Can We Talk About the Mental & Emotional Energy it Takes to Navigate Life?

We’re nearing the end of our school year and I am feeling the mental, emotional, and physical drain of navigating daily life in a country that’s not my own. To put it bluntly: I’m over it. Chasing down residency requirements, navigating the chaos of Tirana (especially as it approaches summer*), working on my own personal and professional development (lots of calls online), carting the girls all over for end-of-year activities (and making sure they have what they need for them), and finalizing summer plans, all in a heatwave (remember, there’s no central AC in Europe) has nearly done me in.**

You may feel your own version of end-of-school-year, mid-2025 burnout without even being in a foreign country. There’s something about the energy required to make it through certain times of the year (and periods of life) that leaves us feeling drained. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the mental and emotional energy it takes to navigate life. We so often say, “I don’t have time…,” or, “That’s going to take so much time...” And, while this may be true, what I think we’re often really saying without realizing it is that we don’t have the energy reserves required to handle certain things. Our gas tanks are approaching empty and we’re on fumes.

Anecdote: This reminds me of the station wagon we had when I was growing up. It was one of those Caprice Classics, white, with the part in the back where you could lay down on road trips (before seatbelts were enforced). The gas gauge on ours was unreliable, so my parents kept a small spiral notebook in the glove box. Every time they got gas, they’d make a new entry and track the milage they had traveled since they last fill up so they could understand the fuel efficiency and how much was really left in the tank.

(Photos from the Internet)

As humans, many of us are pretty poor at tracking the metaphorical fuel left in our tank. We don’t have gauges we can look at to cue us to fill up. We just assume we’ll be able to power through, only to realize, too late, that we’re hovering at E. If we’re lucky, we coast into the gas station; if we’re not, we call AAA or a friend for roadside service (been there, done that more than once).

But we aren’t like cars. We can’t simply fill up our tanks in a matter of minutes and speed off with a fresh start. We’re far more complex. Refilling our tanks requires actual rest and respite, as well as reflection and maybe even reprioritization. And I know what you’re thinking: “I don’t have time for that!”

But it’s a necessity. And it starts with understanding what is sucking our energy (emptying our tank) and what is giving us energy (filling it up).

Here’s a recommendation and an invitation: Keep an energy log, even just for a few days. It doesn’t have to be complicated. You can do it by hand or digitally—whatever makes it easier. (Though if you want to use an old-school, spiral-top pocket notebook, go right ahead 😉):

1. Write down the activities that comprised your day: Big ones, little ones; just a few or all of them—it’s really up to you.

   1. If you want, note the time of day of the activity. This could be as simple as morning/midday/evening or as specific as the time.

2. Make two columns to the right of each activity: “Depleted my energy” and “Gave me energy.” And make a checkmark in the corresponding column.

   1. If you want to get fancier, instead of simply checking the corresponding column, you could make this a number on a sliding scale of 1-10:

      1. Depleted my energy: 1 means it hardly depleted it at all and 10 means it fully and completely depleted it

      2. Gave me energy: 1 means it gave you a tiny bit of energy and 10 means it fully and completely gave you energy

Once you have some data, see what you notice. What insights jump out at you? What patterns? How full or empty is your tank in general? What do you notice about your energy at different times of day and by the end of the day, and how does that correspond to how you’re feeling?

I’ve started noticing that on days when I feel flattened by the end (gas tank = E), it’s often because I didn’t prioritize any time for myself. I didn’t do anything meaningful to add gas to my tank; it’s just been depleting all day long. I can feel this, and now that I’m writing it down I can really see it. Raising my own awareness of this is helpful. It doesn’t mean I can fully prioritize filling my tank (again, some seasons are hard), but it does help me find small ways to add just enough to keep going. One of those ways lately has been to read something I enjoy. (I particularly like memoirs and historical fiction.)

Here are some of the many ways you can add some fuel to your tank:

• Soften your expectations of yourself

• Exercise/move your body

• Talk to someone—a real person, ideally face to face

• Nourish yourself

• Hydrate

• Make fun plans

• Sleep

• Get outside

How are your energy levels these days? What’s depleting them? How are you filling your gas tank back up?

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*Albania really gears up for tourist season, as it rakes in a lot of money over the summer. So come late spring, construction projects proliferate even more than at other times of the year. This means that some roads become temporarily impassible, some sidewalks disappear, and the general level of chaos, noise, and pollution ratchet up a few notches.

**Plus, all of this against the backdrop of what’s happening in our home country, the Middle East, and beyond. The dissonance and hypernormalization is so much.