🪫 Low Battery

Identity consolidation and Stress management

📍 Identity, stress management, negative self talk, and working to relax.

Recently had a coaching session and thought some of what we discussed was worth organizing - The core insight was about identity consolidation—how trying to be different versions of yourself in different spaces burns way more energy than we realize. If you feel like you’re running on empty by the end of the day, this might be why.

That’s the main subject we explored.

But we also touched on a few others that are connected and worth sitting with on their own:

• Why pain and stress are sometimes helpful signals

• How negative self-talk can fuel you—but not cleanly

• Why “relaxing” might not look how you think

• And the hard truth that some seasons are just… hard

So take what’s helpful, skip what’s not, and feel free to come back to any part that hits you different depending on the season you’re in.

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Oh, and I’m testing out a new workflow—trying to simplify things and slowly move away from my computer.

This one was written on my phone and iPad, in between office time and toddler wrangling.

So if the formatting’s a little off from normal… that’s why. Thanks for your patience

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🔋 IDENTITY CONSOLIDATION = ENERGY CONSERVATION

Every time you shift between versions of yourself — partner, parent, professional, friend — it costs you. It’s like your brain constantly switching tabs. The fewer tabs you have open, the better your system runs.

There’s actually a technical name for it: context switching cost. In cognitive science, it’s the “switch cost”, referring to the mental load and performance drop that happens when you switch between tasks, roles, or modes of being.

You don’t have to be just one version of yourself — but the more cohesive those identities are, the less energy you burn shifting between them. Less toggling. More alignment. And when your internal operating system is aligned, your external life runs smoother.

This shows up everywhere — especially in multitasking. Trying to write an email while texting someone, or making your kid’s lunch while holding a business call… it’s not just the tasks themselves that drain you. It’s the switching between them.

Think of it like this:

→ Doing Task A takes energy

→ Doing Task B takes energy

→ But switching from A to B also takes energy

And if you go back and forth too often, you start leaking energy in the transitions.

⚠️ ONE LAST NOTE ON THIS:

It’s not always realistic to collapse all your identities into one. You’re probably going to show up a little differently with your partner than you do with your friends, your kids, your coworkers, or your parents. That’s normal. That’s human.

But one helpful goal might be to close the distance between those identities.

To let the different versions of you share more DNA — more values, more tone, more presence — so that you’re not shapeshifting completely every time you step into a new room.

The smaller the gap between who you are in different contexts, the less energy you lose traveling between them.

And the more cohesive your internal world becomes, the more grounded and efficient your external world starts to feel.

Even if the roles are different, the core of you stays intact.

You can tell I’m not an artist… but hopefully the image still makes sense

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So that’s the core idea: fewer versions of you = more energy.

What came next in the session were a few reflections that branch off from that—still connected, still useful—but each worth sitting with in their own right.

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🔬 TEST → REFLECT → ITERATE