The Real Reason Protecting Your Energy Is So Hard
Here’s something I’ve noticed about the women I coach, the women I know, and honestly, the woman I spent most of my life being: we are very good at knowing what we should do, and very practiced at not doing it.
We know we’re overextended. We know we need rest. We know that saying yes to one more thing means saying no to something that actually matters to us. We’ve read the books, heard the advice, nodded along to every article about boundaries and self-care and the importance of protecting our peace.
And then someone asks us for something, and we say yes before we’ve even finished listening to the question.
So, what is actually going on?
I’ve been sitting with that question for a long time. And in July, as I’m writing about protecting your energy — the beautiful obligations we carry, the emotional weight we absorb from other people, the burdens we take on that were never ours to hold, the courage it takes to disappoint someone, the identity we build around being endlessly available — I keep coming back to the same answer.
Protecting your energy is hard because it requires you to believe that you are worth protecting.
And for many of us, that belief is the very thing we’ve never fully settled.
The Lesson I Almost Missed
Years ago, when I was still working a 50-plus hour week that took me all over Southern California — commute not included — I was also singing in a chorus, rehearsing regularly with my quartet, taking a weekly yoga class, and filling whatever was left with my kids, grandkids, husband, parents, travel, concerts, and friends. My husband and I were busy people with a full, layered life, and I wore that fullness like a point of pride.
Whenever the pace started to feel like too much, I had a little reframe I’d reach for: this isn’t a “have to” life, it’s a “get to” life. A rich and rewarding life. And most of the time, that reframe worked. It helped me stay grateful rather than resentful, and it was genuinely true — I loved my work, I loved my people, I loved the life we’d built.
But there was something underneath all that fullness I wasn’t looking at. Something I was, in fact, using the fullness to avoid.
I didn’t see it until a quartet rehearsal brought it into focus.
We were trying to schedule a coaching session — the four of us friends, comparing calendars, looking for a date that worked. Of all of us, I had the least flexibility. I had the big job, the long commute, the chorus commitments, the standing yoga class, the family obligations. One particular friend didn’t work outside the home and had, from where I was standing, what looked like wide open availability. So when she kept declining dates and said she didn’t want to book more than a couple of events in a given week, I felt my frustration rise.
I finally said it out loud: “Can’t you just fit us in? I’m much busier than you, and this is the only week that works for me.”
Her answer stopped me cold.
“I don’t want to be that busy.”
I remember feeling annoyed. We found a date eventually, I moved things around to make it work, and I spent the drive home feeling vaguely put out. My friend, I thought, just didn’t understand what it meant to have a full life. She was choosing smallness when she could have been choosing more.
It took me years — and a retirement, and a lot of open, uncomfortable silence — to understand that my friend wasn’t choosing smallness. She was choosing herself. She knew exactly how much she wanted to carry, and she wasn’t apologizing for it. I was the one who didn’t yet know what I actually wanted, because I had never slowed down long enough to ask.
The truth I couldn’t see then: I wasn’t busy because my life demanded it. I was busy because busyness had become my hiding place. If I kept every minute filled, I didn’t have to sit with my feelings. I could stuff them, defer them, Scarlett O’Hara them into tomorrow — and tomorrow never came. I had learned to run almost entirely on caffeine and cortisol, and I had dressed it up as ambition and called it a rich and rewarding life.
It wasn’t until I retired from my day job and experienced a truly open schedule for the first time that I understood what my dear friend had been trying to teach me in that rehearsal. She wasn’t less than me. She was further along.
What Protecting Your Energy Actually Requires
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, after all of it: protecting your energy is not primarily a time management problem. It is an identity problem. Or more precisely, it is a worth problem.
When we believe — really believe, not just intellectually acknowledge — that our value is fixed and not contingent on our productivity, our availability, or our willingness to carry whatever is handed to us, the practical decisions get easier. Not easy. But easier. Because the question stops being “how do I justify saying no?” and starts being “what is actually mine to carry in this season?” Those are very different questions. The first one puts you on trial. The second one treats you as someone with legitimate authority over your own life.
That shift doesn’t happen on its own. It happens through a series of moments, most of them inconvenient, that crack something open.
There was the dream I’ve shared with some of you this month (and I also wrote about it in another blog post HERE and I’m writing about it this month in the newsletter, so subscribe!) — the one with the iridescent obligations filling my hands until things started slipping away and no one stopped to help me gather them up. I woke up in a panic and spent years not fully understanding why. There was the realization that a painful relationship I had made mean something devastating about my worth was never really about me at all — that the other person was protecting something of her own, and her limitations weren’t a verdict on my value. There was the afternoon I stood in the middle of Hobby Lobby and sobbed in a way I hadn’t allowed myself to sob in years, finally admitting that I wasn’t just grieving the mother I was going to lose — I was grieving the relationship I had spent decades hoping we would one day revive, a hope I’ve been tending while I manage medications and drive to appointments and keep moving, because that’s what I do when things are hard. And there was the evening I stayed home from chorus dance auditions I had genuinely wanted, because I was sick, and because something in me finally recognized that pushing through would cost more than I was willing to spend anymore.
