7 Total Wastes of Energy You Need to Stop Doing

You could probably free up half your mental energy today. Half of it. If you stop doing just a handful of things that feel productive but are actually draining you dry. Now, I'm not talking about doom scrolling or eating junk food, even though yes, those drain your energy. I'm talking about things that feel important, things that feel like you're working on yourself, things that might even feel noble. But they're taking the energy that you need for your actual life and just burning through it. It's like you're running your car engine while you sit in the driveway and you're using up all the gas, but you're not going anywhere. Now, if you grew up with trauma, you probably got used to pouring enormous amounts of energy into all kinds of things to try to hold life together, trying to be appreciated by people who weren't even paying attention, trying to control situations that were totally uncontrollable. You're trying to figure out what was wrong with you so that you could finally fix it and just fit in with other kids. And a lot of us carried those patterns straight into adulthood. Maybe fixing some of them, but some you can't even see because they feel so normal. So, you're frantically spending your energy on things other than your life, which feels like, you know, when you're still kind of driven by trauma, it feels like what life is. But here's the question, has it worked for you? If you're behind where you want to be in your life, if you're totally stuck even, that is evidence that you've been using your energy on the wrong things and you can change this. But it helps to know what this looks like, okay? So, the first waste of energy that's common for us is rehearsing conversations that will probably never happen. So, you're in the shower, you're driving, you're lying in bed at 2 in the morning, and you're mentally delivering this incredible monologue to someone, your mother, your ex, your boss, where you finally say the perfect thing, and they finally get it. They can see what they did to you. Maybe they cry a little, and you feel that relief of being truly, finally understood. Be nice, right? Except none of this happened, and it's not going to happen. And honestly, even if you delivered that speech word for word, the person would probably interrupt you in the first 10 seconds and get defensive and twist it around, and you'd end up feeling worse than before you started. But your brain keeps running that simulation because the fantasy of being heard is so intoxicating. It's what we want. And meanwhile, you've just burned 40 minutes in a trance, basically. 40 minutes that could have gone towards something that actually exists in your life. Okay? So, number two, waste of energy, is trying to figure out why someone is the way they are. Now, this is a big one for people who grew up around unpredictable or cruel people. And you develop this like detective habit. Like, if you could just understand why your mom flew into rages, or if you could just piece together what happened to your boyfriend that made him turn so cold, then what? Then what, exactly? Then it'll hurt less? Nah, it won't. Understanding someone's backstory does not undo how they treat you, and it keeps your focus locked on them instead of on you and on your life right now. So, their why is it's just not your project. You could spend the rest of your life assembling that puzzle, and it would change nothing about today. So, the focus belongs on you in present time. Do you accept this behavior that you're encountering? And if not, then why are you arguing with them about what they are not willing to change? And arguing it for the hundredth time perhaps. Focusing on yourself, that is the only place where anything can actually shift. All right, number three. It's waiting for an apology. Do you do this? You've organized your emotional life around something that another person may never do and probably never will. So energy-wise, it's like you're flying into the airport, you're circling, you're burning fuel, you're waiting for permission to land from somebody in the control tower who is never going to give it to you. Mhm. Some people will never apologize. In fact, most of Not because they don't know what they did necessarily. They probably know, but the character problems in them that led them to behave the way they did also make them incapable of admitting what they did. They're not very strong. Occasionally somebody will like get

sober and really have a transformation and they will come around, but that's still not going to solve your problem. I'm just pointing out. You may have a better relationship. But mostly people who have hurt you don't have strength and they're fragile and they fear that they would collapse if they were to ever admit what they did. And so they fight and blame and rationalize and deny to the death. And your life cannot be on hold while they develop integrity. You can heal anyway. You were once a victim of what they did. Yes, but now you are free. So their apology is not the gate you have to pass through so that you can start living. This is number four. Abandoning yourself thinking you can keep everyone happy if you like don't exist. So, you might be spending a huge amount of energy every day anticipating what people need, monitoring their moods, adjusting yourself, softening your opinions, laughing at things that aren't funny, and saying yes when you mean no. You might be asking how they're doing and listening for 45 minutes without ever being asked back. This is exhausting. And here's the painful part. It doesn't even work. It doesn't work. People can sense when you're being agreeable instead of being real. And it creates this subtle kind of ick, really. It creates distance, and it actually pushes people away. Your actual self, your real opinions, your honest reactions, good and bad, your weird sense of humor, that is what people can connect with. When they're talking to the managed, people-pleasing version of you, it's like they're trying to hug a mannequin. Nobody gets nourished by that. Now, if you're going to heal that wound underneath your frantic efforts to be nice and good and not making people angry, what heals you is connection, real connection. And that's what finally gives you the strength to stop dancing around trying to, you know, get some sort of like secret way to get people to approve of you. You don't need that. You need the real thing. All right. Number five, waste of energy, is arguing on the internet. I know, right? But you've probably seen me do it. But someone is wrong, right? — They're wrong. And you are preaching to the choir with me here. People take a swipe at me all the time in the comment section. And I once put up a video about why I thought that men should pay for the first date, okay? I said that. You might agree with me, you might not, but two guys, they got in there and they called me a like bloodsucker, white trash, trailer mama, expecting everyone to take care of me, leech on society. So, what did I do? I got in there and, you know, helpfully explained to them that actually I'd always worked and had never been financially dependent on anyone. As if they were going to say, "Oh, we're so sorry for attacking you and misunderstanding when you're obviously such a good and noble person. " Of course, that's not what they did. They flipped in the other direction like in a flash, and they called me a like a man-hating or something who was going to die alone or something like that. And I was all worked up. And trust me on this one, you're never going to change a stranger's mind in the comment section when they're determined to tear you apart. So, what you will do if you engage with such people is you're going to spike your cortisol and clench your jaw, and then get very, very dysregulated and spend 2 hours crafting the perfect rebuttal that the other person will either ignore or respond to with something so breathtakingly evil and stupid that you want to throw your phone in the ocean. So, that's not engagement. That's not worth your time at all. It's like a slot machine. — You keep pulling the lever and you're hoping that if you say just the right thing, you'll win. But, there is no winning except to walk away. If you're the host of the channel, you can delete those people, you can hide them from the channel, you can block them if you want. They are never worth reasoning with. And this is exactly why I do my daily practice techniques, so all that resentment has somewhere useful to go. And what gets you upset in the daily practice becomes information. It becomes growth because there you can face it and you can get rid of it. You if it doesn't get kicked up in the form of resentment, you don't have the chance to face it and it's just still there kind of lurking, coming out as a bit of like snarkiness or an overreaction occasionally. But here, when you're doing your daily practice twice a day, you have the chance to actually see what that resentment is, what are the fears underneath it, and be free of them. Now

