When Your Energy Becomes Unpredictable, Your Attention Changes Too
If you're living with chronic fatigue, how much of your day do you spend thinking about your energy?
Perhaps it starts before you've even got out of bed.
How tired do I feel?
Does anything hurt?
How much energy have I got today?
What do I need to do?
Will I manage it?
And if I do that today, how might I feel tomorrow?
Sometimes the checking is so familiar that you barely notice you're doing it.
At other times, you may be very aware of it — and perhaps even frustrated with yourself.
“I know I shouldn't worry about this, but...”
“I know worrying probably makes it worse, but I'm concerned that...”
And so another worry gets added to the original one.
I shouldn't be worrying so much.
But what if there is a perfectly understandable reason why so much of your attention has become focused on your body and your energy?
And what if the first step isn't to make yourself stop?
When energy becomes unpredictable, paying attention makes sense
Most of us tend to think about energy physically.
How well did I sleep?
How much have I done?
Where does my body hurt?
How much energy have I got left?
All of those things matter.
But our experience of energy can be influenced by much more than physical activity.
Think about a conversation that left you feeling completely drained — despite the fact that you were sitting down for most of it.
Or perhaps a conversation you were worried about beforehand. Sometimes the hours spent anticipating it use more energy than the conversation itself.
Compare that with spending time with somebody you feel completely comfortable with. You may do exactly the same amount physically, yet come away feeling lighter or somehow restored.
Or think about the moment somebody asks you to do something and you hear yourself saying yes when everything inside you wanted to say no.
Sometimes you can almost feel your energy sink.
Physical energy matters.
But so do mental energy, emotional energy and social energy. There is also energy connected with our sense of purpose, who we are in the world and how we're living our lives.
Once we start looking at energy through this wider lens, some of our experiences begin to make a little more sense.
Your brain is constantly deciding what deserves your attention
Your brain receives vastly more information than you could ever consciously notice.
It therefore has to filter.
One part of the brain involved in this process is called the reticular activating system, or RAS.
You may have experienced its filtering ability without realising it.
Imagine you're thinking about buying a particular car. You've noticed a model you like — perhaps even a particular colour.
Suddenly, that car seems to be everywhere.
There aren't necessarily more of them on the road.
Your brain simply knows that this particular piece of information matters to you, so it becomes easier to notice.
And this is where things get interesting when we think about chronic fatigue.
Because if your body or your energy has become unpredictable, what has your brain learned is important to notice?
Of course you're checking
If activity has sometimes left you feeling much worse afterwards, it makes sense that you begin trying to calculate its possible cost.
If you've been caught out by your energy before, it makes sense that you try to avoid being caught out again.
If a new symptom might mean you need to change your plans, of course you notice it.
And if you don't know what sort of day your body is going to give you, it makes sense to check before you start making demands of it.
Your attention may have become very skilled at noticing:
tiredness
pain
changes in symptoms
pressure
risk
uncertainty
what might go wrong
whether you're doing too much
how you might feel tomorrow.
That's not a failure.
And it isn't evidence that you've been managing your fatigue incorrectly.
Your attention has been trying to help you.
It has been gathering information that might help you predict, plan, manage and protect yourself.
Perhaps, then, we can replace:
Why do I keep doing this?
with a slightly different question:
What has my attention been trying to do for me?
That small change matters.
Because instead of fighting with ourselves for worrying, checking or noticing, we can begin to get curious about why those patterns might have developed.
What does your attention notice first?
Here's something you might simply observe over the next few days.
When you first wake up, where does your attention go?
Do you scan your body for pain?
Check how tired you feel?
Notice how busy your mind already is?
Start running through everything that needs to happen that day?
Perhaps you begin calculating.
If I do this in the morning, will I have enough energy for that this afternoon?
If I go out today, will I pay for it tomorrow?
You don't need to stop yourself.
You don't even need to change anything.
Just notice.
What does my attention notice first?
And perhaps, very gently:
What might it be trying to help me prepare for?
There is quite a difference between worrying about the fact that you worry and becoming curious about what the worry is trying to tell you.
The worry may still be there.
But now there's a little space around it.
