Ep. 28 - How to Eliminate Energy Vampires and Create Space in Your Life
There are so many positive things we can add to our daily life to help improve our overall state of being. However, before you can add things into your life (even good), you need to subtract and create space for that good to grow.
Space will allow you to focus on those things that will produce tangible results and awareness around what specific goal or path you should be working on or taking. It’ll help bring light to what area of your life or business you want to focus your energy on and as a bonus you’ll be excited about it!
In this episode, I talk about my process for identifying, organizing and eliminating these non-value adding activities, distractions, and mindset viruses that are pulling the energy out of you every day, aka "energy vampires" that are literally sucking the life and energy out of you.
Listen & Follow
Come join me in my sandbox of life and in this podcast to explore, play and discover something new every single week.
🎧 LISTEN: https://link.chtbl.com/MOAC
⭐️ SUBSCRIBE & REVIEW: Tune in weekly because I know you've yelled "Mommy's on a Call" at least once in the last week!!!
☕️ JOIN THE FACEBOOK COMMUNITY: The Modern Mama Society - Health & Wellness for Modern Moms
✨ FOLLOW ON IG: @MommysonaCall & @StephanieUchima
🔥 BOOK A RECHARGE MAMA SESSION: http://rechargemama.com
Episode Transcript
[00:00:56] How many of you have given yourself permission to just rest last week? All I wanted to do was rest. I had zero motivation to work. I felt super drained, and I was even on week three of this health cleanse that I'm doing, that I should be in what they call tiger blood stage, where you're just on fire and you have so much energy and everything's going well.
[00:01:19] But I just felt drained and I didn't know what was going on. I, I wasn't sick. I just felt emotional and physically drained. And when I started to reflect about why I was feeling that way, I realized that I was letting what I like to call energy vampires. Start to creep into my life and they were slowly and slowly sucking the life out of me a couple of years ago, I've ran this challenge called detox, your best challenge, and it was all about creating space in your business to allow awareness, clarity, and focus, to grow sort of like a Marie condo for your business by eliminating.
[00:01:56] Things that were draining you and your business. You could allow space for creativity to grow. And what I discovered over time is that by stepping away from the day-to-day business activities, it helped bring more mindfulness, clarity, connection, creativity, focus, and growth in my business. And when I started to think about that challenge and it was, I can't believe two years ago, I could see so many commonalities that I could relate to in life right now, and not just in business, but in motherhood, relationships and life as a whole.
[00:02:27] So today I want to revisit that topic and talk about how to detox your life right now. And I know talking about energies may sound a little. Woo, woo. But I, as a physics major, I, yes, I majored in math and physics in college. I do believe that the science behind the extent, change of energy, even if it has to do with the ebb and flow of positive and negative energy into our lives holds true.
[00:02:52] It's kind of like having a lot of tabs open on your computer. There's just like this. Slow slow drain on your life battery. So just like a phone where you need to close all the apps to a hard reset, a recharge and maybe just reboot your computer. This slow drip again in energy, from energy vampires that are sucking things away from you.
[00:03:12] Can you to depleat you until all you want to do is just rest. So before you can actually add things to your life, I know I talk a lot about. Positive things you can do for yourself. And you know, what, as a mom can you do to really make yourself feel better before you can start doing these things, to make yourself happier and a more fulfilled person, you do need to subtract and create space for those things. So you don't overload your system and I realized that over the last month or so I've been doing this a lot of things to better my health to better my mind, to just really my overall being, because I was getting really brain foggy and my body felt terrible. So it was really trying to build this sort of new Stephanie and new positive way.
[00:04:03] But what I wasn't doing was I was just adding and adding and adding things to my life and I wasn't subtracting, and I wasn't paying attention to it. All of those little negative things that were actually really training me.
[00:04:15] So my goal today's podcast episode is to help you identify those. Non-value adding activities, distractions, and mindset viruses that are really pulling the energy out of you. So energy vampires, you know, literally things that are sucking the life and energy out of you.
[00:04:32] And while you can't just remove them overnight, my hope is that you gain an awareness of what these are, so you can work on eliminating them. Or stop the habit of falling back into the same trap, because step one is really just to acknowledge what's going on in the present. I'm really big on taking a break, assessing the situation, what is going on?