these techniques saved my life 32 years ago and I still do them twice a day. You can learn the techniques, too. This is the foundation of my courses, my membership, my coaching programs. You can learn them in a short free course that I offer called The Daily Practice and I'll put the link to it in the top line of the description section below. All right, number six waste of time is over-researching your own psychology. Now, this might surprise you coming from me, but not if you know me. I see people who spend years reading about attachment theory and watching videos about narcissism and memorizing diagnostic criteria and they can explain trauma beautifully and disorganized attachment, emotional flashback, fawn response. And they've got the vocabulary down. They've got it cold. But nothing in their actual daily life has changed. Still lonely, still dysregulated, um you know, still stuck because knowledge, all right, without action is a very sophisticated form of avoidance. It feels like progress, but it's not. And this is where I have to be blunt. At some point, you have to stop consuming information, including mine, and start doing something with your life, even if you don't feel ready, especially because that feeling of readiness, for people who with childhood PTSD, it almost never comes on its own. It comes after you start taking action, not before. And you do know what to do. You know exactly what to do, even if it's just under the surface of your awareness. So, you know, I have a membership program. I encourage you to check it out. There's always a link down below. You can find it on my website. This is like all action at the pace that you want it membership at Crappy Childhood Fairy. You'll love it. It's not very expensive. You get all my courses. webinars. You um get to come to group Q& A calls and daily practice calls with me twice a month. And you get to be part of this online community if you choose to be, where there's a whole bunch of people working together and supporting each other and hosting peer-led daily practice Zoom calls all the time. I encourage you to check that out. I will put that down in the description section. It's always there. Membership. And I also want to leave you with um an exercise, very simple. I call it one year to heal. And this is how you surface what you unconsciously know you need to do. And it's very easy to access this information. You kind of trick yourself with a set of questions I give you. And your answers will just appear. You'll be writing them out on the paper. You know what to do. You can download this exercise for free um and do it right now, in fact. And I'll put that link in the second line of the description section below this video. Now, number seven, time waster, is staying in contact with people who consistently make you feel terrible. So, you do it out of obligation or out of guilt or out of fear that without these people that you don't even like, you're going to be alone. And you might be for a little bit. But the way you know them is that every phone call you have with them, it just like leaves you flattened. And every visit takes three days to recover from. And you keep showing up because deep down, you believe that putting up with bad treatment is what good people do. Do you have that sort of thing? I did. Sometimes it's true, actually. Sometimes that's a duty. You show up for people who are difficult. But if you're taking on too much, it'll grind you down. You are the one who has to set the boundary. Protecting your energy and your confidence is not selfish. It's what adults do. All right, number eight is pouring love and attention into someone who is clearly unavailable. We talk about this a lot here, but I have to throw this in because it's a major energy waster in the romantic area of life. So, you're fixated on someone who won't commit, who breadcrumbs you, who keeps you dangling with just enough warmth to keep you hoping. Or maybe it's a friend where you give and get nothing back. That feeling of longing, of almost having, that is not love, okay? That's the slot machine again. You give everything because you want to keep hope alive. And you keep hoping, and you keep hoping. And I always say, hope is our dope. It's like a drug. But the energy you're throwing at someone who isn't, you know, receiving it, doesn't want it, that energy is some of the most potent creative energy that you possess. And right now, it's going nowhere. So, redirect it. Direct it towards your own life, your own work, your own healing, your own goals, your own hopes for connection

with people who actually show up when you need them. And then, watch what happens. All eight of these energy drains have something in common. They keep you focused on other people and on the past. And when your whole focus is there, you can't be present for your own life, which is happening right now, whether you're paying attention to it or not. The injury of childhood trauma is disconnection from yourself, from other people, and every one of these habits is a form of disconnection dressed up as something productive. So you feel like you're doing something. getting somewhere, but you're actually absent from your own life. And the results of your efforts, well, wherever your life is now, good or bad, where you are now is the result of how you've handled this. So stop trying to make the change happen by changing someone else or changing something that no longer exists. Now, I'm not a therapist. I'm someone who healed from my own childhood PTSD symptoms, and I teach people here exactly how I did it. And what I can tell you is that the energy that you get back when you stop throwing it into these black holes, it is so fruitful. It is so strong. It is so life-changing. And suddenly there's fuel for the things that matter, for making your life work, for being present with people who care about you, for building something real. That energy is yours. It's the best part of you. So use it wisely, and everyone in your life is lifted up. Sometimes that urge to clutter up your mind, your heart, your time, your home, it's a way to hold life away from you. It's covert avoidance. Life is hard sometimes. It can be triggering. —