How to Build Sustainable Wellbeing by Aligning with Your Natural Energy

SHOW NOTES: 

WorkLife Stories from School of WorkLife Episode: How to Build Sustainable Wellbeing by Aligning with Your Natural Energy 

Learning how to build sustainable wellbeing by aligning with your natural energy begins with questioning the assumption that pushing through tiredness is simply what professional discipline requires.

Sally had always believed success meant pushing through tiredness. If work needed doing, you did it — regardless of whether your energy was high or low. For years, that approach seemed to work. Until it didn't. This is the story of the moment a simple one-week experiment showed her that the problem was never her discipline — it was that she had been working against her own energy all along.

RESOURCES MENTIONED

The Storytelling Newsletter (Free) Short, focused, and grounded in real WorkLife situations — how we communicate, lead, make decisions, and navigate challenges at work.  

Story Lesson How to Build Sustainable Wellbeing by Aligning with Your Natural Energy Learn how understanding your daily energy patterns can restore creativity, sharpen thinking, and help you design a way of working that supports both professional performance and long-term wellbeing.

Guided Programme Take Care of Your Wellbeing Both In and Out of the Workplace - Finding Balance When Personal Crisis Meets Professional Responsibility 

Support This Work: Your support makes a difference and helps me to continue creating resources that are accessible to everyone. Thank you. Carmel

Commissioned learning resources, speaking engagements, and organisational partnerships: carmel@schoolofworklife.com

