When you overdraw your energy account, you feel crummy. Even so, it can be hard to accept the choices this forces you to make as a sensitive person.

I’ll never forget the look the student health center doctor gave me when I showed up in her office one morning. I was a college sophomore, and she evidently felt I was behaving sophomorically.

Like all the music performance majors around me, I worked hard. I also suffered from chronic anxiety (and overarousal, though I had no name for that back then.) I had recently discovered that when I downed two or three beers, all this discomfort went away. I stopped worrying and started having fun.

There was only one apparent downside: the way I felt the next day. I explained this to the doctor. “When I go to parties and stay up until 2 AM drinking beer and eating potato chips,” I said reasonably, “my stomach feels bloated in the morning and I feel tired and icky.”

She eyed me wearily before replying, “Then don’t go to parties and stay up until 2 AM drinking beer and eating potato chips.”

This was not what I wanted to hear.

In fact, her words left me speechless. Give up Budweiser—so refreshing when imbibed from a plastic cup (it was so economical being 19, wasn’t it?)— and Ruffles potato chips with sour cream onion dip? Was she kidding? I searched her face for irony but found only irritation. Clearly, no morning-after solution would be forthcoming.

I left the health center in a huff. I see now that Dr. S was handing the responsibility for my bloated stomach back where it belonged— with me. Back then, though, I was a typical 19-year-old. I had a menu of acceptable options in mind, and behavioral adjustments were not on the list

This was hardly the first time I had paid a price for something I’d done earlier, but there was a difference. I made a conscious connection between my beer and potato chip consumption and my later digestive distress. My search for a hangover pill may have failed, but I had taken the key first step towards greater awareness of my own agency. I had overdrawn my energy account, and I knew it.

Energy overdraw feels lousy

I laugh when I tell this college story. Still, energy overdraw can be a daunting challenge for sensitive people. Why is this? For one thing, many of us struggle to accept our sensitivity. In fact, this non-acceptance itself is a barrier to good self-care for HSPs. On top of all that, we suffer more than non-sensitive people when we overdo it.

Energy overdraw is painful. If you drink or eat too much, you may feel physically hung over or bloated the next day, as I did that day. If you do too much intellectually demanding work in the evening before bed—or if you fail to take breaks during the day—you may feel mentally bloated and hung over. If I work on the computer after dinner, I pay for it with unpleasant fatigue the next day.

Similarly, if I “cheat” and make withdrawals on my sensitive energy account on weekends, I wake up Monday morning feeling desperate. I work in a focused way all week, and I’ve learned the hard way that if I don’t take a break on weekends, I become illness-prone.

I’m not alone in this. In fact, many HSPs get sick because they are desperate for a socially acceptable excuse to rest. We can be conscientious to a fault: we’ll make sure everybody and everything is taken care of before we’ll attend to our own needs. We end up with a bad case of energy overdraw. Finally, the body says, “OK! If you won’t rest, I’ll make you rest!”

Why energy overdraw is challenging to address

Why don’t we just snap out of it? Why didn’t I just take Dr. S’s advice and give up the parties, the beer, and the chips? If you remember yourself at 19, you know the answer: it is hard to face our limitations.

That’s why self-empathy is an essential skill for sensitive people. We need to have compassion for ourselves. Inner Relationship Focusing is a powerful tool for self-compassion. With Focusing, we can greet the parts of us that struggle to resolve the inner conflict inherent in energy overdraw:

I’m sensing something in me that wants to hang with friends late at night, drinking beer and eating potato chips. And I’m sensing something in me that hates the way I feel the next morning. I’m here with both…and I am the space where both can be.

Once you become that bigger space, you can hold all your parts in a way that permits change to happen when things were stuck before. Each of your parts—even the ones that appear self-destructive, irrational, or irresponsible—is doing its best to try to take care of you. When you honor this and form a relationship with each one, your inner world becomes much happier.

Hanging out with other HSPs is another powerful way to normalize our needs for rest and down time, rather than trying to rearrange ourselves to fit the habits of the non-sensitive majority. When you observe other happy HSPs, you quickly grasp that you are not a wimp for needing, say, eight hours of sleep. You simply a happier, kinder, more effective person when you are well-rested.

It’s not all bad news—on the contrary

This may sound like managing your sensitive energy is all about giving things up, and that HSP life is a litany of “can’t do this, don’t do that.” This is not true. Yes, you will have to make tough choices sometimes. But here’s the energy secret I’ve discovered, after years of experimentation and observation:

You can approach the point of energy overdraw repeatedly, as long as you pause to rest before you cross the line into energy overdraw.

That’s it. You do what you want to do, if you know how to manage your energy skillfully. You have to learn to pace yourself. Only you can discern the fine line between garden-variety fatigue and true energy overdraw. You will need to experiment. Sometimes you won’t know until later whether you made the right call. This discernment is the key, though, because once you enter that deeper level of depletion, you will need much longer to recover.

To develop this discernment, I suggest these three steps:

1—Observe yourself closely and notice the flow of your energy. What drains it? What recharges it? What patterns do you notice? Do this minute by minute, hourly, weekly, monthly, and yearly. (Tip: Pretty much everything affects your energy: sleep, food, exercise, company, spiritual practice, stress level. Leave no stone unturned.)

2—Ask yourself, “What is under my control here? What isn’t under my control?” Be honest with yourself. Make a list of things you actually could change if you wanted to.

3—Tweak your routines, your schedule, your work, and your play time so you have the flexibility to work hard when you have energy and pause to rest when you approach energy overdraw. Then go back to Step One and repeat.

Managing your HSP energy is a long-term project

If you repeat these three steps patiently and faithfully, you will see a significant increase in your energy over time.

That said, you may sometimes choose to break your carefully crafted self-care rules and do something that requires energy overdraw. I did this myself, for example, when I chose to drive home from the Midwest in one day in order not to miss events I had scheduled for the coming week. I knew that 11 hours of high-concentration, caffeine-fueled driving would send me into energy overdraw, and it did. I got home safely, but I needed extra rest for several days in order to recover.

In this case, the recovery time was worth the chance to spend an additional day with my elderly parents after my dad’s surgery. But the unpleasant sensations of energy overdraw reminded me why I so rarely choose to override my body’s fatigue signals as I had done that day.

Instead, I keep a close eye on my energy, and when I find myself approaching energy overdraw, I pause to rest. I never let myself get down to my last few cents. As a result, I rarely get sick anymore. It’s not that I can’t stay up late and drink beer and eat potato chips, or indulge occasionally in energy-overdraw behavior. Life is short. So once in a while, I’ll do something I know I’ll pay for later. But I do it with my eyes open.

Image: © Emily Agnew 2024
Note: This is an expanded version of the article that originally appeared here on Aug 21, 2018.