12 Mindless Habits That Are Secretly Exhausting You

It’s no secret feeling drained has become the status quo, one that leaves us overexerting ourselves just to get through the necessities of the day. This leads us to lean on any energy booster we can think of to help us make it through. However, we also should suss out the energy sappers lurking in our daily habits.

Think of your energy as water in a cup that has a hole in the bottom. There are two ways to ensure the cup always contains enough water: pour more water into it or make the hole smaller.

“Finding ways to boost your energy is analogous to filling the cup and focusing on ways to make tasks less draining to making the hole smaller,” Tyson Lippe, a psychiatrist at Heading Health in Austin, Texas, told HuffPost. “Both are equally important, yet we often underestimate what can drain our stamina.”

So continue doing what’s necessary to boost your energy (eating healthier, exercising, getting enough sleep, setting boundaries) — and make sure that process includes finding and quashing the sneaky energy saboteurs on your plate. To get you started, here are 12 easily overlooked things that can drain your energy (and how to turn things around):

Watching emotionally charged television shows

One of the ways binge-watching emotionally charged TV shows can lead to mental exhaustion is through trait identification, which refers to the process of temporarily imagining yourself experiencing the same feelings and events of a specific character.

“The experience allows individuals to perceive the world differently and acquire and gain access to various emotional capacities they were formerly unable to experience,” said Leela R. Magavi, a psychiatrist and regional medical director for Community Psychiatryand MindPath Care