Protect your energy, boundaries and self-love

Season 5 • Episode 43

Protecting Your Energy

The Adapted Life: Finding Next

In this episode of The Adapted Life: Finding Next, Julie

explores the quiet but necessary practice of protecting

your energy — especially after loss, caregiving, burnout,

betrayal, trauma, or seasons of deep emotional

exhaustion.

As part of the Season 5 theme, Tending to the Energy, this

conversation reflects on what happens when we become

more aware of where our energy is going… and realize

that not everything deserves full access to us.

Julie shares gentle reflections about emotional labor,

boundaries, overstimulation, compassion fatigue, and the

pressure many sensitive people feel to constantly give,

explain, fix, or carry. This episode offers permission to

step back without guilt, to honor your nervous system,

and to recognize that boundaries are not punishment —

they are stewardship.

Through calming encouragement and thoughtful insight,

listeners are invited to consider:

• What restores versus drains them

• The hidden cost of constant giving

• Why protecting your peace is an act of healing

• How grief and trauma can change our capacity• The importance of creating space for recovery,

creativity, and presence

This episode is a reminder that protecting your energy is not selfish — it is part of tending the light within you. You, are not the weather, you dear friends, are the lighthouse. 

Take a breath, settle in, and join Julie for a gentle

conversation about honoring your limits, reclaiming your

peace, and learning that you are allowed to protect what is

sacred in you.

