Taking Time Off Feeds Your Life Energy...and Money Energy

Money Energy Law #29:

Free time energizes life. Invest in memorable experiences which uplift your life.

Without recovery periods, our ability to continue performing at high levels diminishes significantly and according to past studies, and it may reduce your ability to generate wealth.¹ That goes against a common belief system that the longer and harder you work, the more success you will experience. But how does this inverse relationship work? 

The Connection Between Life Experiences and Life Energy

Life experiences have the potential to shape and influence our overall energy levels and our nutritional, psychological, physical, and financial well-being. Positive interactions such as engaging in meaningful relationships, pursuing passions, achieving goals, or simply increasing joy and contentment, can often help recharge your life batteries. What’s more, it also feeds purpose and commitment, which can create a charging station for your Money Energy.

There’s a process at work here. Engaging in various activities boosts your creativity and productivity, meeting with people expands your network and professional opportunities, and learning new skills and gaining new experiences can lead to improved health and reduced stress. Enriching activities help build your confidence and self-esteem, which also boosts your wealth over time.

However, a word of caution: do your best to avoid prolonged exposure to negative experiences such as unhealthy stress, emotional hardships, or extensive periods of dissatisfaction. They have an adverse effect on your life energy and may hamper our ability to actively participate in or derive fulfillment from subsequent experiences. 

Be wary: negative life experiences can trigger behavioral biases.

• Loss aversion. Experiencing losses or failures can amplify loss aversion, which can lead to placing a higher value on avoiding losses than acquiring equivalent gains.

• Confirmation bias. If someone encounters a series of negative experiences, they may be more inclined to seek out information that validates that negative world view and dismiss contrary evidence that would open the doors to positive inferences.

• Anchoring bias. People may rely heavily on their first or repetitive negative experiences and set overly pessimistic expectations that fuel even more negative energy.

• Trust Erosion. Extensive exposure to unpleasant events can lead to a tendency to distrust others, a product, a service, an organization, or even an overarching process that has good intentions.

• Availability Heuristic. Unfortunately, negative or traumatic experiences tend to be more vivid and memorable, and those past instances that quickly come to mind can misguide decision-making.

Tapping Into Positive Memories 

The neurons (nerve cells) in our brains are truly amazing. They help us form new memories that may be stored by the brain for life. Expanding those positive life experiences equates to increasing the number of positive memories you can recall and can exponentially grow your Money Energy. Memory is our ability to retain and recall information. Money Energy is similar. It’s the power and capacity to generate wealth that becomes a stored force releasable into your life at any time.

Your memories and Money Energy need to be recharged periodically with new input to maintain their functionality and longevity. So, make sure to continually explore opportunities and activities that positively impact your life. Sometimes it’s merely hitting the “pause” button to gain clarity.

We need to charge up our emotional, physical, and mental batteries to live a happy, healthy, stress-free life. Taking breaks recharges the batteries; it’s essential to our health and well-being, makes us significantly more productive and attentive to others, and provides inner strength. The following story will hopefully illustrate that point.

A nudge occasionally helps.

One of my colleagues, her name is Shelly, shared this story of her experience with a former employer whom she felt was not in a stable, emotional state. His behavior manifested into sharp responses to staff, demanding unrealistic project turnarounds, and unintentionally creating a hostile environment for the employees.

As his personal assistant (PA), Shelly had the ability to make changes to his schedule. She took a proactive approach and placed her boss into an unavailable state every Thursday moving forward, cancelling every meeting on those dates. She knew that his recklessness was endangering the future of the company and his leadership was losing energy. He needed to recharge his batteries, otherwise both he and the company might be in jeopardy. By the way, Money Energy isn’t just personal, it’s also essential to a business.

When he challenged her actions, she told him the business was suffering from his behavioral responses to high levels of stress. She reminded him how a weekly “time-out,” especially for leaders, helps to add clarity of thought, revitalization of the body, mental wellness, and significantly affects not only an individual's memory bank but also an organization’s Money Energy.

Fortunately, this intervention was enough for this leader to hit the pause button. Although it was not possible to completely remove all business activities every Thursday, it was enough for him to build in time to relax. The simple act of someone else challenging him sufficed.

I found this story from my colleague very useful for retelling. Conduct an audit on yourself. Have you marked your daily calendar with times to press the pause button, and have you scheduled time away from the office with meaningful vacation time? It’s time to recharge both your memories and your Money Energy.

I hope you’ll take your journey one step further and explore the Money Energy Discovery Process, which includes completing the DNA Natural Behavior Discovery Process. Isn't it time you learned an improved method to achieve better financial wellbeing? Stay tuned every week as we continue to reveal all 40 Laws of Money Energy.

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¹The Data-Driven Case for Vacation, Harvard Business Review, July 13, 2016.