244: Work drains me more than it should — is it my nervous system?

  📍 If you are capable, thoughtful, and you care about your work, but by the end of the day you feel like it's taken too much energy, more than it should have, then you are in the right place. My name is Sheridan.

I am a somatic trauma therapist and yoga therapist with a background and a specialization in behavioral psychology and how we relate with work, money and burnout. My past experience has been working with individuals with Complex PTHD, neurodivergence and OCD, and this podcast explores why work can feel draining, uh, and how our bodies adapt to pressure and responsibility.

And then what are the practical things we can do in our day-to-day lives without burning everything into the ground to bring back a bit more energy, a bit more agency, and a bit more joy. We are not gonna talk about how to change your mindset or how to heal everything until the world is perfect again, or I don't know how to optimize your life to get there and be productive.

We're gonna take an experimental approach with curiosity and hopefully a little bit of fun along the way.

 It feels like other people have more energy to get through the day, and sometimes you might wonder like, is there something wrong? Uh. This episode is gonna offer you a little bit of a different reframe. I don't think that it is all about needing necessarily more discipline or more mindset work or perfection than the best system.

Sometimes it's the reason that we're finding ourselves in these depletion and, you know, you're so tired of making decisions by 3:00 PM or you're, you have all of this energy inside of a meeting, but then you're completely exhausted after. Is. More because you've been adapting to an environment that doesn't actually fit in with the way your body works.

And I get it because there's constraints. You have bills to pay, there are things that you need to do that make it hard to just like stop doing that. Um, but it still has a cost on your body. And you feel that in that decision fig or in the overthinking or the anxious looping or collapsing at the end of the day or the end of the week, and it does require a little bit of creativity kind of to redesign your work in a way that you will have more energy without blowing up your entire life.

But that's what I wanna talk about today. We're gonna cover an energy audit. Which I share inside of the five week energy management program I have, which we'll talk about. And then I also wanna go into some deeper reasons that this might happen. So. If you're curious about taking this work into real deep, you know, real life beyond the podcast, um, and you really like structure that fits your system, the five week nervous system energy management program work doesn't have to cost all your energy could be for you.

Um, but if you feel like there might be something deeper underneath as you go and, and you're listening to me, um, then one-on-one support might be a good next step. Let's talk about the simple stuff first. So like, we're assuming that otherwise you're really healthy, um, and there's no, you know, I don't know, maybe you've had your thyroid checked, everything's fine, or maybe you just know deeply that it's not your thyroid.

We're gonna look at. The energy audit, this is something that I give you inside of work, doesn't have to cost all of your energy where we do an audit and we really focus on this in the first couple of weeks where you can notice what gives you more energy. So it might be like working at a certain time of the day, um, and what depletes it?

So receiving feedback in a certain way or context switching. We've been speaking a lot, uh, particularly in the Hyper Focus podcast about that real pain when someone interrupts you and you have to switch your, uh, focus and how much energy the back takes. Uh, we've also spoken before. And we do a lot inside of the five week program around sensitivity.

So having high sensitivities or feeling quite intense, like you have really big energy cycles or you have, um, you're quite sensitive to relationships and if your relationships are in certain way, you really find that, that just makes you feel really heavy or really anxious. And the energy audit isn't necessarily about.

You fixing any of it? It's an invitation to just like write down and you can do it right now. We'll do a really simple one, a mini one compared to what you would do inside of the course where you just write, write three moments down where you notice that a. It takes you more energy than you want three moments in your day to day, and it might even been that you were in a conversation and for six minutes of that conversation it was fine.

But then at the seventh minute you notice yourself getting frustrated. That's that moment. I want you to write down that moment and for each of those moments, write where in your body that is occurring,

and if you can do that. Each day for a couple of days. Then I want you to bring curiosity to that sensation and start asking, what happened here? Was I pulling myself away from my values? Was I getting frustrated? Like, ask the sensation. What is it trying to tell you? What is it trying to protect you from?

Slow with it. Don't analyze it. Or even just bring your awareness to it and ask and like, notice what happens if I just sit with this. What happens if I practice compassion towards it? And we are more curious about what's living in that aspect of your body. Or feeling that might be moving or even emotion.

And if you're struggling to identify what that sensation is or what that emotion is, uh, I would really encourage you to look into developing that skill of interception. We do this inside of the course, but you can do it inside of many other courses and many other skills online. You could probably even ask church EPT, how do I increase my capacity to, uh.

Learn my sensations and learn my emotions. I write about this in my book and we have a list of sensations. So if you're struggling with that and you'll find yourself like in the story, like, ah, it's because so and so said this. I'm not, no, I'm not talk. No, we're not talking about that. We're talking, ah, what's that thing in my neck that I'm noticing and feeling?

Could I be with that? Um, because this just be, this could just be like a work fit, like you're moving away from your values or you've forgotten your motivation. Um. Maybe it's even just a postural thing. Sometimes just like changing your posture as you engage in that activity can change the way that energy moves around and you can move forward and it can be quite simple.

But as you're in that inquiry, you might notice. Either things start getting really foggy or you feel kind of blocked, or you just can't quite wrap your head around it, or you can't quite pull yourself out of it and it feels like you almost lose agency or lose choice. Maybe you get confused, maybe you get very frustrated.

Maybe it starts to feel like, well, I don't understand how it could be anything else, and it feels like there's a little bit of a block. If you've sat with that sensation or that emotion that you've identified inside you. For more than 20 minutes and you can't quite totally feel or understand. It doesn't feel like there's even like a sense of understanding or relief.

This could be a sign that it's something deeper. Sometimes there's a history of trauma or freeze or even just the way that we play about in family roles. The one that feels most present at the moment is. Um, a couple of conversations I've been having actually around being kind of the family therapist or like a client of mine was like, you know, I'm the oldest sister, so I'm just the one that mediates the whole family.

And we kind of joke, but then it's like, well wait a second. Also you're unwell and this is causing you, you're depleting yourself a lot and you can't focus on the things that you want and you're not happy and you're frustrated. So what's really going on there? And could we just stop doing that? Could you just not be the family therapist?

Or sometimes it's because we grew up in an environment where we assumed scarcity, and so we're bringing that pattern and that bracing and that tensing forward. And so sometimes sitting with that feeling requires going back and maybe doing some parts work or maybe, I guess you could call like. New age, whatever people say, like releasing the trauma around it.

I like to think of it as integrating the wisdom that your body has, but applying that to the real life that you're having at the moment, which is most likely that you're relatively safe, and sometimes that requires teaching your body that you are safe and you don't have to use these old coping mechanisms.

People pleasing, manipulating, pushing through, getting it done, you know, staying busy, being even addicted to stress. That is, I think, uh, one we have that is also around, you know, like I think there's messages that even women receive around, you know, is it, are you allowed to just be happy? What does that mean?

You could stand out, don't be too. Too, um, don't be too much, right? So we've got all these wounds and they're very sticky, and then we can entangle them on top of each other. So sometimes it's a little bit deeper and sometimes you'll be able to use your own insight to work around that. But sometimes it's helpful to have somebody else to do that.

If you find yourself as you're going through this little energy audit wanting a little bit more support, and you feel like there might be some freeze trauma family wiring underneath, then one-on-one support is your next step. You can find all the information for those below, including the Energy Management Program and one-on-one support.

And if you have any questions about completing the energy audit, um, please send me a message either on LinkedIn or on Instagram or via my email. You'll find all of that information down below, and I can't wait to hear what you learned from your energy audit. I'll speak to you soon.