Find Your Polar Energy to Be Productive and Happy

I’ve not been in my energy lately. Each morning, I wake up and hear it whisper in my ear, but then I drown it out with the noise of how other people live.

We’re all used to social comparison. Sometimes it’s useful, which is why we can’t give it up, but other times, we’re influenced to change who we are in a way that hurts.

You’re probably using the wrong polar energy: the yin/yang preference we all have that helps us to navigate the world.

This is where I found myself and I realized it was ruining my life and my productivity.

Active and Reactive Energy

Polar energy helps us to live in the world and with each other. You have traits of both, but almost everyone leans one way and trying to embody the wrong polar energy will leave you feeling sick and tired.

It’s sort of like the dynamic between introversion and extroversion, but polar energy deals with more than just social interaction. It also deals with our relationship with our bodies and the universe itself.

I have yin energy. That means I embody a more receptive rather than active way of life. Instead of pushing and penetrating the world around me to get what I want, I nest and nurture

However, the modern world prioritizes and even demands yang energy. You see this play out in the drive for status and competition. It’s an energy that’s just as good as yin, but not appropriate in all circumstances or for all people.

Those with yin energy, like myself, may find themselves pushed into an ambitious and “efficient” lifestyle. Instead of listening to their intuition and creating a cozy environment to work in, they’re encouraged to live austere lives of focus.

Discovering Your Polar Energy

The irony of trying to live in the wrong polar energy is that you won’t do it well for long.

Someone with yin energy who wants to work in law won’t function well time blocking their way to the top of a corporate firm. They would do better reacting to the diverse and unexpected needs of clients as a public defender.

Similarly, someone with yang energy who wants to be a nurse wouldn’t enjoy the domesticity of home health. They’d prefer the rules and technical precision of the operating room.

You’ll know you’re in the right polar energy when you don’t feel persistent friction in how your day is structured. Challenges will be energizing instead of defeating.

But even if you’re in the right profession, like me as a tarot reader, you can go about it using the wrong energy.

I love productivity advice and most of it is very good and relevant, but not all strategies work for both polar energies. Unfortunately, I and many others forget that in our mad dash to achieve our life goals.

What Each Polar Energy Needs

In general, I find that yin polar energies do well with environmental productivity and yang energies do well with precision productivity.

The way this works out to productivity advice is a bit like this.

If You’re Yin, Do This

Yin environmental productivity does best by listening to the rhythms of the body and adjusting what you’re doing depending on what’s happening around you.

Possible Strategies

• The Eisenhower Matrix helps yin individuals prioritize what is most important right now.
• To-do lists give you the ability to brain-dump what needs to be done and then choose what you can handle to take on in the moment.
• Kanban boards let you arrange tasks into projects that you can pick from according to its progress status

The point here is to avoid strict deadlines and give yourself as much time as possible to do anything. You’re avoiding efficiency and choosing priorities reflected by how you feel.

My personal yin productivity system is to have a OneNote document with my life purpose goals and then briefly broken down into potential milestones over the next few decades. I then plan my tasks by referring to this document and assigning flexible deadlines on a calendar.

Yang? Try This Instead

If you have yang precision productivity, you need to focus on routines and break down goals into discrete tasks that should be accomplished within the smallest amount of time you can.

Possible Strategies

• Time blocking helps you to assign tasks or categories of tasks to specific times of the day when you feel most energized.
• Pomodoros, or timers, allow a yang individual to start a task at any time of day and create a time barrier to stay focused.
• Habit tracking, which requires intense executive functioning, is about building consistent routines to eliminate wasted time and bad habits.

Deadlines and artificial structures help yang individuals to block out distractions. These techniques have very little leeway for interruption so they’re designed to eliminate the possibility of future distractions happening.

The goal is to work alone and be “in the zone.”

Trust What You Need

Remember: either polar energy is great, but the best one for you is yours. It’s difficult and perhaps impossible to embody the wrong one for a long period.

Stepping into the right productivity style will also help you regulate your polar energy and feel better.

When I used yang instead of yin, I was so stressed out that I would grind my teeth and give myself migraines. Sometimes, I’d have to take two to three days off in a row just because I pushed myself to use time blocking and pomodoros.

It may seem to go against standard productivity advice, but giving myself the whole day to do tasks whenever I want to do them is more efficient, not less, because I avoid burnout.

Give yourself the gift of structuring your day and life with the right energy. You’ll feel better for it.

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