Increase Your Energy Easily, Without a Focus on Food [Episode #501]

Today’s solocast topic is: Increase Your Energy Easily, Without a Focus on Food

The one topic that I constantly hear from, or the one thing that everybody wants, whether they’re a man or woman, is energy. And I think that the first place for almost all of us to go to and to think about is what we’re eating, of course, which is our first Solluna cornerstone. 

It’s obvious that we start there because we have to eat every day and we have to pick up food. We have to put it into our body. And that’s just part of one of our daily functionings that we can’t get past as human beings. However, there are so many other ways to both elevate our energy and also deplete our energy.

We are going to leave the food one to the side, and we’re going to talk about what we can do with our body, our emotions and with the spiritual part of our lives, to really bring in energy. To call in energy, to preserve our energy and to elevate it.

Topics Covered In How to Have More Energy- Besides From What You’re Eating

#1. Establishing a really strong morning practice

#2. Tapping into source

#3. Simplifying and saying no

#4. Focusing on one thing at a time and not multitasking

#5. Reducing clutter

I LOVE HEARING FROM YOU!

There are lots of ways to share your responses or questions about the podcast:

• Comment below
• Connect on Twitter: @_kimberlysnyder
• Follow the conversation on my Instagram
• Comment on my Facebook Page
• Ask a question: mysolluna.com/askkimberly

Be sure to Subscribe to the Podcast and follow me on Soundcloud, so you never miss an episode!

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

You may be really intrigued by podcasts, but you may just know how to listen or subscribe. It’s very easy, I promise! To listen to more than one episode, and to have it all in a handier way, on your phone or tablet, it’s way better to subscribe so you never miss an episode!

Want to know what to expect from other episodes of the “Feel Good Podcast with Kimberly Snyder”? My passion is to inspire and empower you to be your most authentic and beautiful self. We offer interviews with top experts, my personal philosophies and experiences, as well as answers to community-based questions around topics such as health, beauty, nutrition, yoga, spirituality and personal growth.

The intention of the Feel Good Podcast is to well…help you really Feel Good in your body, mind and spirit! Feeling Good means feeling peaceful, energized, whole, uniquely beautiful, confident and joyful, right in the midst of your perfectly imperfect life. This podcast is as informative and full of practical tips and take-aways as it is inspirational. I am here to support you in being your very best! I have so much love and gratitude for you. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the community :).

LEAVE A REVIEW ON ITUNES

Listeners really respect the views of other listeners, so your response helps people find good material they are interested in! If you enjoyed the podcast, please tell your friends and give us a rating or review. Many thanks in advance.

[❤️ FAN OF THE WEEK]

[RESOURCES]

• SBO Probiotics
• Detoxy
• Digestive Enzymes  
• Feel Good Starter Kit
• FREE Gift: 7-Day Meditation Series (DIGITAL COURSE)
• Recipes For Your Perfectly Imperfect Life
• Be a part of the community Join the Feel Good Circle
• Kimberly Snyder’s Books
• Four Cornerstones FREE PDF: Text the word: feelgood (833) 744-0079
• Additional resources in transcript

Other Podcasts you may enjoy!:

• Boosting Energy the Ayurvedic Way with Dr. Jay
• Your Energy: Out With The Old and In With The New
• Increasing Energy and Productivity
• Simple and Healthy Wellness Rituals

Additional Research Resources:

• Impact of stress on metabolism and energy balance
• Emotional Distress Can Speed Up Cellular Aging
• The Effects of Anger on the Brain and Body
• Just say no
• “I Don’t” versus “I Can’t”: When Empowered Refusal Motivates Goal-Directed Behavior
• The True Cost Of Multi-Tasking
• Interactions of top-down and bottom-up mechanisms in human visual cortex

Powered and Distributed by: PodcastOne

Xlear: For better breathing, get Xlear today – You can find it at all major retailers, CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens, Sprouts, Whole foods, and everywhere else.

