10 things to get rid of that are quietly draining your energy

Last Updated on June 19, 2026 by Candi Randolph

There’s a particular kind of tired that’s hard to explain.

Not the good tired, the kind that comes after a full and satisfying day where you did something meaningful and felt it in your bones at the end. Not the obvious tired, the kind that follows a poor night’s sleep or an unusually demanding week.

This is the other kind. The kind where you look back at your day and nothing particularly hard happened. You managed the things, showed up for the things, handled what needed handling. And yet by late afternoon or early evening you have almost nothing left. A low, persistent depletion that has become so familiar you’ve almost stopped questioning it.

If that sounds recognizable, I want to say something to you right away. You’re not imagining it. And it’s probably not what you think is causing it.

The biggest energy drains in most of our lives are not the obvious ones. They’re not the hard days or the difficult people or the genuinely demanding stretches that anyone would find exhausting. They’re quieter than that. Smaller. So gradual and so constant that we stopped identifying them as drains a long time ago and started accepting them as just the way things are.

They’re not just the way things are. They’re choices. And some of them can be changed.

That’s what this list is about. Not a dramatic overhaul or a wellness program or a set of life changing habits to adopt all at once. Just a quiet, honest look at ten things that have been running in the background, costing you energy every single day without your full awareness or permission.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe. Learning how to have more energy after 60 is less about adding things to your life and more about removing what’s been quietly taking from it.

That’s a different kind of self care. And in my experience, it’s one of the most effective kinds there is.

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10 Things That are Quietly Draining Your Energy

1. The Clutter You’ve Stopped Seeing

There’s a fascinating and slightly uncomfortable thing that happens with clutter over time. We stop seeing it.

Not literally – it’s still there, the stack of papers on the corner of the desk, the drawer that doesn’t quite close, the collection of things on the kitchen counter that have no real home and have simply claimed that spot by default. We see it in the peripheral sense. We just stop registering it as something that’s costing us anything.

But it is. Quietly and consistently, physical clutter costs mental energy in ways that research has confirmed and most of us have felt without quite being able to name. Every unresolved pile, every surface that holds more than it should, every space that feels vaguely chaotic rather than settled, is sending a low level signal to the brain that there is something unfinished, something unresolved, something that needs attention. That signal runs in the background all day long. And background processes, as anyone who has ever watched a laptop slow to a crawl knows, use real energy even when you’re not actively aware of them.

Declutter your life is advice that gets thrown around so casually it has almost lost its meaning. But the reason it keeps getting said is that it keeps being true. Clearing a physical space – genuinely clearing it, not tidying it temporarily before it fills back up – does something to the mental space around it that is almost immediate and consistently underestimated.

This doesn’t have to be a whole house project. It doesn’t require a weekend or a system or a philosophy. It can be one drawer. One counter. One corner of the room where things have accumulated that don’t belong there and everyone has quietly agreed to pretend otherwise.

Start there. Not because it will solve everything, but because the energy you get back from even one genuinely cleared space is real. And real is a good place to begin.

2. The Unfinished Tasks Living Rent-Free in Your Head

Psychologists have a name for this one. They call it the Zeigarnik effect – the tendency of the brain to hold onto incomplete tasks with considerably more persistence than completed ones. Which is a very clinical way of saying something most of us already know from lived experience.

Unfinished things take up space in your head in a way that finished things simply don’t.

The email you’ve been meaning to respond to for three days. The phone call you keep putting off. The form that needs filling out, the appointment that needs scheduling, the conversation you’ve been rehearsing mentally without actually having. The half finished project in the spare room. The thing you told someone you’d look into and haven’t yet.

None of these things is necessarily large. That’s almost the point. They’re small enough individually that they don’t feel urgent, don’t demand immediate attention, and don’t get handled. But they don’t go away either. They just join the queue, that persistent mental list that runs quietly in the background of your day, surfacing at inconvenient moments, interrupting your focus, and costing a small but steady amount of energy every single time they do.

This is one of those ‘why am I so tired’ situations that has a surprisingly practical answer. Not more sleep, not more vitamins, not a different morning routine. Just fewer open loops.

Healthy habits for women who want more mental energy almost always include some version of this. Getting the unfinished things out of your head and into a place where they can be seen, prioritized, and actually dealt with. A simple list. A notebook. Whatever system works for you, as long as it moves the mental load out of your head and into something external where it can stop running in the background.

Closing an open loop, even a small one, produces a disproportionate sense of relief. You’ve probably noticed this yourself. The thing you’ve been putting off for two weeks that takes fifteen minutes once you actually do it, and the feeling afterward that is so much lighter than the task deserved.

