Self-Care Is an Energy Practice

And your nervous system already knows the difference

This week in circle, we found ourselves talking about going outside — really outside. Putting the phone down, stepping away from the to-do list, and letting a tree line be the most complicated thing in your field of vision for a few minutes. It sounds simple. It is simple. And that simplicity is kind of the whole point.

There's actual science to it. Pine and cedar trees release compounds called phytoncides — antimicrobial molecules they use to protect themselves from insects and fungi. When we breathe them in, our bodies respond: stress hormones drop, blood pressure eases, and immune function gets a measurable boost. The forest isn't just pretty. It's medicinal. And we don't have to understand it for it to work.

But we weren't just talking about trees. We were talking about something underneath trees — underneath all of it. We were talking about energy.

Everything Is Energy (Stay With Me)

At the most foundational level, everything is energy. The chair you're sitting in, the thought you just had, the anxiety you carried into this morning — all of it, at its base, is energy vibrating at a particular frequency.

You already know this intuitively. You've walked into a room and felt something was off before anyone said a word. You've sensed a friend approaching before you saw them. You've been around someone who left you feeling lighter — or someone who left you feeling like you needed a nap.

That's not woo. That's you reading frequency.

And if everything is energy — if we are constantly giving and receiving it — then self-care stops being about bubble baths and becomes something more precise. More personal. More important.

Self-Care Is Knowing Your Battery

Think of it this way: you have a battery. And every person, place, habit, conversation, media source, and environment in your life is either charging it or draining it. Some things charge it slowly and steadily. Some are a supercharge. Some are a slow leak you barely notice until you're running on empty. And some are a fast drain — you know the ones.

Self-care, then, is understanding your battery capacity. Knowing what charges you. Knowing what drains you. And actually applying that knowledge — not just holding it in the abstract.

You don't have to maintain 100% charge. But you do need to know how to manage your energy resources,

which means you have to first know what they are.

And here's where it gets honest: most of us know, somewhere beneath the surface, exactly what charges us and what drains us. We just haven't given ourselves permission to act on it consistently.

Caring About the Water You're Swimming In

Self-care is caring about the energy you're swimming in — and what you're contributing to it. That means noticing the people you spend time with. The news sources you return to. The social media rabbit holes. The conversations that leave you feeling lit up versus the ones that leave you deflated. The structures and systems you're engaging with, intentionally or not.

This isn't about bypassing or pretending the hard things aren't real. It's about owning your choices — your state of mind, your perspective, the automatic thoughts and judgments that are either moving you toward what you say you want, or quietly moving you away from it.

You cannot get angry enough to change someone else. You cannot worry someone into well-being. But you can own and cultivate what you are emanating — what you're putting into the shared field.

I had a small version of this play out for me personally this past weekend. I found myself stuck in a familiar loop — whichever choice I made, some voice inside was insisting I should have made the other one. Should have rested. Should have been productive. Should have been more grounded. More spacious. And the shoulding itself was the drain. I wasn't in either option — I was hovering in the guilt between them.

When I finally caught it, I remembered something: I cannot should myself into feeling good.

That's not a small thing. That pattern — where we judge our choices in some endless effort to optimize ourselves — is its own energy drain. The judgment is the leak.

Choose Simple

Right now, in this particular moment in history, caring for your energy isn't a luxury. It's an essential practice. And practices don't have to be grand.

Words don’t teach, so here's what I'm inviting you to do:

Take sixty seconds and do a quick audit. Write down three things in your life right now that genuinely charge your battery. And three things that are draining it.

Then pick one of them — and do something about it today. If it's a charger, go do it. If it's a drain, find one small way to reduce it. Choose the easy win. Choose simple.

The forest will be there when you're ready. So will the circle.

I'd love to hear from you:

What's one thing that reliably charges your battery? Drop it in the comments — you might inspire someone else to try it.