Transcript:

Note: The following is the output of transcribing from an audio recording. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate. This is due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.

Hi Beauties. Welcome back to our Monday solocast episode, where our topic today is how to have more energy, besides from what you’re eating. Energy is something that I have been asked about for years. I would say with all the clients I’ve worked with over my career, probably energy is the one thing that comes up for pretty much everyone. Sure, you know, a lot of us would like to slim down and just create more organization in our lives or feel more peaceful and more joyful and manifest this and create this and that.

The one topic that I consistently hear from, or the one thing that everybody wants, whether they’re a man or woman, is energy. And I think that the first place for almost all of us to go to and to think about is what we’re eating, of course, which is our first Solluna cornerstone. And it’s obvious that we start there because we have to eat every day and we have to pick up food. We have to put it into our body. And that’s just part of one of our daily functionings that we can’t get past as human beings, but there are so many other ways to both elevate our energy and also deplete our energy.

And this is something that I’ve been really interested in now, for some years. I started off obviously very into food and became a nutritionist and it was everything I wanted to talk about, but then it really has expanded. I would say it started expanding when I started writing Beauty Detox Power, which was back in 2015, it was published. So back in 2014, I started really getting in this idea of energy and all the different sources.

And what I am excited to share with you today is all the different ways to have more energy beyond food. To look at different sources. To look at maybe some ways you’re not realizing that you’re actually leaking energy and also ways to build up your energy. So we’re not just reliant on food. And that’s a really positive thing, I think because when we just have one tool or one thing that we think is the answer, it’s usually not. And when we don’t have all the best results from it, we tend to get really frustrated. We can start to get down and yeah, it’s incredibly frustrating. And I totally understand that.

Our topic today, this podcast is not going to be really about food. It’s not going to be about, of course caffeine and energy drinks, which is obviously a quick go-to. If you’re interested in foods for energy, we have other podcasts and other vlogs and other articles on that. But today I really want to talk about all the other parts of our lives. So this fits really into our four cornerstones of Solluna, which I’ve been talking about now for some months, which are food, body, emotional wellbeing, and spiritual growth.

We’re going to leave the food one to the side, and we’re going to talk about what we can do with our body, with our emotions, with the spiritual part of our lives, to really bring in energy, to call in energy, to preserve our energy, to elevate it. And again, to not leak it out inadvertently or deplete it in any way.

Leave a Review and Subscribe on Itunes

I was about to jump right in, but let me just give a quick reminder. You haven’t yet left us a review on iTunes, please leave us a review. I’m going to call out our fan of the week and just show you how easy and fast a review can be.

Fan of the Week

Our fan of the week is Ping MC and he or she writes, “Love Kimberly’s podcast.” Amazing, thank you Ping MC. I am so grateful for you being in the community, sending you a huge virtual hug. Thanks for the shout out. And I thank you too, beauty, in advance. It’s really easy and it’s a great way to support the show. So please just take a moment to do that. It helps other beauties like yourself find this information, which can hopefully really help improve their lives, which is what our goal is here.

Solocast

All right, all that being said, let’s jump into our discussion, how to have more energy besides from what you’re eating. And my first tip for you guys, we’re going to go through five. The first tip is, keep your emotions in check and do not over emote. Now I’m going to throw out some science here, and then we’re going to talk about the Eastern yogic perspective of this.

From a Western perspective, a study published in the Journal of Behavioral Science found that when chronic stress uses up the body’s energy, it uses up the stores in the same way as it would be when responding to a threatening situation. And chronic stress was found to stimulate the nervous system and metabolic system in a way that increases risk of cardiometabolic disease. So I have this whole page of similar sorts of studies.

Researchers from the University of California and San Francisco found a link between chronic stress, anxiety, and rapid cellular aging. A 2017 study in the Frontiers for Human Neuroscience found that mental stress results in chronic inflammation in the body. Gateway for diseases like liver disease, so on and so forth. National Sleep Foundation found 43% of Americans experience sleep disorders as a result of chronic mental stress and worry, which we know very much depletes energy. And it really does go on and on.