That lightness is energy you get to keep. It was yours all along. It was just being held hostage by something unfinished.

3. The People-Pleasing That Has Become Automatic

This one is worth sitting with for a moment before we move through it. Because people-pleasing is one of those habits that wears very effective disguise. It looks like kindness. It looks like flexibility. It looks like being easy to get along with, low maintenance, generous with your time and energy and accommodation.

And sometimes it genuinely is those things. There’s nothing wrong with kindness or generosity or choosing your battles thoughtfully. Those are genuine virtues and worth keeping.

But there’s another version of people-pleasing that has nothing to do with genuine generosity. It’s the automatic yes that comes out before you’ve even checked in with yourself about whether you actually want to say it. The opinion swallowed because sharing it felt risky. The need unexpressed because asking felt like too much. The plan changed, the preference deferred, the discomfort quietly absorbed, not out of genuine choice but out of a habit so old and so ingrained that it stopped feeling like a choice a long time ago.

That version is exhausting. Not occasionally. Consistently, reliably, every single day.

Here’s why people-pleasing drains energy in a way that genuine generosity doesn’t. Genuine generosity comes from a full place. You have something and you choose to give it. Automatic people-pleasing comes from a managed place. You are constantly monitoring, adjusting, anticipating, calculating. Reading the room, smoothing the edges, keeping everyone comfortable. That kind of vigilance is tiring in a way that is hard to overstate, and it runs whether or not anything particularly demanding is actually happening.

Self care habits that make a genuine difference at this stage of life almost always involve some version of this reckoning. The recognition that saying yes to everything and everyone has a cost. That the cost is paid in your energy. And that you have been paying it for long enough that it has started to feel normal when it was never actually supposed to be.

Positive habits for women who want to feel better in their daily lives include learning to pause before the automatic yes. Just a breath. Just a moment to actually check in with yourself before you respond. Not to become someone who is difficult or ungenerous or withholding. Just to become someone who makes genuine choices rather than automatic ones.

That pause is one of the smallest and most life changing habits you can build. And the energy it gives back to you is remarkable.

4. The News and Social Media Consumption That Goes Past Useful

Let’s be honest about something first. Staying informed matters. Knowing what’s happening in the world, being engaged with issues that affect your community and your life and the people you love, is not something I’m suggesting you abandon. That kind of engagement is part of being a thoughtful, present person in the world.

But there’s a point – and most of us know exactly where it is even if we don’t always acknowledge it – where staying informed tips over into something else entirely. Where the scrolling continues not because there is anything new or useful coming in but because stopping feels somehow wrong. Where the news consumption has become less about information and more about a kind of anxious monitoring that never resolves because the thing being monitored never stops.

That point is where the energy drain begins.

Here’s what excessive news and social media consumption actually does to your energy levels in practical terms. It keeps the nervous system in a state of low level alert. Not full alarm, not crisis mode, just that persistent hum of unease that comes from a steady diet of things that are troubling, unresolved, and largely outside your control. That hum is exhausting in a way that is hard to connect directly to the scrolling because the connection isn’t immediate. You don’t feel depleted while you’re doing it. You feel it an hour later, or at the end of the day, or in the quality of your sleep.

‘Why am I so tired‘ is a question with many answers, and this is one of the most common ones that goes unrecognized. Not because women don’t suspect it, but because the habit is so woven into the rhythm of the day that identifying it as the source feels almost too simple.

Self care after 60 includes being intentional about what you let into your nervous system and how often. It includes recognizing that your peace of mind is a resource worth protecting. That the news will continue whether you monitor it constantly or check it once in the morning and once in the evening. That social media will keep generating content whether you’re there for all of it or a considered portion of it.

You don’t have to disappear from the world to protect your energy. You just have to decide how much of the world gets access to you, and when.

That decision, made deliberately and without guilt, is one of the quietest and most effective self care habits available to you right now.

5. The Physical Environment That Doesn’t Support You

We spend an enormous amount of time thinking about what we do in our spaces and very little time thinking about whether our spaces are actually working for us. Whether they’re set up in ways that support how we live, how we move through our days, how we feel in our own homes over the course of an ordinary afternoon.

And the physical environment, it turns out, has a quiet but significant effect on energy levels that most of us significantly underestimate.

