I’m excited to announce a new course I have coming out next week, Everyday Energy. It is a three-month program designed to help you build new practices into your life to feel more energetic and complete meaningful work. This course builds on the topics I’ve been writing about over the past few months. It’s not just a deep dive into the research, but transforms those insights into doable changes that make sustainable improvements to your energy levels.

Registration opens on Monday, March 23rd. In the meantime, I’m sharing a brief essay series that discusses the problem of energy, and samples from the Everyday Energy curriculum (fuel, flow and flourish).

The Human Energy Crisis

We’re living through a human energy crisis. One in three people report feeling fatigue. One in eight report feeling tired most days or every day. At our jobs, 76% of people feel burnout at least some of the time, with nearly a third feeling burned out “very often” or “always.”

In some ways, our exhaustion is paradoxical. As a society, we’re richer than we’ve ever been. The amount of labor needed to get enough food to survive is far less than at almost any point in history. We’re saturated with entertainment and new leisure activities. And, for most of us, the physical effort needed to do our jobs is at an all-time low.

Describe our lives to almost any human being plucked from history, and they would imagine a life of ease and convenience: machines that wash our clothes and dishes, water that flows from pipes in our homes rather than being hauled from rivers or wells, desk jobs, and food delivered to our doors—ready to eat.

Yet there’s evidence that all these modern luxuries haven’t left us brimming with extra energy. Researcher Robert Hockey, author of The Psychology of Fatigue, even argues that the notion of fatigue itself, the unpleasant experience of feeling drained, is an invention of the modern age; people in past societies felt tired after work, certainly, but they didn’t have our modern problems of burnout and exhaustion.

Instead, we have trends of pervasive fatigue and burnout, rising incidences of energy-related mental health issues like depression and ADHD, and increases in our consumption of coffee and energy drinks—these all point to something deeply wrong with how we manage our energy.

Why Are We Exhausted?

This crisis of energy has three root causes:

First, our modern lifestyle puts heavy burdens on our biology. Indoor lighting and always-on entertainment disrupt our sleep. Sedentary habits undermine our health and fitness. Poor diets leave us simultaneously overfed and undernourished. Chronic psychological stress drains our bodies and our minds.

Second, our work culture is unnatural and unhealthy. For most of human history, work was governed by natural rhythms of effort and recovery. Hunter-gatherers had to work hard to survive, but they also got plenty of rest throughout the day. Before electricity, work ended when the sun set. Even medieval peasants likely got more days off than we do.

Third, social trends have robbed our work of much of the meaning it once had. Few premodern people had “dream” jobs, but they didn’t have “bullshit” jobs either. Work, even hard labor, fit into an understanding of the world that meant it could fill psychological needs. Divorced from that understanding, we oscillate between an unhealthy obsession with work and escape fantasies of perfect dream jobs or early retirement.

These three forces mean that, despite lives of material abundance and apparent ease, many of us feel exhausted and apathetic.

Energy Management is Key to Productivity and Well-Being

The forces that leave us exhausted and drained are much larger than we are. And nostalgia for a simpler time is a daydream, not a solution.

Even so, we can cultivate practices that restore the prior, more humane, ways to manage our energy.

In the face of a world designed to drain our biological sources of energy, we can create new fuel. We can cultivate deliberate practices of sleep, exercise, consumption and stress-management to restore our full capacity to live with energy and vigor.

In the face of unrelenting pressure to work more, longer and harder, we can design a new flow. We can craft rhythms of work and recovery that allow us to avoid exhaustion—while actually getting more done.

In the face of unsatisfying jobs divorced from meaning, we can create work that allows us to flourish. Neither a burden nor an obsession, we can choose work with greater meaning, and we can also cultivate an attitude that enriches the work we have already chosen.

These are not easy aims, and the overall cultural trends certainly do not help. But these aims are achievable, provided we take them seriously.

Next week, I’m going to begin working with a cohort of students for my new program, Everyday Energy. If you’re serious about improving the quality your energy in your life, both for work and for well-being, I hope you’ll consider joining us.

The post Lesson One: The Human Energy Crisis appeared first on Scott H Young.



I’m sure most of us can think of at least a few people who fit that description. Maybe it’s a friend who continually makes bad choices in their dating life. Or a person who complains endlessly about their job but seems unable to take even trivial steps to improve it. “If they only did X,” we think, “their problem would go away.”

In almost all of these cases, the problem lies in their beliefs. The person struggling isn’t able to see a solution that’s obvious to everyone else, because their worldview won’t allow them to.

Limiting beliefs are easy to spot in other people; they’re much harder to notice within ourselves.

Today I want to recommend a new book on the science of beliefs, written by my friend Nir Eyal. Beyond Belief explains the fascinating science of how beliefs shape what we perceive, how we feel and the actions we take. It also provides tools for helping us identify our own limiting beliefs—and how to change them.

Nir sent me an advance copy of his new book to read, and I recorded an interview with him about what he learned digging deep into the research:

Belief, Reality and Delusions

Writing about belief is hard to do well.

On the one hand, there’s ample evidence for the power of beliefs to transform what we perceive, feel and do. We’re never just neutrally observing reality. Instead, what we experience is always a combination of the outside world and our beliefs about what that outside world is like.

On the other hand, a lot of self-help has taken the belief-shapes-reality notion too far. There’s a whole genre of delusional, quasi-mystical books that argue that simply believing in something is enough to change reality. These books teach a kind of unsustainable optimism—every time something bad happens, the explanation is that it’s because our beliefs were imperfect. Thus, every failed prediction becomes more evidence we need to double-down on our delusional optimism.

Nir does a good job of avoiding the extremes of both delusional optimism and faux-intellectual pessimism in his coverage. In reviewing the science on the placebo effect, for instance, he points out a great study which found that placebo inhalers for asthmatics had a similar effect on relieving symptoms as real ones, but, critically, the placebo didn’t actually change lung capacity.

There’s a sort of meta-question here that seems important: what actually can be changed by our beliefs, and what are the stubborn truths about reality that don’t change based on how we think.

Belief and Energy

Nir’s book release comes as I have been researching and writing on energy management, spurring me to think about how our topics overlap.

Fatigue and energy levels are exactly the kind of domain where our beliefs can have a big impact. Indeed, one of the early critiques of ego depletion research was that depletion can be moderated substantially by mindset. If we believe working hard “depletes” or “energizes” us, that belief itself can make a big difference in our persistence.

More deeply, the story we tell ourselves about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it can have a big impact on our energy levels.

A major finding in research on fatigue is that intrinsic motivation plays an enormous role in moderating the tiring effect of mental effort. It’s why doing sudoku puzzles can be a relaxing activity on a Sunday morning, but we might find the same task straining if it was a work assignment.

Intrinsic motivation is all about beliefs. The best theory of intrinsic motivation is that we feel intrinsically motivated to pursue activities that allow us to satisfy our basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence and connectedness. But those, in turn, depend critically on our other beliefs about whether our job is a burden or a calling, if we feel skillful or inept, and whether the work is meaningful or useless.

Further Questions on Beliefs

One sign of a good book is that it leaves you thinking about its ideas long after you’ve finished. Some of my lingering questions after finishing this book include:

• How much of having “better” beliefs is a shift towards greater accuracy versus useful self-deception?
• Are explicitly articulated beliefs and unconscious expectations governed by the same mechanisms? Are there some beliefs that we can change simply by introspection, while others require direct experience to shift?
• Is it better to shift beliefs by affirming the desired belief, or by increasing doubt on the limiting one? In other words, is the action of belief change more like increasing confidence or increasing skepticism?
• How should we reconcile the “beliefs as tools” notion with the idea of degrees of belief, as espoused by Bayesian models of rationality?
• If limiting beliefs are easier to spot in others than ourselves, how do we see past the self-fulfilling logic of our own worldview? What techniques and practices should we cultivate to help spot when our own beliefs need adjustment?

I encourage everyone to check out Nir’s book. I found it a compelling read that pushed me to rethink some of my own beliefs.

