There’s this little saying I like, and it goes like this: “Hot girls leave the function early.” Sometimes after a shit day, you just want to go home, throw on your Adam Sandler clothes, and go to bed. A tip: the best way to avoid a bad time is simply protecting your energy.

What exactly does “protecting your energy” mean, though? It isn’t just about declining an invite or leaving a function in dint of a low social battery. While there’s no vetted term, Dr. Vania Manipod, DO, from Oak Health Center, likes to describe protecting your energy as “emotional burnout prevention,” “self-preservation,” and “boundary setting.” “All of these describe ways to be proactive about maintaining emotional equilibrium as much as possible in order to sustain your daily responsibilities as much as possible,” she says.

In doing so, we preserve and take control of our energetic hygiene, identifying what keeps us feeling full and what leaves us feeling empty. And if you couldn’t guess, the benefits of protecting our mental and emotional well-being outweigh the detriments.

Take burnout, for example. When you’re burned out, chronic stress can impact you physically by worsening existing medical conditions like skin rashes, migraines, blood pressure, and pain. It can even trigger the onset of new issues such as heart attack, stroke, and acid reflux, Dr. Manipod says.

On the flip side, maintaining full, healthy energy provides us with higher dopamine levels, leading to a happier life. “We are going to be more able to put the energy in real, true connections. And in those connections, we will build our confidence, our self-esteem, and again, our energy. We will be physically more healthy,” says Dr. Leslie Dobson, PsyD,, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist based in Long Beach, CA.

The concept blew up on social media during and after the pandemic, when people began to see why prioritizing your energy (and who gets some of it) took hold both during lockdown and as we left our bubbles of isolation. That sparked a renaissance of people re-learning how to communicate, establishing new levels of comfortability, and monitoring who entered their social circles. 

One way this manifests? Through “friend cleanses.” If you’ve been feeling a lot of negative energy lately, you might be ready for a cleanse, where you consider all the people in your life and decide if you want to keep them (and how far away).

Dr. Dobson likes to do these cleanses quarterly with her clients. “It allows us to control where our energy goes in our life, such as identifying a friend as just a texting friend and then we lower the expectation and we don’t get hurt when we really don’t see them in person and they don’t ask us to hang out,” she says. “Another friend may be a deep conversation friend, and we only hear from them once a month or once a year.”

In a survey conducted by StyleCaster, Mental, and the Mental Health Coalition, 91% of participants said they actively work to protect their energy on social media. To inspire this practice, users on Instagram and TikTok are sharing their tips for meditating, balancing mental health, and preserving your energy.

“Thanks to social media, there’s more discussion of the importance of setting boundaries with things that can easily drain our energy, such as work, finances, relationships, bad news—mass shootings, racist acts, etc.,” says Dr. Manipod. “Protecting your energy feels like a tangible way to set boundaries and guide decisions that one makes in their daily life in order to preserve their energy and get through each day as much as possible.”  

You don’t have to belong to a certain demographic to protect your energy, and it’s not one-size-fits-all, either. Maintaining healthy energy levels is necessary for respecting the boundaries we draw in our personal and professional lives.

The rules are yours. You decide how to protect your energy and who you want to invest it in. But if you want some places to get started, find 6 ways below.