This isn’t about having a beautifully decorated home or a perfectly organized space. It’s about something more functional and more honest than that. The chair you sit in for hours that is slightly uncomfortable in a way you’ve learned to ignore. The lighting in the room where you read or work that strains your eyes just enough to be tiring without being obvious enough to address. The space that feels vaguely cluttered even after you’ve tidied it because the layout isn’t quite right for how you actually use it. The temperature that’s slightly off. The noise that’s slightly too present.

None of these things is dramatic. Each one individually is easy to dismiss as minor. But minor things experienced consistently over hours and days accumulate in ways that are anything but minor.

How to have more energy is a question most women approach from the inside out. Sleep, nutrition, movement, stress management. All of which matter enormously, as we’ve discussed. But the outside in approach deserves equal attention. Your physical environment is either supporting your energy or quietly working against it every single hour you spend in it.

This is worth a slow, honest walk through your home with fresh eyes. Not looking for what needs cleaning or organizing, but looking for what feels slightly off. What makes you subtly tense rather than subtly at ease. What you’ve been compensating for so long that you stopped noticing you were compensating.

Healthy habits for women who want to feel genuinely well in their daily lives include tending to the spaces they inhabit. Small environmental adjustments, a different chair, a warmer light bulb, a rearranged corner of a room that finally makes sense, can return a quiet but meaningful amount of energy to your day.

Declutter your life is advice that applies here too, but in a broader sense than just clearing surfaces. It’s about creating spaces that feel settled and supportive rather than draining. Spaces that work with you rather than against you.

You spend most of your life inside your home. It should be on your side.

6. The Unresolved Conversations and Relationships

This one operates so quietly that it often doesn’t get identified as an energy drain at all. It just gets absorbed into the general background hum of daily life and accepted as part of the landscape.

But unresolved things between people are among the most persistent and costly drains on energy there are. Not because they demand constant active attention, but because they don’t. They just sit there, underneath everything else, requiring a low level of ongoing management that never quite resolves and never quite goes away.

You know the ones I mean. The conversation you’ve been meaning to have but keep finding reasons to postpone. The misunderstanding that was never fully addressed and now has a thin layer of normalcy over it that everyone is pretending is the same as resolution. The relationship where something shifted and neither person has named it, so you’re both navigating around an unspoken thing that shapes every interaction without ever being acknowledged. The apology that was never given or never fully received. The boundary that needs to be said out loud but hasn’t been yet.

None of these things announces itself loudly. That’s precisely what makes this category of energy drain so insidious. There’s no acute moment of exhaustion you can point to. Just a persistent, low grade tiredness around certain people or certain situations that you’ve learned to carry without questioning where it’s coming from.

Life changing habits don’t always look like new practices or morning routines or systems for managing your time. Sometimes the most life changing thing you can do is have the conversation you’ve been avoiding. Say the thing that has been sitting unsaid. Address the tension that everyone is pretending isn’t there.

This doesn’t mean forcing resolution where none is possible, or reopening things that are genuinely better left closed, or having every difficult conversation regardless of whether it will actually help. Wisdom includes knowing the difference between an unresolved thing that needs addressing and one that simply needs releasing.

But for the ones that genuinely need addressing, the energy cost of continued avoidance almost always exceeds the energy cost of the conversation itself. The thing you’ve been dreading having tends to take far less out of you than the months of quiet dread that preceded it.

Self care habits at this stage of life include tending to the relational landscape with the same honest attention you’d give to anything else that affects how you feel every day. Because the people in your life, and the unresolved things between you, are part of your environment too.

And unresolved things, left long enough, have a way of becoming the loudest quiet in the room.

7. The Perfectionism Applied to Things That Don’t Deserve It

Perfectionism is one of those qualities that comes with a complicated reputation. On one hand it’s worn almost as a badge – the conscientious person, the one who cares deeply, the one who always does things properly and completely and well. On the other hand most of us who have lived with it for any length of time know the other side of that story. The exhaustion. The paralysis. The way it can make even simple tasks feel weighted and complicated in ways that have nothing to do with the task itself.

But here’s the specific aspect of perfectionism I want to talk about, because I think it’s the most draining and the least examined. It’s not the perfectionism applied to things that genuinely matter. It’s the perfectionism applied equally to everything, regardless of whether the stakes actually warrant it.

The email that gets rewritten four times before sending even though it’s a casual note to a friend. The dinner that has to be just right even on a Tuesday night when nobody is coming and nothing is at stake. The errand run in a specific order according to a specific logic because doing it differently would feel wrong somehow. The small daily tasks held to the same exacting standard as the things that actually matter, because somewhere along the way the dial got stuck on high and never quite came back down.

