Issue #3 - Personal Energy And How To Comprehend It
Get in kid! We are going to unleash our minds and our bodies. Invite your fellow warriors. We are in this together.
In the last issue, we discussed the mechanisms and troubles of the modern mind. I was going to write the follow-up on that issue but, in the meantime, I realized that we have to talk about a bigger facet of life - energy. Most of us do not understand energy at all. We only understand the physiological aspect of it. You know how our digestive system breaks down carbohydrate molecules such as glucose, turns them into ATP molecules, and supplies them to our muscle and brain cells. That kind of stuff.
But is that it? What about the psychological aspect? Or the spiritual aspect. You see, we have become too much scientific in our minds. Anything that does not align according to the logic, we conspicuously ignore. We never even try to think if there is an alternate explanation. Just think about how a song can instantly flip your mood and fills you with creative energy. Have you ever stopped to ponder on that for more than a few seconds? Think about all the worship you do but have you ever stopped to think about what it does to your psyche rather than treating it as just another chore.
So, where is this energy? You might have studied potential and kinetic energy in high school. Can we use their mechanisms in an analogy? When you get angry. When you get anxious. When you dance. Aren’t all these states contain energy in them? The forms could be different but the source is your bodymind.
I believe most of us suck at energy management. Our culture focuses too much on time management. We have this fuel tank metaphor about energy which states that we have a limited amount of it on any given day and we have to spend it consciously. It does not seem quite right. We know that every creative work needs a toiling stage until the energy bursts kick in after which you don’t even care about how much of it is left in the tank. You just go down with it until it lasts. Time also stops to matter in that state. So, isn’t it more useful to work in phases of energy bursts rather than a perfectly scheduled plan that hardly ever materializes?
We know that every creative work needs a toiling stage until the energy bursts kick in after which you don’t even care about how much of it is left in the tank.
Here are some questions that need some necessary pondering:
How do we spot our energy sources?
How do we act on the energy bursts?
How to associate external stimulants with energy bursts?
How do we recurringly retain the energy?
How do we prevent the analysis paralysis standing between us and the creative work?
We also don’t have an intuitive knowledge of different sources of energy that affect and reinforce each other. For example, regular exercising can increase motivation in your day job and relationships. Good relationships prompt us to maintain a healthy lifestyle. A healthy lifestyle inspires us to do creative work other than our day job. Creative work leads us to better opportunities. Better opportunities can lead us to meet our potential partners. Often, we get stuck in the pithy problems of daily lives that we miss the big picture. It’s not intuitive to visualize the chain reaction of good things that can follow from good energy management techniques.
It’s not intuitive to visualize the chain reaction of good things that can follow from good energy management techniques.
The issue here is that we don’t have any built-in mechanisms to manage energy well. Our minds have evolved to work in a fight and flight mode. So, it remains mostly in the energy conservation mode — using energy only when needed for survival. This sucks in the modern era since, on most days, we are not fighting for survival. At least not in a way akin to our hunter-gatherer counterparts. So, naturally, these tasks have been left to the higher and more abstract parts of our minds. I call this the bootstrap problem. Our minds do not store the mappings for our previous energy bursts and the respective creative work we performed using it. It forgets as soon as the work is done. As soon as you go to sleep.
So, we have to solve this problem ourselves. This requires a higher level of awareness. People who practice mindfulness actively are better at recognizing these patterns. The first step to generating energy is spontaneous action based on instincts. Think of it as training your mind to activate your energy pockets the next time you get into a similar situation. It does not matter what you do based on the said instinct. The purpose is to cue the mind to warm up. Note that this is a one-off event. So, the next time you get the energy burst, you have to borrow some motivation from that random event that has some association with your current situation. Think of your memory as a potential energy store. The stored energy is your ability to act on an instinct without the presence of analysis paralysis.
Think of your memory as a potential energy store. The stored energy is your ability to act on an instinct without the presence of analysis paralysis.
