Word of advice: stop managing your time! It won’t help you overcome burnout, depression, or any mental health struggles you’re going through. Instead, try managing your energy. 

Believe it or not, we are made up of the same energy as everything around us. This promotes the ease and flow of our connection to our surroundings, and invokes a sense of belonging. While time represents the finite and limitedness of what we can do, energy represents an infinite cycle that can constantly be reused. With this in mind, one thing to keep track of is how separate you feel to your surroundings. This can help in figuring out whether or not your energy is being blocked, and is the first step to gaining healthy mental fitness habits. Conserving, managing, and opening up our energy allows us to stay present and flow through our daily schedules. 

Here are four tips on how to conserve and manage your energy, and how to apply them to your own life. 

Strengthen Awareness and Agility Through Mental Fitness

Just like how physical fitness helps strengthen muscles, mental fitness strengthens your awareness and agility, allowing you to conserve energy and become the most productive and mentally satisfied version of yourself. Implementing strict practices and following them diligently helps you become more present, conscious, disciplined, and grounded, as well as sparking more inspiration and focus towards your goals and responsibilities. This can come in the form of practices such as daily breath work, meditation, establishment of boundaries, and clarity of values and beliefs to name a few. Make sure to implement practices that activate your physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual energy!

Anchor Decisions in Clear Values and Goals

Any decision you make, regardless of how big or small it is, should be decided based on values and goals that are important to you. Making choices that go against what you value and what you hope to achieve leads to a sense of aimlessness in life, which could invoke feelings of anxiety and depression. For example, if you are someone that values helping the environment, then joining a volunteer group that plants trees in deforested areas may be in your best developmental interest. On an even more basic scale, if you have a goal of trying to eat more healthily, then ordering burgers for dinner may not be the best choice to make. 

Minimize Decisions Involving Structure and Routine

Getting rid of everyday decisions that involve structure allows you to focus on other aspects of your life where you want to achieve. Having to consciously decide to work out or to meditate, for example, takes away energy that can be channeled into other things. Instead, integrating these habits into your schedule eventually turns it into a second-nature action, allowing you to focus your conscious decisions on mentally stimulating things you don’t do routinely. 

Conserve Your Words

As they always say, silence is golden! Choose what you say wisely, and conserve your words for when it really matters. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t express yourself at all, of course, but being more mindful about what you say and who you say it to allows you to channel your energy into the correct words at the correct time. This will make your words more impactful too.