What Is Draining Your Energy
Updated: 4 days ago
Your phone has a screen that shows exactly what drained the battery. Open the settings and there's every app, with a percentage next to it. Some of the culprits are obvious. Others are apps you forgot you had, running in the background all day.
Nobody gives you that screen for yourself. By the afternoon you feel flat, you put it down to being tired, and you reach for something sweet. It doesn't occur to most of us that the day had a battery report, or that we could read it.
Yesterday was about prana, the energy underneath willpower. Today is the battery screen. Where does the energy actually go?
Where tiredness comes from
We like to think we're tired because we worked hard. Sometimes that's true. More often the energy went on small things we never looked at, and each one felt harmless at the time.
The Bhagavad Gita describes how this works in a passage I come back to often. In the second chapter Krishna traces how a person falls apart, one small step at a time (2.62 and 2.63):
Brooding on sense objects, a person becomes attached to them. From attachment grows desire. From desire comes anger. From anger comes confusion. From confusion, the memory is lost. When memory is lost, discernment goes. And when discernment goes, the person is ruined. Bhagavad Gita 2.62 and 2.63, paraphrased
It starts with brooding: letting your attention rest on something a little too long. Nothing dramatic happens at that step. You'd never put it on a list of problems. Yet everything after it is the same energy running out, a little further down the line.
Swami Sivananda gives the same chain in a shorter form in Practice of Karma Yoga: "Thought is the fuel. Desire is the fire." Stop supplying the thought, he says, and the fire goes out, like a lamp when the oil is withdrawn. In Mind: Its Mysteries and Control he does the accounts. Energy is wasted in useless thinking just as it is in idle talk, so don't waste even a single thought.
The wandering senses
A few verses later, Krishna gives the picture I find most useful today. If the mind follows even one wandering sense, it loses its judgement, the way wind pushes a boat off course (2.67).
Take a ten-minute scroll. It feels like a break. Meanwhile your mind makes a hundred tiny decisions about what to look at next, reacts to a dozen small things, and ends up somewhere you never meant to go. The boat has drifted. You look up, the time has gone, and so has the energy.
The Gita's counter-image is the tortoise, who draws its limbs in at will (2.58). Yoga later gave this skill a name, pratyahara, the withdrawing of the senses. Scrolling is no sin. But attention is the first thing that uses up energy, and it keeps using it whether you notice or not.
What Patanjali lists
The Yoga Sutras have a list that reads like a doctor's notes. Sutra 1.30 names nine obstacles that scatter the mind: illness, dullness, doubt, carelessness, laziness, craving, wrong understanding, not finding your footing, and losing it once you have.
Then sutra 1.31 says something I love. These obstacles bring four companions with them: sorrow, despair, a shaky body and uneven breathing.
Look at the last one. Shallow, uneven, held breath is listed as a sign that something is draining you. If you've ever caught yourself barely breathing while answering email, you've seen this sutra at work.
Six things that wear you out
Here are the usual suspects, in no particular order. Check them against your own day.
Scrolling. The senses wander and the mind follows. This is the boat in verse 2.67.
Caffeine on an empty stomach. It lends you energy at a high interest rate, and the bill tends to arrive around 3 pm. The Gita would file the restless, driven kind of energy under rajas, the quality of activity and craving (14.7). It feels like energy, but it burns hot and fast.
Open loops. The reply you haven't sent, the decision you keep postponing, the thing you said you'd look into. Each one keeps humming in the background. This is close to what Patanjali calls samshaya, doubt or indecision, and it costs something every hour it stays open.
Irritation that keeps running. The Gita names desire, anger and greed as the three gates to self-destruction (16.21). Minute for minute, anger costs the most. An argument you replay in the shower for twenty minutes is twenty minutes of energy with nothing to show for it.
Eating at odd hours or too much at once. We'll spend a whole day on this later in the week. For now, see how you feel ninety minutes after a very heavy meal.
Idle talk and arguments. Sivananda is blunt about this one. In Practice of Karma Yoga he says energy is wasted in idle talking and worldly gossip, and that the person who talks much thinks little and does little. In Mind: Its Mysteries and Control he adds arguments: they bring heated feelings and a wastage of energy. His remedy is mouna, silence, for a couple of hours a day. A gentle version: pick one conversation today and let the other person have the last word.
Why the small things matter most
A big drain, like a sleepless night or a bitter row, is easy to see. You know what happened, and you can forgive yourself for being tired afterwards.
The small ones are harder to catch, because each one is trivial and each one repeats, sometimes forty times a day. Yoga has a word for what repetition does to the mind: samskara, an impression that deepens every time it is traced, like a path worn across a field. That's why the habit of drifting to the phone is so much harder to spot, and so much harder to break, than any single bad day.
So a big resolution won't fix a small habit. Noticing it will, one time after another, until the path starts to grow over.
Build your own battery screen
You can make that report for yourself, and it takes under a minute a day.
Sivananda made a version of this decades ago. In Practical Lessons in Yoga he gives a Spiritual Diary of 27 questions to answer every night. When did you get up? How many hours did you sleep? How many times were you angry, and for how long? How many hours did you spend in useless company? He asks you to compare this week with last week and adjust. It's a battery screen in 1940s language, and it works for the same reason: what you write down, you start to see.
On a sheet of paper or a note on your phone, draw three columns: time, energy from 1 to 10, and what I was doing in the last hour. Fill in a line at four points in the day, say 10 am, 1 pm, 4 pm and 8 pm. Do this for three days.
On the third evening, read it like a detective. Do the low numbers come after a certain meal? A certain kind of meeting? A certain app? Most people find that two or three things explain most of the dips.
Then do the thing that sounds too small to matter. Pick one and fix only that. Leave the rest for now. One habit fixed is worth more than a perfect plan you give up on by Thursday.
That's the work for this week: check the fuel gauge before you push the car any harder.
Tomorrow: what puts the energy back.
Where to read more
All of these are Sivananda-tradition books.
Practice of Karma Yoga, Swami Sivananda (on thought, desire and conserving energy)
Mind: Its Mysteries and Control, Swami Sivananda (chapters on mouna and thought-energy)
Practical Lessons in Yoga, Swami Sivananda (the Spiritual Diary)
Meditation and Mantras, Swami Vishnudevananda (on useless conversation)
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