A Gestalt inquiry into energy – and why we so rarely tend to it honestly.
Most of us manage our energy the way we manage our finances when we are avoiding the bank statement. We have a rough sense of things, we hope it’s not as bad as it feels, and we carry on.
There is a particular quality to the first week back after a proper break.
Things that felt heavy somehow feel lighter. Decisions that were stuck become unstuck. You find yourself actually looking forward to things you had begun to dread. The work hasn’t changed.
That contrast between depleted and restored is one of the most useful pieces of information available to us. It tells us something true about what we need, about what our work costs us, and about what genuinely replenishes us. The problem is that most of us notice it only at the extremes,
when we are running on empty, or when a holiday has briefly topped the tank back up.
This blog is an invitation to pay closer attention. Not just to the dramatic swings, but to the quieter daily rhythms of energy, what gives it and what takes it, what is genuinely restorative and what only mimics restoration, and what it might mean to tend to your energy as something worthy of
real and honest attention.
Energy is not just physical
When we talk about being drained or energised, we tend to think first of tiredness, of sleep and rest and physical recovery. And these matter enormously. But energy, in the fuller sense, is something more layered than that.
You can be physically well rested and still feel flat. You can be objectively exhausted and still feel oddly alive. Because energy is not only a function of the body, it is also a function of meaning, of contact, of alignment between what we are doing and who we actually are.
“The most draining experiences are rarely the busiest ones. They are the ones that ask us to be someone we’re not, for longer than we can sustain.”
This is worth sitting with. The work that leaves you depleted at the end of the day is not always the hardest work. It is often the work that requires the most management, of self, of impression, of feeling. The endless meeting in which you said what was expected rather than what was true. The
relationship that requires constant careful navigation. The role that fits the CV but not quite the person inside it.
Conversely, the work that restores, even in the middle of difficulty, tends to be work that feels genuinely yours. That calls on something real in you. That connects you to people or purposes you actually care about.
Gestalt lens
In Gestalt, energy is understood as the lifeforce of the organism, the vitality that moves through us when we are in genuine contact with our experience and our environment. When the awareness cycle flows freely, energy flows with it. When the cycle is interrupted, through deflection, retroflection, desensitisation, energy gets bound up, stuck, unavailable. Depletion, in this view, is not simply tiredness. It is often the cost of sustained interruption to contact.
What actually drains us
It’s worth being more precise about this than we usually are. Not all drain is equal, and understanding the different kinds helps us respond more usefully.
The drain of inauthenticity
Performing a version of yourself that isn’t quite true is exhausting in a very specific way. It requires constant maintenance, monitoring how you’re coming across, adjusting, correcting, ensuring the gap doesn’t show. Over time, this becomes a background hum of effort that most people stop
noticing, until they have a conversation where they don’t have to do it, and the relief is startling.
This kind of drain is particularly common in leadership, in client-facing roles, and in
environments where psychological safety is low. It is also, notably, one of the hardest to name,
because admitting it requires acknowledging the performance.
The drain of unfinished things
Incomplete conversations, unmade decisions, unacknowledged tensions, these accumulate in the background and draw energy steadily and silently. They don’t announce themselves. They just make everything slightly heavier.
We explored this in the awareness cycle blog, the way unfinished gestalts keep calling for attention, pulling focus from whatever we’re trying to be present to. The drain here is not the thing itself but the ongoing cost of carrying it unresolved.
The drain of misalignment
There is a particular kind of depletion that comes from doing work that doesn’t fit. not badly, not disastrously, but just not quite. The role that uses your skills but not your strengths. The organisation whose values don’t quite match yours. The work that is fine, but never quite alive.
This is perhaps the subtlest drain of all, because it produces a life that looks, from the outside,perfectly acceptable. It just doesn’t feel like much from the inside.
The drain of never stopping
And then there is the simplest one: the cost of never allowing the withdrawal phase of the cycle to complete. Never giving experience time to land before the next thing begins. Never letting the tank actually refill.
We covered this in the blog on rest. But it bears repeating here, in the context of energy: the withdrawal phase is not optional. It is where restoration happens. Without it, we are simply spending down a reserve that is never replenished.
A small experiment
At the end of today, take five minutes to do an honest energy audit. Not of tasks, but of experiences. What gave you energy? What took it? Try to be specific, not just ‘meetings drain me’ but which meeting, and what about it. The patterns that emerge are worth knowing.
What actually restores us
This is where it gets personal. Because genuine restoration is not the same for everyone, and what we think restores us is not always what actually does.
Most people, if asked what restores them, will list things that sound restorative: a glass of wine, scrolling through their phone, watching television. These are not without value. But they are often stimulation or numbing rather than genuine restoration. The nervous system doesn’t particularly
distinguish between doomscrolling and working, both involve a kind of effortful processing that keeps the system activated.
