7 Avoidable Everyday Habits That Could Be Draining Your Energy Without You Realising
You might be more than "just tired."
You sleep for eight hours. You haven’t pulled an all-nighter since your university days. Your blood tests are fine. And yet, by mid-afternoon, you’re staring into the fridge hoping a Babybel might somehow change your life.
If that feels uncomfortably specific, the problem may not be what you’re missing; it’s what you’re unknowingly spending.
You see, I’ve reached the point in adulthood where I assess my social plans less by whether I want to go and more by whether my battery can handle it. Drinks after work? Depends. Dinner on a Thursday? Ambitious. A weekend with back-to-back plans? Let’s not get carried away.
For a long time, I blamed persistent fatigue on the usual suspects: poor sleep, stress, not enough water, too much coffee. I recently started wondering whether the issue wasn’t what I was lacking, but what I was repeatedly giving away.
When you really think about it, many of us spend our days in a constant state of low-level output. Before we’ve even got out of bed, we’ve checked WhatsApp, scanned our emails and caught up on the latest headlines. We fill commutes with podcasts, lunch breaks with life admin and evenings with scrolling.
I hear you - none of these habits seems particularly exhausting in isolation, and I think that’s what makes them so easy to miss. But together, they create what some experts describe as an “invisible energy tax” - a steady stream of micro-demands on our attention, decision-making and nervous system that can leave us feeling surprisingly shattered.
Thankfully, this isn’t an invitation to optimise every corner of your life. With the help of psychologists, behavioural scientists, medical experts and burnout specialists, below, I'm uncovering seven everyday habits that could be quietly draining our energy. Chances are you’ll recognise a few, and that’s exactly the point. Don't miss our expert-backed guide to how to boost energy, the tell-tale exhaustion symptoms to watch out for, and how to beat fatigue, here.
The 7 Modern Habits Quietly Preventing True Rest
Habit 1 - Checking Your Phone Before You’ve Even Got Out of Bed
A habit I can safely admit - and I suspect most of us can - is reaching for our phone first thing. Harmless enough in the moment, but according to behavioural scientist India Lesser, the reason it becomes so automatic comes down to a simple behavioural design.
As she explains, for many of us, the phone is also our alarm clock, meaning we physically start the day by picking it up. “From there, the next step requires almost no effort: notifications, messages and emails are already waiting. That lack of friction makes the behaviour almost inevitable, especially when the brain is still half-asleep.”
There’s also the reward factor.“When checking our phone first thing, we get information coming in that we often then need to respond to,” says Lesser. “It can lead to information overload,” particularly when some of those inputs feel urgent or emotionally charged. “Add in variable rewards: messages, updates, surprises - and the urge to check becomes even harder to resist.”
But it’s not just behavioural. According to Psychologist Dr Tara Quinn-Cirillo, there’s a psychological cost. “When we check our phones first thing, we wake up more abruptly - It’s all more data to process. Meaning, this action can trigger a mild stress response rather than a gradual waking state.”
Another reason that first-thing scroll is leaving you feeling sluggish: light. It's one of the strongest signals for our body clock, and emerging research continues to show that the quality and timing of light exposure after waking can influence how alert you feel. That’s why sleep experts recommend prioritising natural daylight in the first hour of the day, rather than immediately staring at a screen.
TLDR? You’re already responding to everyone else’s demands before you’ve even decided what you need from the day.
Habit 2. Treating Every Notification as Urgent
A familiar habit for many of us: being a little too available. The problem isn’t necessarily the notifications themselves; it’s what they do to our attention. As Ciriloo puts it, “constantly responding to phone pings disrupts our ‘present moment awareness’, repeatedly pulling us away from whatever we're doing.” Before you know it, it can start to feel like your phone has your attention on retainer.
From a cognitive perspective, switching between tasks relies on working memory, and this could be where the energy leak starts: “When we constantly jump from message to email to app, the brain has to hold onto previous information while processing new inputs, increasing the risk of cognitive overload and fatigue. This doesn’t just reduce efficiency, it can also impair our ability to process, weigh up and retain information accurately.”
On their own, these costs are almost imperceptible. Together, they pile up into a quiet, ongoing disruption - like your mind being gently knocked off course all day long. Cirillo warns the result isn’t panic, but a slow build of friction that leaves us more irritable, less steady, and quietly drained.
Research on task-switching suggests that every time we switch, the brain incurs a small “switching cost” as it resets attention. On their own, these costs are almost unnoticeable. Together, they accumulate into a quiet, ongoing disruption - like your mind being gently knocked off course all day long. Cirillo warns the result isn’t panic, but a gradual buildup of friction that leaves us feeling irritable, less steady, and yep, you guessed it, quietly drained.
Habit 3. Filling Every Quiet Moment With Content
I am, admittedly, guilty of all the habits thus far. As for this one, well, this is my personal kryptonite.
The issue, according to Cirillo, is that this kind of constant stimulation doesn't really support "rest and digest" mode - the nervous system's calmer counterpart to fight-or-flight. Instead, we stay busy enough to never fully downshift.
"It also quietly keeps us from being fully present in the moment. And that includes the less comfortable parts: thoughts, emotions, or sensations we might otherwise notice.”
Could this habit be a very elegant form of avoidance? I think so. One packaged up like productivity, but often delays proper processing.