This is where the energy drain lives. Not in caring about quality – caring about quality is a genuine virtue and worth keeping. But in the unconscious application of maximum effort to minimum stakes situations, over and over, all day long, until the energy that was needed for the things that actually mattered has been quietly spent on things that didn’t.

Positive habits for women who want to feel less depleted include something that sounds almost counterintuitive. Getting comfortable with good enough. Not in a resigned or careless way, but in a genuinely discerning way. Asking honestly, before investing significant energy in something, whether this particular thing deserves this particular level of attention. Whether done is better than perfect here. Whether anyone, including yourself, will actually notice or benefit from the extra effort.

Life changing habits are sometimes about raising your standards. But just as often they’re about lowering them strategically, reserving your best energy and attention for the places where it will make a genuine difference and releasing the rest to a standard that is perfectly adequate and completely fine.

Good enough, applied wisely, is not a compromise. It’s a choice. And it gives back more energy than most of us realize we’ve been spending.

8. The Comparison Habit

We touched on this one in a recent post about feeling more like yourself again, but it deserves its own moment here because the energy cost of comparison is specific and significant and worth naming clearly in this context.

Comparison is one of those mental habits that feels like it’s doing something useful. It feels like assessment, like motivation, like keeping yourself honest about where you are relative to where you could be. But here’s the thing about comparison that makes it such a reliable energy drain. It almost never resolves.

Unlike a task you can complete or a problem you can solve, comparison has no natural endpoint. There is always someone further along, someone who appears to have more figured out, someone whose life or body or home or relationships look from the outside like the thing you’ve been working toward. And so the comparison continues, scrolling through an endless loop of measurement that produces no useful information and costs a steady, quiet amount of energy every time it runs.

The question, “why am I so tired?” is sometimes answered by looking honestly at how much mental energy is being spent measuring. Measuring against other women. Against a younger version of yourself. Against an imaginary standard of how things should look by now. Against the carefully curated version of someone else’s life that you’ve seen enough times to have started treating as representative of their actual daily reality.

None of these measurements are accurate. All of them are exhausting.

Self care after 60 includes getting honest about the comparison habit and what it’s actually costing you. Not with judgment or self criticism, because the habit is deeply human and entirely understandable. But with clear eyes. Because the energy spent measuring yourself against anyone or anything outside your own actual life is energy that could have been spent living that life. Enjoying it. Appreciating what’s genuinely in it rather than auditing it against what isn’t.

Here’s a reframe worth sitting with. The only comparison that yields anything genuinely useful is the one between who you are now and who you were a year ago. That one has real information in it. That one can actually tell you something about growth and change and the direction you’re moving in. Every other comparison is just noise dressed up as data.

Healthy habits for women who want more energy include noticing when the comparison loop has started running and making a deliberate choice to step out of it. Not forever, not perfectly, just this time. And then the next time. Until stepping out of it starts to feel more natural than staying in it.

That’s how habits change. One quiet choice at a time.

9. The Guilt Around Saying No and Doing Nothing

We’ve talked about the people-pleasing that has become automatic, the yes that comes out before you’ve checked in with yourself. This one lives in the same neighborhood but it’s a slightly different street.

Because even when you do manage to say no – even when you hold the boundary, decline the invitation, protect the afternoon, choose the rest – there’s often something that follows it uninvited. A quiet, persistent guilt that turns the thing you chose for yourself into something you now have to justify, explain, or feel vaguely bad about for longer than the original decision deserved.

That guilt is its own energy drain. Separate from and in addition to the people-pleasing itself.

Here’s what it looks like in practice. You say no to something and spend the next several hours second guessing whether you should have. You take an afternoon for yourself and can’t quite settle into it because the mental justification keeps running. You do nothing for a stretch of time that you genuinely needed, and instead of feeling restored by it you feel vaguely guilty about it, which means you don’t actually get the restoration you were after. The rest doesn’t rest you because the guilt won’t let it land.

This is one of the more insidious entries on this list because it has a way of undermining the very things you’re doing to protect your energy. You make the right choice and then spend the energy you saved feeling bad about making it. Which means you end up depleted anyway, just for a different reason.

Self care habits that actually work require something guilt cannot coexist with very easily. Permission. Real, genuine, internalized permission to have needs and honor them without a lengthy internal trial afterward. Permission to say no without it meaning you are selfish. Permission to do nothing without it meaning you are lazy. Permission to choose yourself sometimes without it meaning you have failed the people you love.