There is no magic to energy. The problem with low levels of raw energy output in the modern world is information overload and the illusion of optionality it provides. The illusion that you have recipes for everything in the world now. All you have to do is to act. It is a grave lie and we are the ones to blame to some extent - because we spread it. The paradox of choice makes our minds go into a spiral. We spend inordinate amounts of our energy on inconsequential things that do not have any power to reinforce them. At some point, technology surpassed our ability to comprehend it. Our minds never evolved to process the volume of information we consume daily. It only knows prioritizing. Therefore, feeding it the cue that it can do anything in the world that you put your effort into is self-sabotage.
Yeah, we can do anything practical, but we are not good at everything. And when you cue the brain into believing in this illusion, it cannot decide where to put the energy pockets you have in your life. So the problem is not of ability, it is one of confusion and indecisiveness of our minds. That’s why instinctual action is so powerful. There are a lot of methods in contemporary self-help literature to achieve this. Well-programmed incentives, structuring/reorganizing your environment, keeping energy-consuming elements at bay, habit building, etc but life is not a laboratory and you are not a machine. Hypotheses conjured from lab experiments are more or less useless as soon as you leave the lab. Sure some people pull it off in life with these recipes but most can’t - for reasons that no lab experiment can predict. A counter-intuitive way of capturing the energy burst is to surprise the mind. Our minds love surprises. It doesn’t care about ordinary patterns. Anything that it deems worthy of registering in the long-term memory must be of a higher impact than our daily shenanigans.
There are a lot of methods in contemporary self-help literature to achieve this. Well-programmed incentives, structuring/reorganizing your environment, keeping energy-consuming elements at bay, habit building, etc but life is not a laboratory and you are not a machine. Hypotheses conjured from lab experiments are more or less useless as soon as you leave the lab.
Take the example of writing. We know that ideas come when you sit and start writing gibberish. The content of the writing doesn’t matter. It is the pattern of the phenomenon that matters. You know that to overcome the bootstrap problem, you have to start with the raw action of putting gibberish on the paper. This is a cue to the brain to start attuning the neural pathways for this activity. This is a simplistic explanation but it is not false. It is simply because I have stripped the role of thoughts from this analogy. You see thoughts are the real devil standing between you and creativity. You can visualize thoughts as electric charges in a battery moving in the Brownian motion. They need some input to align themselves for a particular task. The slightly forceful activity of intentional focus is that input. Our minds are self-reorganizing entities. But they are dependent on physical stimuli to do that. The reason for this is that our bodies did not evolve in isolation. It evolved in perfect coordination with nature. The same goes for the mind. But it has also got memory to store patterns that are repeated consistently. So, it is our job to solve the bootstrap problem for recurring energy generation. Even a computer has to check itself whether it can start successfully or not.
It’s not that we like to be in our comfort zones but it’s the default setting. The brain has evolved to put creativity to use only when it’s required for survival. We have created a kind of society where everything is in abundance required for our physiological survival — while today’s problems are more of psychological survival. In the race of growth and progress, we forgot to master this mystical beast called energy. Not the physiological one but the psychological one. One that makes Stephen King release novels and Elon Musk launches companies at the same pace. Our genes do not care for it. Nature does not care for it. But it is absolutely vital for our future existence and we have to come up with something to overcome this limitation of the human bodymind.
We have created a kind of society where everything is in abundance required for our physiological survival — while today’s problems are more of psychological survival.
In the next issue focused on this subject, I’ll be talking about how thoughts and other mental patterns are the real reasons for capping our energy. I hope you will glean some ideas about energy in your own lives. The sources for it, the patterns of bursts, the patterns that prevent its reoccurrence, and things you can do to remove the barrier between you and the energy that is ready to be released from inside you.
Shoot your questions or any issues you are having with energy management at letsharden@gmail.com or DM me on Twitter @poetofgrindset. Don’t hold back. I assure you that I’ll get back to you. But you have to take the first step!
We are in this together and we are going to win ourselves. 💪