Music by Epidemic Sound

written, recorded, and created by Julie Hasselberger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everybody, welcome back to the Adapted Life Podcast. My name is Julie Hasselberger, and I am coming to you today with episode 43 in my season five. This episode is called Protecting Your Energy. I am really grateful that you're here today. And if you've been listening to some of the podcasts so far this season, I've been generally talking about energy, not just physical energy, but emotional energy, spiritual energy, nervous system energy, the invisible energy that we carry into our relationships every single day in our lives. So in episode one, I talked a little bit about the spark, that tiny flicker of reminding us that we are still alive and still becoming. In episode two, I talked a little bit about where our energy is going and how exhaustion is often far deeper than simply being really busy. Episode three, we talked about tending to our energy. In other words, learning how to care for ourselves gently and intentionally, just to give ourselves kindness and you know pay attention. And today I want to talk about kind of something that can feel uncomfortable at first and was very hard for me too when I started to realize that I needed to do it. And it is called protecting your energy. And it sounds really simple, right? I gotta protect my energy, or maybe it doesn't, maybe it's like, how do you do that, right? Um, but basically, you can think of it like learning what deserves to have access to you. Because not everything deserves full access to you, and so there comes a point in healing, especially in post-traumatic healing and in grief healing, where we start to really begin to realize something important, and that is, like I just said, that not everything deserves unlimited access to our heart, our mind, our nervous system, and our peace. For many of us, um especially empathic people, caregivers, helpers, parents, deeply feeling human beings, this can feel really, really difficult because we give so much of ourselves to other people instinctively, right? I know that for me, you know, being a good person meant always being available to other people when they need me, you know, and taking care of other people and being hyper-vigilant. And when you have someone who's disabled that you're taking care of, you have to be that way because they cannot discern, you know, one way or the other. You're just you're taking care of somebody who needs to be kept alive and you do everything. But yeah, it it a lot of people feel that being a good person meant I have to be available, right? Being a good mom, being a good wife, right? Always available, always taking care of other people. It's what we do. And being empathic means it's another whole level of just absorbing energy too. What does that mean? Right? Always being available meant always understanding, always forgiving, always accommodating for everybody, you know, always carrying a load of things to do. As mothers, we do this, as as caregivers, we do this, and as women, we do this. You know, we're supposed to be the nurturers, the carers, the the ones who are in charge of feelings and all of that. Eventually, in doing this, eventually the body keeps score. And as you get older and as you go for go through increasingly difficult, traumatic experiences in your life, because we all do at one point or the other, we all will experience grief. If we love someone or love many people, eventually we'll experience grief because that's just the way life is. Right. And how does the body keep score? Well, the exhaustion starts to show up, the anxiety gets bigger, the burnout shows up, the resentment shows up, and along with that can come mental health crisis, can come physical, actual manifestations of illness, stress, hypertension, headaches, tension, muscles, I don't know, everything you can think of is in many ways linked to the stress and what we're putting ourselves through. And sometimes we uh, you know, I don't know, you'd be sitting there and you're like, I barely did anything today. Like, why am I so tired? I'm so tired all the time. How could I be so tired? Uh I I I don't know. But emotional labor is also labor holding tension is also labor constantly ruminating and thinking and stressing takes energy. Hypervigilance is exhausting labor. And let me tell you, hypervigilance, and if you don't know what that means, that's when like you're you're trying to keep everything okay. Or if you have a partner who you're worried that there's something going on, so you're watching their behaviors, you're looking for things, you're on guard, you're responding to behaviors, you're you're just always looking and being like you're guarding, you're making sure everything's okay. Like, well, where's this one? Where's that one? What's going on? Why did they do that? Why aren't they home yet? When you're at like a special needs parent, like I was with Daniel, Daniel was medically fragile and he had so many issues to be on top of. So it was all the time 24-7. Because at night he would have seizures, or he would not sleep, or he would have issues, or he needed diaper changing, or whatever the explanation was, I was always on guard because there were so many needs, so I needed to be ready to meet the needs, so I needed to watch his behavior because I loved him and I wanted him to be happy and well cared for, and so I hyper-vigilant it. I was I was so good at it. And over the years I developed uh hypertension, uh, I gained weight, I have fibromyalgia, um, back problems, and a lot of mental health crisis came along with you know all of that. So, yeah, your your nervous system is most likely already carrying way more than it's meant to carry. So if, and especially if you are walking through right now grief or trauma or betrayal trauma or chronic stress or illness or caregiving or loss, and grief can be any kind of grief. Grief can be loss of a loved one, grief can be loss of a of a job, grief can be loss of a pet, it can be loss of a life that you thought you were living, but then you find out you're not