Need more energy? Read this
Or, what I learned from doing The Lightning Process
A few months ago I was doom-scrolling TikTok in bed, waiting for it to be past 9pm so I could legitimately turn off the light and go to sleep, when a young woman glowing with health and energy popped up. She was talking about her history with chronic fatigue syndrome and the one thing she’d found that actually worked for her, something called The Lightning Process. I must have rewatched the video ten times, I wanted what she had. I thought about googling it but I was too tired, so I put the phone down and went to sleep.
If there is one thing that unites all the women I know, it is that we are tired. Whether it’s having children and never again regaining your ability to sleep through the night, the onset of perimenopause, or simply having a brain that WILL NOT SWITCH OFF when you want it to, everyone I know could do with more energy.
To be clear, what I’m talking about here is not the feeling of tiredness you have after a good night’s sleep, followed by a busy day where you’ve used your brain, done some exercise, conquered your to-do list and it’s now the late evening and your body is winding down, ready to go to bed. That is just your body telling you it’s time to rest.
The sort of tiredness I’m talking about here takes one of two forms. Either, you find that at about 2pm each day a deep, deep weariness settles on you and stays there for the remainder of the day, making doing anything in the evening feel like the most tremendous chore (even if you really wanted to do it when you were making the plan). Or you find yourself constantly in a state more usually seen in small children who have had too much sugar and not enough sleep; your brain is whirring, you know you’re tired but somehow you’re also jigging about from spot to spot, your heart is pounding as though you’ve had your fourth coffee in an hour even though you gave up caffeine a year ago. And try as you might, you simply cannot get to sleep.
For at least the past year (and if I’m being honest, probably longer), I have been moving between these two states and it was making my life very small. Since I’ve been back in London, I’ve been making the absolute most of being near people and culture and busyness again. But I’ve also been watching my body like a hawk. I’ve planned out my schedule so that I don’t do more than two nights out a week because otherwise I come down with a cold. I’ve stayed away from booze because I’m terrified of feeling even more tired the next day. I’ve turned off my laptop at 5pm and been in my pyjamas by 5.05pm. All this “managing my energy” is in itself as huge energy suck.
And then I saw the TikTok video that promised me the one thing I really wanted, my life back.
I thought about it The Lightning Process for days, googled it, read the reviews, downloaded the introductory guide and eventually signed up for the three day course. It’s a blend of neuroscience, NLP, coaching and a mish-mash of other techniques, designed to help you train your brain to work for you rather than against you. I read reviews from people who’d taken it; people with CFS, as well as long-Covid sufferers, those with deep depression and anxiety, and some, like me, with a host of auto-immune issues.
I had a call with the founder of the Lightning Process, Phil Parker, and talked through it with him. My biggest fear was that he would tell me that my health conditions were just in my mind and that if I really wanted to, I could “think myself to wellness”. Thankfully, that wasn’t his approach at all. Instead, we focussed on what I had control over and how I could use the Lightning Process to trust my body again. I completed the course this weekend and two things really stuck with me that I think everybody in search of more energy should know about.
Our energy is just a state of being and we can choose to shift that state at any point.
There is no point “pushing through” when your body is exhausted but there is a lot of space between “pushing through” and just collapsing on the sofa, and we might want to explore some of that space first. (And that collapsing on the sofa is sometimes the correct response).
What does that mean in practice? Let me tell you.
First up, shifting your energy. If you are someone who suffers from procrastination (hello friend!), then this might help. Essentially, we think our energy is dictated by how our body is feeling in any given moment but it’s also about what is going on in our brain and the messages we’re sending ourselves. So, if your body feels tired and then the message in your brain is “of course I’m tired, I’ve been out three times this week and I’ve done a whole day of intense work and I’ve still got another four hours to go before I can stop”, then it’s going to be really hard to feel energetic. Not only is your body tired but your mind is then throwing a lot of heavy thoughts on top of it.
Rather than staying with those heavy thoughts and compounding the tiredness, see if you can find a way to shift your energy even if only for a second. Some ways you might want to do this:
Put on a piece of music that is the exact opposite of your energy levels and move to it (if you’re feeling lethargic, put on something upbeat. If you can’t sit still, find something calming).
Take yourself back to a time when you felt how you’d like to feel. Really visualise it, remember the sounds, colours and smells around you. Talk yourself through how it felt to be in that space. Close your eyes and imagine you are there. And when you open your eyes, see if you’ve moved your energy even 1% in that direction.
Change your language from passive to active. “I’m exhausted” to “I’m doing exhaustion”. Notice if you start judging yourself here - “I shouldn’t be doing exhaustion, I should be doing energised and enthusiastic” - having an opinion on your energy state isn’t going to help, just noticing it and changing the language around it is enough.
And then we come to the topic of pushing through. As someone who is very “all or nothing” in their approach to life, I am terrible for pushing through and then eventually coming to a hard stop. I know it’s not a helpful approach to life but I also can’t seem to stop. What I learned at the weekend, however, is that when I stop arguing with myself about whether or not I want to push through and instead ask myself what I really want here, I can be far more creative with my energy.
A live example of this is writing this newsletter. I know I need to do it, I also know I have a hundred other things that I need to be getting on with and there is a small fear at the back of my mind that I’m about to use all my energy on this and not get to anything else. One response would be to simply say, I don’t have time for this, I’m not going to do it. (And then spend the rest of the day distracted because my brain was worrying that I should have done it and all of you were secretly mad at me for not doing it.) The other response was to ask myself what I wanted from work this morning, and what I really wanted was to give myself a set period of time to focus on writing this newsletter. When that time was up I would stop, regardless of how far I had got and I won’t beat myself up if I don’t finish it and send it today. Oh, and I wanted to write it on my balcony in the sun.
So that is what I’m doing and, frankly, I’m having a lovely time.
The Lightning Process is a group coaching programme and on my course there were people with conditions that had kept them bedridden for years. Over the course of the weekend one of them went for the longest walk she’d been on in two years, another set foot in a gym for the first time in nearly three. I went for a swim and didn’t freak out when a woman in the changing room insisted on showing her small child (and everyone else in the changing room) the rash on her bottom, before GETTING IN THE POOL WITH IT! (Ok, I had a small freak out but I didn’t let it stop me from swimming and that is a big step forward.) Most importantly, I’ve stopped “managing” my energy and instead, I’m just trusting that my body knows what it’s doing and will look after me.
I’ve just read that last sentence back and I can’t believe it’s true. But it is.
*My place on The Lightning Process was gifted but I’m not required to write about it and would never promote something I didn’t think was genuinely helpful. I loved it, if you want to know more about it then I’m very happy to talk about it but mainly, I thought the two points that I’ve written about above would be helpful for everyone. Also, the advice I’ve given here is not The Lightning Process itself, just thoughts I’ve had about how we can all get a bit more energy into our life.*
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