Energy as Information

I've been wondering if some of what we've labelled as anxiety, overthinking, or uncertainty is actually something else entirely. What if it's information we've simply never been taught how to interpret?

In this episode, I'm exploring one of the foundational ideas behind my work: that energy isn't just something we feel, it's information. I unpack what I mean when I say "energy speaks before your mouth even opens," why so many women become disconnected from their own inner knowing, and how learning to understand your body's signals can completely change the way you make decisions, build your business, and trust yourself.

We also explore the relationship between intuition, energy, the nervous system, and self trust, and why so many high-achieving women mistake intuitive information for anxiety. If you've ever struggled to explain why something didn't feel right, even when it looked perfect on paper, this episode may completely change the way you interpret what your body has been trying to tell you all along.

In this episode, you'll hear:

• What it means to think of energy as information instead of something mystical
• Why so many women mistake intuitive information for anxiety or overthinking
• How to distinguish your own energy from the energy of the people around you
• Why your body often recognizes truth before your logical mind can explain it
• How reconnecting with your own energy helps you make clearer, more aligned decisions

Mentioned in Episode:

• Daily Energy Management Practice: https://www.brenda-johnston.com/energy-management
• 60 Minute Power Session: https://calendly.com/brendajohnston/deep-dive

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Welcome back to the Limitless Life Podcast. Or if you're new here, welcome. I'm your host, Brenda Johnson, and this is a show where we go deep on the work that actually moves the needle. I am just not a fan of surface level strategy. I like the stuff, the deeper stuff, the identity, subconscious, energy, and you know what it actually takes to become the fullest expression of who you really are. If you've been in my world for a while, either here or Instagram or Substack or wherever, or even if you're brand new, there is a saying that I say a lot, because it is true. And honestly, I wish I had understood it years ago. And that statement is energy speaks before your mouth even opens. And I just want you to sit with that for a second. Because when I say it, I don't mean it as a metaphor. I mean it literally. It's really the belief under everything I'm gonna share with you today, and it's become one of the guiding principles or foundations of my work. And as always, take what resonates with you, leave what doesn't. Everything I'm sharing today comes from my own experience, my experience with energy, my experience learning to read energy, and what changed when I finally could manage and work with energy. My way is not the only way to look at this, is what I'm trying to say. It is simply this perspective that has made the most sense in my life and in the work that I do with the women that I work with every day. So let's get into this. Because you know what? I've also been thinking a lot lately about why this particular conversation feels so important right now. I don't think it's a coincidence that there are so many women questioning themselves. They are questioning the careers that they've spent decades building, they're questioning relationships right now, they're questioning their own success, they're questioning what they actually want. And underneath all of that, I actually believe they're asking themselves a much deeper question, even if they don't realize what it is yet. And that question is, can I trust myself? Not everybody else's opinion or what just sounds like is good or what maybe looks good on the surface, but like can I trust myself? And I actually believe that understanding energy is a massive part of that conversation. And not because it's a mystical thing, because it's incredibly practical. For a really, really long time, like a good chunk of my life, I was completely disconnected from my body. I couldn't feel my own energy. I couldn't tell the difference between what was mine and what wasn't. I would walk into a room and immediately feel something shift, but I didn't have an understanding for what I was experiencing. So I would leave conversations completely exhausted and assume there was something wrong with me. I'd feel things, pick up on things, know things, but I couldn't explain any of it, definitely couldn't control it. So I did what a lot of high functioning women do. I called it anxiety, and at a couple points in my life I took medication for it. And looking back now, I understand that for me, anxiety wasn't the problem. It was I was receiving information that my body didn't know how to interpret. And so it was giving me feelings of anxiousness. So I want to talk about that a little bit more because I think a lot of times we think something's happening. It's like if I asked you what's been showing up lately, I imagine your answer might sound something like, oh, I've been feeling anxious, I'm overthinking. Just been so sensitive lately. Ugh, I'm in my head all the time. You know what's crazy? I just can't make a decision. Like I have to ask three different people what they think before I trust myself. Or this one I hear a lot. I have conversations with certain people and I'm completely drained. And I get it because I've said some version of those things. Maybe you've even caught yourself saying, uh, yeah, I don't know what's wrong with me. But like I'm definitely an empath. And I want to say something that might be a little different than what you've heard before. I believe on some level we are all empaths. I think we are all constantly receiving information from the people around us, the environments we're in, our own bodies, and some people are simply more aware of it than others. But I don't think or believe that feeling energy is rare. I don't think it makes anybody more special than somebody else. I truly do believe that being able to feel the energy and read the energy and work with the energy, it's just part of being human. I think the difference isn't whether you're receiving the information. I think the difference is whether you know how to recognize it and what to do with it. And I think that's probably where we've stopped the conversation. We've just accepted the, oh, I'm an empath almost as the explanation, like, oh, that's