Inside the Mind, Beyond the Desk
Aug 22, 2026 · 33 min · 12 segments
Why do some days leave us completely drained, even when we haven’t done that much? In this episode of *Inside the Mind: Beyond the Desk*, we explore **energy management** and why managing your…
Áine O'DeaHost
Karen BeckettHost
us through what is energy management? Energy management is all about recognising that our cognitive, emotional and physical resources only have a certain capacity.
So Karen, when you think about energy, if you think of it a little bit like a bank account, if you withdraw all of your money from your bank account and you go into your overdraft.
it takes an awful lot longer to get out of the overdraft and back into credit, into the saving again.
It's very easy to spend and to use it all up, but it can take a lot longer to replenish and bring it back.
And that's why everyday life, you know, our personal and our professional lives, sometimes we can overspend that resource and end up feeling really depleted.
Yeah, and I think it's really important that we acknowledge that if you're a busy brain, if you're a divergent, there is a lot of your energy that you're utilizing just for the kind of normal day to day.
So for instance, and we talked about in another episode around your sensory environment, so if your brain is designed a bit differently and you're a little bit more sensitive or hyper aware of your sensory environment, so lighting, sound, your body temperature, all of those things, that is already going to create an energy spend essentially before you even get involved in a cognitive task.
So you think about all of that, as you said, the sensory side of like being, you know, our nervous system being more receptive to all of that environmental and everyday stimuli.
that burns up energy first so too does all that cognitive piece we spoke in another episode around the ability to be able to hyper focus that burns a lot of cognitive energy so you can see now if you're sensitive to the environment you've got the ability to really hyper focus on a task emotionally if you're sensitive as well now all this energy is being used up across multiple systems and you can be left feeling really depleted
Yeah, and I think even when we're talking about the amount of decisions that you make just on a basic day-to-day, well, you're saying 33,000 to some extent, so you can see kind of deposits literally going out like tapping your card.
So then when we come to actually do some cognitive heavy tasks, It is quite difficult and that's why sometimes we do get into the situation where we're nearly finding it difficult to get started if the morning has been heavy or if the journey to doing that task, you know, has involved an awful lot of processing, an awful lot of decision making, some energy management around your sensory environment.
oh yeah and that's why there's so many myths around this because people have to think is that actually it's about time management and that if you could manage your time better because we all have the same amount of time in the day but actually we should really be encouraging people to think about managing their energy and rather than their time.
Because as you were describing that, the other piece that really came up for me was, we forgot about the social energy.
If you've been at a lot of social events, and that might be, even now, people say this constantly of, I was in the office there last week and I was so tired after it.
Because there's such a social... energy required for that if you go to an event if you go to an after work dinner you have to potentially smile chat engage with a lot of people a lot of social energy so we need to think about time and energy and i suppose how we plan and balance them because i think that will give us a much healthier approach to it that we can think about sustainable performance or sustainable engagement versus thinking that we can just do it all all the time and
us through what is energy management? Energy management is all about recognising that our cognitive, emotional and physical resources only have a certain capacity.
So Karen, when you think about energy, if you think of it a little bit like a bank account, if you withdraw all of your money from your bank account and you go into your overdraft.
it takes an awful lot longer to get out of the overdraft and back into credit, into the saving again.
It's very easy to spend and to use it all up, but it can take a lot longer to replenish and bring it back.
And that's why everyday life, you know, our personal and our professional lives, sometimes we can overspend that resource and end up feeling really depleted.
Yeah, and I think it's really important that we acknowledge that if you're a busy brain, if you're a divergent, there is a lot of your energy that you're utilizing just for the kind of normal day to day.
So for instance, and we talked about in another episode around your sensory environment, so if your brain is designed a bit differently and you're a little bit more sensitive or hyper aware of your sensory environment, so lighting, sound, your body temperature, all of those things, that is already going to create an energy spend essentially before you even get involved in a cognitive task.
So you think about all of that, as you said, the sensory side of like being, you know, our nervous system being more receptive to all of that environmental and everyday stimuli.
that burns up energy first so too does all that cognitive piece we spoke in another episode around the ability to be able to hyper focus that burns a lot of cognitive energy so you can see now if you're sensitive to the environment you've got the ability to really hyper focus on a task emotionally if you're sensitive as well now all this energy is being used up across multiple systems and you can be left feeling really depleted
Yeah, and I think even when we're talking about the amount of decisions that you make just on a basic day-to-day, well, you're saying 33,000 to some extent, so you can see kind of deposits literally going out like tapping your card.
So then when we come to actually do some cognitive heavy tasks, It is quite difficult and that's why sometimes we do get into the situation where we're nearly finding it difficult to get started if the morning has been heavy or if the journey to doing that task, you know, has involved an awful lot of processing, an awful lot of decision making, some energy management around your sensory environment.
oh yeah and that's why there's so many myths around this because people have to think is that actually it's about time management and that if you could manage your time better because we all have the same amount of time in the day but actually we should really be encouraging people to think about managing their energy and rather than their time.
Because as you were describing that, the other piece that really came up for me was, we forgot about the social energy.
If you've been at a lot of social events, and that might be, even now, people say this constantly of, I was in the office there last week and I was so tired after it.
Because there's such a social... energy required for that if you go to an event if you go to an after work dinner you have to potentially smile chat engage with a lot of people a lot of social energy so we need to think about time and energy and i suppose how we plan and balance them because i think that will give us a much healthier approach to it that we can think about sustainable performance or sustainable engagement versus thinking that we can just do it all all the time and
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