From peaks to plummets—linking sleep, effort, and absorption to trajectories of energetic activation during the day

Abstract This study examines daily energy trajectories at work from a temporal self-regulation perspective, addressing the paradoxical finding that effort can be both energizing and depleting. Rather than treating daily energy curves as purely descriptive, we distinguish three self-regulatory phases of energetic activation—resource mobilization, resource utilization, and resource retraction—and investigate sleep quality, effort, and absorption as phase-specific regulatory predictors. Using experience sampling data from 106 employees over 10 workdays, comprising four daily self-reports (2552 observations), we applied piecewise growth curve modeling to analyze within-person variations in energy trajectories. Our findings confirm an inverted U-shaped energy trajectory, peaking at midday. Sleep quality emerged as a key driver of the resource mobilization phase, associated with higher baseline energy levels but a flatter energy increase during the first half of the workday. During the resource utilization phase, higher noon effort was associated with a steeper decline in energetic activation over the work episode, independent of noon absorption. During the resource retraction phase, afternoon effort predicted a steeper evening decline, although this association did not persist once absorption was included. Effort and absorption also interacted in predicting evening energy trajectories, such that absorption differentiated evening declines primarily when effort was low, whereas differences were smaller under high effort. These results advance theoretical frameworks on energy regulation by identifying distinct mechanisms across daily phases and by showing that the energetic consequences of effort and absorption are temporally structured rather than uniform, becoming most visible after work.