From Niceness to Kindness: How to Protect Your Energy

Ever wonder why you feel drained after being “nice” all day? We dig into the difference between rigid boundaries and observed limits, then show how energy hygiene can help you respond to life without burning out. With returning guest Anabel Salimian, we unpack practical tools that honor your capacity, protect your sleep, and make kindness to yourself a daily practice.

We start by reframing boundaries as living edges instead of concrete walls. Anabel shares insights from psychotherapy training on how observing limits creates flexibility without confusion. You’ll learn to read physical cues like tightness, restlessness, and fatigue as early signals, then pair them with emotion labels to turn vague discomfort into clear action. We walk through simple tracking—three daily check-ins, energy ratings, and a short sleep log—to transform hunches into patterns you can trust.

From there, we zoom in on sleep as your most honest boundary. If falling asleep takes longer or wake-ups spike, your system might be stuck processing unfinished loops or unspoken needs. We map small, doable moves—earlier wind-downs, tomorrow-lists, and shifting high-stimulation tasks—that restore rest without overhauling your life. Finally, we draw a bright line between niceness and kindness. Niceness often seeks approval; kindness aligns with values and capacity. You’ll hear scripts for saying a smaller yes, setting expectations early, and sharing limits clearly at work and at home.

By the end, you’ll have a lightweight system to observe your limits, track what truly drains or fuels you, and communicate your edges with calm confidence. If you’re ready to replace people-pleasing with sustainable care, hit play, share this with a friend who overgives, and leave a review to tell us your biggest shift.

Transcript

Welcome And Theme: Energy Hygiene

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Welcome to Who's Your Mama, a podcast focusing on tomorrow's future, which are our kids, educators, teachers, parents, all-encompassing with the goal of understanding that our brain is a muscle that we can exercise to control the speed in the direction that we want. Let's go, y'all. The time is now. Annabelle Sullivan of Roots, welcome back to Who's Your Mama? Thanks so much for having me back, Michelle.

SPEAKER_00 0:26

Love to be here.

Defining Limits Versus Boundaries

SPEAKER_01 0:27

So as always, I during the time that we connect and then afterwards, I do a lot of reflection and and I hear a lot of people do as well. So um making a difference through community together. So uh on that note, let's kick off and um think about I I was thinking about, and I know you and I discussed like where we left off before and just what's been going on since the last few months we spoke about. And one of the areas that I can say, not just in my life, but friends and family, some common conversations that have come up is around uh boundaries. And I talk a lot about, and even to my daughter, uh, you know, you you can have your your limits tested, but people in your life that push your boundaries, there's a difference. They're not, it's not semantics. And a lot of that can be intertwined into am I just being nice by not saying anything? Am I being, you know, nice to myself versus kindness, which is ties into energy hygiene and and all of that. So could you um expand on uh especially the area that you work in and just personal, what where are the differences there? And then we can talk about some practical tools that people can take away from there.

Flexible Boundaries And Personal Plans

SPEAKER_00 1:46

Yeah, I love that, Michelle. And I love the tie-in also to thinking about energy hygiene in relation to these boundaries or these limits. I think what's super interesting and timely is that I just wrapped up my psychotherapy course and we talked a little bit about how you can either observe your limits or you can set boundaries. And just like you mentioned, right, how the terminology boundaries is different than our limits and how, you know, practicing how to just not necessarily be better, but in good practice and in kind of that energy hygiene lens, it's helpful to shift more towards observing our limits rather than setting firm boundaries and not being flexible. I think that's something that's super important. A big takeaway is to like embrace some of that flexibility, embrace that sometimes you do have strict boundaries, right? There's certain things that are kind of more set in stone, but other times we can be more flexible with our limits and expand or contract depending on the situation, depending on the conversation, the person, the peer. Um, so I think it's really important to mention that and kind of notice those two differences.

Practical Tools: Gut Checks And Signals

SPEAKER_01 3:00

So I I agree with you, and it's our own personalized healthy plan for ourselves and ultimately up for us to see signs for people that are trying to expand upon that, or even those that this would be new area to them. They they didn't maybe grow up with any of that, haven't um really they don't know where to start. What would be some some practical tools that you would suggest that uh they could put into practice to see those signs of understanding the differences?