The post Book Recommendation: Beyond Belief appeared first on Scott H Young.

“Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

This “law” was proposed by the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson in a satirical 1955 essay for The Economist. Taken literally, it’s obviously false. Simply setting a deadline doesn’t make a goal achievable on an arbitrary timeframe.

There’s a heap of academic literature making the opposite case. The planning fallacy describes the well-documented tendency for complex projects to have cost overruns and delays. Indeed, the truth is perhaps closer to Hofstadter’s Law, where the author Douglas Hofstadter argued tongue-in-cheek that, “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”

Despite its definitively un-lawlike empirical status, Parkinson’s Law does capture an essential human truth: when we loosen time constraints, the time needed to do something somehow expands to fill at least some of the gap.

Energy, Pacing and the Limits of Human Endurance

I was thinking about Parkinson’s Law as I was reading Endure, Alex Hutchinson’s excellent book examining the limits of human persistence and some of the scientific controversy as to the exact nature of those limits.

Hutchinson, an impressive endurance athlete himself, retells a story of trying to beat his personal best time in the 1500m race in his days in track and field. He notes that despite giving every bit of effort he could muster, his pace would always speed up right at the end. He even tried to “trick” himself into running flat out, but consistently found the same dip in speed in the middle of his races.

If we assume that endurance is limited primarily by the body’s internal resources—muscle glycogen, oxygen uptake, ATP and whatnot—this makes no sense. If we’re giving it absolutely everything we’ve got, how is it possible that we can speed up as the race reaches its final stretch?

Hutchinson wasn’t alone in his peculiarity, however. It turns out that world-record runs show the same pattern of a dip in pace followed by a slight acceleration toward the end of the race. Even the most well-trained, disciplined and motivated runners must be holding something back.

Phenomena like this suggest to some academics that the true limits on endurance are not physical, but in the brain. Runners like Hutchinson don’t top out because they reach their true physical limits, but because the brain throttles performance so they never risk reaching those limits. This gives a comfortable margin to prevent bodily damage, and it anticipates future requirements for performance, holding back some when the race is still far from over.

The Connection Between Physical Fatigue and Mental Energy

The presence of a “central governor” that throttles athletic performance makes evolutionary sense. If we run so hard we tear our muscles, break blood vessels or starve our brain of oxygen, it doesn’t matter that we just set a personal best.

But do the same rules work for mental fatigue? After all, nobody’s brain starves of oxygen because they stop procrastinating.

The links between mental and physical fatigue are interesting. Participants who perform difficult mental tasks and then do an endurance test on an exercise bike give up earlier than those who haven’t done hard mental tasks. Mental performance is generally enhanced by exercise, but our performance typically suffers when we try to do cognitive tasks while exercising.

Some scholars even argue that physical and mental fatigue are the same thing. That, while there are certainly different facets to the phenomenon (e.g., being sleepy, muscle weakness, etc.), there is a general component of fatigue that seems to encompass both physical and mental work.

It’s not yet clear what the function of mental fatigue is. It’s possible that, like physical fatigue, mental fatigue is tracking some underlying biological state: energy availability, local sleep debt or stress hormones.


Another possibility is that fatigue in general, and mental fatigue specifically, is really about protecting us from investing in undesirable goals. When we work too long at an activity that lacks intrinsic value and is not immediately satisfying, fatigue begins to build. Perhaps fatigue is a more general emotion that creates pressure to change activities—protecting our bodies from physical overexertion in athletics and our limited attention from being absorbed by tasks that seem uninteresting or futile.

In either case, the effect of mental fatigue is similar to physical fatigue: throttle performance to prevent overexertion, both in the moment and anticipating future demands.

Getting More Done by Working Less

I bring all of this up because a key idea in energy management is working within natural rhythms of effort and rest. Work non-stop and we’ll exhaust ourselves. But if we can adopt periods of intense focus with complete recovery, paradoxically, we can get more done in less time with less exhaustion.

I’m certainly not the first to point this out, and the idea that we somehow get more done when we restrict our working hours within natural rhythms is a long-standing finding in productivity literature. From the earliest days when H. M. Vernon found that reducing workloads from then-common 70 to 80 hour workweeks did not result in reduced work output, to modern incarnations like Cal Newport’s fixed-schedule productivity, the paradoxical finding that we’re more productive when we force ourselves to work less has long been a self-help staple.

These ideas on fatigue add an interesting twist to the explanations. If the effort we put into tasks is not simply a measure of our underlying mental capacity, rather a subtle “pacing” strategy our brain is implementing to get through the work, it explains why punishing, non-stop schedules so often lower productivity.

Anticipating that we’ll be unable to rest, we unconsciously reduce our willingness to put in effort. This can mean sticking to the task but putting in less effort and accepting reduced performance. Alternatively, it can mean procrastinating, slacking off or engaging in trivial aspects of the work that are lower effort and less important.

As a result, the time needed to finish the work to a given standard expands, and we get an effect akin to what Parkinson described in his 1955 essay.

What Does it Mean to Manage Energy?

This, I think, gets at the heart of what it means to manage energy. It’s not simply about finding “balance” or making trade-offs between self-care and time for work. Instead, it’s reflecting the fundamental reality that we work best when we have healthy rhythms of work and recovery.

Too often, our culture pits extremes against each other. You’re either an ambitious striver committed to the hustle, or you’re a delicate orchid that must be sheltered from excess stress. Then, predictably, people line up to denounce one side and support the other.

I think what the research I’ve been covering shows, convincingly, is that this is a false dichotomy. Meaningful work, natural rhythms of work and rest, and healthy lifestyle habits like nurturing good sleep, diet and exercise: these practices for managing energy aren’t just key to working hard, but to living well.

The post Does This Psychological Quirk Explain Parkinson’s Law? appeared first on Scott H Young.

For instance, we all understand that sleep restores our energy. It would be bizarre to say, “I’m too tired to sleep.” However, we frequently say, “I’m too tired to exercise,” even though the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that moderate-intensity exercise gives both a short-term energy boost, and a long-term improvement to your overall energy levels.

So today, I want to discuss some of that research, pointing out seven behaviors where the typical perception doesn’t match reality, and offer a potential explanation for how we can so often be confused, despite our ample first-hand experience.

Misconception #1: Exercise is exhausting.

After a long, draining day, most of us would rather slump onto the couch than go running. For most of our evolutionary history, that would have been smart. Food was scarce, life was laborious, and, thus, it didn’t make sense to burn calories on anything not essential for survival.

But our instinct for laziness tricks us when it comes to our energy levels. Comprehensive reviews show that acute bouts of exercise generally have an energizing effect. Exercise boosts cognition, lifts mood and has strong effects on depression, anxiety, ADHD and more.

The long-term effects of consistent exercise are even more positive. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which contributes to the well-documented brain-boosting effects of exercise, actually gets released in higher amounts as you exercise more regularly.

That said, high-intensity exercise can be temporarily draining, and overtraining, which is more common among competitive athletes, flips the normal benefits around. So, while most of us benefit from exercising more, it is definitely possible to overdo it.¹

Misconception #2: Introverts are drained by socializing.

Imagine you’ve been invited to mingle with strangers for the next twenty minutes. Would you find that activity energizing or draining?

Your response might depend on whether you’re an introvert or not. Supposedly, extroverts are energized by social activities, while introverts are drained by them. This popular perception owes its origin to the early twentieth-century psychologist Carl Jung.

Researchers tested this idea by measuring the extroversion of 146 participants and then asking them to anticipate how participating in twenty minutes of socializing with several strangers would impact their energy. Participants’ expectations were very much in line with Jung’s formulation: most predicted the interaction to be draining, except the most extreme extroverts:

But then the study participants actually socialized, interacting one-on-one with a group of strangers without instructions on what to talk about. Afterward, participants were asked to report on their mood. The results did not match most of the participants’ initial expectations. Nearly everyone felt better after socializing, except for the extreme introverts (who felt neither better, nor worse):

This study isn’t the only example of this phenomenon. In another study, participants were asked to predict what their mood would be after spending their morning transit commute alone, or talking with a stranger. Most predicted they would feel worse after socializing, but the reality was the opposite.