living. It can be any significant loss that is affecting you. So, yeah, your your nervous system is already carrying so much if you're experiencing all of these things. So, boundaries. I don't know. For me, I thought about a boundary as like, I gotta keep you away from me. You know, like punishment, right? You can't come into my world. When I started to go through relational trauma healing, I started to learn about boundaries, being more of a kindness to myself, because what you're doing is you're protecting yourself, you're keeping yourself safe. It's not that you're punishing, you're just giving yourself protection so that you can continue to heal and feel safe and stable. Because when you're dysregulated in a state of like heightened anxiety and PTSD, it's very difficult. So you do need to develop boundaries in order to be protected. I'm not going to get into the specifics, but learning about boundaries is very, very helpful. I think sometimes, yeah, people think walls, punishment. I mean, what do you think of when if you don't know about setting boundaries? Like what does it what does it mean to you if if someone says I'm putting up a boundary? Is it coldness, distance, punishment? Um, I think we tend to think that, but really, boundaries are not punishment. Healthy boundaries are not punishment. Healthy, good boundaries. That's the kind I'm talking about. Healthy boundaries are more about self-stewardship. You're learning how to care for your own life force, your peace, your own emotional bandwidth, your ability to remain grounded and connected to yourself. And a boundary can sound like I can't hold this conversation right now, or I just need rest right now, or I'm not available for chaos today, right? I love you, but I also need some space just to breathe for a little while, or even hey, I don't want, I don't want to keep abandoning myself just to keep everybody else comfortable. And that's one of the things that I tended to do for so long is just like stuff all my own feelings about things in because like I had to keep everybody else comfortable and make everybody else happy to the point where I started to forget who I was. And and I wasn't, I was really not very kind to myself in order to make everybody else happy. Abandoning ourselves is a big one, especially for women and especially for sensitive people, especially for those of us who learned very, very early that our worth was in line with our ability to take care of everybody else. And I want to say, especially for people who are empathic and who are highly sensitive people, we have to be careful not to abandon ourselves. So, okay, protecting your energy, my my friends, is is not selfish. And it's really hard to unlearn that the belief of protecting ourselves is selfish. Like we think it's selfish. I gotta protect myself. It feels sometimes like I'm being selfish. I'm not I'm limiting what I'm giving to others because I feel like it's just too much for me. And sorry, you know. Whereas in my young days, I would just push myself, push, push, push. More coffee, push, push, push, get up early. Oh, I have a lot of energy. I keep going. I'm good. I'm so strong. I'm people used to say, Oh, you're just incredible. You're amazing. What a good mother. You're so strong. Oh, you do everything for your kids. Look at you, you're just incredible. But really, I was just keeping everybody else taken care of and ignoring myself. I wasn't incredible. I was I was just caregiving for everybody else. Protecting your energy is absolutely necessary because when we are constantly depleted, we stop being able to hear ourselves deeply. We turn off the volume to our own needs. We put ourselves off to the side, we lose touch with joy. Creativity dries up, we forget what we like to do. Our presence disappears, we become invisible. We begin surviving instead of living. And surviving instead of living is kind of a place where sometimes people will start to self-medicate, numb themselves, lean into ways to just shut out the world. Uh, because you know it's it's really difficult when you're when you're not in touch with yourself and you're taking care of everybody else, and the pressure of that is too much, you know, then people might just turn to drinking every day at the end of the day or whatever, or just zoning out, or just finding very bad, maladaptive coping mechanisms because forgetting yourself really it makes you feel depressed and lost and invisible, and you want to feel better. So a lot of times people just do things that might uh mask what they're feeling. So, yeah, you become uh just surviving instead of living, and that's that's a really unfortunate place to be. I mean, how many how many people are out there are like, oh, I'm working so hard and I come home and I gotta do all the things for the family, I gotta pay the bills, I gotta mow the grass, I gotta clean the house, and then I go to bed, and then I get up, and then I do it again, I gotta play it. And like, when are you stopping and paying attention to what is really bringing your heart joy? And how is your soul experiencing life? Like, how do you even know? Um protecting your own energy does not mean you are becoming hard, and it doesn't mean you are unkind. As Marat, it means you are very kind. It doesn't mean that you stop loving people. It simply means that you begin asking what environments make you feel more like yourself, what relationships feel safe and reciprocal? Do you have people you're in relationships with where you feel like you never get heard or seen and like you just listen, listen, listen, and then they don't really hear what you say or pay attention to you, and and yet you're fine, you're always there on the receiving end, but it's very one-sided. What constantly drains you for me? I am very drained by very large crowds, chaos, a lot of noise, things being too loud, just too many things going on at once. I also have ADHD, so it's even worse because my brain is in that state sometimes. Oh sorry, and I have to like really work on it. What leaves you grounded? What makes you feel like you're like in a good place, like you're