SPEAKER_00 3:39

Yeah, I love that. And for me, what comes to mind, I think a lot about like trusting your instincts and like going with your gut, as people say, like there's a lot of times where your body, your mind will have a reaction to certain situations, to certain circumstances, events, and you'll kind of feel like what is your ground truth, right? And I think for me, it's really important to follow that feeling and follow that gut instinct because that's what you're doing.

Tracking Activities And Emotions

SPEAKER_01 4:06

What's rooted within you, no pun intended. Yes, it's but your gut, so so physical signs is something like that. Cause oftentimes, too, depending on what we're juggling, it's easy to dismiss some of those physical signs. Yeah, like, oh, it's attached to this versus it could be the company that I'm keeping, those sort of sort of things. So pardon me. Um, I'm getting all choked up by this good conversation. Like, um, I'm thinking about you know, some people like to journal, and that's one of the reasons that you know, I I love your day-to-day wellness guide and planner is taught it, it's not just what you do in like say your work life or school life, but what's happening day to day or week by week, so you can kind of track those things. Um, would you say that that could potentially be a way to see a pattern of maybe this is what I've been doing. So you could say, like, oh, this might be related to work versus maybe this is the company that I'm keeping in my personal life, certain things that you can control versus not control.

SPEAKER_00 5:16

Yes. Can you expand on that? Yeah, 100%. Thanks for mentioning that too, Michelle. One of the other like tools or activities that you can do is like you mentioned, kind of like this activity tracking. So whether that's with the day-by-day planner or not, kind of just jotting down, you know, what are the activities I'm doing and how do I feel in that moment? And I think another kind of part to what I wanted to mention as well is tuning in to not only your gut feeling and that physical sensation, but also your emotions in that moment. So, how do you feel in response to certain activities or being around certain people, certain communities? And then just like you said, being able to look at those patterns down the road when maybe you look back or you complete your weekly reflection, you can kind of get a sense of, okay, here's where I was feeling a little bit more down, feeling a little bit more stressed. What was I doing? Why was I feeling that way? And then you can identify those patterns and then hopefully make some beneficial positive life changes to try to account for some of those actions or behaviors or feelings that you're experiencing.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

I know for me, one of the biggest signs is my sleep. And what time I go to bed and why, and sometimes it's later because it's just unavoidable. Other times it's because my mind is not unwound in the way that it should. So it's what point in time can I take some things off my plate, maybe earlier in the evening before I go to bed, and how long it takes me to fall asleep. So it's it's the period of time which I fall asleep, and then how long I sleep. And so for me, I try not to uh take things, we take it day by day, week by week, as we've discussed, but not to paint the whole canvas if say, okay, for a couple days it's been off so that I'm not hard on myself and telling myself, like, oh no, like I go to you know, Deathcon one. It, you know, I take it as what it is, and but if something's consistent for me personally regarding my sleep, if it's been like that for say at least a week, then I look at it at a more micro level. What are your thoughts on seeing kind of patterns to gauge on generally speaking for people listening that to take more of a micro notice to make changes?

Micro Changes From Personal Data

SPEAKER_00 7:47

100% versus just life happening. Yeah. And I think that that's what's really hard, right? It's not so fun or not so easy to be tracking down, okay, here's what I did, you know, four times a day, kind of making notes of here's what I did, here's how I felt. It's not easy, but I think that if you are motivated for change in certain aspects of your life, then this is a really good first step to being like, let me, it's like, you know, putting yourself in the shoes of like a researcher of a scientist, right? Let me like get some data, let me do some analysis of my own life. What am I doing? How am I feeling in those moments? And then getting that understanding, right? Because it also what's so difficult is trying to think back to last week and thinking, how did I feel? When did I feel that way? And sometimes our mind can like misconstrue some memories, right? So that's what's really important about, you know, if you're serious about I want to change certain aspects of my life, I want to feel better, XYZ. A lot of things that I've been learning right now in my coursework as well is taking that first step to identify, like you said, what are these patterns, what's actually going on in my week, and how is that making me feel? So then I can see exactly where things can be changed or things can be implemented, XYZ.

