How are you currently feeling? When I ask women this question, the answer is generally a combination of “I’m busy, I’m tired, I’m exhausted”.
And while life being full is unlikely to change anytime soon, there’s one thing I want you to know: energy isn’t something you simply have or don’t have. It’s something you create and sustain.
I’ve spent more than 15 years working at the intersection of wellbeing and high-performance, helping people build the energy and capacity to perform at their best in work and life.
Ultimately, energy is an outcome, shaped by what you eat, how you move, how you manage stress and recover, how you sleep, and who and what you stay connected to. While at the same time, your body and brain love rhythm. Rhythm doesn’t just support and stabilise your energy, it helps conserve it.
When these inputs are proactive and consistent, your body and brain start to trust and know what is coming, and from there energy starts to build rather than you simply surviving the week and living reactively.
To create and sustain your energy, you don’t need to follow (or force) a perfect protocol or recreate a routine that worked five years ago in a completely different season of life. It’s to take stock of where you’re at right now, and look at what small upgrades you can make to create predictability and consistency – not just on your best days but your busiest.
These are the five rhythms that help create and sustain energy:
1. Nutrition: Fuel for your body and brain
What you eat and when you eat directly shapes your energy, mood and focus across the day.
For most women I work with, the pattern looks something like this: a rushed or skipped breakfast, a coffee (or two) to compensate, a reasonably good lunch when time allows, and then dinner bearing the weight of everything the day didn’t deliver.
The fix isn’t a diet overhaul. It’s creating a rhythm that supports steady energy rather than spikes and crashes. One of the highest-leverage changes is distributing protein more evenly across the day, starting at breakfast.
Research shows a protein-rich first meal improves appetite control, reduces energy dips and supports the cognitive sharpness you need when the day gets demanding. Most women under-eat protein at breakfast. Spreading it more evenly across the day can help stabilise appetite and energy.
2. Exercise: Movement creates energy
This is the one that feels most counterintuitive when you’re already running on empty. The last thing you want to do is move. But physical activity is one of the most powerful energy-generating tools you have. It improves sleep quality, reduces cortisol, lifts mood and increases your body’s capacity to deliver oxygen and fuel to the brain.
The key isn’t intensity. It’s consistency, and adopting the mindset that something is always better than nothing. If you can’t do your usual workout, can you fit in 10 minutes instead or take a walk and talk meeting?
It doesn’t need to be long or punishing. It needs to be in the diary, protected the same way you’d protect a meeting you can’t move.
Get more tips in the book For the Long Run by Jessica Spendlove.
3. Stress and recovery: The most underused rhythm
In professional sport, we never talk about training load without talking about recovery. The two are inseparable. Your life works the same way. Stress is not the enemy. Unrecovered stress from constantly being on and available is.
What’s often missing is the deliberate downshifting that allows the nervous system to reset between bouts of pressure. It doesn’t need to be a 90-minute yoga class. A 10-minute walk, a few deep breaths between commitments or protecting a boundary around Sunday afternoon can stop you running on a permanently depleted tank.
4. Sleep: The foundation everything else is built on
So much of our daily lives works against getting a good night’s sleep, which is exactly why it needs to be prioritised and protected. When you’re sleeping poorly, everything else gets harder. Sleep is where the brain consolidates information, emotional regulation is restored, and physical repair happens.
One of the highest-impact things you can do is aim for a consistent sleep and wake time. Most people significantly underestimate what inconsistency is costing them.
As a mum myself, I know sleep isn’t always straightforward. But even in seasons of disrupted sleep, focusing on what you can control, like allowing more time in bed or choosing an earlier bedtime, can make a meaningful difference.
5. Connection: The rhythm most people overlook
Research consistently shows that meaningful relationships, purpose and connection are powerful buffers against fatigue, stress and burnout.
Women in particular tend to prioritise connection for everyone else and deprioritise it for themselves. Connection to your values, your people and the things that genuinely matter to you isn’t a luxury. It’s a stress regulator and an energy creator.
If you’re running on empty, you don’t need a reset, an overhaul or a six-week challenge. What you need is to look honestly at where you’ve been living reactively and inconsistently – it’s the skipped breakfast, the 4pm coffee, the ‘one more Netflix episode’ when you should rather go to bed.
That’s what these five rhythms give you. It’s not a protocol to follow perfectly, but a framework to return to, adjust and build on. Because energy is an outcome and what determines it is the consistency of your inputs. When those inputs become more predictable and more intentional, your energy starts to reflect that – and not just on your best days, on all of them.