just who I am. I just absorb everybody's energy. I'm exhausted because I'm an empath. Okay, maybe, or maybe nobody ever taught you how to recognize what belongs to you and what belongs to somebody else. Because those are two very different things. And there's a huge difference between being deeply aware and carrying everything you become aware of. Let me say that again. Huge difference between being deeply aware and carrying everything that you become aware of. I don't think the gift is that you feel everything. I think the gift is when you notice what is happening. I think the gift is learning what to do with that awareness. And I also think that's the work. Here's what I've learned because the visible problem is really the real problem. What you might be calling anxiety or overthinking or sensitivity, those are symptoms. They're not the root cause of things. But because we assume that they're the problem, we spend years trying to manage them. We spend years trying to manage the anxiety, we spend years trying to stop the overthinking, we spend years apologizing for being sensitive. And we spend years trying to become less of ourselves instead of understanding what we are actually experiencing. And here's where that gets really tricky because if we're solving the wrong problem or trying to solve the wrong problem, we're never going to find the right solution. So that's me going on a tangent about what we usually think is happening. Let's talk about what's actually happening now. Here's how I would explain what is actually happening underneath all of that stuff. Your body and your energetic field have been communicating with you constantly. There is a language running underneath every experience you have. It's just most of us simply were never taught how to read it. And the body often knows before the mind understands. You've probably experienced this. Think about the last time you walked into a room and instantly felt tension or somebody gave you the ick before anybody even said a word. Or think about the relationship that maybe looked really good on paper, but it never felt right. Or the opportunity that made complete and logical sense, and everybody told you to say yes, but something inside of you hesitated. Or maybe it's something a little more personal. Like, I don't know, being in the middle of launching something you're genuinely excited about, and then realizing that as much as you love the idea, something doesn't quite feel right. That is exactly what happened to me recently. I was literally in the middle of launching my Limitless Life Collective, which has been twelve years in the making. And let me be very clear, it wasn't because I didn't believe in the experience, because I think it is an incredible experience, but I could not shake the feeling that something wasn't fully aligned. Not for me, not for where I'm at right now, and not for the women that I'm here to serve. Logically, everything made absolute sense on paper, and logically, it made absolutely no sense to pause it. Everything in my brain wanted to keep going. But my body just kept saying, Nope, not like this. So I listened, and I've paused the launch right now. And again, not because it wasn't good enough or valuable, because there's another layer that I need to sort out. It needs to become more aligned with the way that I am designed to lead so that I also don't get burned out. I'm not one of those people that talks about things and doesn't walk the walk, is what I'm trying to say here. And so that's what I'm working on right now. Making sure that not only is the experience going to resonate with the people who are going to be spending time with me, but also that I'm not going to get burnt out or resentful. So this is what I'm saying. Most of us have had experiences where our body registered something before our mind could explain it. And that's not a coincidence. It's information. And here's where I think we've really gotten disconnected. We have become incredibly good at trusting things that we can explain, things that we can prove, what other people agree with, what makes logical sense. But somewhere along the way, and it's different phases of life for different people, we stopped trusting what our own body and energy has been communicating. And like when I look back over my own life, man, my body knew long before my mind did. It knew which relationships were not aligned or had run their course. It knew which opportunities weren't right. It knew when I was trying to force something. It knew before I can explain things, but I didn't trust it. And I know there's a lot of you listening to this going, yeah, that's me. I've experienced that too. Now I want to go a layer deeper, because that's what I like to do. Because honestly, understanding that energy carries information still doesn't answer the bigger question. Why do so many intelligent, capable women stop trusting themselves? Do I think it's because we were all taught to distrust energy? I feel like on some level that is actually a thing. I believe more so we've been taught to distrust ourselves because somewhere along the way we learned that trust had to be able to be measured. You could trust things that could be explained, you could trust things that other people agreed with. And listen, I'm not saying logic is bad, and I'm not saying evidence doesn't matter, because of course it does. But for many of us, we stopped believing our own body could be a source of information as well. Knowing something without being able to explain it started to feel very irresponsible. That is very old era thinking, by the way. So what did we do? We just we didn't listen. We overrode the signal. We explained it away, we logicked it away, we talked ourselves out of it. We asked everybody else what they thought, and we kept looking outside of ourselves for certainty when our body and our energy had already offered us the information. You know, looking back now, I don't think that's an energy issue even. I think it's an authority issue. Every time I ignored my own knowing, I handed my authority to somebody outside of me. I gave my power away. And I lived this, I've talked about it. I was so disconnected from my own field that everything ran together. My energy, other people's energy, the energy of the room, the energy of conversations. I literally couldn't tell what belonged to me and what didn't. And here's the thing, because what changed wasn't another mindset tool or book or strategy. It was actually learning a very, very