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Balancing Your Daily Stress with Spoon Theory Insights from Coach Tom

Writer's picture: Kieran Douglas JonesKieran Douglas Jones

Hi guys, coach Tom here and today I'm going to talk to you about the spoon theory. The spoon theory is a theory all about how we manage our stress and how we manage our energy balance throughout the day.


It's super important, when we're talking about our lives, to know how much energy we've got, how much we're able to put into activities, so that we can then schedule our days out accordingly.


Now, the spoon theory is an interesting theory, and everyone asked me why is it always called the spoon theory? Spoons is an arbitrary term that we use as an analogy to describe how much energy we've got in a day. It could easily be your stamina bar in a video game. It could also be your credit card balance, for example. But every day when we wake up, we start off with a limited amount of spoons, a limited amount of stamina, a limited credit card balance, and throughout the day, we will gain and lose spoons as a result of our activities and the things that we do throughout that day.


Now, some activities will cause us to lose spoons, and the act of losing spoon is an inevitability because we're going to do activities throughout the day. So, for example, say, we start off with 10 spoons as a random number. Some things like getting out of bed might cost a spoon. Some things like going to the gym might cost a spoon. Some things like doing our work might cost three spoons. And you can quickly see how, with a limited amount of spoons in our day, we're going to be able to do a limited amount of activities.


Tom Steven, Nutrition coach at Empower Fitness adn Nutrition Coaching
Tom Stevens - Spoon Theory for Stress Management

Now, for some of us, on certain days as well, those spoons might be higher. So, for example, getting out of bed on a normal day in the summer one spoon, but on the cold winter, six o'clock in the morning, that's going to be three spoons. So, as we go throughout our day, it's going to be a different amount of spoons depending on the situations that we live in. It also is going to depend on the people we interact with as well. For some people they may our interaction with them might only cause us to lose a spoon, but some people might cause us to lose multiple spoons during the duration of that conversation.


So we need to be careful and managed about what we do throughout the day to make sure that we can get to the end of the day without completely exhausting ourselves. Now, when we're stressed, it will also cause us to lose more spoons as we go. So the more stressed, the more overworked, the more overwhelmed we get, those spoon costs are going to get higher.


So, just like we spoke about before, we need to make sure that when we are stressed, when things are tough, that we have plans in place that allow us to get towards the end of that day and sell spoons left to make our dinner, to enjoy ourselves on an evening, go out with friends, something like that, so we can live our lives. Because the consequences are, if we run out of spoons or we exhaust ourselves right at the end of the day, we might not recover enough for the next day or we might reach a point where we just overload ourselves. So that brings us then to the conversation of well, tom, I'm just going to be losing spoons all throughout the day. What happens then? Well, that's a good thing.


At night you get a chance to recover spoons, all right, and we always want to get back to that point where we've got 10 spoons left in the day our credit card balances. For how do we do that? Recovery can come in a number of different ways, but the best thing you can do to recover your spoons, recover your energy balance, lower your stress. All of these amazing things to allow you to prep for the next day is get some sleep. Super, super simple on the face of it.


Making sure we get our eight plus hours sleep, making sure it's restful sleep, that we're not waking up throughout the night. If we can do that, we're gonna recover our energy. We're gonna feel so much better the next day and we're gonna start again from 10 spoons. If we don't get our full night's sleep, maybe it's interrupted, we're stressed, we're under recovered. We might only recharge back to seven spoons, in which case we're starting the day at a deficit. We're gonna be able to do less the next day and if we exhaust ourselves again, you can see this becomes a never ending cycle. So by getting ourselves a really good night's sleep, guess what? We're gonna be able to start the day again full of energy.


Other things that allow us to reset that energy balance good food yeah, we get three meals in a day. We get a good amount of protein, good amount of carbs, good amount of fats that allow us to feel energized, and they're gonna allow us to recover spoons throughout the day Rather than just at the end. It allows us to recharge throughout our day. Other things that are gonna be important when we're trying to recover spoons. It's taking breaks, yeah, from our work, from our day to day life, taking little breaks that will allow us again to get that little bit of recharge.


Could also be something as simple as going for a walk in the morning, or in the evening it could be come to the gym. Some of us might find that as a spoon increasing thing Could also be watching TV on a night, watching a favorite TV program, having a bedtime routine, having a bath or a shower. Little things will allow us to recover spoons and allow us to reset our energy balance for the next day, cause, like we said, if we don't reset that, we're gonna be going completely the opposite way.


So what does that actually mean for us? In our real day to day life? It really comes down to maintaining our energy balance and maintaining our stress level, understanding when we're stressed and when we're low on energy and what sort of boundaries we can put in place to maintain those energy levels If we know that we're running out of spoons quickly throughout the day. It's gonna be one of those situations where it's like maybe I don't wanna take on as much work, maybe I need to do something a little easier for dinner, so that maybe I've done meal prep and I'm gonna have a meal prep dinner. It might be that we need to cut out some things as the day goes on that allows us to keep recharge. It might mean that as the day goes on and you get more and more stressed, I probably should go out for a walk. I might wanna include more recharging activities.


So the whole thing really comes down to looking after yourself and setting boundaries with yourself, understanding how many spoons you have, understanding what you can do in a day, rather than over setting yourself and coming out of the day feeling flaky or maybe feeling like you have under delivered.


Rather understanding where you are, what boundaries you can put in place will come out, at the end of the day, with success. Yes, I'm actually able to go and socialize and see my friends for a drink on a night, or I've succeeded and done everything I wanted to do on my plate today. Having an idea of what our spoons are will allow us to also communicate with others our friends, our partners and say, hey, I'd love to come and do this thing, but I've only got this many spoons and I really need to have a shower tonight, understanding with your partner that when you come in and you're really, really tired and go, I've only got two spoons. Can you make dinner for me tonight? I will pick it up when I have more spoons. That communication will allow us to leave happier, more positive, more fulfilled lives, as long as we understand where our energy balance and where our stress levels are.


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