connected, grounded instead of shattered? Do you even know what it feels like to be grounded? I know I didn't for a long time. I started doing grounding meditations and learning all about my my root chakra, and I remember being like, wow, this is really cool. Like I feel pretty good. I feel like I'm like a tree, like I feel grounded. And now I mean I just love I love nature. And there's something about actually being around trees that is very grounding, like it's is the thing I do. What brings you back to life? What makes you feel alive? And maybe you don't know the answers to the questions, but maybe it's something you can journal about and just that's that's what I did. I started to really kind of think about what makes me feel really happy. These are very sacred questions. Because what you're basically saying is, do I know what my soul is is is yearning for? Do I know that I even am a soul? I I have a soul, I am a soul, you are a soul. We are all a soul, we're people, but we're also a soul, and your soul only wants what's completely best and most loving and enriching and nurturing for you. So what brings you back to life? Think about it a little bit. I think for me, as an example, what brings me back to life is quiet, being still, laughter with a good friend, like when you just really belly laugh and like and you feel so happy. Um, I I feel back to life when I'm being heard, and somebody's able to like kind of validate what I'm trying to say. I feel alive when I'm making art and creating beautiful things and writing beautiful words when I'm in nature, when I'm gardening, when I'm in my productive creative flow, or like I am doing really well with my goal setting and my vision planning, and it's based on soul purpose, and it's also based on creating something that's gonna help other people, and that brings me back to life. When I see one comment on a post, and somebody says, You really helped me today, thank you. Uh uh that brings me back to life because that's um that's kind of what I feel in my heart and my soul that is how I want to move forward into life now that my son has passed away and share the legacy of his love. But that's that's all that. It's all good, right? What brings you back to life, what constantly drains you, just really think about those things. And then I just want to talk about energy leaking. So sometimes our energy leaks, and you might not even be aware of it when it's happening, you know. But then when you really start to think about it, it be it can feel pretty obvious when you say, Where did my energy leak? Well, it's when you overcommit to things and you have too many things going on and you can feel yourself just stressing out, and then that's your energy leak, right? If you're having conflicts about something with somebody and it's it's kind of going on and on and on, and you're going over it and over and over, and you're fighting, or you're back and forth, or you know, you're having an argument and you're talking or texting all day long, back and forth, back and forth, and your brain can't kind of regulate into normal day because you're focused on that conflict and it's really bothering you. Yeah, that will definitely drain your energy. Doom scrolling it's a it's a thing. I do it. I mean, I I try not to. I'm trying to get better of it. Less screens, more real life, right? Less screen time. Get off your screen, stop scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. It is crazy how much time we spend and it's like wasted energy. Constant comparison. You're someone who constantly compares everything. You know, you're looking around, you're like, well, oh wow, I like that. I wonder if I could have that. Oh, that's better than mine. Oh, they they must be rich, or like, oh, they must be poor, or how dare they, or just oh my god, why is she wearing that? And like, like always judging other people and comparing things, that takes a lot of energy. If you never allow silence, that will take your energy. If you cannot sit in stillness with yourself and just be still and quiet, if you need to have the TV going all the time and the noise in the background, I know a lot of people like that. Oh, I turn the TV on for companies, always on in the background. Um for for me, that's one of the things actually that drains me is having excess noise. I think it's an ADHD thing. For me, I can't think if there's so many chaotic noises coming in. I feel energized when I'm in quiet. And even sometimes in my car, I just drive. I don't listen to the music, I don't listen to things. I just drive and I love it. And it's me and driving and quiet. And uh my husband's always gonna have the the music on. He's have his I-95 rock and roll going. But I I I don't know. Sometimes I like to be in quiet or I like to just listen to a podcast of somebody talking about these kinds of things. I don't know. What are some other ones? Uh, some other ones, and sometimes the leaks are quieter. So when you say yes to something when your body is screaming, don't do that, right? Your back is hurting and you're still working on lifting those boxes to get into the car because you just gotta get it done. Gotta get that stuff done. Gotta gotta my body is hurting me. I'll be okay. I'll take some Advil later, right? And you push, push, push. Yeah, that's not good to do. And yeah, sometimes we gotta do things. But it's I'm just giving you the example that when your body is telling you I I shouldn't be doing this, you should listen to it. If you live in a constant state of urgency, that's definitely gonna take all your energy. Um and some people are in a constant state of urgency, needing to get things done, needed to make money, needing to pay the bills, uh, having like like I always think of like the emergency room at the hospital as like a constant state of urgency. And when I was in the hospital recently, I spent like two days in the uh emergency department watching, you know, from a distance. I'm like, this is insane because you just don't know what it's just like a constant urgent situation all the time. The urgency gets triaged, but it's all urgency and it's uh really