Emotional Exhaustion: How to Recover Your Energy
Have you ever gone through a time when you feel you have no energy or not enough energy to carry out your activities? Do you consider that you’ve had or have emotional fatigue and you’re not at ease? If so, you surely know how uncomfortable it is.
Nowadays, stress and emotional exhaustion are very common day-to-day issues, no matter who you are or what you do. Therefore, it’s not something “strange”.
Human beings have the capacity to think about and establish our life experiences. Each experience generates a feeling when we pay attention to it and become aware of it. When one brings negative energy, it’s very likely to cause problems in their physical and mental health.
To combat emotional fatigue, you can try the following strategies that we’ll discuss below. These, combined with healthy habits, could help you feel better and regain your well-being.
1. Make Yourself Aware of Your Emotions
We’re all emotional, whether we experience negative or positive emotions during the day. These can allow you to evolve or get stuck, depending on how you deal with them. Ideally, you should learn to let go of them – little by little – so that you can recover and maintain both your wellbeing and your balance. To do this, you can rely on psychological therapy.
At the same time, to take control of your emotions, it’s good to become aware of them. In this sense, you could try some deep breathing exercises to relax and try to understand what you are experiencing before expressing any opinion or judgment.
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2. Love Who You Are
Another way to combat this emotional fatigue is learning to love yourself. This emotion should be honest, but also complete. In other words, you should love the person that you are right now, even though there are things that you don’t like or may want to change.
It’s common to see people going through life with a negative mindset, critical of themselves because of how they look or because of what they feel they lack. It’s common for them to end up completely drained of energy without knowing how to be happy.
Your mind is always busy, making noise and looking for the reason why behind things. However, it’s necessary, on top of all of this, to unconditionally love yourself.
If it’s hard for you to accept yourself because of violence or negative messages that you’ve received before, perhaps you should consider therapy. There are many different options and the results could be very surprising.
3. Connect With Yourself
Another way to overcome emotional exhaustion is to reflect on your actions and develop skills and talents that let you get in touch with yourself.
Observe yourself and be conscientious of what you think and what those thoughts make you feel, or the actions that cause those emotions. When you pay attention to yourself, you become aware of your qualities and strengths.
Discover or remember the things that you are passionate about and the things that make you want to wake up in the morning. This allows you to understand what you still need in order to develop yourself, move forward, and reach your goals, leaving behind anxiety, fear, and lack of confidence.
If until now you’ve been doing things just because others expect you to, maybe it’s a good idea to take a close look at your friendships and eliminate those that don’t benefit you. Remember, you’re the center of your life, and the only person that you need to satisfy is yourself.
4. Be grateful
One of the main causes of emotional exhaustion is complaining all the time about what you don’t have, what you wish you had or what you have but don’t like.
If you want to get your energy back, change the complaints for gratitude. Although this might sound like a cheap philosophy, the reality is that changing your perspective influences your emotions. Even if your life in general seems bad, finding something good is always possible.
When was the last time that you told your partner that you appreciate them and are grateful to be with them? Have your parents heard a “thank you” from you lately? These actions might seem insignificant, but they’re very important.
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5. Find a Purpose
One of the most common causes of mental fatigue is going through the motions and not following your passion. If you’ve gotten to this point, remember that you can do whatever you want to do.
Thinking about the past or in what you didn’t successfully become exhausts you and strips away your happiness. Instead of this, look for a purpose and focus your energy on it. Just be sure that this purpose is something positive.
This requires you to work hard to discover your talents and develop others that put you in the place you want to be. Maybe you’re afraid, insecure, and confused, and if you can conquer them, you’ll reach happiness.
6. Forget Trying to Control Everything
One of the biggest problems of emotional exhaustion is that it can come back at any time…even if you let the criticism go or have a purpose. It’s common with people that feel they need to always have control, every minute of every day.
Unfortunately, life is something that you will never have full control of. Whenever you grasp that and learn to let situations come and go, you’ll feel much happier.
An alternative to fight mental fatigue while keeping your need for control is to offer help. If there’s a situation that is causing you large problems, create a plan of action to confront it.
Emotional exhaustion doesn’t have to defeat you
As you’ve seen, emotional exhaustion doesn’t always have to defeat you or lead you astray. If you seek professional help and commit yourself to making some improvements in your life, you’ll be able to move forward and recover your well-being. But keep in mind that, in order to do so, it’s you who must take the first step.
Remember also that all of the above recommendations are not made on a personal basis. Of course, it is up to you to decide at any given moment what will help you to regain your energy
All cited sources were thoroughly reviewed by our team to ensure their quality, reliability, currency, and validity. The bibliography of this article was considered reliable and of academic or scientific accuracy.
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Barnes, C. M., & Van Dyne, L. (2009). I’m tired’: Differential effects of physical and emotional fatigue on workload management strategies. Human Relations, 62(1), 59-92.
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Ramírez, M. T. G., & Hernández, R. L. (2007). Escala de cansancio emocional (ECE) para estudiantes universitarios: propiedades psicométricas en una muestra de México. Anales de psicología, 23(2), 253-257.
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Teresa González Ramárez, M., Landero Hernández, R., & Tapia Vargas, A. (2007). Percepción de salud, cansancio emocional y síntomas psicosomáticos en estudiantes universitarios. Ansiedad y estrés, 13(1).
