ask me anything: how do you deal with preserving your energy in your work life as someone who is very sensitive?

It’s taken me years and years to work through the shame and guilt of not being productive enough, not working hard enough, and not comparing my capacity to others. These days, I (mostly) accept my body’s needs and rhythms and have built my schedule around them. 

For some context, in high school, I was on the swim team, the flag team, in the local youth orchestra, national honor society, the editor of my school newspaper, took two languages, and worked part time. As I transitioned to college, my drive to achieve shifted into working towards a career in orchestral classical music. It was normal to practice my instrument alone in a small room for three or four hours a day in addition to a full course load, homework, rehearsals, and as always, a part time job. After grad school, I worked in various jobs as a performing musician, arts administrator, and public school teacher.

I was always stressed, I was always tired, and I never felt like I was doing enough. Aside from the cultural conditioning that that’s normal, I had a few other influences. My father was a labor activist and idealized the worker. The harder someone worked, the more virtuous they were (my friend Maggie Frank-Hsu calls it moral masochism). In the field I was in, classical music, the message was that if you weren’t practicing in every free moment of your day, someone else out there was and you were going to lose to them. Working in public education and non-profits, it was assumed that you’d spend many of your free hours and financial resources giving to your job. 

During the twenty years of attempting to manage all of that stress, I began to learn things about myself that would have surely changed my career trajectory had I factored them into my career decisions as a 17 year old. I discovered I was highly-sensitive, introverted, empathic, and prone to depression, all temperaments that meant that it required a lot of energy for me to show up to life even without the stress of a pressure filled job. 

I could never understand how people around me were working 40+ hours a week, maintaining a household, planning activities and having a social life. Were they all as tired as I was? Yes, but also, some just had a different level of capacity. 

With huge financial privilege and support from my husband, I started mindful closet in 2013. From the beginning, I knew wanted to work differently than I had at other jobs. I wanted to be able to be flexible with scheduling and allow time in my day for taking care of myself physically and emotionally. 

Entrepreneurship isn’t a field that comes without pressure to hustle and I felt immense pressure from myself to be successful, but I constantly pushed back. I read Essentialism, The Lean Startup, Company of One, and The Power of Less (it’s not lost on me that all of these books were written for men).

Even though my job technically left me with time to recover, I also have two kids, and we had no outside childcare for each of their first two years. During my second child’s toddler years, we also had a pandemic that meant there was no childcare for the oldest either. I’m not sure there’s anything that drains my energy and capacity more than parenting. There were long stretches of time where I just had to pause any work I was doing because I was spending all my available energy on parenting (to be clear, this is with splitting parenting equally with my husband). 

Now that both kids are in school full time (assuming no sick kids or school vacations), while I still have to consciously remind myself that to-do lists never end, I feel as though there’s a pretty good balance. My work is fulfilling and flexible. It allows me to go on field trips and be free on random school holidays. 

A few of the shifts I’ve made to honor my energy and capacity are:

• I really try to allow myself freedom to work with the energy I have that day. I acknowledge that my energy fluctuates based on my menstrual cycle, the seasons, and what’s going on in the rest of my life. This means that while I’ve tried time blocking (Mondays are for writing, Tuesdays are for meetings, etc), my energy doesn’t always line up with what is on the schedule that day. On days when I feel energetic, I try to cross off some of those tasks that require more energy, and I take it easy on days when I feel depleted. 

• Although I absolutely love working with clients one-on-one, it’s draining. In my current schedule, I only do two hours of client calls a day, and I’m thinking I might even drop it down to one. There’s still plenty to do, and the rest of the time gets filled with tasks like creating social media graphics, recording videos, editing videos, social media interactions, being interviewed for podcasts, pitching podcasts, writing for Substack, interacting on Substack, writing client notes, shopping for clients, and accounting.

• Mondays are always a bit of a recovery day for me (weekends are not relaxing when you have kids), and I usually don’t schedule client appointments those days. 

• Afternoons are a dead time for me. If I’ve really put my energy into what I’m creating or giving in the morning, I’m wiped out. If I continued working right up until my kids got home and then switched right into parenting mode, I’d be depleted. No one would benefit from any interactions with me, not to mention the work I’d do in the afternoon would be crap because my brain just. does. not. work. I work from about 9 to 2 most days. Sometimes I take a nap, sometimes I scroll TikTok, sometimes I’ll work on something that requires less brain power, but I always try to lie down for a while. 

• Since the pandemic, 99% of my clients are remote. I’ve found that not having to be perfectly polished, drive somewhere, and be with someone in person requires less of an energy expenditure on my part. 

• I allow myself to not work if I feel sick or just drained, and the resulting shame or guilt that often comes with that continues to diminish. 

• I try to keep a good handle on my schedule and when I notice that a day is filling up, I will block out the rest of the time on my calendar so that no one else can book in and so that I know not to overload myself. When I do have a busy day, I build in time to recover afterwards.

I know that there are so many of you who don’t have this freedom. I know how lucky I am to be able to set my life up this way and I continue to work on not feeling guilty about it. But I remind myself that feeling guilty doesn’t help other people (for more about the importance of rest, especially as a social justice issue, I love Tricia Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance). I remind myself that I am a more useful force for good in the world when I’m rested. I remind myself that I want to set an example for my kids that work you love doesn’t have to be the thing you give all of your energy to. And I remind myself that I want to show up as my best, most resourced self for myself and my family. 

How do you manage ups and downs in your energy level?