Rhythms, Not Rules: Listening to Your Energy

I keep having the same conversation in my office.

Someone will be telling me about a routine that used to work for them that they had dialed in for a while that felt good, but for whatever reason, they didn't do it anymore.

What's interesting to me isn't that it stopped working. Routines shift. Life shifts. That part makes sense.

What actually catches my attention is how they talk about it. As if they did something wrong. Like the routine was fine, and they just couldn't hold up their end.

I get it. I've had that same inner narrative more times than I'd like to admit. But here's what I've started paying closer attention to: when I ask these women to really think back, to pinpoint when things started feeling off, it's almost never the moment they think it was. The big life change, the schedule disruption, the thing they point to as the reason. That came later. The misalignment was already building long before that, and their body had been signaling for a while, but they just didn't have a framework for what those signals meant.

What I’m really trying to get at isn’t flexibility for its own sake. It’s the biological rhythms underneath your routines, and the shift that happens when you finally understand them.

The deeper layer here isn’t about doing less. It’s about the rhythms your body has been running all along, and what becomes possible when you learn to read them.

There Are Rhythms You Were Probably Never Taught

Most people have already heard of the circadian rhythm. The 24-hour cycle of sleep, wake, light, dark. That one gets talked about.

But what doesn't get talked about nearly enough is that your body isn't running on just one rhythm. It's running on several, layered one on top of each other, operating on completely different timescales. And if you don't know they exist, you end up fighting patterns you can't even see.

Take ultradian rhythms. I didn't learn about these in school. I stumbled onto the research years later and it genuinely changed how I structure my own days.

Your brain cycles through waves of focus and rest roughly every 90 to 120 minutes. Not in a smooth, constant line of attention, but in actual waves. You get about 90 minutes of higher capacity, and then your brain needs a dip. About 20 minutes where it wants to consolidate, reset, and shift gears.

You've felt this. That moment when you've been working on something and suddenly your focus just... scatters. You're reaching for your phone on autopilot, getting up to make another cup of coffee, or staring at the screen without actually seeing it. We usually interpret these as distractions and a lack of discipline. "UGHHH! Why can't I just focus?"

But it's not a failing, it's a cycle completing. Your brain's asking for a different mode before the next wave starts.

The problem is that most of us override it. We push through using caffeine to flatten it out, just to force ourselves to keep producing at the same level. And yes, that works, sort of... for the moment at least. But there's a cost that accumulates over time. When you consistently ignore these dips, you're not building discipline. You're building a specific kind of exhaustion that doesn't resolve with a single good night's sleep.

And beneath those daily shifts, there's a longer rhythm that shapes the month as a whole. This is the one that changed things for me and for many of the women I work with.

If you menstruate, you're also running on an infradian rhythm. This is the roughly 28-day hormonal cycle, and it affects so much more than just your period. Your energy, your mental clarity, your tolerance for stress, even what kinds of tasks feel easy or hard. All of it shifts across the month.

And nobody teaches us this. We're just expected to show up the same way every day, output the same amount, and maintain the same routines, as if our capacity isn't literally changing week to week.

The week or so after your period ends, during the follicular phase, a lot of women notice their energy climbing, mental clarity feeling sharper, and their tolerance for challenge and novelty being higher. This is often when hard projects, important conversations, and demanding work feel the most doable.

Around ovulation, our social energy tends to peak, and communication comes more easily.

Then comes the luteal phase, which is the two weeks before your period, and this is where I see so many women beating themselves up. Their energy starts high and then drops, causing the need for rest to increase, and their tolerance for chaos to evaporate. This isn't the time for launching something new or saying yes to everything. It's the time for completion, for detail work, and for protecting your capacity instead of spending it freely.

During menstruation itself, the body is asking for the most rest.

And if you're on hormonal birth control, it's worth knowing that these methods work by changing your hormonal landscape, which means they also change this rhythm. Combined methods like the pill, patch, or ring suppress ovulation and flatten that natural hormonal wave. Some women feel more even on it, more stable. Others feel flat or disconnected from themselves and can't quite figure out why. Both experiences make sense when you understand what's happening hormonally.

Progestin-only methods tend to vary more. A hormonal IUD, for instance, often leaves ovulation intact, so many people still feel their cyclical shifts. The implant or shot tends to suppress ovulation more significantly, which alters the rhythm more.

I'm not saying any of this to suggest what you should or shouldn't do about your birth control. That's a conversation for you and your provider. But if you've been reading this section thinking "that doesn't match my experience at all," this might be part of why. It's another layer worth being curious about.

I can't tell you how many times I've watched a woman suddenly understand why she felt like she "couldn't stay consistent." She wasn't inconsistent. She was running the same routine across a cycle that was never designed for sameness.

Treating Energy as Information

Here's what I keep coming back to: What if your energy isn't a problem to manage or push through? What if it's actually information?

Most of us treat energy like an obstacle. We're tired, so we override it. We're scattered, so we force ourselves to focus. We're depleted, so we caffeinate and keep going. We treat our body's signals as inconveniences getting in the way of what we're supposed to be doing.