None of these moments came with a lesson neatly attached. They arrived messy and inconvenient, often in public places with bad lighting. But taken together, they kept pointing at the same thing: I had spent a very long time treating my own needs as negotiable while treating everyone else’s as fixed. And that arrangement had a cost I was no longer willing to pretend I wasn’t paying.
What This Actually Looks Like in Practice
Protecting your energy is a conviction before it’s a practice, but it does eventually have to become a practice. Here’s what I’ve learned about what that looks like on the ground.
Pause before you answer
This sounds almost too simple, but it is genuinely radical for women who have been trained to respond immediately. When someone asks something of you — your time, your presence, your energy, your emotional labor — you are allowed to say “let me think about that and get back to you.” You are allowed to check in with yourself before you check in with their calendar. That pause is not rudeness. It’s self-respect.
Ask the second question
Most of us have learned to ask “do I want this?” But the more important question is often the one that follows: “Do I want the life that comes with it?” Wanting a front row spot in a chorus is one thing. Wanting the additional rehearsals, the time commitment, and the pressure that comes with it — in this particular season, with everything else already on the plate — is a different question entirely. The two aren’t always the same, and the gap between them is where a lot of unnecessary exhaustion lives.
Name what you’re actually feeling, not just what you’re doing
I was a world-class doer for most of my life. Managing, organizing, executing, moving. What I was less practiced at was feeling. When I finally let myself cry in Hobby Lobby (not that I had a choice,) it wasn’t a breakdown. It was a breakthrough — the moment I stopped doing long enough to feel what had been waiting for me. Our bodies keep an honest account even when our minds are busy spinning a different story. When exhaustion shows up, when resentment shows up, when relief surprises you in places you didn’t expect it, those are signals worth listening to rather than overriding.
Release what isn’t yours to fix
One of the steadiest drains on our energy is continuing to reach toward something another person isn’t able to offer — trying to heal a relationship that requires two willing people, managing someone else’s emotional experience, taking responsibility for outcomes that don’t actually belong to us. You can love someone without carrying their work. You can grieve what isn’t possible while still being present, and joyful, for what is.
Let your margin be part of your identity, not just your strategy
My friend didn’t protect her time because she had a system. She protected it because she knew what she valued and she wasn’t willing to trade it away for the approval of someone who had a different relationship with busyness. That’s the difference between protecting your peace as something you do when you’re already depleted and protecting it as part of who you are. The woman who pauses before she says yes, who honors her limits without apologizing for them, who understands that her capacity is not a character flaw — she’s not being selfish. She’s being a good steward of the one life she’s been given.
The Question Underneath It All
On my desk, I keep a small pewter butterfly dish with a collection of iridescent marbles in it — marbles I found at a county fair years ago, marbles that look exactly like the beautiful obligations from my dream. The dish is small. It holds what it holds. I don’t look at it as a symbol of limitation. I look at it as a reminder that I am a finite person, and that my finitude is not something to overcome. It’s something to honor.
The vessel only holds so much. Knowing that isn’t resignation. It’s wisdom.
I spent a long time being Scarlett O’Hara about my own needs — promising myself I’d deal with them tomorrow, filling today so full there was no room to look at what was actually going on underneath. I thought I was being strong. I was actually just being avoidant in a very productive disguise. And the people around me — the ones I was so busy serving — never got the version of me that was actually present and at peace. They got the managed, caffeinated, cortisol-fueled version, and I told myself that was love.
What my quartet friend understood, and what I had to learn the slower way, is that protecting your peace isn’t about having less. It’s about being honest about what you actually want to hold — and having the courage to say so, even when someone else doesn’t understand, even when it disappoints them, even when the old version of you would have just made it work and resented it, in silence, for weeks afterward.
So, as we close out this topic this month, I want to ask you something that goes a little deeper than the usual reflection questions. Not just “what are you carrying?” — though that’s worth knowing. Not just “what do you need to put down?” — though that matters too.
But this: Do you actually believe you are worth protecting?
Not as something you say because it sounds right. As a settled, lived conviction that shapes the way you spend a lazy afternoon, the way you respond when someone needs something you don’t have, the way you treat your own exhaustion when it arrives.
Because if that belief isn’t there — or if it’s there in theory but not yet in practice — no amount of boundary-setting or schedule-restructuring is going to hold for long. You’ll set the boundary and then apologize for it. You’ll protect the time and then fill it with guilt. You’ll say no and spend three days wondering if you’re being selfish.
The work of protecting your energy is, at its root, the work of deciding that you matter. That your peace is worth something. That the woman you are becoming — not the one who can do it all, but the one who does what is truly hers with intention and presence and joy — is someone worth becoming.
That’s the work. And it’s good work.
And I’m so glad we’re doing it together.
I’m cheering you on.
— Jonni