Misconception #3: Scrolling on your phone is a great way to relax.

We spend a lot of time looking at screens. Recent data suggest the addition of social media and smartphones didn’t shift our media consumption away from television; we simply added new screen time on top of our already voluminous TV habits.

A common belief is that we need this mindless downtime to relax and unwind. However, recent research suggests that extra screen time may be more draining than energizing. This isn’t because screens themselves are always bad—although algorithms built to exploit our built-in negativity bias can make a lot of algorithmically-pushed content more stress-inducing than relaxing. Instead, the largest problem seems to be that screens are so compelling that they shorten our sleep.

Another downside of screens is that, while they can be relaxing, they often fail to provide the experiences of mastery and meaning that we can get from other leisure activities. When we spend our downtime on activities we don’t feel great about afterward, our leisure can actually be draining. 
Certainly, not all online content is bad. But it does suggest that being deliberate about our consumption is better for our energy levels.

Misconception #4: Long hours at work inevitably lead to burnout.

Equating our energy—the physical and mental powers we rely on to do things—with energy in the physics-sense of the word is itself a metaphor. And this metaphor is a seductive one: work hard and you use up your energy. Use it up too much, with too little recovery, and you burn out.



But the reality of fatigue is more complicated. It is true that longer hours on the job and higher work demands are (weakly) associated with fatigue and burnout. However, this effect is substantially moderated by the degree of control workers experience over their work.

When workers have autonomy and meaningful work, high demands no longer result in fatigue. Indeed, some researchers even argue that the energy metaphor is fundamentally mistaken. Fatigue may be better seen as an emotion that arises when you spend too much of your limited attention on activities that don’t feel intrinsically worthwhile to you.

Indeed, history is rich with examples of tireless men and women who worked nearly nonstop without burning out, but did so with a high degree of autonomy and meaningfulness of their actions. Simply working less—but doing so under conditions of low-autonomy and low intrinsic motivation, may not fix the underlying problems that lead to burnout.

Misconception #5: Alcohol helps you sleep better.

Sleep is essential for energy. But getting a good night’s sleep can be difficult: the more you try to sleep well, the harder it can be to drift off.

Faced with these difficulties, many of us resort to a variety of chemical means to promote sleep. Alcohol, sleeping pills, and marijuana are all common chemical agents that many feel are necessary to help them sleep well.

Unfortunately, the benefits of a nightcap are mostly illusory. While alcohol (and other chemical sedatives) do make it easier to become unconscious, they disrupt the delicate neural choreography that gives sleep its value in restoring our energy. Worse, long-term use can lead to habituation, which can make falling asleep without them incredibly difficult.

Instead, if you do suffer from insomnia, a better solution is CBT-I, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. This is the gold-standard treatment for insomnia that works to overcome some of the maladaptive beliefs and behaviors that keep us from getting consistent shut-eye. For those interested in learning more, I highly recommend the book Hello Sleep by Jade Wu.

Misconception #6: Venting helps you relieve stress.

Stress is draining. But our methods of relieving stress often make matters worse.

The centuries-old hydraulic model, which attempts to explain physiological and psychological observations based on some rather primitive science, posits that negative emotions build up inside and need to be released or they will rot us away from the inside. Catharsis, or the release of anger as a way to prevent the emotion from burning you up, was long seen as a necessary release from this internal tension.

Except it doesn’t work. Research finds that hitting a punching bag, angry journaling or other methods of catharsis tend to make anger worse—not better. The hydraulic model has largely been supplanted by a cognitive perspective that argues that emotions and thoughts form a self-reinforcing loop. Thus, angry behaviors reinforce angry thoughts. The key is to break this loop, not reinforce it.

If you’re angry or frustrated, take deep breaths, don’t vent your emotions. Then, in a calmer mood, you can either shrug off the issue or, if it requires communication, do so in a way that’s less likely to further inflame tensions.

(Partial) Misconception #7: Coffee boosts your energy (in the long-run).

Okay, so this one isn’t a complete misconception, but it is overstated.

The acute benefits of caffeine are positive and widely studied. Caffeine boosts alertness, reduces sleepiness, increases endurance and muscular performance, and has many other cognitive benefits. What’s more, assuming we get our caffeine from coffee rather than soda or energy drinks, the habit is good for our health.²

However, while the acute benefits of caffeine intake are undeniable, the long-term cognitive benefits are more controversial.

To understand why, a brief primer on caffeine is helpful. The main mechanism of caffeine in the brain is blocking adenosine receptors. Adenosine is a metabolic byproduct that tends to accumulate in our brain as we’re awake, making us feel sleepy. By blocking these receptors, we get a temporary boost of alertness.

However, the brain doesn’t just sit idly by in the presence of a foreign chemical. As a result of these adenosine-blocking caffeine molecules, we start creating more adenosine receptors to counteract the effect. Now, if we stop drinking our morning coffee, the result is we feel more tired than we would have if we didn’t drink coffee at all.

The controversy in the research is that almost all tests of caffeine’s effects on cognition don’t distinguish whether caffeine is boosting participants’ cognition beyond their natural baseline, or if it is simply undoing the physiological effects of withdrawal common in habitual caffeine users.

Methodologically speaking, given how prevalent caffeine use is in modern society, the baseline condition of the participants must be accounted for to determine caffeine’s true effect. Scientists must compare performance between people who have had caffeine and people who have abstained, after 1) a period of regular caffeine consumption and 2) a period of abstaining from caffeine from several days to overcome the effects of withdrawal. 



Their results suggest that much of caffeine’s boosting effects can be seen not as a stable long-term improvement, but simply as temporarily undoing the withdrawal state. 

Right now, the research is still equivocal, and the withdrawal-reversal explanation of caffeine’s cognitive boost may not apply to athletic performance enhancement, which is thought to be at least partially mediated by different mechanisms.³ However, it does suggest that caffeine may not be the long-term energizer it is often suggested to be.

Why are We Confused About Our Energy?

All of these confusions speak to a broader problem in our energy management: we’re often simply wrong about what leads to feeling drained and energized. While folk theories of energy management do get some things right (e.g., sleep is good, persistent stress is bad, and toxic work conditions lead to burnout), we get enough wrong that it’s worth questioning whether we might be able to do better.

I suspect some of our confusion stems from the fact that many of the items on our list have a higher immediate effort cost but create energy over the whole activity. Exercising is energizing, but it takes more effort to lace up our shoes than to flop onto the couch. Similarly, socializing with strangers is mildly anxiety-provoking, so we underrate how much friendliness improves our mood rather than drains it.

Other items may have more to do with subtle effects that only careful science can tease out. Caffeine, for instance, definitely raises alertness. But whether it does so by boosting our baseline energy or counteracting withdrawal is hard to know without doing a careful experiment.

Similarly, our ideas about energy may be misled by a faulty metaphor. While some aspects of our energy are indeed like a fuel that requires replenishment, many are not. The understanding we gain from these metaphors shapes our decisions and our behavior and, at least in some cases, may be pushing us into adopting the wrong solutions.

This matters because energy doesn’t just matter for productivity—it’s crucial for our well-being. Properly managing our energy isn’t just about getting more work done, but cultivating the positive emotions that make life worth living.

_ _ _

If you enjoyed this essay, I’m working on an upcoming course diving deep into the science of energy management and guiding you through creating new habits and practices to create more energy in your life. If you’re interested, click here and I’ll send you a free essay series on energy management.

The post Feeling Tired? Here Are 7 Things We Get Wrong About What Gives Us Energy appeared first on Scott H Young.


But what we do after work matters too. If we can recover adequately after work, we can maintain high energy even under demanding conditions.

Today, continuing my ongoing series on energy management, I want to look at our time outside of work: what we do in our time off and how our leisure choices determine the energy we have at work.