Here’s what I want to say plainly, because I think it needs to be said plainly. No is a complete sentence. Rest is not a reward you earn after sufficient productivity. And the guilt that follows a legitimate choice about your own time and energy is not a moral compass. It’s a habit. One that was probably installed a long time ago by a culture that had very specific ideas about what women should and shouldn’t be doing with their hours.

Those ideas were never entirely fair. And they are worth questioning now, at this stage of life, perhaps more than at any other.

Because the energy you spend feeling guilty about your own legitimate choices is energy that was always supposed to be yours. It’s time to stop spending it on something that was never actually deserved.

10. The Gap Between Your Values and How You’re Spending Your Time

We’ve arrived at the last item on this list. And like the final item in the post we wrote about feeling more like yourself again, this one quietly contains all the others.

Because underneath the clutter and the open loops and the automatic yes and the comparison habit and everything else we’ve talked about today, there is sometimes something deeper running. A more fundamental misalignment that explains why the depletion persists even when you’ve addressed the more obvious things. Why you can sleep well and eat well and manage your schedule carefully and still end the day feeling like something essential is missing.

That something is often this. A gap between what you actually value and how you’re actually spending your days.

It’s one of the most invisible drains on this entire list because it doesn’t announce itself clearly. It doesn’t feel like a specific problem you can point to and solve. It feels more like a vague restlessness. A low hum of dissatisfaction that you can’t quite locate. A sense that you’re busy, often very busy, but not quite busy with the right things. That the days are full but not always full of what matters most to you.

This gap develops gradually and without drama. Life makes demands and you respond to them. Obligations accumulate and you manage them. Other people’s needs and preferences and timelines shape your days in ways that seem reasonable individually and are quietly significant in aggregate. And one day you look up and realize that the things you said you valued – the relationships, the creativity, the rest, the meaning, the simple pleasures – are getting the leftover hours. The things that feel urgent but not necessarily important are getting the best ones.

Life changing habits don’t get more fundamental than this. Bringing your actual values and your actual time into closer alignment is not a small adjustment. But it is the adjustment that everything else in this post has been quietly pointing toward. Because when how you spend your days reflects what you genuinely care about, the energy equation changes in ways that are difficult to fully explain and impossible to miss.

This doesn’t require a dramatic life overhaul. It starts with something much simpler. A honest question, asked quietly and without judgment. If someone who loved me looked at how I spent my time last week, would they be able to tell what I value most? And if the answer gives you pause, that pause is worth paying attention to.

Positive habits for women at this stage of life include the habit of returning regularly to this question. Not with guilt or urgency but with genuine curiosity. Because the answer changes as life changes, and staying in conversation with it is one of the most sustaining things you can do for your energy, your sense of purpose, and your feeling of being genuinely alive in your own days.

You don’t get the days back. But you do get to choose, starting with today, what you do with the ones ahead.

That choice, made consciously and with your own values at the center, is where the energy comes from. Not from doing more. From finally doing more of what’s actually yours to do.

You Don’t Have to Do More. You Just Have to Let Some Things Go

There’s a version of a post about energy that ends with a productivity system. A morning routine to optimize, a schedule to restructure, a set of habits to layer into your days until you’ve engineered yourself into a more efficient version of who you already are.

That’s not what this has been about.

What this has been about is something quieter and, I think, more honest. The recognition that the energy you’ve been looking for isn’t hiding behind a better routine or a more disciplined approach to your days. It’s been quietly leaking out through the things on this list. The clutter and the open loops and the automatic yes and the unresolved things and the guilt and the gap between your values and your hours.

Plug the leaks, and the energy comes back. Not all at once, and not without some honest attention to what’s been draining it. But it comes back. It was yours all along.

You don’t have to address all ten things at once. Please don’t try. Just read back through the list and notice which one made you pause the longest. Which one felt uncomfortably familiar. Which one you found yourself nodding at in a way that went a little deeper than the others. Start there. Just that one.

Because here’s what I’ve come to believe about energy at this stage of life. How to have more energy after 60 is not fundamentally a question about sleep or supplements or superfoods, though all of those things matter in their own way. It’s a question about what you’re allowing to take from you. What you’ve been tolerating so long it started to feel normal. What you could choose, gently and without drama, to simply stop giving your energy to.

Self care after 60 looks like a lot of things. It looks like rest and nourishment and movement and connection. But it also looks like this. The quiet, courageous act of examining what’s been draining you and deciding that you’ve given it enough.

You have things to do with your energy. Good things. Things that matter to you and the people you love and the life you’re still very much in the middle of living.

Go reclaim it.