schoolofworklife.com

The stories I write are based on real WorkLife challenges, obstacles, failures and successes. Persons and companies portrayed in the stories are not based on real people or entities. Carmel O’ Reilly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Sally had always believed success meant pushing through tiredness. If work needed doing, you did it, regardless of whether your energy was high or low. Deadlines didn't wait for inspiration. Creative ideas didn't always arrive on schedule. Professional discipline meant showing up and forcing the work forward. For years that approach seemed to work until it didn't. Welcome to Work Life Stories from School of Work Life. I'm Carmel O'Reilly, and today's episode is how to build sustainable well-being by aligning with your natural energy. It begins with questioning the assumption that pushing through tiredness is simply what professional discipline requires. This story is about Sally and about the moment she discovered that the exhaustion wasn't a discipline problem. It was what happened when you spend years working against your own energy rather than with it. When pushing through stopped working. The creative campaigns that once flowed naturally started taking longer to produce. Ideas arrived more slowly. Focus felt harder to sustain. By mid-afternoon most days, Sally found herself staring at her screen, trying to force words to refuse to come. Another coffee helped temporary. But the cycle continued. Caffeine disrupted her sleep. Poor sleep left her sluggish the next morning, and the creative energy that once defined her work began quietly draining away. When energy stopped cooperating, the moment that forced Sally to pay attention came during a presentation to the executive team. She had prepared the campaign proposal during one of our usual afternoon energy crashes. The result was competent but uninspired. The concept feels a bit safe, her CEO said. It's solid, but I'm not seeing the breakthrough thinking we usually get from your campaigns. The comment stayed with her because Sally knew it was true. She wasn't failing because she lacked ideas. She was trying to produce her best thinking during the exact hours when her energy and creativity were at their lowest. The idea that made her pause. A few days later, Sally listened to a workplace wellbeing podcast during her morning commute. One sentence caught her attention. Energy management starts with observation. Track your energy levels for one week and you'll see patterns you've been too busy to notice. At first it sounded almost too simple to matter, but the idea lingered. What if the problem wasn't motivation or discipline? What if she simply didn't understand how her energy actually worked? That evening Sally decided to try the experiment. The experiment. The shift began with a simple observation exercise. For one week, Sally tracked her energy levels throughout the day. Every two hours she noted how alert, creative, and focused she felt, and what kind of work she was trying to do at the time. The pattern became obvious almost immediately. Her best creative energy appeared between 9 and 11 a.m. and again around late afternoon. Yet her schedule placed creative campaign work during the 2 to 4 p.m. energy dip she experienced almost every day. She wasn't lacking discipline. She was working against her own biology. What happened next? Instead of forcing productivity during low energy periods, Sally began redesigning her schedule. Her morning peak became protected time for campaign strategy and creative thinking. Administrative tasks moved to the afternoon when her brain was naturally better suited for routine work. Instead of fighting the mid-afternoon dip with coffee, she started taking short walks. The difference was immediate. Creative work that had taken three hours now took 90 minutes, ideas flowed more naturally, and the work itself felt energizing again. The shift, one shift changed everything, from forcing productivity regardless of energy, to designing work around natural energy rhythms. The ripple effect, something else began changing too. Better scheduling improved her sleep. Better sleep sharpened her morning thinking. Clearer thinking improved the quality of her work. The cycle reversed itself. Instead of exhaustion, feeling more exhaustion, restored energy began reinforcing itself. Within weeks, Sally noticed something else she hadn't felt in months. Work felt natural again. The creativity that once defined her role returned, not because she pushed harder, but because she had finally stopped fighting against the way her energy actually worked. The ripple effect for others. Something else began to change. Her colleagues noticed a difference. You seem more energized lately, her manager Tom said during a team meeting. Her campaign ideas were sharper, her strategic thinking clearer. She contributed more confidently during discussions. When a colleague mentioned feeling constantly exhausted despite working reasonable hours, Sally recognized the pattern immediately. When are you scheduling your most demanding work? she asked. The answer revealed what Sally had expected. Creative work attempted during natural energy values. Important thinking squeezed into whatever time slots remained. Sally shared her framework simply. Track your energy for a week. Notice when you naturally have peak capacity versus when you're fighting uphill. Then put your most important work in your best windows. One change, but it opened up everything else, just as I had for Sally. Within weeks, others on the team began experimenting with their schedules. Some moved analytical work to the morning. Others protected time for deep thinking before meetings filled their calendars. The team's output improved, not because people worked harder, but because they started working in alignment with their energy rather than against it. The teaching insight. Sally discovered something professionals can overlook. Energy isn't simply personal fuel. It's the infrastructure that supports thinking, creativity, and decision making. When she stopped treating tiredness as something to override and started treating it as information, everything changed. Her work improved, her well-being stabilized, and success stopped feeling like a constant uphill battle. Why this matters? Professionals can believe productivity comes from discipline alone. If you push hard enough, focus long enough, and ignore tiredness, the work will eventually come. But Sally's experience showed something different. Sustained performance rarely comes from pushing harder against fatigue. It comes from recognizing when your mind and body are capable of doing their best work and designing your day around those moments. When Sally stopped forcing creativity during her lowest energy hours, the quality of her thinking returned, but the impact reaches further than one person's schedule. When you stop fighting your natural rhythms and start designing your work around them, something else becomes possible. The chronic exhaustion eases, the thinking sharpens, the creativity that one felt forced begins to flow again. And when you share that shift with others, they begin to see that sustainable performance was never about pushing harder. It was always about working in alignment with how you actually function. Are you scheduling your most important work when your thinking is naturally at its best? Or asking yourself to produce your strongest ideas at the exact times when your capacity is lowest. That's today's story: how to build sustainable well-being by aligning with your natural energy. The complete lesson follows Sally's full journey, including the simple energy observation framework she used, how she redesigned her schedule around her natural rhythms, how replacing caffeine with short walks during her energy valley started a chain reaction that restored her sleep, her immunity, and her creative confidence, and the colleague she helped who recognized the same pattern in herself and shows how those changes restored both her creativity and her well-being, and how the same practice can help you do the same. And if you want to go deeper, the companion guided program, Take Care of Your Well-Being, Both In and Out of the Workplace, is there when you're ready. All the details and links are in the show notes, or you can find everything at schoolofworklife.com. Subscribe to the podcast for weekly audio stories, or visit a storytelling newsletter for the written versions, or both. Next time we'll be exploring how classic literature develops professional voice and confidence. A story about Susie, whose ideas were consistently overlooked in meetings, until three novels from different centuries each taught her something different about clarity, judgment, and a right to be heard. Until then, remember your energy patterns are not obstacles to overcome, but valuable information to guide sustainable excellence. Thank you for listening.