Let me just read you one more study published in the National FORUM Journal of Counseling and Addiction found that anger triggers a release of neurotransmitter chemicals, cortisol, and high blood pressure, which can result in hormonal imbalances. Suppressing thyroid function, which we know is important for energy. Weakening the immune system. Chronically angry people suffer more frequent colds, infections, asthma, and skin disease, flare ups.

Lots and lots of research to back up this idea that when we over emote, when we are overly emotional, when we let very strong emotions take over us and we don’t process them, but we keep them going and going, especially anger, we are leaking out our energy. We are letting it pour out of us in hand over fist. And so this goes back to our emotional wellbeing cornerstone, where we talk about so much of wellness, isn’t exactly what you just see with your physical eyes. Our emotions, our feelings, our mental health really impact our energy.

And we, if you recall the last big blowout fight you had, whether it was with a family member or your best friend or whoever, you may remember feeling really exhausted afterwards. And maybe you were hungry, maybe you needed to get a snack. Maybe you just needed to sit on the couch because you felt too knackered to do anything else. Or if you start to feel those big surges of emotions, waves of whatever it is, sadness, resentment, just all these different, huge, big emotions is very depleting for your energy.

#1: Establishing a really strong morning practice

What we want to work on is being able to keep more calmness and more equilibrium. And we do that through getting enough sleep and establishing a really strong morning practice where we meditate in the morning. We have time to ideally ease into the day. Have our hot water with lemon, so on and so forth. And give ourselves that space to find calmness in the morning because then if we find it at the beginning of our day, it’s much easier to sustain it. If we start our day in a really chaotic space, it’s much harder to come down and rebalance after coming from a frenetic state.

I really encourage you to pay attention to your morning routine and how you’re sailing into the day. Sleeping well and journaling is really, really powerful. I just did a video for the Chopra Center on emotional wellbeing in journaling. If you want to check it out it’s on our IGTV, Instagram, where my handle’s @_kimberlysnyder. And I just think journaling is a really powerful way to be authentic to, when anger comes up, it’s not that we repress it or suppress it, or pretend it’s not there. What we do is we let ourselves feel it. We let it pass through.

And when that happens, you’re not damaging your body. You’re letting yourself feel the full range of human expression. We need to feel our emotions, but you’re not keeping the cycle going by reliving it and replaying it and singing about it over and over again, which is where the overemoting happens. Journaling is a way to just feel it and acknowledge it, to witness it, to express what you were feeling, what the triggers were to help you identify stories. So journaling could be a very powerful tool in this regard.

Anything you can do to let yourself process before accruing all these big emotions until they erupt, is going to be really, really healthy for your energy levels.

#2: Tapping into source

And so my second tip is tapping into source. So I mentioned this a little bit about starting your day with meditation, but this idea of meditating and going within is probably the number one energy source. This is where the real energy comes from. I want to tell you the story about Dr. Jay, who, if you’ve listened to this podcast for a while, you’ve heard him on here. He comes on probably once a quarter. He is my Ayurvedic teacher. He’s been in the United States now for about 10 years, but he’s very traditionally Indian. He’s Bengali. I was fortunate to study with him for about four years as I was going into Ayurveda. And it was really valuable. It was really a wonderful experience.

And I tell you about Dr. Jay because he really lives what he preaches and he does his full Ayurvedic routine in the morning, which takes at least two and two and a half hours. If you were to do the full Ayurvedic morning practice, I think there’s 11 steps alone, just in the oral part, what you do with your teeth, and the oil pulling, and the tongue scraping, and the knee. I mean, it goes on and on. It’s very involved. So Dr. Jay gets up at 4:00 in the morning or 3:30 in the morning, and he gets about three or four hours of sleep every single night. And I tell you guys, you’ve never seen someone more energized. Someone that has so much vigor, and humor, and lightheartedness, and focus, and intelligence, and it’s really amazing to witness.

