find that you’re forgetful, and you may feel that you have the edginess, the irritability, that you’re feeling in interactions with people or maybe even just on your own.
Circle a number that represents where you’ve been over the last 90 days on this scale. It’s hard to think back to how we’ve been feeling over a long period of time but do the best you can to try to say where on an average day you have been on the scale. Circle the number that applies to you. You can even fill in the whole box around the number if you’d like.
Next is the calm scale.
On the calm scale, we’re going to select two different numbers. Think of them as bookends. The first number is the highest level of anxiety you experienced during the measurement period. The second number is the lowest level of anxiety, or calmness you experienced during the measurement period.
What many of us find is that we probably live somewhere between the 3 and the 6 range. I certainly have anxiety days that get me up to 7 or 8 on a somewhat regular basis, maybe within any month, but on an average day I probably live between a 3 and a 6, maybe a 7. Think back over the last 90 days. What’s the highest level that you typically get to? It may not need to be the most extreme high points over the last 90 days, but on a typical day, what’s a common number that you would get to on the high side of anxiety? Circle that number and fill in the square around the number.
Now, let’s think on the low end. I think the big opportunity here for most people is we don’t usually experience numbers as low as 1 or 2 that are just incredibly restorative. Those low numbers reactivate our intuition. They keep us from burning the energy that we spend on anxiety, so we can then recapture it for other things.
The things that get us to this level of calm can be incredibly powerful tools. Unless we’re doing things intentionally, our default behavior and patterns almost never get us down to those levels, so as anxiety builds up and builds up over the day, maybe instead of ending up at a 6, we end up at an 8 because we started at a 3 instead of starting at a 1 in the morning. We will talk a lot more about that later. But just for now, think about the lowest level that you would typically experience on an average day.
Now, if you went and did a 10-day silent meditation retreat during the middle of the 90 days, let’s call that probably not a normal day, although maybe a very fruitful activity for your calm practice. Instead, just think about an average day. Do you have processes that help you get down to the 1 level? If not, that’s fine. We’re going to build those through the system and the tools in this program.
Select that low-end number for an average day, put a circle around the number, fill in the box, and then I want you to draw a line between the two numbers that you’ve circled. If you’ve got a second, you can even fill in the numbers from your high point down to your low point. This is the range that you live within, and that’s fine. We’re going to see if we can expand that low side a little lower, towards calm, and do some things to try and bring that top level down a little bit as well.
In our next post, we’ll cover the mood scale and identity hours, which will bring us one step closer to completing our scorecard for personal health and performance. Once complete, we’ll have a better understanding of our current mindstate.
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