Relax or Engage?

One question is whether activities like lounging on the couch and scrolling on your phone or watching television are more restorative than more involved activities like hobbies, sports or personal projects?

Before we can answer that, though, it helps to make sense of what it even means to “recover” our energy. Researchers describe what I’m referring to as “energy” with two different dimensions: fatigue and vigor.

Fatigue is the feeling of being drained, exhausted and worn down. In this view, the more we work without recovery, the more fatigued we feel. This feeling is amplified when our work is demanding, effortful or stressful.

Vigor, in contrast, is the feeling of being motivated, engaged and driven. We feel vigorous when our psychological needs for autonomy, control and relatedness are met, so our actions feel voluntary and meaningful.

Although there’s a reasonable tension between these two ideas—fatigue tends to be associated with low vigor and vice versa—they’re conceptually distinct. We can be high in both vigor and fatigue, as in the final sprint to finish a race. We can also be low in both vigor and fatigue, as when not wanting to get out of bed to do chores on a lazy Sunday.

Energy recovery can impact our fatigue, vigor or both, depending on exactly what kind of recovery experience we have. Researchers who study the matter split these experiences into four types:

• Detachment. Being able to disconnect from work pressures and stresses after the day ends.
• Relaxation. Calming, stress-reducing activities.
• Mastery. Tackling personally meaningful challenges and pursuits.
• Control. Having the ability to choose what to do with our free time.

Keep in mind, these experiences aren’t a one-to-one match for leisure activities. Rather, think of them as being distinct components of different “recovery experiences.” For instance, we might get detachment and control from watching a movie, but not mastery; or we might get detachment, mastery and control from playing tennis, but not relaxation.

In one meta-analysis, researchers found that detachment and relaxation were more strongly associated with reduced fatigue, and mastery and control were more strongly related to increased vigor.

This suggests that feelings of exhaustion benefit more from detachment and relaxation, whereas feelings of low motivation or drive benefit more from attending to our psychological needs for competence and autonomy.

How to Recover Energy in Your Time Off

This leaves us with the question of which sorts of leisure time activities actually produce detachment, relaxation, mastery or control.

Here, a few reliable findings emerge:

Unsurprisingly, doing chores at home doesn’t do much to recover our energy. So-called “high duty” activities may not be part of our jobs, but they still feel like work and don’t contribute to recovering our energy.

Importantly, the interpretation we attach to these activities matters more than their objective characteristics. Childcare, for instance, can be either a joy or a burden—and thus restorative or draining—depending on whether we enjoy spending time with our kids or feel it as an obligation. Similarly, lots of chores, like gardening, carpentry or home organizing, can also be hobbies.

The critical distinction between “active leisure” and “chore” is whether the pursuit is internally motivated. This, in turn, depends on whether the pursuit feels voluntary, is positively connected to other people, or can provide experiences of competence and mastery.

Another finding from the same literature is that while recovery experiences matter, they’re dwarfed by the impact of sleep. Good sleep has 2-3x the effect of recovery experiences, suggesting that while staying up late to watch an extra episode of television may help us relax, its benefits are undercut by the sleep we lose.

Furthermore, while relaxing with activities like watching television or using a digital device can contribute to reduced fatigue, they’re less likely to help with vigor because we don’t generally find them particularly satisfying or meaningful. This suggests that if we can spend our free time in a way that satisfies our deeper needs, we’ll be more successful at recovering our energy.

Finally, physical activity has a robust effect on energy levels. This owes to some powerful physiological effects of exercise in addition to the psychological benefits of recovery experiences. Mentally engaging but largely sedentary leisure activities, like painting or baking, are often better than completely passive leisure activities. But including at least some physically active leisure activities in our time off is even more powerful.

The Exhaustion Cycle

If you’ve been struggling with low energy, you might have noticed a problem: all of the “better” leisure activities tend to be more effortful!

This creates a paradox: when we don’t have energy, we opt for lower-effort leisure activities. But, because those activities don’t really fulfill any of our deeper psychological needs, they aren’t particularly invigorating.

Often this hits as a double whammy: we get overwhelmed or stressed by acute job demands. Because of the added stress at work, recovery becomes more important. But, since we have less time and energy, we cut back on active leisure, physical activity, socializing with friends and the added stress makes our sleep worse. The result is that a short-term stressor can easily become a cycle of exhaustion that can slide into burnout.

This is unfortunate news, as it suggests our energy levels are vulnerable to a draining spiral.


But another way of looking at it is that the spiral of energy also runs in reverse. Just as a sudden wave of work can cause a cascading downward spiral, small positive changes can also compound. Small actions to recover our energy—adding in small bouts of physical activity, taking brief chunks to attend to psychological needs instead of just doomscrolling, putting in a little extra effort to sleep earlier—compound so that we’re able to take on bigger investments in our energy that reap bigger returns.

Instead of a cycle of exhaustion, we can create a cycle of enthusiasm and energy. The key is to take the first steps.

What is your approach to fully recovering your energy after work? What are obstacles do you have to feeling fully energized? Share your thoughts in the comments!

The post The Relaxation Paradox: Why Zoning Out Doesn’t Always Restore Your Energy appeared first on Scott H Young.

Today I want to talk about effort. Why do some tasks feel harder than others? And how can we make the hard work we need to do feel easier?

What Makes Something Effortful?

Why does solving a math problem in your head feel mentally effortful, but scrolling on your phone or playing video games does not?

A naive answer might be that some tasks are effortful because they use more of our brain. Casually speaking, we sometimes talk about “turning our brain off” when we’re exhausted and can’t do mental work.

It’s an intuitive idea, but ultimately false.

Simply opening our eyes generates an enormous amount of neural activity in the parts of the brain that process vision. Thus, if effort simply corresponded to using our brain, watching a video should be more effortful than trying to solve a math problem with our eyes closed.

A better answer would say that not all brain activity feels that effortful, but brain activity associated with deliberate control often does. The parts of the brain most clearly associated with the subjective feelings of effort are those associated with working memory and executive control.

But here, too, we run into some difficulties. Playing a video game doesn’t feel effortful the way that solving math puzzles in our head does, but both require total concentration. In contrast, staring at a blank wall requires no working memory, yet is incredibly effortful to sustain for more than a few minutes.

The best explanation I’ve heard for this is that effort is a sensation of opportunity costs. Basically, our working memory is limited and needed for most tasks, so we must use those resources wisely. When we engage in low-reward activities that monopolize those limited resources, we experience it as effort.

This helps to explain why video games, despite being cognitively demanding, can feel effortless, and why boring tasks, like staring at a wall, can feel effortful. Video games are designed with all sorts of intrinsic and immediate rewards that sustain our engagement. Staring at a blank wall is hard, because we could be using our brain for something that’s more rewarding.

Effort and Fatigue

Thus motivation, in particular the immediate rewards predicted by the dopamine network in our brain, plays a critical role in the sensation of effort. If we’re doing an activity that is steadily giving us rewards in the here and now, we’ll find it less effortful.

In contrast, if an alternative activity (including daydreaming) would provide a better stream of in-the-moment rewards, it will take more effort to keep on task.

This opportunity cost theory of effort is one I’ve shared previously. I believe it holds true, but I think when I wrote that article I was missing the kernel of truth buried in the now somewhat-tarnished ego depletion research: namely, that our capacity for effort isn’t constant.

When we are well-rested, energized and optimistic, we have a higher capacity for effortful activity. In contrast, if we’re exhausted, sleepy or depressed, even moderately effortful activities can feel impossibly hard.

Consider two different activities. One is low effort, and has low long-term rewards (such as phone scrolling). Another is high-effort, and has high long-term rewards (such as studying for an important exam). Which we choose to do will depend, in part, on our energy levels—it isn’t impossible to study when low on energy, but we’ll be much less likely to choose that high effort/high long-term reward task.⁴

This can help reconcile the “energy as a resource” and “energy as motivation” perspectives. When we are depleted of energy, it tilts the motivational landscape so that effortful activities must promise even greater rewards to get us to take action.