The problem? Biologically, our brains aren't designed for uninterrupted input all day. "We need natural pauses and intentional downtime to process what's going on." With that being said, Cirillo warns that “decompression time” is essential to help regulate emotions, memories, and stop everything from feeling like it's happening on a loop. Without it, we stay in a kind of low-grade mental buffering state, one where the wheel doesn't stop spinning, and nothing loads.
Habit 4. Working Through Lunch Without Really Stopping
Now for a break in theory, and a lesson in practice. I’m a firm advocate for taking a lunch break - and no, I don’t mean unhaling a sandwich while replying to “urgent” emails and convincing yourself that counts as rest. I’m talking about actually stepping away. Radical, I know.
Without real pauses, your system never properly resets across the day. There are no recovery gaps - just one long, unforgiving stretch of output.
Which is where Burnout Specialist Dr Claire Ashley’s concept of “working with your biology, rather than against it” comes in. “Our energy naturally rises and falls in roughly 90-minute cycles known as ultradian rhythms. When we push through those dips, we’re effectively overriding the body’s built-in signal to recover before the next cycle begins.”
Breaks matter physically, too. Ashley notes that without them, stress hormones like cortisol can build up across the day - a pattern linked to poorer sleep, reduced immunity and burnout. And crucially, stepping away isn’t inefficiency; it’s performance support. “Proper breaks improve focus, reduce errors, and often mean you actually get more done, not less.”
Habit 5 - Overcommitting Your Calendar (Even to Things You Enjoy)
I dedicate this habit to my people pleasers in the room. We all know the background hum of pressure that a packed schedule creates - and what this translates to is that there’s always something to prepare for or recover from. Even the “nice” things don’t quite land as rest when there’s no space between them.
Ashley explains this through the concept of ‘allostatic load,’ “the cumulative physiological wear that builds when the body is under sustained demand without enough recovery. Crucially, even positive experiences contribute to this load, because your system still has to mobilise energy, even for things you enjoy.”
The picture is clear: when that builds without relief, you stay subtly switched on in the background, and over time, it quietly becomes your baseline.
Which brings us to the part that people pleasers won’t enjoy hearing. The antidote: "learning to say no - and permitting yourself to mean it."
Habit 6. Turning Downtime Into Productivity
Ah, optimisation - our new favourite personality trait we’ve invited in under the guise of “getting our lives together.” For the overachievers, especially, this one is simple: rest starts to look like performance. Hobbies become goals, workouts become metrics, weekends become projects.
As Ashley puts it, “Overcommitting your calendar fills your time with external demands. Turning downtime into productivity does the same thing internally, and the effect on your nervous system is the same.”
Researcher Sabine Sonnentag has spent decades studying recovery, and her 2024 findings are consistent with this: real rest only happens when we psychologically detach - when we mentally step away from doing, improving and achieving.
Otherwise, we stay in “pursuit mode”, and the nervous system stays firmly on. The key to recognising this habit, understanding the difference between restorative and simply busy, usually comes down to feeling. As Ashley gently reminds us, “restorative activities absorb you rather than evaluate you, often creating flow - where stress responses actually switch off, and you emerge feeling lighter than you expected.” The irony, of course, is that the moment you try to optimise that feeling… you’ve kind of lost it.
Habit 7. Mistaking Distraction for Actual Rest
Personally, I think this habit is all six rolled into one. We’ve become so used to filling every spare moment that we’ve started confusing distraction with recovery. If we’re not working, we’re scrolling. If we’re not scrolling, we’re streaming. If we’re not streaming, we’re online shopping, listening to a podcast or half-watching TV just because. All feel restful because they're “helping” us switch off from something. But often, they're simply helping us avoid something else.
As psychotherapist David Cornwell points out, many of us now find it increasingly difficult to sit with uncomfortable thoughts or emotions. “Instead, we gravitate towards activities that either make us feel productive or numb us to our experience. The problem is that while these distractions may provide temporary relief, they don't necessarily leave us feeling restored.”
In Cornwell’s view, genuinely restorative activities tend to bring us back into the present moment and leave us feeling more connected, grounded and energised afterwards. Distractions, on the other hand, can keep us disconnected from what we actually need - whether that’s rest, movement, reflection, connection or simply a break from stimulation.
If writing this piece has taught me anything, and in hopes of leaving you with something, it’s that exhaustion isn’t always the result of doing too much. Something is the result of never quite stopping. Of filling every quiet moment, answering every ping, treating rest as something we should be justifying.
So, if you’ll excuse me, I have some absolutely nothing to do.
MC UK's Recharge Recommendations
Because saying “no” is easier said than done, I’m a big believer in making rest as appealing as possible. Enter: Houseplant by Droplet’s Ash & Scent Set. With grounding, woody notes and a sleek diffuser that looks chic on any bedside table or desk, it’s the kind of product that encourages you to actually take the break you’ve been promising yourself all day.
As someone who can spot the warning signs of exhaustion and then immediately ignore them, I appreciate anything that keeps me accountable. The Oura Ring tracks sleep, recovery, stress and activity, helping you better understand when your body might need a little more rest and a little less powering through.
If you’re trying to swap “go, go, go” energy for something a little gentler, consider this your uniform. Free People’s Hot Shot Strappy Set is the kind of throw-on outfit that makes a lunchtime walk, post-work Pilates class or weekend potter feel effortlessly achievable.