[00:04:53] What can I control? Because we all know really, you can only control yourself. You can't control what's going on around you, but you can control what you do.
[00:06:02] Today I wanted to talk about. Energy vampires. And step one is just awareness. How do we identify these energy vampires and make them aware in our lives?
[00:06:14] So couple of questions you can ask yourself are what are the things that really upset you? What don't you like? What triggers you or sets you off? And that's a big one. What, what really is in your life that triggers you and what are the things that question your values?
[00:06:33] I know for me, I have my own values and if something isn't really aligned with it, I can't keep those negative things in my life. So step one is just awareness. Ask yourself these questions and in the following steps, we'll go through how to identify exactly where those can fall. So again, what are the things that upset you?
[00:06:54] What you don't like, what triggers you and what questions your values?
[00:06:58] Step two, look into identifying toxic people in relationships. How many of you know, like the Debbie downer friend who was, it's always complaining, who's always negative and you really don't want to jump on a phone call with them.
[00:07:11] Cause you know, every single phone call is just so drained. They're always complaining about something going on. Something's always happening. Like you never understand why everything always happens wrong in their life, but they're just that Debbie downer. Or there's that person in a Facebook group.
[00:07:26] That's like the mommy. No, at all, who gives all the mommy advice and makes you feel like you're a bad mom because you know, they know it all and that's kind of toxic too. Then there's also those people in our lives that are judgers, they're always correcting you or making you feel bad for your decisions.
[00:07:42] I don't know if you have any of those. But those exists. So those are some examples of kind of toxic people. And then look at your relationships. Are there bad or unresolved relationships? They're everything from friends to bad clients to bad vendors. Is there anywhere where you can cut ties or fire clients or find a new vendor to work with or put in boundaries?
[00:08:04] For example, like in your contracts. I know when I was working one on one in the wedding industry, I had claims that were literally a drain on me. Like they would text me at like 11:00 PM and demand response. And I had to, to put boundaries in place to make sure that they weren't sucking the life out of me, but then there's also, so those relationships we have from friends, just like I was saying, the Debbie downer, who always wants to talk because they need someone to complain to and you become their therapist.
[00:08:31] And that's just draining also. So look at all of the relationships you have in the physical sense and in your business and see if there's any way to put boundaries around them or even just eliminate. And another big place that I find that is a really big drain with people and relationships are my friends on social media.
[00:08:52] honestly, I realize that. I had to unfriend block and, or just mute a lot of people on social media to the point where I actually am debating now to take a little break from social media, because I feel like. I see posts from friends that maybe trigger me or that make me feel jealous or FOMO, or even in the opposite where I, I don't know, it just like it triggers something in me.
[00:09:22] And so the other day I actually went through it and eliminated 200 people off of my list. I just, if you annoyed me, triggered me, made me feel angry. I deleted you, or if I don't even talk to you anymore. So I thought, actually, this was a really great tip by my father in law is he uses Facebook birthdays.
[00:09:41] It's a way to clean out his friends list. So every day Facebook tells you whose birthday it is. And so you look at that list and it's an easy everyday way to just eliminate someone if you don't want them to follow them many more. But I found that I had to really cleanse my social media because. It was mentally exhausting and draining me.
[00:10:01] And I would spend hours an hour scrolling during any minute I had free before I went to bed and like breeding some of those things you don't even mean to read because it just appears in front of you would trigger me and then I couldn't sleep well. So that's step two, identify toxic people in relationships.
[00:10:20] Step number three, identify areas that have been constant negativity. So for example, the news right now, I know the news is very triggering for some people. I mean, during the pandemic, every information that was coming out about COVID, you know, are we going back? Are we not, are people, you know, are businesses closing what's going on?
[00:10:43] It was draining and every day something was different. So instead of opening phone, right when I woke up to read the latest news, because I was very curious, I stopped. I had to, because then I started off my day. Super negative. I would read something terrible. And I'm one of those people who goes down this wormhole.