And he talks about this openly. He says, “I get most of my energy from my meditation practice and you really have to learn how to do that.” So it is possible and I have definitely experienced it myself, getting more energy from meditation when I don’t sleep enough. And let me be honest with you, I haven’t slept well in years since having kids. No, that’s not true. Bubby has been great the last few years, but now we have a newborn, so it started the cycle again.

It is true that the real source of energy is within, the real source of energy is whatever word you want to use. God, the divine, the divine intelligence, the universe, there is infinite energy. We don’t just get it from food. We don’t just get it from sleep. Energy is all around us. Energy transmutes and changes form, but it is there. And so if we consciously pull it in. If we sit and meditate and you might want to check out some of our free guided meditations, if you sit and meditate and consciously pull in and learn some basic techniques, you will feel revived. You will feel the consciousness of energy being purposefully pulled in. And it’s very, very powerful.

If you’re someone that’s like, “I like the idea of meditating, but I don’t know what to do.” And you just feel like you’re sitting there and then thoughts come in and it’s kind of a waste of time. It is true, you need some technique. You need to be guided through, otherwise you’re just sort of sitting there. So I encourage you to try different techniques to find something that resonates with you. I do Kriya Yoga, so you can check that out from Yogananda at yogananda-srf.org, or again at mysolluna.com. We have some free meditations.

But anytime, the more deeper you can get into your meditation, you will be amazed and surprised and so happy to find that, that is a huge source of energy. So besides your morning and evening meditations, you can also do many meditations throughout the day when you need to boost your energy, you need to tune in. And that’s a wonderful practice. Sometimes I just close my eyes and I meditate for one minute or five minutes. You know if Bubby’s playing by himself, which I always encourage, or he’s doing something next to me, I’ll just close my eyes. He won’t even notice. I’ll just go in, into my spine, into my practice. And I get little energy boosts through the day from that.

#3: Simplifying and saying no

My third tip is the power of saying no and simplifying your life. And there’s some amazing research we found here as well. The American Psychological Association found that people, and especially women have the habit of saying yes. And this is even compared to an addiction. And it results in increased anxiety, stress, depression, difficulty in relationships, and burnout. So I get it, we don’t want to disappoint anyone. I feel that so strongly. I never want to say no to Bubby. I never want to put Mosey down. Even though sometimes I do need to take a shower or I need to eat or do something for myself. I just think this give, give, give mentality is woven into so many of us that it becomes this way of being.

And I really used to be such a yes person, but I have transitioned, I will say, over the last few years. For several reasons, including the fact that I physically can’t do everything that I am doing, writing books, and running Solluna, and doing this podcast, and having two kids now. So I do, and I have been really a lot more discerning with saying no. And before quarantine saying no to events and speaking and certain things, unless I really felt good about it, unless I really wanted to put my heart into it. So there’s a tremendous power, tremendous energy is preserved and will grow the more time you have to just focus on what you want to focus on, but say no to all this extraneous stuff and simplify, simplify, simplify your life.

Now, a study published in the Journal of Consumer Research found that saying I don’t, instead of I can’t, is a lot more of a effective refusal strategy because it means there’s a choice and it increases your confidence.

So instead of saying, “Oh, I can’t, I just can’t do this right now. I can’t go to the show. I’m just so crazed.” What you could say is, “I don’t think that’s a good idea right now. I just, I don’t want to go because I have so much going on. And if I were to do that, it would just put everything over the top, like that would be the straw that broke the camel’s back. So I don’t want to do that.”

Try it out for yourself. Language can be very empowering. Language can be very important. So saying I don’t versus I can’t, has a certain resonance, which may be a lot and make you feel a lot more empowering to you. So this idea of saying no means your life becomes a lot simpler and simpler means more clarity. It means more, less things to focus on. And so it means that you are able to really have energy for the things that matter to you.