exhausting. It was exhausting just to watch. Some people live like that. If you ignore your grief, that'll take away your energy. If you try to find every way possible to shove down your pain and ignore the stress and the grief and and the heart and the sadness, I'm gonna stuff it down, I'm gonna stuff it down, I'm gonna ignore it. Yeah, from everybody that I've met in grief counseling and grief therapy and grief support, it is uh very bad to do that. You need to find a way to acknowledge your grief. And grief is there for a reason. It is a healing tool, it is a way for you to figure out how your life is gonna be now. It's just like your brain, your body is trying to adjust to this new reality and um shoving it down and trying to morph yourself back into how things were before is really just going to take away your energy and and make you sick in some cases. It's it's not good, or you're just gonna have a big breakdown. Um, if you ignore your anger, if you it's the same kind of thing, if you push it all in, um and also you know, the the ignoring of your intuition. A lot of people just feel something isn't the right thing to do, they do it anyway. Um, they feel like they should be doing something else, but they just no, I'm not gonna do that, even though you know it's you just your gut is telling you something, and you're like, be quiet, gut. I'm not gonna listen to you. And then you end up with um, you know, ulcers and other kinds of problems, right? Sometimes, though, honestly, the biggest leak of all of our energy is when we try to become who everybody else needs us to be. That's the biggest one. That takes a catastrophic amount of your energy. That's one of the things that I realized that I always did too. So healing often involves sort of a slow returning to yourself. And a lot of times we don't even know what that means. Like, what do you mean, myself? This is just how I am. I'm a stressed out person. But it's like I remember going, no, myself is not that. That is the weather, that is the storm. I don't chase the storm, I'm the lighthouse, right? My light is constant, my love is constant. The rest of it is the weather. But that process can feel very vulnerable, and um especially after grief and trauma, we we don't tend to understand what we're feeling, and also people don't understand that we are not the same human being we were before our catastrophic loss or grief or adversity or trauma or betrayal or pain, illness. I don't know, whatever the really life-altering situation is. We're not the same afterwards. We can't go back to being the same. And people externally who do not see the real us for who we are and are not reciprocal, they don't understand. They just want us to be the same person we were before, and it's just not possible. The more you become connected to yourself as you go through healing and and this whole journey, it becomes harder and harder to tolerate the things that are taking your energy and the things that hurt you that you were tolerating before because that's just how it was. And you want to really take a second and think about it because you know, the real you is what is emerging, and you're not tolerating what harms you. Because the real you does deserve worth and safety and love and light and everything that makes you you, and it is something that needs to be protected and preserved and cherished. Um I'm talking from my heart during this episode because this is something that I have been working on for a couple of years now, not only since Daniel died, but even before that, when I really had an identity crisis and and and started to see that uh yeah, I was basically dissociating my way through reality. Sensitive people absorb their environments. Are you a sensitive person? Are you a HSP or an empath or somebody who is just very in tune intuitively with energy? So I am. I I am very empathic. I can feel energy, I can sense energy. I actually even think I'm starting to channel a little bit. Uh, a lot of this deep uh spiritual connection can sometimes be developed through extreme adversity and pain. No why, but it's just how it is. I do absorb energy. So if you're somebody like me, you feel a room. Like you walk into a room, you feel the room, you feel the energy in the room. It's like overall kind of a happy, joyful vibe, or you might have some people that are there feeling kind of negative, or this one over here who's, you know, just sort of doing something else. You feel how people are feeling. I feel that in restaurants, I feel that on airplanes. Anywhere I go in the public, I can kind of feel energy and it it can be very like exhausting. You feel tension, you absorb people's moods, you uh you can notice a lot of things that other people might just miss. Um, and it can be very distracting for you. So while that kind of sensitivity can be really beautiful to be able to like to read the energy and understand people, um, it also can be exhausting because you might not have discernment, you might not know when you need to stop or how to stop or how to like change things so that you are not doing it all of the time, because not every emotion belongs to you. And not every crisis that people are experiencing is yours to carry. Not every storm requires you be participating in it, right? So all of this absorption that happens is very harmful and can can really zap all of your strength. So discernment becomes a tool that you have to pay attention to. I'm writing that down. Discernment is a tool for myself, and it's something I'm still learning too, how to do that. So sometimes protecting your energy simply means pause before you automatically step in. Right? Just pause. Like, do I need to be getting involved in that conversation? Well, I don't need to sense what they're feeling right now. Is it necessary? Just pause. And maybe it is, but pause, because sometimes it isn't. Um before you start rescuing, fixing other people, over-explaining things, um before you abandon yourself and and start to just insert yourself in places, just just pause because the most healing sentence that you could say to yourself is, hey, um, self, I