Genuine restoration tends to have a different quality. It involves a genuine downshift, in pace, in effort, in demand. And it tends to involve, in some form, the things that make us feel most like ourselves.
Contact that is genuinely nourishing
Not all human contact is restorative. Some of it is draining – transactional, guarded, or simply mismatched. But the right kind of connection, where you feel genuinely met, where you don’t have to manage the impression you’re making, where something real passes between you — is one of the most powerful sources of restoration there is.
This is, in Gestalt terms, the I-Thou quality of contact – full presence, genuine meeting. It doesn’t require hours. A conversation with the right person, even briefly, can shift the whole register of a day.
Doing something for its own sake
Much of professional life is instrumental, we do things in order to achieve other things. Restoration often comes from the opposite: activity that has no agenda, that produces nothing, that is done purely because it is itself enjoyable or meaningful.
Walking without a destination. Making something with your hands. Playing music. Cooking a meal
slowly. Reading something you’ll never be tested on. The absence of purpose is, paradoxically,
exactly the point.
Being in the body
Movement, nature, physical sensation, these return us to a mode of experience that is pre-cognitive and pre-strategic. The body doesn’t perform. It doesn’t manage impressions. It just is.
And spending time there – walking, swimming, reading gardening, simply sitting outside – can restore a quality of presence that thinking-intensive work gradually erodes.
Meaning and mattering
Perhaps the deepest restoration comes from contact with what genuinely matters to us. The work that feels like ours. The relationships that feel chosen. The moments where we sense that what we are doing is connected to something larger than the immediate task.
This is not always available. But when it is – even briefly, even in small doses – it restores something that nothing else quite reaches.
Gestalt lens
In gestalt, genuine restoration is understood as the completion of the contact cycle – the withdrawal phase not just as stopping, but as integrating. We are restored not merely by ceasing activity but by allowing what has been experienced to settle, to be taken in, to change us slightly. This is why a holiday that was spent in genuine presence – really away, really resting, really experiencing something different – restores more deeply than one spent half connected to work. The restoration is proportional to the quality of the withdrawal.
Tending to energy honestly
Most of us manage our energy reactively, responding to depletion when it becomes impossible to ignore, rather than attending to it as an ongoing practice.
What would it look like to do this more honestly? Not as a productivity strategy, not to optimise output, but simply as a form of genuine self-knowledge and care.
Knowing your own patterns
Energy patterns are personal. Some people are depleted by social contact and restored by solitude. Others are the reverse. Some people find deep focus restorative; others find it draining. Morning and evening people are genuinely different in their energy rhythms.
The first step is simply honest observation – not what you think should restore you, or what works for someone else, but what actually, reliably, shifts your own register.
The drains you accept unnecessarily
Not all drains are unavoidable. Some we accept because we haven’t looked at them honestly, or because we assume they’re simply the cost of professional life, or because changing them would require a conversation we’d rather not have.
It’s worth asking, without defensiveness: which of the things that drain me are actually negotiable? Which commitments, habits, or relationships are costing more than they are giving and what would it take to change that?
The restorations you postpone
And equally: what genuinely restores you that you keep putting off? The walk you mean to take. The friend you mean to call. The creative thing you used to do before you got too busy.
Postponed restoration is not a small thing. It is the slow withdrawal of what makes us most alive, often in the name of things that, on reflection, matter considerably less.
Reflection practice
Set aside ten quiet minutes this week for an honest energy inventory. Draw a simple line down the middle of a page. On one side, write what drains you, be specific and honest, including things you feel you shouldn’t admit. On the other, write what genuinely restores you, not what should, but what actually does. Then ask:
- What patterns do I notice?
- Which drains are genuinely unavoidable and which am I simply accepting?
- Which restorations am I postponing and what story am I telling myself about why?
- What is one small thing I could change this week, in either column?
You don’t have to overhaul your life. Just look at it honestly. That is usually the beginning of something.
A final thought
The week back after a break is one of the most instructive moments in the professional year. The contrast is sharp. The information is clear. Something in you knows, without being told, what it feels like to be restored and what it feels like to be running on empty.
The question is whether we use that knowledge, or whether we let it fade as the week fills up again and the old rhythms reassert themselves.
Tending to energy is not self-indulgence. It is the most basic form of professional sustainability and, in the end, the most honest form of respect for the work itself.
“You cannot pour from an empty vessel. But more than that, you cannot be fully present, fully alive, fully yourself, when the thing that makes you has quietly run out.”
What restores you is worth knowing. And worth protecting.
Written with care
Fredrik