[00:11:01] So like, I'll see one thing, like for example, like I remember someone mentioning Wayfair and so then I started to look into Wayfair and then look into sex trafficking and all of this stuff. And I went down this terrible, terrible rabbit hole that took me like two hours to dig myself out of. And I realized, wow, you need to take a break on the news.
[00:11:19] So there was the news detox. And then again, like I mentioned, digital detox or social media detox, for me seeing a lot of social media posts on opinions and even news things and everything right now is so polarizing. I know we have to stay informed. I know I need to look at, you know, the news and the media in order to know what's going on in the world.
[00:11:42] So I'm not media illiterate, but I also don't need to see a lot of that. So. Identify areas that are just really negative. Maybe eliminate certain news outlets that you don't want to follow because the stuff they put out there are just not in line with the way you think, , same with, you know, your digital detoxing.
[00:12:04] Are there areas where you can just eliminate or say mute or block people that you don't want to see? Step number four is a big one that I have a lot of issues with, but it's identifying areas of your life that are disorganized, right. Filled with clutter. So kind of like Marie Kondo, there's the physical clutter, but I always say there's also digital clutter.
[00:12:30] And for me a big, the thing is that I am, I'm really organized in a lot of stuff. But I'm also that person who has subscribed to every email list I have probably, I don't know. I think 20 tabs open on my desktop. I save everything to my desktop too. So like I have all these icons, I have tons of apps that are on my phone.
[00:12:53] I have notifications for everything and all of that digital clutter, every time you swipe, you know, ignore or you. notice that you have a tab open that you're like, Oh yeah, I need to remember to, , book that thing or read that article or, Oh, look, I have 200 unread email messages, things like that.
[00:13:13] If you keep seeing them in front of you, digital clutter can be a real drain on you. So what I've started to do, and this is just a tip is. At night when I'm actually breastfeeding. So for those of you who aren't, but who I have a downtime, I say every day, I'm going to unsubscribe from at least 10 email lists.
[00:13:34] And so during that time I sit there and I just look at the last 20 to 30 emails I got. Yeah. And I say, do I want to keep them, do I want to delete them? Where do they go? And or can I create a filter in order to put them somewhere? So like, I have shopping emails that I don't want to actually unsubscribe from, but I put them into a daily shopping folder.
[00:13:56] So they don't clutter my inbox. But if I am looking for say like a coupon to gap or Carter's or something like that, I can go to my daily shopping, email and search for that. But it's not in my list of all the things that I'm getting. And I even have the Gmail, like promotions updates in that, but I'm really trying to get more systematized on the way my emails coming in.
[00:14:19] The other thing is I literally cleared off my desktop. No more icons. There's none of that. And I started to take out absolutely. I follow him that I don't use. And I know, I think Apple now, we'll archive an app for you, so you have to re download it, but I just started to delete it. And now my front page is really the only thing that I go to.
[00:14:36] another tip is you have too many tabs open on your Chrome. I really like using one tab because you can see. Save all of your tabs into this one folder. I think it's a Chrome extension. I don't know if it's on Safari, but they've been using that so that I don't have to stare at all of the notifications and numbers that are on every single one of my tabs.
[00:14:58] I want, I don't want that. The other side is physical clutter. So that's where I struggle with a lot too, is I'm what you call organized in my disorder. I mean, right now our dining room table has piles and piles of mail that are probably a month old that I haven't looked at. And I just, it's not that I don't have the time to do it.
[00:15:20] I don't make the time to do it because it's low on my priority list. But every time I walked by that table, literally I cringe and that I realized is triggering to me. And so by even cringing and seeing it and noticing and taking that energy to think of how I need to do this, I realized, wow, that's actually slowly draining me by staring that.
[00:15:41] So it's not done yet, but I keep making a promise. I am going to do it. I took out a trash bag. Sitting there. I am going to tackle the physical clutter because honestly, looking at less things really, really helps to calm you. Another thing about clutter and disorganization are unfinished projects. I don't know about you, but I have tons of projects that I have on my list to do, or that I started, like I started hanging photos and then I flipped stopped midway, but I realized there are really only two outcomes to unfinished projects.