But those signals are data. They're telling you something about what your brain and body are actually ready for. Not what you wish they were ready for. Not what your calendar says you should be ready for. What's actually true right now.

This is different from time management. Time management looks at the hour and asks what can I fit into it. Energy management looks at the hour and asks what is this hour actually good for.

And the answer changes. An hour at 9am when you're rested and in the peak of an ultradian cycle is a completely different resource than an hour at 3pm when you're in a dip and your brain wants something easier. One of those hours is good for strategic thinking, while the other might be good for answering emails. Treating them as interchangeable is part of why we end up so frustrated.

You don't need an app for this or a complicated tracking system. You just need to start noticing. When do you tend to feel sharper? When does your focus fall apart no matter how hard you try? Are there days of the week that consistently feel harder? If you cycle, when do you have the most capacity, and when does everything feel like it's underwater?

A few weeks of paying attention will show you the patterns. And those patterns are worth more than any productivity system you could download, because they're actually true for you.

Matching Tasks to Modes

Once you start seeing energy as something that shifts, you can stop fighting it and start working with it.

I think of this in terms of different modes.

High-capacity mode is when you actually have fuel for demanding things. The hard conversation you've been putting off, the project that requires you to really think, or the task that drains you even on a good day. When you're genuinely in a high-capacity window, that's when to bring these forward. Not at the end of the day when you're running on fumes. Not during the week before your period when your tank is already low.

Generative mode is different. This isn't about grinding through difficulty. It's about openness, brainstorming, creative work, and making connections. For a lot of people, this kind of energy shows up at different times than their analytical focus does. It's worth noticing when your brain feels expansive versus when it feels precise.

Maintenance mode is for the stuff that has to happen but doesn't need your best thinking. Emails. Scheduling. Organizing. Admin tasks. These can fit into lower-energy windows that would otherwise be wasted trying to do something that demands more.

And rest mode. Which is not a reward you earn after you've been productive enough. It's part of the cycle. Your body needs periods where you're not outputting anything. Just refilling. If you only rest when you've collapsed from exhaustion, that's not rest. That's crisis recovery. Intentional restoration is different.

The goal here isn't to create a perfect schedule where everything is optimized. That would just be another rigid system to fail at. The goal is to stop forcing high-demand tasks into your lowest-energy windows and wondering why you feel like you're constantly underwater.

This Extends to Bigger Seasons Too

These patterns don't just exist within a day or a month. They exist across the year. And across the various chapters of your life.

I notice it in myself with the seasons. The darker months, I need more sleep. I want to stay in more. I have less capacity for social plans and big initiatives. For years I made that mean something was wrong with me. But it's actually just... biology responding to less light. The body still tracks seasons even when our calendars pretend they don't matter.

Summer is different. More energy for expansion. More tolerance for activity and output.

And then there are the bigger life seasons. The routine that works when things are calm doesn't fit a crisis. What's possible when you're healthy looks different than what's possible when you're managing chronic illness, or caring for aging parents, or in the first year with a newborn. These are different chapters with different capacities.

I think one of the most practical things we can do is actually name what season we're in. Not the one we wish we were in, or the one we think we should be handling better. The one that's actually true for us right now.

Sometimes that means scaling back and letting things go that would have been fine in a different chapter. Sometimes it means recognizing you actually have capacity to spare and this is the time to say yes to something bigger.

Both are valid. Neither is permanent.

Bringing It Together

If you've been working with flexible habits, scaling things up and down based on capacity, giving yourself permission to adjust without calling it failure, then you already have the foundation for this.

What I'm offering is a layer underneath. A way to make those adjustments less random. When you understand your rhythms, you're not just reacting after you're already exhausted. You're starting to anticipate. You're making choices that account for how your energy actually moves instead of pretending it doesn't.

This might look like blocking your mornings for deep work and saving email for the afternoon dip. It might look like scheduling harder conversations for the first half of your cycle. It might look like building more margin into your winter and not judging yourself for needing it.

Mostly it looks like pausing more often, and asking a question that seems simple but isn't: what is my energy actually available for right now?

Not what do I wish I had capacity for. Not what does this deadline demand. What's actually true in my body today.

That question, when asked honestly and repeatedly, will teach you more about your rhythms than anything else.

I've started to think of this as learning a language. Your body has been speaking it all along. The 90-minute waves. The monthly shifts. The way your capacity responds to seasons and chapters and transitions. It's all been running in the background.

Most of us were just never taught to listen for it.

So here's my question for you:

What might change if you stopped treating your energy as something to overcome and started treating it as something to understand?

Your body isn't the obstacle to your consistency. It might actually be the guide.

Disclaimer & A Note from a Caring Practitioner:
My goal is to translate complex wellness concepts into relatable ideas to support your journey. The explanations I provide are simplified models intended for general education and motivation, based on both clinical patterns and established wellness principles. They are not complete medical explanations, diagnoses, or personal advice.

Every person's body is unique. Your individual health needs, experiences, and underlying conditions must be evaluated by your own healthcare provider. This information is educational only and is never a substitute for professional medical consultation, diagnosis, or treatment. Always partner with your personal healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.