Niceness Versus Kindness

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Well, then that leads me to the next thing that um again around energy hygiene and listening to our internal voices and stuff, is what we tell ourselves, and like you said, our mind can play tricks on us, yeah, is about and I think we touched on this uh the last time we were together, but just on a top level, is around the differences between again talking about it words matter and it not being semantics is nice niceness versus kindness. So I I I think that and myself included at times, I can naturally, and also what I do for a living, and and in my personal life, sometimes offer more to others, which takes away from me, and it's not poorly guided until it shows up in other areas for me that I'm not looking after uh myself in the way that I look after others, and so it's not a tit for tat, so to speak, but am I investing in myself as much? And so can you expand on the differences of one over the other? And again, going back to that personalized energy Gene.

Kind To Self, Nice To Others

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, and it it sounds a bit like what I'm gathering and what we talked about last week was or last time we talked was also a little bit about how niceness can maybe be a little bit of a surface level or external sort of communication or feeling. Whereas this kindness seems more deeply rooted. It seems more in tune with our energy hygiene concept, it seems like a little bit more of like a next level of niceness, maybe being here, level one, more external. Um, whereas kindness is a little bit deeper, and that's where you're actually fulfilling your purpose, your destiny, and in tune with what you feel. Um, to me, it seems like there's that healthier exchange, would you say? Yeah, yeah. And I'm curious to hear about your kind of insight too, and what you think those differences are. Do you think that that's also the same way where niceness is maybe a little bit more external, a bit more surface level kindness taking that next step and really putting yourself first?

SPEAKER_01 11:38

I I agree with everything you just said. So the answer is yes. It's taken me much later in life to recognize that. Because when we know we're good people and we're the intention is pure, which is the place I come from. Sometimes it is harder to recognize well what's behind it, why the whys and understanding oneself. And that was a huge reason why I started Who's Your Mama? Because I've said, said no person ever in life, oh, I wish I would have learned this life skiller skills later. So this is one of an area that you know I I think about personally, I think about um when I've talked, I speak with friends or family, it's been coming up a lot, which is part of the reason I wanted to dive a little bit deeper. So I agree with you. And I think it's all intertwined with what we were talking about before about you know, limits versus versus boundaries. Yeah. And again, what we've we've talked about the last time was if we said and a few times, I think, is if we said, if somebody that we cared about said things to us, what we say internally, if we said that, you know, if we said it out loud, if the answer is no, then why are we giving ourselves that self-talk internally? And I think that ties into the limits and boundaries, which is niceness versus kindness.

SPEAKER_00 13:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So I really like the way you phrased it all. Um I would love to dive deeper into that, like because I think some people are able to just decipher the difference in maybe their personal life, but not their work life or their work life and not their personal life, but they are intertwined. And so diving a little bit deeper in that, I would love to hear your very professional expert and just all around amazing human opinion because you know it's it's uh what what leads us to actually have those aha moments I think are super important.

SPEAKER_00 13:42

Yeah. And you know what? As we discussed this, I was just thinking to myself, for me, it kind of seems like you can be nice to others and you can be kind to yourself. And I think that kind of encompasses or could encompass some of the stuff we're talking about here, where for me, it feels like if you're nice, if you're a nice person, someone gives you that compliment, that's great. But it seems to be more external, right? Kind of what you're mentioning as well. What am I doing on the outside or on this facade and my interpersonal relationships to appear as nice, right? But then we have kindness, and if someone calls you a kind person, that feels deeper, right?

Closing And Community Focus

SPEAKER_01 14:23

Yeah, that's your heart and your soul, like where they reconciled. And not everyone, like you can be a good person, but not everyone deserves a general admission to either. It does it's not a ticket to be an a-hole, but it it is being more selective and understanding how much energy you spend and where and why. So I would love to dive deeper into that with you next time we speak. So thank you again, as always. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. And again, it gives me things to think about. And so I look forward to the next time. Likewise. And um, as you know, at Who's Your Mama, we sign off with Let's Go, y'all. The time is now.

SPEAKER_00 15:04

Let's go, y'all. The time is now. I love it, Michelle. Thanks, Annabelle.

SPEAKER_01 15:09

Thank you for tuning into Who's Your Mama. And I look forward to collaborating from a community standpoint for the next episodes.