Three Paths to Making Hard Work Easier

All of this suggests that we have a few levers we can pull to make the hard work we need to do easier:

1. We can make the tasks less effortful.
2. We can make the tasks more rewarding in the long-term.
3. We can increase our baseline energy to make effort itself easier.

Let’s take a look at each:

1. Finding Flow: Make Tasks Less Effortful

Since effort is a sensation of the opportunity costs of using our general-purpose executive control faculties, there are a few ways we can directly reduce the effort of tasks.

We can make hard tasks easier. This can be done by lowering our standards (e.g., aiming for a lousy first draft or not allowing censoring when brainstorming). It can be done through shifting to a “meta” task that seeks first to understand the source of our difficulties (e.g., journaling, rubber duck debugging or the Feynman technique). It can also be done through learning and experience, which causes initially-effortful tasks to become increasingly automatic.

We can make boring tasks more engaging. We can do this by increasing standards to make a task more challenging, adding constraints and complexity, or turning them into a kind of game to increase their intrinsic rewards.

Finally we can tweak what sorts of alternative tasks we engage in. If we reduce the pull of nearby temptations and distractions, the effort needed to do the exact same task goes down. Go to the library to study instead of staying at home by the television, and be wary of tons of shallow and easy media that drains our motivation to do harder things.

2. Creating Drive: Make Tasks More Deeply Motivating

Alternatively, instead of trying to reduce the effort of the work, we can increase our motivation to do hard things by picking more inspiring projects and goals. When working on something that feels deeply meaningful and important, it becomes much easier to push through momentary effort than if it all feels pointless.

Finding more motivating projects to work on is itself a deep topic. Part of this skill comes from exposure. Some ideas are naturally good, and others are bad. So if we don’t have a good stock of ideas to work on, we’ll naturally be less motivated.

However, we all know that simply having a great idea is rarely enough for motivation. We need self-confidence that we can achieve it. This kind of belief builds through positive experience. We need a worldview that values the aims we aspire to. And, perhaps most importantly, we need to be in an environment that genuinely rewards our strivings.

Building more purpose and meaning doesn’t solve the problem of effort—the most driven people in the world still work hard—but it makes overcoming apathy and stagnation much easier. Even heroic efforts are possible to persist through if the long-term motivation is apparent.

3. Fueling Energy: Make Effort Itself Easier

Finally, we can work on cultivating the baseline energy that makes effort easier to sustain and tilts us towards doing harder things.

Some of this is biological. As discussed in my essay on stress, short bursts of stress work to energize us, sharpening our attention and motivating us to take physical action. However, chronic stress saps our energy, because it impairs our body’s investment in repair and recovery, eventually grinding us down.

This means cultivating good lifestyle habits, like regular exercise, getting good sleep, eating well, and engaging in stress-management practices like self-reflection and building solid relationships, is important. While we only have limited control over our health—many of us are beset by illnesses or conditions that are not our fault—taking what control we do have over our health can make an enormous difference in our capacity to do hard work.

This was perhaps the biggest benefit of my recent Foundations project. By fixing my sleep, diet and fitness habits, the work I need to do to sustain my business and take care of my family feels a lot easier, even though the effort required to do the tasks and my motivation to do them hasn’t changed.

_ _ _

This essay is just an introduction. In reality, all three of these steps: making the work less effortful and finding flow, making it more meaningful and increasing your drive, and cultivating the baseline energy that fuels you are all huge topics with lots to discuss.

To help achieve this, I’m working on a new course, Everyday Energy, to synthesize the research into a practical roadmap for people who want to improve their energy.

In the meantime, I want to dig deeper into some of these topics as I continue this essay series. Next, I’d like to look at how the time we spend not working impacts our energy levels, and try to answer the question of whether it’s more restorative to spend free time relaxing deeply or engaging in more active pursuits.

The post How to Make Hard Work Feel Easy appeared first on Scott H Young.

Foundations is a guided journal that condenses much of the research I did in my year-long project. The book explains what foundations are, how to cultivate and sustain better habits, and teaches you the essentials for each of the twelve foundations I explored during my project.



As a guided journal, it also includes a progressive habit tracker you can use for your own year-long project to build the twelve keystone habits, helpful prompts for breaking through sticking points and additional tracking sheets once the year is over.⁵

You can get the book on Amazon in hardcover, paperback and Kindle formats.

The Foundations project I finished last year was one of the best projects I’ve done. In one year, I worked through twelve different habits, improving my fitness, productivity, finances and relationships. I read over 100 books, lost weight, improved my sleep and just generally became a happier person.

While we still plan on running the full companion course (next session starts in May) with its 160+ lessons, guided worksheets and community coaching, I understand that not everyone is able to participate in a premium course. Therefore, to try to make the project more broadly accessible, I created a condensed version of what we taught in the course in this guided journal.

What is a Guided Journal?

This is my first foray into guided journals. For those unsure of what that means, exactly, it’s a mixture of a regular book, structured prompts for your own reflection, and a handy habit tracker that allows you to pursue your own version of the Foundations project.

Just to put that in context, the full manuscript is a little over 20,000 words. In comparison, my two traditionally published books, Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, were around 75,000 words.⁶ The book is also more to-the-point and action-oriented than my typical nonfiction book writing, as the idea is to give you everything you need to know to succeed with transforming your foundations for life.

If you’ve seen my Foundations project and are serious about undertaking it yourself in full, the journal is a perfect guide.

If you’d like to implement a just few of the habits, the information contained is exactly what you need to get started.

And even if you’re still on the fence and aren’t sure if you want to start anything yet, the book is still a great read. Who knows, you might even convince yourself to embark on some new efforts to make your life better?

The Foundations guided journal is published through Amazon and is available in paperback, hardcover and Kindle (with links to PDFs for the tracker and journal prompts).

I hope you’ll enjoy reading this book as much as I enjoyed writing it!

Special thanks to my editor Maria Bengtson, designer Dávid Csere, course production lead Vat Jaiswal and my wife, Zorica, who encouraged me to create the journal!

The post My New Book: Foundations appeared first on Scott H Young.

But even if we recognize that our energy is a major part of getting the work done, the concept of energy isn’t quite so simple. Last week, I made a deep dive into one facet of this problem, the twists and turns in the saga of ego depletion research.

The conclusion I came to was that while hard work can certainly be draining, this effect is moderated by many factors. Thus, managing our energy is more than just safeguarding a simple resource—we must also grapple with questions of motivation, context and beliefs.

Continuing this series, today I’d like to focus on a different angle of the psychology of energy management: how does stress impact your energy levels?

This is an interesting question because stress has seemingly paradoxical effects on our energy. In the right amounts, at the right times, stress is actually an energizer—it allows us to quickly deploy resources to face a challenge. However, our stress responses are often inappropriate, both in timing and intensity, and the result is burnout and exhaustion.

So let’s take a quick look at what stress is actually good for, what amount is ideal, and how we can take steps to optimize (not eliminate) the stress in our lives so we can truly thrive.

The Origins of Stress

While stress as a feeling has been known for ages, the exact mechanisms through which it functions in the body weren’t understood until relatively recently.


Hans Selye, a Hungarian endocrinologist, was studying the effect of injecting “extracts” of various organs into rats. Soon, the rats began to show a strange set of symptoms: enlargement of the adrenal cortex, shrinking of the thymus and gastric ulcers.


At first he was elated: he thought he had discovered a new hormone in the ground-up organs! But then he checked the control group and saw they were suffering the same way. It seems that it was the injections themselves driving the response, not any mysterious substance in his preparations.

This caused Selye to reflect on an earlier observation he’d made: people suffering from diverse diseases, such as cancer or tuberculosis, generally displayed many of the same symptoms despite having wildly different pathologies.

Selye proposed that animals in general exhibited what he later termed a “stress response,” a kind of universal coping mechanism to disturbances from their environment.

Stress: What Is It Good For?