[00:16:16] Or actually three, one, just finish it to eliminate it or forget about it. And three, if they're really not aligned with your big picture, just, or are there kind of in that it would be nice to do save it for later and store it, but allocate them into one of those three buckets. Either one, just finish it to eliminate it or three store them for later.
[00:16:39] Other than that, they don't need to exist. And the last thing in clutter is not having systems in place. So that's something that I'm starting to work on is really organizing everything from day to day, day of like how we get ready in the morning, how close are put out how lunches are made, how that to business systems.
[00:17:00] So, yeah. Having an assistant handle email, and what are the steps that I take in order to do that? And so that I can pass it, but really putting those systems in place. . Really helped to eliminate that fatigue of thinking about it. I mean, , as a mom, there's so much decision fatigue. We're always making decisions.
[00:17:22] Our brain is always turned off and having kind of automated systems. Like I started to automate my animals. So I know that we need size two diapers every month for Zoe. So instead of me having to remember when the diapers are low, I just calculate it. Okay. There's, you know, 90 something diapers. This is how many days it takes.
[00:17:41] I just put it on subscribe and save and I don't, we'll have to use the energy. So think about easy, simple systems at home or in your life or at work where you can put in place to help eliminate the tabs open in your own brain.
[00:17:55] Step five is now to take all of those areas that you've identified whether it's in people, in relationships where it's negative resources.
[00:18:05] Whether it's in clutter disorganization and start to analyze, which of those is the biggest energy drain in your life right now. So I'm not talking about like, Oh, that's a nice to do. I'm talking about right now. What is the thing that just like makes you cringe and you realize every time you talk or think about it, it just drains you.
[00:18:25] Step six, take that. And now can you outsource it, eliminate it or automate it. And those are really the only three things you need to do. Can you have someone else take care of it? Can you just get it, get rid of it? Or can you automate it? And I guess you can say step four is just to finish it, but that's kind of like eliminating it.
[00:18:50] So making the decision if you're going to eliminate or just get it time. And those are really the six steps in helping vanquish energy vampires and identifying them. I know for me that I always need to remind myself that even if I want to try something new, I need to get rid of something in order to make that space.
[00:19:13] And just remind yourself, your work will always be there. So if you decide that right now work is the drain in your life. That's actually the relationship that, you don't want to have right now. It'll still be there. Don't worry your emails will get answered in a week if needed.
[00:19:30]. You'll be fine. Another reminder is that by creating space, it'll allow for more positive and good to enter into your life. So instead of searching for that next thing and searching for that, golden ticket, that'll make you happy, eliminating those negative things.
[00:19:51] Yeah. Actually open up. Space to bring positive energy in, because again, it's like an energy exchange out with the bad in with the good, and also another reminder really listened to your body. Last week, I had this huge guilt over, why am I so tired? All I want to do is rest, but it got so many things to do.
[00:20:10] And I had to remind myself, you need to listen to your body because if you're not healthy, if you're not, you. You can't be a good parent, a good spouse, a good friend, a good, whatever that is. You need to listen to your body and really pay attention. And the last thing is, make time to recharge yourself. So of all of this stuff, create space in your life.
[00:20:39] So maybe it's that you eliminate social media for a day or social media for even two hours. That time you spend scrolling social media on the couch. Maybe use that for something else. And I always like to say, like for moms, I know the calendar tends to run us. If it's not scheduled on the calendar, it's not going to happen.
[00:20:59] So make an appointment with yourself, put yourself on your own calendar, schedule that time, even if it's to take a nap, even if it's to read a book, even if it's, you know, to work out, whatever. Yeah. That is put that time in your calendar, because if it's scheduled in your calendar, you're more likely to stay accountable to yourself and accountable to following through on that.
[00:21:23] Because if you like, for example, schedule the doctor's appointment. You wouldn't just bail on that because it's scheduled in your calendar and you know, you need to go forward with it. So treat. Time with yourself to recharge as like a doctor's appointment. And instead, you're the one healing yourself. So I hope those tips helped.
[00:21:42] I know I've been trying, it's a hard thing to do. I've been working on this. I'm a constant work in progress, but these are the things that I found for me really helpful in just lightning my whole energy field. So hope you enjoyed it. Leave me a comment and let me know what energy vampires are you looking to vanquish from your life?