#4: Focusing on one thing at a time and not multitasking

Which brings me to my fourth tool, my fourth tip, which is, focus on one thing at a time and don’t multitask. Study from Psychology Today found that multitasking, a survey rather, decreases productivity by up to 40%. And stress levels are reported much higher among multitaskers, which leads to health issues. So there you go. Sometimes we think, especially as moms that we should multitask and fit as much as we can in. I remember when Bubby was born, I was stressed about all this different stuff going on. And I was in the middle of writing Radical Beauty with Deepak Chopra. And so I remember pumping on one boob, feeding Bubby on one boob, working in my computer, I have my food on the side. And it was really depleting actually. So you live and you learn, right?

With this pregnancy, with this birth, with my second son, Moses, it’s been very different. I, in this postpartum period, I took my 40 days and really did no work. And now I am focused on doing this solocast and I’m looking over, he is napping on me right now. But I don’t want to do multiple things at once. If he’s up and I’m playing with him, I’m not going to be trying to do a call at the same time. I’m not going to try to eat while I’m talking and playing with Bubby and five different things. I do feel like that is a huge energy suck. And we’re packing so much in that our brain feels divided and it just doesn’t feel good. And so we go into overload and our energy actually goes down. It doesn’t go up. It goes down from that that way of have being.

In contrast, if we can focus on one thing at a time, our energy gets singularly focused towards that one thing. We can really channel all our energy, and our attention, and our light, and our love into that and fuse with it. And have creative solutions in great writing or great communication, whatever is called for in that task. And then we move on to the next thing, and that’s actually not depleting. That’s actually, theoretically should be a very wonderful way to keep your energy up. It’s when we’re doing so many different things at once, and we feel like we’re losing at everything. So we’re just struggling and fighting and thrashing around. That’s when the energy goes down. So just like this survey showed, 40% less productivity. When we think that we’re being more productive by packing in more, it’s time to rethink, reevaluate, and actually do one thing at a time.

#5: Reducing clutter

And my last tip here is to reduce clutter. So clutter, I know for me, really stresses me out. I’ll look at, and it’s believe me, reducing clutter in my house is a huge, huge task because I feel like between these two little kids and my hubby, God bless him, but he definitely will create little piles everywhere. And there’s the physical clutter that I am affected by. So if it’s really messy around, I don’t do my best writing. I start to feel really stressed out. I feel like I focus on it and it’s an energy leak. I know it just doesn’t keep me in my best, brightest state.

Now another form of clutter besides the piles of mail and the piles of dishes and all that, is the clutter in your mind. So just like we were talking about with our last tip, this idea of multitasking and having a lot of things going on. The same thing as if you have 10 different windows open on your computer, open on your phone, and you’re just floating back and forth, you’re doing online shopping, and then you’re checking out 20 million different feeds on Instagram. And then you’re talking to your mom, but then you’re writing a work email, and you’re just flitting from thing, to thing, to thing. That’s a lot of different clutter in your mind, and your mind then tries to go back and forth. And that’s a huge depletion of energy that your brain uses.
I believe, don’t quote me on this statistic, but it’s something like 20% of your energy or something like that is a lot of mind power, there’s a lot of energy going in your brain. And so you don’t do it any favors when you clutter it with so many different things, and so many different windows open, and so many different apps, and all these alerts and everything coming at you. So you can see where these tips start to weave together. This idea of decluttering is related to this idea of simplifying. So keep it simple. What’s in front of you, what you’re focusing on, what you’re putting your energy into, instead of scattering it.

The scattering it, means your brain tries to again, fill as much as it can with all these different aspects. And it’s exhausting. And so focus, go from one thing to the next. Don’t try to do 10 different things on your to-do list at once, but reduce the clutter in your everyday life, in your everyday schedule, in your everyday work environment. Since we moved into this new house, I got rid of so much stuff and I like to keep things more minimalistic around. And I feel energized from that. I don’t feel it’s crazy this idea of feng shui and how much our environment affects us, but I can say personally that it does, it does affect my energy. I feel really good when things are clean and things are organized.