But why would animals have a mechanism that gives them stomach ulcers in response to repeated injections? Isn’t stress a bad thing?

The answer depends on the intensity and the timescale.

Stress begins when the brain senses a threat. That could be external (e.g., a lion is chasing you), it could be internal (e.g., you’re losing a lot of blood) or it could even be purely psychological (e.g., you have an exam in two weeks that you haven’t studied for). 

This causes a cascade of hormones to be released that mobilize your body into action. Energy is diverted away from long-term processes like growth and repair, and poured into muscles to enable you to quickly move away from that threat. Your immune system is diverted to the front lines to deal with immediate infections at the site of injury (spending less on the antibodies that might tackle longer-term illnesses like colds, flus or cancers). Your attention narrows and your memory is temporarily enhanced.

In short, the stress response acts to mobilize energy quickly, marshaling resources to take action in the present moment while putting long-term projects on hold.

This is all well and good if you’re being chased by a lion on the savannah. The stress response may make the difference between escaping with your life and being some predator’s lunch.

 But stress has two major drawbacks in our largely lion-free lives:

1. Too much stress can impair our work.

Nearly everyone can recall a situation where they did much worse on a test because, in that state of high-tension stress, they couldn’t remember the answers to questions they knew they studied.

This isn’t just a post hoc rationalization; it corresponds to one of the earliest documented psychological laws, which showed that the relationship between the level of stress (or general arousal) and performance on a range of tasks is generally an inverted U-shaped curve.

Robert Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson’s eponymous law noted that for relatively simple tasks, such as running away from a lion, higher stress improves performance. However, for complicated tasks, like remembering the quadratic equation in the middle of an exam, lower stress is generally better.

This doesn’t mean stress is always negative. Certainly, firefighters and emergency paramedics benefit from some elevated stress levels toward the end of a 24-hour shift. But for students, programmers, artists and academics, the work we do usually deteriorates when stress is above the optimal intensity.

2. Ongoing stress can impair your energy.

The second problem with the stress response is what happens when it goes on for too long.

Many of the chronic diseases we associate with stress are a result of the stress response lasting too long: high blood pressure helps move energy to your muscles in an emergency, but chronic high blood pressure leads to heart disease and stroke.



Other chronic diseases come not from the stress response itself, but how the body turns off the stress response. Stress temporarily upregulates some parts of the immune system—this is useful if you anticipate receiving an injury that might be the source of an infection—but too much immunity can also be bad (think: autoimmune diseases). As a result, built into the stress response is a lagging downregulation. The result is that long-term stress ends up suppressing the immune system, making you more likely to get sick.⁷

Keep activating the stress response, through stressors real or imagined, and the result isn’t a consistently energized state, but burnout, depression and exhaustion.

Optimal Stress

The optimal stress for productivity is mild-to-moderate in intensity and persists only as long as is needed to energize the work.

A good example of an optimized stress response comes from Robert Sapolsky’s book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers, where he describes a team of Norwegian paratroopers who were practicing skydiving. In the beginning of their training, stress levels were high before and after the jumps. But after many repeated attempts, the stress response became elevated only during the jump itself.


If you think about it, this is exactly what you’d want. A racing heart and sweaty palms for hours before or after your jump aren’t helpful. But the boost in alertness and energy that accompanies the stress response is probably beneficial when you need to remember to pull your ripcord as you’re hurtling towards the ground in free fall.

Following the Yerkes-Dodson Law, most of us need a far smaller bump in stress response to energize our work than a paratrooper might, ranging from the moderate intensity needed to give a killer speech to a large crowd, to the mild alertness needed to maintain vigilance while we’re poring over financial statements.

More importantly than optimizing the intensity, however, is the duration of the elevated stress. Ideally, stress should energize us to take action when needed, then recede when we’re no longer working on the problem. Like the skilled paratroopers, the ideal would be to have enough stress to focus us during our task, but to remain calm both before and after.

Improving Your Stress Response

Selye’s discovery was that stress was a general response to many different kinds of stressors. Since the causes of stress are diverse, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The right way to deal with excessive fear of public speaking, for instance, isn’t necessarily the same way to cope with excess stress caused by a toxic boss or unpredictable work demands.

I can’t do a full treatment of all possible stress management approaches in this essay, but I do want to leave some pointers for additional reading in case you or someone you know is struggling with managing stress.


Broadly, the research I’ve encountered breaks down stress management into four types: health, support, mindset and elimination of the underlying stressors.

1. Health: Exercise, Eat Well and Get Enough Sleep

While we often think about stress in the psychological terms of thoughts and feelings, it’s important to recognize that the process is fundamentally biological. Stress involves a cascade of hormones with resulting physiological changes. Therefore, how you cope with stress and the overall functioning of your body are not independent.

Exercise has a well-documented protective effect against stress. Some of this is because exercise improves our underlying physiological system so stress can turn on and off more effectively, but some of it is also probably due to the release of endorphins and other hormones associated with exercise that can counter some of the stress response.

Insufficient sleep can cause chronic stress, and stress can make it harder to get enough sleep, potentially creating a vicious cycle. If you’re not prioritizing sleep already, making it a goal to unwind before bed can help you sleep enough. If you are prioritizing sleep but can’t seem to make it happen, there are treatment options that work better than sleeping pills.

Speaking informally, diet is often the biggest factor people associate with energy levels, but the evidence I’ve encountered has been fairly mixed. That doesn’t mean eating healthy is unimportant, however, as a characteristic feature of the stress response is elevating insulin levels to shuttle energy to your muscles—something that worsens other metabolic problems that can stem from a poor diet.

Some further reading on improving stress through health and lifestyle changes:

1. Spark by John Ratey — Showing how exercise has many mental well-being benefits, including stress reduction.
2. Hello Sleep by Jade Wu — A book on overcoming insomnia, with sections focusing on breaking the stress-insomnia cycle.

2. Support: Find Friends Who Care About You

Loneliness kills. Research finds social isolation has negative health impacts on the same level as smoking cigarettes or failing to exercise. This is because social isolation is incredibly stressful.

This isn’t to say simply being around people will eliminate stress. Indeed, other people can often be the cause of our stresses. Toxic relationships or sitting alone in a room full of strangers can make us feel worse, rather than better.

However, there are strong associations between social capital, friends, family and spousal support and how you cope with life’s stressors. Contrary to popular wisdom, this applies to introverts as well, with even introverts benefiting from social contact rather than staying home alone.

Some further reading on improving stress through social support:

1. Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam — A great introduction to the science of how social networks foster health and well-being in both individuals and societies.
2. Friendship by Lydia Denworth — A review of the science of socializing, including its impacts on stress and health.
3. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation — A 2023 report by the U.S. Surgeon General on the the stress of social isolation and its consequences for health and stress.

3. Mindset: Reframe Your Stress

Stress may be in the body, but what counts as a stressor is in our head. In order to have a stress response, we need to perceive and interpret a situation as threatening.

This can occur through mechanisms mostly outside of our conscious awareness, such as if we suffered a catastrophic injury. However, many of the stressors we face in life are psychological, meaning they are mediated through layers of beliefs and attitudes we hold about the world.

Different approaches we can use to change our mind to change our stress have been developed and validated:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) works by challenging automatic thoughts and the beliefs they represent, especially working to get rid of irrational thinking patterns that make situations more stressful than they ought to be.
• Instead of challenging beliefs, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) works to try to accept them and avoid getting “hooked” by thoughts and feelings. This can be useful to deal with uncontrollable stressors that can cause unwanted rumination and worrying.
• Mindfulness and meditation can also help, in this case by shifting attention away from imagined worries and onto our present sensations and feelings.

In addition to psychological approaches to stress management, there’s also a world of advice offered by religion and philosophy as well. Stoicism and Buddhism, to me, seem in part designed to deal with humanity’s collective problem of overactive psychological stress.

Some further reading for reducing stress by altering how you think:

1. Cognitive Behavior Therapy by Judith Beck — A great CBT primer.
2. ACT Made Simple by Russ Harris — An introduction to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.
3. Altered Traits by Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson — Reviews on the science of meditation to alter long-term traits, including those related to stress.

