Mental Health and Energy Management: Keeping Your Sanity
By Jared Smith
College is a balancing act between social life, school, work, and sleep (but you can never have it balanced completely). You set a goal to catch up on sleep, and you miss a few long readings for that one history class. Then you decide to go on a date… Now you’ve missed a reading, lost three hours of sleep, and can’t focus at work.
Now you’re feeling a little discouraged, sitting dejectedly on the bench by the pond as you contemplate the meaning of life and attempt to figure out how the heck you are going to do this college thing.
We’ve all been there, and we seem to visit this place quite often from time to time. It all comes back to what we all have said: there just isn’t any time!
If you’ve taken a class with Professor Zeb Riley, you know that humans have a lot of wants but limited resources. We want to do everything, but time is limited.
What if I told you that time management is not going to fix your problems?
Listen — I don’t have any credentials, but Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz do. For years, these guys worked with Olympic athletes to find out what drives their peak performance. Loehr and Schwartz were surprised by their discoveries, so they wrote a book about it. Their book, The Power of Full Engagement, is based on the premise that “managing energy, not time, is the key to high performance and personal renewal.”
We have a limited amount of time with an endless amount of things we would like to do. So, shouldn’t we be focusing on maximizing our performance with that limited amount of time? Loehr and Schwartz say we can do this by focusing on managing our energy, not our time. It will enable us to accomplish far more in the same period of time.
What’s the key? Rituals.
Loehr and Schwartz found that people cannot give 100% to any given activity for much longer than 1–2 hours. After that amount of focused engagement, performance declines and energy starts burning out — you start running on fumes. Essentially, you have to actively disengage to renew your energy.
If you just finished writing a massive paper for two hours, your brain would be fried. When you’re done, you just want to sit down and take a nap, but you also may be tempted to just keep working. Despite being brain dead, you keep working and can’t comprehend anything you just read for the last 10 minutes.
If you just worked for two hours, you need to actively disengage yourself to renew energy for your future studies. Take a 10 minute walk around campus, go sit by a big oak tree and do breathing exercises, or maybe call a friend to chat for a little while.
Mental health is a complex issue because it is interconnected with our emotional, physical, and spiritual health. We have to renew ourselves in all of these aspects in order to keep a good balance.
Feeling overwhelmed? Start focusing on managing your energy, rather than just your time. Don’t get me wrong; we do need to plan our time wisely, but we need to take our energy into account. Plan for times where you can actively disengage in a way that will renew your energy and make you more effective with the time you do have.
You might feel guilty taking a 10 minute walk after two hours of studying, but remember that it is an investment. Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr’s research shows that the same way you have to let your muscles recover after a workout, you have to have recovery after mentally or emotionally strenuous activity. If you want consistent high performance from yourself, you have to make time to recover.
You’re worth investing in. So, take some time to breathe today, it’ll help you work better.
If you are interested in learning more about mental health, Southern Virginia University will be hosting a mental health seminar this Wednesday, October 12 at 5:30PM in the Academic Center 108. Business Professor Jared Covington and Theater Teacher Kim Hirt will be speaking on the topic of perfectionism and mental health.
