I had run my voting power down pretty far too. Took it a couple of days to recover. I've seen posts where people recommend trying to keep your power at around 80%, which is like 11 upvotes per day, from 100%. I use https://steemnow.com/ to keep track of where I'm at. I've also started trying to comment and resteem things more and reserve my upvotes for posts from my followers and posts that are just really well done. I have to constantly remind myself that upvotes aren't really the same thing as liking something on FB.
Yes, my voting power never seems to recover from the abuse that I give it. :-)
Most days lately it starts out at around 35% and I burn it down to about 23% or so. I start out with my upvote worth 4-5 cents, and it's usually around 2-3 cents by the time I'm done. I do it anyway because I do a fair amount of curating posts most nights and I read a lot of posts that are worth upvoting. I figure that I don't have much value to give them yet, but I can give them something anyway.
It's my understanding that voting power recovers at a rate of 20% per day. Even at 90+% I'm still only giving out a penny per upvote. I've been being a little stingy with my upvotes lately to try to keep my voting power up. I generally go through my feed and upvote followers/following posts first, then look for new posts from people I haven't seen before to upvote, then upvote comments if I have enough voting power left and am burnt out on reading through posts.
That makes sense to me. It's as good a way to do it as any.