Now, a study done on the effects of clutter was published in The Journal of Neuroscience, and it found that physical clutter resulted in mental distractions, decreased productivity levels, as we were just talking about, and required more brain processing, power, and energy. So there you have it, there are studies on this, more energy in your brain. So it’s a really great idea to take inventory of, maybe just sit and ask yourself, consider this idea, where is there excess clutter in my life? Is it in my kitchen? Is it in my phone? Is it in my email? Is it in my to-do list? Is it in the way that I approach my day saying yes to everyone and everything, and then everything’s packed?

Some of these may be easier for you than others. The saying no to me is probably the hardest. I get asked to do a lot of different things, and I’m sure you do too. And it’s not that I don’t want to spend two hours. People say, “Oh, can I just pick your brain? Can we just go to coffee?” But that’s two hours, and as much as I want to help, I don’t have two hours. I know if I give that two hours, that throws a whole wrench in my schedule and my energy goes down. And I don’t have the energy for my kids, which are my family, my number one priority, and then everything else.

In Closing

So again, they are number one, keeping your emotions in check with journaling, sleeping well, starting the day off on a good foot. Number two, go to source. Get energy from meditation, which is really, really powerful. Really, really important. We don’t just get energy from food and from water and from exercise, we get energy from within. Energy from source. Energy from the divine. Energy, the energy that runs through everything we consciously call in and accrue when we meditate.

Number three is, simplifying and saying no, so that there’s less that will deplete your energy and more focused things that you put energy into. Number four is, focus on one thing at a time and don’t multitask. And number five is, reduced clutter. And again, that clutter could be anything from junk on the table to a bunch of clothes piled up or could be a million windows opened up on your computer, or your clutter could be following too many people on social media. So, your feed is really fast and you don’t get to see as much of what you really want to see. So there’s so many different ways to reduce clutter. And I encourage you again to look at that because these could all be different ways that you’re leaking your energy.

I hope you enjoyed these tips. I hope it expanded your perspective of energy a bit, which is really the focus of my work now, how we elevate our energy, how we go deeper into our energy, how we go to new levels. So that’s how I started with food really was thinking, those of you that have read the Beauty Detox Solution, will remember me talking about this concept of beauty, energy, and freeing up energy from digestion. And that’s really been such a core, core part of my work. And the difference now is, since I focused and really learned so much about food, I’ve been teaching so much about food years ago. Now it’s really expanding into all these other areas.

The cornerstones I love to talk about, which it’s been a few years now talking, at least over a year now, really defining that. Talking about the spiritual part of life and our lifestyle, because I think that’s where we can really, really tap in and have huge improvements and feel amazing.

Thank you so much, beauty, for being with me today and remember that you can always ask your questions over at mysolluna.com. There is a podcast tab, and you can submit them. We’re doing something exciting now. So I can feel even more connected to you. We are setting up, it may not be up quite yet, but keep checking. We were setting up a way where you will be able to do a little voice recording of your question and send it in. And that way I can hear your voice and respond to you and respond to your energy. And I can feel a lot beyond the question and intuit some hopefully really useful information and wisdom to give to you.

That’s something, and then the community, we can hear each other’s voices. It’s more of a conversation. So I’m really excited to get that going in the next few weeks. As always, be sure to check out the website, mysolluna.com for lots of articles and our products, of course. And Instagram @_kimberlysnyder and also our Solluna one, which is @Sollunabyks.

Have a lovely, lovely week. I hope that you become even more mindful of your precious energy because you have something to contribute to the world that no one else can. And you definitely need your energy for that. So I love you, sending you lots and lots of love. Take great care of yourself. And I will see you back here on Thursday for our next Q&A podcast.