simple daily practice from one of my mentors, which included grounding and clearing and coming back to my own field, and learning how to recognize what was mine and what wasn't. And honestly, once that noise started to settle and it didn't take long, what I found wasn't chaos. I found that I was like, oh, my intuition's actually stronger now. Oh, I'm actually much clearer in the decisions I'm making. Oh, I can go out into public and not feel exhausted when I'm home because I'm not picking up everybody else's shit. This is gonna sound super cliche, but it was like the clarity that had always been there. I just finally knew how to hear it. And I trusted it. I had to learn to trust it. So I want to talk about like when you understand the stuff underneath, like what changes when you stop managing the symptom and when you finally start understanding that energetic signal. Well, first of all, decision making changes, and it's not because life suddenly becomes easier, it's because you stop trying to think your way to every answer and you start paying attention to yourself again. You can recognize the difference between fear and something just not being a match for you. You can recognize the difference between people pleasing and being in genuine alignment with somebody, like really getting along, being a match with them. You can recognize the difference between saying yes because you're afraid to disappoint somebody and saying yes because it actually feels good and right. And you also stop carrying things that weren't ever yours. And I think that's probably one of the biggest shifts. Now, before I say this next part, I want to be very clear. There are absolutely people who experience anxiety because of chemical or physiological factors. That is a real experience. That is not what I'm talking about here. I am talking about something that I have observed over and over again in my own life and in the women that I work with. Sometimes what we are carrying did not originate with us. We walked into a room, maybe we had a difficult conversation, maybe we spent some time with somebody else who was overwhelmed or stressed or frustrated or anxious, and we absorb it. And because we never learned how to separate what belongs to us and what doesn't, we carry it and we call it ours. And learning to recognize that, like when you can learn to recognize the difference of that, it is an incredibly freeing experience. You also find yourself needing fewer outside opinions. And it's not because advice isn't valuable. Trust me, I still ask people for advice and perspectives. I have mentors, I still value wisdom. The difference is I'm not asking somebody else to tell me what I already know. I'm asking from curiosity because sometimes people might have a different perspective that is really valuable. It's a very different place to make decisions from. And to me, that's what self-trust actually looks like. It's not about having all the answers or never questioning yourself, but it's knowing how to come back to your own signal before you hand your authority to somebody else. And I think that's really actually what this entire conversation has been about. Not actually energy, but our own inner authority. Because learning to understand your energy isn't the destination, it's one of the ways you start rebuilding trust with yourself. So here's what I want to leave you with today. Maybe you've been trying to solve the wrong problem. Maybe what you've been calling anxiety isn't anxiety at all. Maybe it's information. Maybe your sensitivity isn't something you need to overcome, but it's something you need to better understand and learn how to work with. I always used to say that the work was about becoming the next best version of yourself, but honestly, I don't believe that's true as much anymore. Yes, we do keep growing and evolving, but the work isn't becoming a different version of yourself. It's learning to understand the version of you that's been there all along. Your body didn't forget how to communicate. You were just never taught how to listen to it. And if today's conversation resonates with you and you're realizing that maybe what you've been calling anxiety or overthinking or overwhelm is actually pointing towards something much deeper, then I'd love to invite you to come join me over on my free substack. It's called The Limitless Life Uncensored. It's where I share notes or longer thoughts that maybe I don't have on the podcast, the deeper thoughts, questions that I'm wrestling with. It's how I think over there. And so the ideas that are shaping the way that I think about identity and subconscious patterns and energy and leadership and what it really means to trust yourself, I work through a lot of that stuff over there. And it's completely free. I will link it in the show notes. And if you're listening to this today and thinking, yeah, but I don't want to just understand this. I want to understand what's happening for me specifically, then I think a really great place to start is my 60-minute power session. I've opened a limited number of spots for them. But yeah, it's a great place to start because in those sessions, we kind of slow everything down and we look under the surface. We look at what the subconscious patterns and the energy dynamics are and what beliefs might be at play driving your experiences based on how you're designed. Because when you understand the root, the underneath, everything starts to make a whole lot more sense. You'll find both of those links in the show notes. Also in the show notes, I'm gonna link up my own personal daily energy management practice. It's four and a half minutes. It'll change your life. I do want to leave you with one more thought. Your body has been communicating with you your whole entire life. The question isn't whether you're receiving the information because there's no doubt that you are. The question is what do you think would change if you finally trusted yourself enough to become curious about what that energy's been trying to tell you? Maybe that's what this next chapter is really about. Not becoming somebody different or fixing yourself, but just learning the language that your body and your energy has been speaking all along. If you love this episode, I would love and appreciate if you would take a screenshot, share it on Instagram, tag me so I know it's resonating with you. Thank you for spending this time with me today, and I'm gonna leave that right there. I will see you next week in the next episode.