need a moment to check in first. Is this okay for me? You know, and sometimes just remember that people sometimes will unintentionally suck you in, and unintentionally you will get hurt by people who do not understand you, and they're all in their own heads. And so, yeah, you you don't want to get sucked in and then end up involved in something which is not going to help you in any way, shape, shape, or form. I think honestly, protecting your energy is returning to peace, gifting yourself the peace of being able to know who you are. And a lot of times we spend years, a lot of people are just waiting, right? They're waiting for peace and happiness to arrive from the outside someday when I'll be happy someday after I get this thing done, then I will blah blah blah. When things get better, when those people change, when life settles down, uh, when I retire, when he retires, when the grief ends, when the uncertainty isn't so big, when when when. And you know, it isn't something that arrives from the outside of us. It is something that we create intentionally from the inside of us. Our peace is already there. Our love and joy and true self and soul purpose and all of that is already there. We have to work on it from the inside. We have to spend time in stillness with ourselves, getting to know our soul, our inner child, our healing is on the inside, not on the outside. So it's what we create intentionally from the inside by little by little, moment by moment, through what we allow, through what we release and let go, through where we place our attention, through how we care for ourselves, my friends. How are you caring for yourself? Protecting your energy. Well, it could look like some of these things: taking a walk, limiting certain conversations, resting without feeling guilty if you're tired, turning off the noise, creating art, listening to music, journaling, meditation. I love meditation. It's my jam, it's my superpower. I really mean it. It is amazing. Prayer, therapy. You know, even if you've never gone to therapy, maybe it's time because it's very healing to have somebody who is there to listen and provide reciprocal care to you. Laughter, being near the water. For me, I love being near the ocean. Um, sitting under some trees, being outside, time with your pets, spending time with animals, saying no to things you don't want to do. I used to say yes all the time. My husband would say, Do you want to go to Home Depot with me? And I'd say, Okay. And I, you know, he's he loves spending time with me from his side because, you know, spending time together. But sometimes I don't want to go to Home Depot or the dump. I just want to stay home on a Saturday morning and just do the things that I enjoy here. So I've started to say, no, not this time. I think I'm gonna stay here and finish my watercolors. Like, is that okay? Do you mind? And he's always like, no, no, it's fine. Saying yes more carefully, finding people in your life who are maybe more aligned with the type of energy that you are seeking. Uh, take some courses, read some books on boundaries and protecting your energy and finding your soul and uh living a more authentic life. I don't know, you know, just practice gratitude, write some affirmations. I have the little affirmation cards. Sometimes you don't even have to write them, you just buy a deck, and then you can they it has a little holder. I think I got these on Amazon, and you put it in the thing, and each day I have a different affirmation that I pick out of the deck. This one says, today's is I prioritize myself with love and attention. Protect your peace. Allow yourself to rest. Just just remember that the small choices, I meant to say this after listing off. Oh, sorry. The small choices that you make, they really do matter. All these little things, little by little, step by step. They shape the emotional atmosphere that you're creating and that you're living inside every day. So each little thing that you do that feels like really like you're protecting your energy and you're actually giving back to yourself and you're increasing your energy, these little things are so important. Even if you do a few a day, little by little, step by step. So, in closing, I just want to say thank you for listening. I really, really value your ears uh listening to this podcast. So I want to leave you with a gentle reminder that you are allowed to protect your peace. You are allowed to rest when you need to rest. You're allowed to step away from things that harm you. You are allowed to become more intentional about who and what receives your energy. You do not have to become hard to do that. You can remain loving and still have boundaries. And in my experience, the better at protecting my energy I've become, the better I have begun to love myself, and the more I love myself, I feel like everything has expanded, and I'm actually giving more love than I was before. So you can remain loving while you still have boundaries. You can remain compassionate while you protect yourself. You can remain open-hearted and still say, This no longer has unlimited access to me. And maybe that isn't selfish. Maybe that's healing. And maybe that's what you need. So thank you so much for being here with me today. I um, yeah, I'm I'm just so grateful. And if this episode resonated with you, then feel free to share it to someone else who might need a reminder that they need to protect their energy too. Um, it is how we take our power back and empower ourselves and protect ourselves and really become in alignment with who we are, and it's a better way to live. It's beautiful, and you're beautiful, and you deserve that, and that's a boundary I need to set. Text messages. Um, so as always, I want you to take gentle care of yourself this week, this month, always, and until next time, I want you to keep tending to that light that's within you, your steady light. And you know, remember you are the lighthouse. You are not the storms or the chaos, you are that lighthouse, and so you need to protect that lighthouse, right? Keep it burning and keep it strong, and we'll see you next time.