4. Eliminate Stressors: Stop Doing Work You Hate

Finally, there’s an obvious way to de-stress: stop doing the things that stress you out. Leave a toxic workplace. Escape your abusive spouse. Get out of the frustrating one-sided friendship. Quit the project that is making you miserable.

I previously reviewed Christina Maslach’s research on burnout. She takes the view that we have made a mistake in medicalizing burnout. This is an understandable reaction in a world of insurance providers and pricy therapy. But when burnout is treated as a medical disorder, the assumption is that the person, not the environment, is sick.

Instead, Maslach argues that we should treat burnout cases as canaries in the coal mines of our workplaces. They show us that toxicity is building up, and the proper treatment is clean air, not more resilient workers who manage to get by while breathing noxious fumes.

“Just say no” to stress is not always an option. Life is full of unasked-for stressors that can’t simply be walked away from. But, to the extent that we can make choices about what sorts of jobs, relationships and environments we live in, we can also choose healthier situations that will be better for our mental well-being and stress response.

For further reading, I suggest The Burnout Challenge by Christina Maslach and Michael P. Leiter.

Concluding Thoughts

A recurring feature of energy-management is the importance of working within humane cycles of effort and recovery. The research on stress helps put that into perspective by showing how a modest amount of stress response can be beneficial, but that stress can become disastrous when it is too much for too long.

I’m curious about your own thoughts on stress: how much stress do you feel in your own life? When do you find it energizing and helpful for your work? Or do you typically find it excessive and exhausting? What do you do to manage your own stress? Share your thoughts in the comments.

For the next installment of the series, I’d like to shift to focus on effort and motivation: what makes work harder, and how can we make the work we need to do easier.

The post How Stress Impacts Your Energy Levels appeared first on Scott H Young.

But what, exactly, is energy?

It sounds obvious: We work, we get tired, and then it’s harder to work more. You had energy, you used it up. Now you’re running on empty, and work is difficult. Pretty straightforward, right?

Except, it’s not so simple. The science behind this “obvious” idea is surprisingly complex, involving biological, psychological and sociological factors. Even a basic question, like whether it’s harder to do an effortful task after doing another effortful task or an easier one, leads straight into one of the most infamous scientific controversies of the last two decades.

So today, I’m going to dive into some of this complexity. I know my appetite for esoteric social scientific debates is higher than average, and many people are simply interested in how to feel more energized and able to do their work.

But to have any hope of managing our energy, first we must understand what energy even is. And in order to do that, we need to grapple with that complexity.

Let’s dive in. I promise it will be worth it.

Is Energy a Resource?

A basic idea, built right into the idea of energy itself, is that it is some sort of resource: a metaphorical battery that is depleted and refilled. 

For a while, this was the scientific consensus. In the 1990s, psychologist Roy Baumeister and colleagues proposed the theory of ego depletion that worked off of this premise.

Self-control and, by extension, mentally effortful tasks tap a universal mental “resource.” As with any good scientific theory, it made a falsifiable prediction: people would be less successful at exhibiting self-control after a “depleting” task than after a neutral control task. Energy would be used up, and they would be more likely to succumb to impulse or temptation.

Ego depletion also had an ancillary hypothesis: Not only was energy like a battery, depleted with use and recharged with rest, but the overall capacity could grow or shrink with use, much like a muscle. By exercising self-control regularly, we could become more disciplined.

Both the battery and muscle analogies have a certain commonsense appeal. And, for a time, it appeared they had solid scientific support as well. To date, over 600 published studies in the literature have found support for ego depletion, and a 2010 meta-analysis by Martin Hagger and colleagues found that not only was the effect statistically significant, but it was practically significant with an effect size about 50% larger than typically found in social psychology.

As evidence accumulated, ego depletion researchers looked for a physical property in the brain that corresponded to the behavioral effects. And many believed they found it: glucose.

The brain is a hungry organ. Despite accounting for only 2% of the body’s weight, it consumes nearly 20% of our daily calories. Thinking, it turns out, is a costly business, and that price is paid in the currency of glucose.

Once again, support began to build not only for the behavioral reality of ego depletion, but its correlation to brain glucose levels. Drinking a sugar-sweetened beverage could temporarily boost glucose and stave off the energy-depleting effects of mental effort, whereas a placebo drink sweetened with an artificial sweetener would not.

It was a textbook case of science done right: a commonsense observation was translated into an experimental hypothesis, the hypothesis was rigorously tested in controlled experiments, and, finally, research found the physical mechanism mediating the effect. Credits roll, end of story.

Cracks in the Ego Depletion Story

Except, that’s not what happened. Instead, research on ego depletion imploded, calling into question not only this theory, but the entire edifice of social science.

The first cracks in the simple sugar-powered battery analogy came from an interesting 2010 experiment by growth-mindset researchers Job, Dweck and Walton.

In their experiment, they found that a person’s beliefs about willpower moderated the ego depletion effect. If a person believed willpower was a like a battery that gets used up, they were more depleted in the follow-up task than if they believed willpower was unlimited.


But if ego depletion is drawing on a physical property of the brain, like glucose levels, how could mere beliefs about willpower itself influence the results?

Other researchers found that incentives could influence depletion. Small rewards could eliminate the effect of depletion altogether. This was another strike against a straightforward reading of the ego depletion theory. After all, if your car is out of gas and stranded on the highway, it’s not as if throwing some cash on the dashboard will unlock a secret fuel tank.

Attacks mounted against glucose as a biological mediator of the ego depletion effect. While the brain does consume a lot of glucose, any additional amount consumed owing to self-control is negligible. The amount consumed by the visual cortex is much greater, but we rarely feel fatigued from simply looking at stuff.

In light of these findings, other researchers proposed alternative accounts: perhaps ego depletion was better understood as a decline in motivation, not a resource, and so could be influenced by beliefs or incentives. Maybe effort is a perception of opportunity costs? Or a kind of affective state?

All of these attacks would have been part of the normal back-and-forth of social science, the theory/counter-theory jabs academics lob all the time, had it not been for a bombshell paper that came out in 2016.

Ego Depletion and the Replication Crisis

By this point in the story, rumors were already circulating that some psychological results were not to be trusted. The field of social priming, where brief (sometimes subliminal) exposure to stimuli was thought to have large effects on behavior, had trouble replicating some of their classic experiments. Science, if it is to have any meaning, has to be reliable. An effect that exists on Monday can’t disappear on Tuesday when a different scientist runs the experiment.

Researchers were coming to realize that practices like failing to publish null results, or tweaking an experiment or analysis until a significant effect appeared, weren’t as innocent as they had thought. To quote one set of researchers, “Everyone knew it was wrong, but they thought it was wrong the way it’s wrong to jaywalk. [But] simulations revealed it was wrong the way it’s wrong to rob a bank.”

After correcting for unpublished null findings, one meta-analysis of ego depletion effects came up with much smaller effect sizes than Hagger’s original 2010 meta-analysis. Suddenly, hundreds of studies all pointing in the same direction felt more suspicious than confirmatory.

To quell doubts, Hagger himself led a preregistered replication attempt. This asked many labs, all following standardized protocols with no possible p-hacking, to re-run ego depletion experiments. Published in 2016, the aggregate statistics found no statistically significant effect.

Run by one of the major ego depletion researchers, the 2016 study failing to replicate findings had a catastrophic effect on the field. Ego depletion as a theory was dead, a cautionary tale into the dangers of unrigorous science.

Ego Depletion: Back from the Dead?

Except, of course, you knew it wouldn’t be so simple.

Ego depletion was wounded, and many of its early studies were fatally flawed, but it’s still far from dead.

The theory adapted in the face of some of its challenges. For instance, the new theory suggests that, while ego depletion is real, we rarely find ourselves truly “on empty.” Instead we conserve energy for future use when it is running low.

