No wonder you don’t have any energy …

You started your day in a hurry to get the kids off to school, so you poured them a bowl of cereal while you dressed for work.

On the way to the office, you swing in to the Starbucks drive-through to grab the biggest cup of coffee they have, along with the sweetest pastry they have, which you scarf down during rush hour.

The day is full of its demands, which means a quick dash to the closest fast food restaurant for lunch, which you finish at your desk.

To keep you going through the afternoon, you hit up the vending machine for a Red Bull after emptying the pot of coffee. You just don’t have time to make another pot. You wonder why someone else didn’t make another pot when they saw it was getting low.

During rush hour home, you’re thinking you’re too tired to cook, so you call in an order for a pizza at the local Italian eatery a couple miles from your house, and swing by to pick it up on the way home.

While the kids work on their homework for school, you finish a little work you brought home from the office. Finally, it’s time for family, which is devoted to watching a couple favorite television shows together, followed by getting the kids ready for bed.

“Where has the day gone?” you ask yourself as you climb into your own bed. But your mind doesn’t just shut off, so you turn on the TV in the bedroom in an attempt to distract yourself. Somewhere between the mix of different late night talk show hosts, you nod off. In the wee hours of the morning, you fumble for the remote and click off the television.

So goes another day.

As you repeat the scenario throughout the week, you feel the energy drain from your body. By Friday, you’re praying you just get through the day. All you want to do is punch out of work and begin the weekend. You can’t believe what a week does to you anymore.

That’s the fallacy of your thinking.

You allow the circumstances of your day to drive you rather than you owning your day … and your life. A key ingredient to your thinking, and your living, is the profound fact that a quality life doesn’t just happen, you have to build it.

“But I just don’t have the energy,” you counter.

You could have.

What a lot of people don’t realize is, by allowing themselves to be driven by their day, they wind up living in way that is designed to rob their bodies of energy, rather than living a lifestyle that energizes them for a better quality life.

Let me share with you just four key reasons why we lose energy:

1. Poor nutrition. Your body is not an early ’70’s Volkswagen Beetle, it’s a high performance vehicle. You might be satisfied shopping stations to find the cheapest, lowest grade gas for a VW, but you wouldn’t dream of pumping that into a Maserati. That’s what you’re doing with a routine of poor nutrition, and it contributes significantly to draining you of energy and physical performance.

2. Poor sleep habits. One of the most basic means we have of re-energizing our bodies — sleep — is something we often give no attention to. We don’t prepare for it or invest in it, we just flop into bed and hope for the best, which is usually what we don’t get.

3. Poor exercise habits. For most of us, there are NO habits of exercise. We rely on what movement it takes to function for our exercise, which means we don’t provide our bodies with the strengthening and maintenance they need. With such neglect for your physical needs, the energy will pour out of you.

4. Poor self-care. We let Mondays be the launch pad of a whole new round of stress, and allow it to pile on — and pile up — with each passing day. We don’t do anything to manage or alleviate our stress, and so it adds its contribution to sucking the energy out of us.

Instead of letting your day drive you, you could exercise the self-discipline God has given you (2 Tim. 1:7) to make sure you’re caring for your body and your self in such a way that you’re maximizing your energy so you actually feel like building a better life rather than living a habit of daily circumstances determining the content of your life.

If you want the energy to live better, you’ll have to do what it takes to generate that energy. Will you?

Scotty