This Wasn’t a Motivation Problem. It Was an Energy Betrayal.

On burnout, misalignment, and losing trust in what gives you life.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, and as always I return with the best of intentions. I don’t like to make resolutions as I’m not sure of how effective they really are. Wanting to do something has never been enough to actually ‘make’ me do it, and in truth I usually end up feeling bad about myself in the fact that I ‘lack motivation’.

Having an ADHD diagnosis has helped me to be kinder to myself; so I understand better now how my brain works, and why getting started without panic is something that so many of us spicy folk struggle with. But understanding doesn’t help us to make the changes that we so badly want to do. If only that were enough…

So instead, I took a look at 2025; where my effort and energy went and where I got energy back. You could call it an energy portfolio.

First up I had to define my portfolio ‘buckets’… this wasn’t job titles but modes of energy. I came up with four:

Gives Energy – creates momentum, clarity, aliveness – leaves me feeling more me than when I started.

Neutral/Necessary – Doesn’t light me up, but doesn’t drain me. Clean, contained, finite.

Costs Energy – takes more than it gives. Lingers, loops, leaks into my nervous system.

Hidden Energy Leak – small on paper, heavy in reality. Often emotional labour, context switching or responsibility without power.

When I sat down and thought about what I had done over the past year, it was mind blowing at how little time I had spent on work that gave me energy. And how disconnected I had become from understanding what that even was anymore. I felt like I knew what I wanted to be doing with my time, but it was always just that bit out of reach. And how every time I got a project it never seemed to pan out how I expected and ended up sucking the life out of me rather than lifting me up.

How over time, I had stopped trusting my own sense of what gives me energy.

This wasn’t a motivation problem, it was a structural betrayal of my energy. I kept stepping into projects that looked aligned on the surface, promised creative or meaningful work, but were built on conditions that guaranteed depletion. So every time something didn’t pan out, the message I was absorbing was: “Maybe this just isn’t possible, maybe I am not good enough”. But the truth was quieter and more precise: I was reaching for the right kind of work in the wrong containers.

And the disconnection makes sense. When energy-giving work drops below 15% something predictable happens:

• You stop recognizing the feeling of ‘this is right’

• Desire becomes vague instead of vivid

• You remember what you like, but can’t feel it anymore

• Hope becomes abstract – not embodied

This is not losing yourself. This is your nervous system going into conservation mode.

Energy isn’t found by thinking harder. It’s found by reducing distortion.

So, how do you fix it?

For me key is not to jump straight into new goals, new projects and big declarations! Instead it’s time to rebuild the signals. And this takes time. Time sat thinking about ‘when was the last time my work made me feel quietly right?’. Not excited. Not validated. Just right.

I see that it could be a moment, a conversation, a tiny slice of a project, something that didn’t even seem important at the time. Just three memories is enough; it’s not nostalgia, they’re coordinates. Blinking lights in a dark sea, guiding you to where you need to be to avoid the rocks. Triangulating you back to yourself.

The painful but freeing insight for me was that projects didn’t drain me because they were bad (they weren’t). They drained me because they never allowed me to arrive as myself. I entered hopeful and then were asked to stay inside existing frames, soften my truth and keep things moving rather than right. And my energy paid the price.

But let’s talk about this honestly, without pretending that you can can just ‘choose better work’ in a vacuum. Bills don’t care about alignment. But neither does your nervous system – and it will collect the debt eventually.

Trying to fund my life with work that requires less of me than the work that gives me life is a brutal gap to sit in. And when you live there too long:

• You accept work for safety

• You hope it will turn into the right kind of work. It doesn’t

• You feel disappointed in the work and yourself

• And your sense of “what’s possible” shrinks

That’s not a failure of courage.
That’s what happens when income work and identity work are tangled.

So what needs to change if you can’t just ‘get better work’?

Well here comes the game-changer… Right now, everything is trying to be one thing:

• Pay the bills

• Be meaningful

• Be energising

• Be aligned

• Be sustainable

That’s too much pressure for any single project. So instead, I need to separate the roles into a two-lane model.

Lane 1: Bill-Paying Work

Purpose: Stability
Criteria:

• Predictable

• Scoped

• Emotionally neutral

• Ends cleanly

This work does not have to energise me. It just cannot drain me.

Lane 2: Energy-Building Work

Purpose: Reconnection + future leverage
Criteria:

• Small, protected

• High-truth

• Conceptual

• On your terms

This work does not need to pay yet. It just needs to restore the signals.

Trying to make Lane 1 behave like Lane 2 is what’s been hurting me. When bill-paying work is honest about what it is you stop resenting it and over-investing emotionally. When energy work is protected then it doesn’t get cannibalised by urgency, and it slowly starts to rebuild confidence and create options.

This is how people quietly change their work — not by leaping, but by rebalancing.

And you don’t need to flip the ratio overnight. If I aim for 70-80% bill-paying work and 20-30% energy-building work; and importantly understand that the energy work is not “extra.” This is what makes the bill-paying work tolerable.

Bu perhaps the most important boundary for bill-paying work is “I will do this well — but I will not give it my soul.”

That means:

• No rescuing projects

• No overthinking outcomes

• No carrying what isn’t mine

• No hoping it will turn into something else

Good enough. Clean exit. Paid. Done.

Wish me luck!