To use a new analogy, think of it like spending money. After a pricey holiday season, you may feel a little overspent and decide to be more frugal with your spending in January to compensate. But it’s not as if you’ve literally spent your very last dollar—if an emergency (or significant opportunity) came up, you’d probably find a bit more money to spend.

Beliefs and motivations can also be seen as inputs to our energy system, rather than viewing things through the overly simplistic lens of a single limited resource governing all behavior.

Defenders of ego depletion argue that many of the failed replications failed to fully test the theory.

For one, there’s the issue of dose. To coordinate many different labs using different tasks, many of the large-scale preregistered ego depletion experiments used very short self-control tasks to “deplete” participants. These “depletion tasks” may only have been 10 to 15 minutes in duration, which is likely too short to meaningfully fatigue the participants. Thus, the lack of significant effects could be due to the studies being underpowered rather than the effect itself being unreal.

Second, there’s the issue of the selected control task. Many experimental designs used boring tasks as the “neutral” condition. However, sticking to a boring task may itself deplete our mental energies, making the control and depletion conditions more similar than they should be.

Third, there’s the issue of whether the depletion task itself was properly validated. Many experiments used letter-crossing tasks, where participants were asked to read a short text and cross out certain letters, such as “cross out any e next to a vowel.” For theoretical reasons, this type of task was assumed to deplete self-control. However, researchers have pointed out that crossing out letters may be tedious, but it doesn’t involve the type of motivational conflict that typifies self-control problems, such as choosing to eat broccoli versus cheesecake.

Proponents argue that, when taking these into account, ego depletion is still real, albeit weaker than previously thought, and more dependent on contextual factors.

Even the biophysical basis is being revised. While the theory that glucose is the mediator of ego depletion is definitively dead, recent neuroscience work using brain wave monitors has found elevated levels of delta-wave activity (the kind normally seen in deep sleep) in the regions of the brain associated with self-control after a longer depleting task.

It may be that, unlike a fuel that gets burned up, ego depletion is more like garbage that builds up and needs to be collected, with metabolic by-products of neural activity increasing the incentive to take a mental break.

What’s the State of the Understanding in 2026?

It’s clear that, despite the scientific roller-coaster ride, the consensus on energy is far from settled.

 It’s completely reasonable to have skepticism about ego depletion given its tarnished history. I know I certainly do.

But, despite my enthusiastic promotion of an early alternative theory in terms of opportunity costs, the evidence hasn’t clearly aligned in support of an obvious successor. 

Instead, perhaps unfortunately, reality is simply messier than the original ego depletion theory permitted. The phenomenon of feeling drained after working hard on something is decidedly real, but the actual mechanisms through which it happens may be a mixture of depletion, motivation, attention and beliefs.

There are important practical consequences of this messy picture as well. It means there isn’t just a single factor, like glucose, that mediates the ease with which we do hard things—we can’t improve our energy just by drinking a soda anymore than we can make a car go faster by dousing it with gasoline.

But that complexity is also an opportunity. If energy comes not from a single resource but from multiple factors, there are more levers we can pull when trying to get more energy out of ourselves and our work.

The story of ego depletion is a twisting one, but it’s just one aspect in the fascinating science of what makes us feel alive and energized. Next, I’ll shift away from controversy to discuss some science with much more stable footing: how stress impacts our health and energy levels.

The post What Exactly is Energy? appeared first on Scott H Young.

Invariably, my answer disappoints: “Well, it depends …”

There are some obvious reasons: I don’t know the exam. I don’t know their ability level. I don’t know what they already know.

But there’s a deeper reason for my ambivalence: I don’t know if they can stick to the schedule they’ve set for themselves.

Setting up a schedule is easy. Sticking to it—especially when the work involved is cognitively demanding—is incredibly hard.

The Myth of Time Management

A few years ago, I started working on a deep, research-based essay on the history of productivity, akin to my other Complete Guides. I eventually pivoted away from the project to work on my second book, but I can still recall reading many 19th century books about the emerging science of productivity.

Early thinking on productivity was dominated by factory work. Time management was understood by the second, not the hour, with theorists like Frederick Winslow Taylor literally timing worker’s movements with a stopwatch in hand, attempting to squeeze ever-more efficiency out of the laborers who happened to be under his gaze.

This focus on time continued, even as “work” increasingly moved from manufacturing parts to manipulating symbols. Peter Drucker, the management guru who coined the term “knowledge worker” also put the problem of productivity squarely in the realm of managing one’s time:

Effective executives, in my observation, do not start with their tasks. They start with their time. And they do not start out with planning. They start by finding out where their time actually goes.

To Drucker’s executives, work was an unceasing flow of tasks, interruptions, appointments and meetings. The issue they faced was trying to assert control over the torrent of demands on their time, rather than the endurance required to stick to a studying schedule described in so many of the plaintive student emails I’ve received.

However, based on both my own experience and my correspondence with readers over the decades, I feel like most of us don’t resemble either the simple “human machines” studied by Taylor and his ilk, nor the captains of industry advised by Drucker. Instead, most of us are more like the students in my inbox: we want to manage our time, but actually sticking to a schedule is much harder than planning it out.

I’ve faced this problem myself. Whether it’s doing research and writing all day or trying to stick to the pace I set for myself during projects like the MIT Challenge, scheduling things isn’t hard—but actually doing the work is.

Energy is the Missing Key

One of my first popular essays I wrote nearly two decades ago was a review of The Power of Full Engagement, an excellent book that helps explain the gap so many of us feel between what we feel we ought to be able to accomplish given our available time and how much we actually accomplish on a routine basis.

The authors, Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr, argue that high-productivity work is similar to athletics, where cycles of intense effort followed by recovery produce training gains, and both non-stop work and non-stop rest result in poorer outcomes.

Schwartz and Loehr found that their typical client is overworked mentally and underworked physically. They work long hours, but sleep and exercise little. As a result, their capacity for productive work falls, and as they slip further from their “theoretical” productivity goals, as defined by time management, they resolve to work ever harder to make up the gap—further entrenching their exhaustion and decreasing their capacity.

I think the prevalence of this type of productivity trap helps to explain why so much productivity advice rubs people the wrong way. When we hear “productivity”, the first thing to come to mind is usually a push to work even harder. Reflecting on our own busyness and mounting exhaustion, our subconscious recoils at the thought of added pressure.

But, if you reflect on it, our most productive moments aren’t actually like that. Instead, when we’re at our most productive, the work has a certain lightness. Focus is easy, the work is interesting, and even if we feel tired at the end, it doesn’t feel exhausting.

When your energy—rather than your time—is managed well, work doesn’t feel all that hard. It can even be joyful.

One of the things people find strange when I’m retelling the stories of some of my intensive learning projects is that they were, on the whole, not so effortful. While studying 60+ hours per week required focus, I felt pretty content most days when doing those challenges.

That wasn’t because I’m always extremely productive (I’m not). I’ve had plenty of projects that were slogs to complete, where getting even an hour or two of work done felt like pulling my fingernails out.

Productivity advice, if it is to be helpful, should be a road map explaining how to make work more like those joyful projects and less like the slogs. It should teach you how to create more situations where, even if you’re working incredibly hard, the work itself feels easy.

Energy is More Than a Fuel

Unfortunately, there is no secret to easy productivity. Energy itself may be a somewhat misleading metaphor. “Fuel” implies that what’s constrained is some internal resource that can be deployed against any task with equal efficacy.

Instead, the ease (or lack thereof) with which we stick to the schedules and plans we make varies according to a complicated mess of factors both biological and psychological.

These factors are what I’m going to explore over the coming weeks in a series of essays. I’m looking at what the best-available research says about how to think about this problem. I’m also sharing what strategies I’ve found work best, from my own experiments in the nearly two decades since I first wrote about this topic.

Right now, I’d like to end with a thought experiment: What would you work on if doing the work was easy? This ideal may not be entirely achievable in all cases, but it at least exposes us to the gap between the things we’d like to achieve and what we feel we have the energy to accomplish. Write your answer in the comments!

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