You don't have to ignore what's wrong
This is where I want to be particularly careful.
I'm not suggesting that you ignore pain, fatigue or symptoms.
And I'm certainly not suggesting that if you simply “think positively” you'll feel better.
Your symptoms deserve your attention.
But they don't necessarily have to occupy all of it.
Sometimes I invite clients who automatically check for pain in the morning to add one more question.
What else is true?
Perhaps your back hurts and your legs ache.
That's true.
Is there also somewhere in your body that feels okay?
Maybe today it's only your little finger!
That counts.
You're not replacing one reality with another.
You're allowing both realities to exist.
This hurts.
And...
This feels okay.
You're simply widening the information your attention gets to notice.
And then there are the “shoulds”
Our bodies aren't the only things we can begin observing.
Our language can tell us an enormous amount about what we're carrying too.
Notice what happens when these words appear:
I should...
I have to...
I need to...
I must...
I ought to...
They can carry a surprising amount of weight.
“I should go to that family gathering.”
“I need to get the house tidy.”
“I must reply to those emails.”
“I really ought to be able to manage this.”
Sometimes there genuinely are things we need to do.
But sometimes those words reveal expectations, obligations, fears or old rules that we've been carrying without consciously noticing them.
So once again, I'm not going to suggest that you replace every should with a more positive sentence.
Just hear it.
And perhaps wonder:
What is that “should” asking me to carry?
You might be surprised by what becomes visible.
Awareness doesn't have to be another job
There can be a temptation when we discover something new about ourselves to immediately ask:
Right. What do I need to DO about this?
Perhaps nothing yet.
Because awareness itself changes something.
When something we've been doing automatically becomes visible, there is a tiny pause between noticing it and whatever happens next.
And inside that pause, we may begin to see things we couldn't see before.
Perhaps there's another way of looking at the situation.
Perhaps we notice a need we hadn't heard.
Perhaps a kinder response becomes available.
Perhaps we discover that something we thought we had to do isn't quite as compulsory as we believed.
Or perhaps we simply understand ourselves a little better.
That is enough.
From worrying to wondering
One of the changes I often notice when working with women living with chronic fatigue is not that all their concerns about their bodies suddenly disappear.
Instead, the relationship with those concerns begins to change.
At first there can be enormous vigilance around the body and energy.
What's wrong?
What if this gets worse?
What am I doing wrong?
How am I going to manage?
Over time, something different can begin to appear.
I wonder why my body responds like that?
I wonder what was going on for me that day?
I wonder what this might be telling me?
I wonder whether there's something I could do differently?
Worry has begun to make room for curiosity.
And curiosity gives us somewhere very different from which to begin.
You don't have to fight the part of you that has been watching, checking, predicting and trying to keep you safe.
Perhaps you can begin by understanding it.
And over the next few days, you might simply notice where your attention goes.
No correcting.
No judging.
No new regime to follow.
Just curiosity.
Because once you begin to understand what your attention has been doing, another interesting question sometimes emerges:
What else have I started doing to try to protect my energy?
And perhaps that's a conversation for another day.
If This Has Left You Wondering…
If you've recognised some of your own experience while reading this, you don't need to work out what it all means — or what you should do about it — on your own.
Perhaps you've noticed just how much attention goes into monitoring your body and your energy.
Perhaps you're beginning to wonder what some of your own shoulds, worries or expectations might be asking you to carry.
Or perhaps you've simply found yourself thinking:
“I hadn't thought about my energy like that before.”
Any of those is a perfectly good place to begin.
If you'd like to talk about what's going on for you
Let's Meet is a free 30-minute conversation with me.
There's nothing you need to prepare and no expectation that you arrive knowing what kind of support you need.
We'll simply start with two things:
What's going on for you at the moment?
and
What would you like to be different?
From there, we can gently explore what feels most important to you and whether there is a useful next step — even if that next step is simply leaving with a little more clarity about what you've been experiencing.
My hope, whenever I write something like this, is that you leave understanding a little more about what might be going on underneath your fatigue — and perhaps feeling a little more curious about yourself than you did when you arrived.
You don't need to have all the answers.
Sometimes wondering is a very good place to start.
Suzanne xx
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