This blog followed the formative years of my life. I wrote my first post when I was 17, still a senior in high school. When I started, I was closer in age to my children than to my current age.

The internet today is unrecognizable compared to the place I started writing two decades ago. In 2006, YouTube was less than a year old, Facebook was still limited to college students, Netflix sent DVDs in the mail, and Instagram, Twitter and TikTok didn’t exist yet.

The internet was a smaller, weirder place back then. Sharing writing online was a hobby for nerds like me who could set up their own website—normal people read magazines and newspapers. Today, nearly everything people watch and read is online.

The personalities that were attracted to blogging were also different. The mostly text-based media meant early blogging afforded quasi-anonymity. Despite using my real name, I didn’t tell many people I knew in real life I was blogging. Writing online allowed me to connect with people over shared interests, even when those interests didn’t always overlap with my real-life peers’.

Today, the idea of going into writing online as way of expressing yourself quasi-anonymously feels quaint. With the dominance of video and viral media, achieving celebrity is seen as the end goal rather than an unwanted side-effect of trying to share your perspective.

This blog feels like a bit of an anachronism. Here I am, still writing blog posts on a personal website like it’s 2006. I’m lucky that I got to build an audience during those early days, and that I can continue to write here despite my idiosyncrasies. It’s hard to say if I had been born twenty years later if I would have had such an opportunity.

On Changing My Mind

Precocity cuts both ways. My early arrival to the internet likely made my current career possible. But it also meant that I made a lot of early mistakes I probably wouldn’t have made had I began today.

Re-reading old essays sometimes makes me cringe. Watching old videos even more so.

 At some point, my essays stopped sucking by my own standards (admittedly, a low bar), and I no longer feel embarrassed by my writing. But, given that I started writing as a teenager, all my old writing (and dorm-room videos) are still there for all to see.

Intellectual consistency is another victim of starting so early. I’ve flip-flopped on many ideas. Sometimes more than once. So much so that it’s become a bit of a joke among my team members that my most popular essays begin with “I was wrong about __.”

These varying perspectives, taken over twenty years, mean I sometimes end up getting in disagreements with myself or with readers preferring a stance I took years ago. While I’d like to think my writing and ideas have gotten better, I’ve also changed as a person. The perspective at 17 and at 37 necessarily differs in ways that can’t simply be accounted for as accumulating wisdom.

I expect twenty years from now my perspective will be quite different again. Assuming, of course, I’m still lucky enough to spend so much of my time writing.

On Giving Advice

Writing online, of course, is a pretty good gig if you can get it.

 I have, for two decades, had my dream job. Being able to make stuff, share it online, and earn enough to survive was my dream at 17. It still is, although by now I’ve gotten so used to it that it’s easy to take for granted.

I have a lot of sympathy for people who email me asking how they might be able to do what I do. But I’m not certain I’m well situated to give good advice.

The metamorphosis of the internet means the path I took to get here literally doesn’t exist anymore. Back then, a nobody with a personal website could rank for top search engine terms, webcam footage could go viral on YouTube, and the hot thing for gaining subscribers was something called a “blog carnival.” (Seriously.)

If anyone reading this eventually does find success creating things online, it will certainly be through a very different route than the one I took.

While I can’t really give any help to someone who wants to replicate my job, I can hopefully offer some suggestions for keeping it. After twenty years, I think my only advice is to write the kind of stuff you like to read. That way, you’ll know you’ll reach an audience of at least one person.

The post Reflections on Writing for 20 Years appeared first on Scott H Young.

On Monday, I’ll be opening registration for my new course, Everyday Energy. The course is a three-month program designed to help you build practices into your life that promote greater vitality—and productivity.

In case you missed it, I’ve written a brief essay series discussing our human energy crisis, the biological roots of our exhaustion and the need to return to natural rhythms of effort and rest. Today, I’m going to examine the meanings we ascribe to work, and why our society’s dominant paradigm so often leads to burnout.

Burnout is not just being tired. If it was, a good night’s sleep would be enough to fix our energy. Instead, burnout is what happens when exhaustion becomes entrenched.

The research into the causes of burnout is complex and fascinating. To put it simply, burnout happens when:

• First, we’re overworked. Demands exceed our ability to cope or recover. Fatigue results.
• This leads to feeling a lack of control and an inability to keep up, which results in our feeling less competent. We feel helpless and impotent.
• Finally, our feelings of exhaustion and helplessness give way to increased cynicism about the work itself. Work is not simply too much and too hard, it feels ultimately meaningless.

These three components of burnout—exhaustion, cynicism and inefficacy—explain why going on vacation doesn’t fix burnout. We may be able to fix momentary fatigue, but by the time burnout has set in, our beliefs about the work itself and our ability to cope with it have soured.



Fixing burnout isn’t easy. The hardened feelings of cynicism and inefficacy need to be replaced with renewed feelings of competence and meaningfulness of our striving. Sometimes that can be fixed within an existing role, but often it requires finding a new workplace, job or even career path.

The persistence of burnout explains why energy management is so important. We want to stop the vicious cycle of exhaustion before it settles into hard-to-adjust beliefs of inefficacy or cynicism.

Avoiding burnout isn’t the only reason to care about energy management. There’s a state opposite to burnout that’s worth cultivating: flourishing. Just as burnout can become entrenched, flourishing can create enduring resilience and offer a wellspring of energy.

Flourishing: The Opposite of Burnout

If burnout is caused by a combination of fatigue without recovery, feelings of inefficacy, and increased cynicism about the meaning of work, flourishing is the opposite. When you’re flourishing at work, you:

1. Have a healthy balance between effort and recovery.
2. Feel confident about your abilities.
3. Feel stable and secure about the meaning of your work.

When these three conditions are met, the effect is resilience. You have more capacity to dig deep in moments of crisis, and you can take on much bigger efforts without feeling overwhelmed.



Flourishing also neatly illustrates that the opposite of burnout isn’t being relaxed, sprawled out on a beach somewhere. While fixing the state of physical exhaustion is often a priority when we’re overwhelmed, the fantasy of fleeing from all work—whether that’s counting the days until retirement, buying lottery tickets or escaping in video games—is a means of coping, not thriving.

Flourishing isn’t a compromise. It’s not a protective stance to prevent us becoming burned out, but one that embraces challenges and strivings in a way that brings more vitality to our lives.

A Flattening of Meaning

I’ve previously explored the biological roots of fatigue and how our culture of work helps to promote burnout. When we undermine our sleep, diet and exercise, fail to manage stress and work outside of natural rhythms, we create conditions ripe for exhaustion to creep in.

But our philosophy of work exacerbates these problems. Our culture sends us conflicting messages on the meaning we’re supposed to derive from work.

On the one hand, we’re supposed to follow our passions, find our voice and have an impact. Work, in this light, isn’t simply things that need to be done, rather it becomes a transcendent mission. That’s a noble vision, but it often conflicts with the mundane reality of our actual jobs. By requiring meaning in our work to reach some ecstatic ideal, we often pass over the actually existing meaning in our everyday tasks.

On the other hand, we’re taught to maximize economic value, to see work as a means to an end—namely leisure. In this view, work is the price you pay to do the things that really make life valuable.

In an interesting essay, the philosopher Agnes Callard writes about teaching a class on Aristotle’s views on work and leisure. She comments that what the students are doing now, pursuing the life of the mind, was true leisure in Aristotle’s sense. But, for most of the students in her class, attendance is more like “work”—a thing they need to do to get good jobs and live in society.

Both of these visions make it harder for us to find genuine meaning in our work. The transcendent calling ignores the mundane and leaves us longing for a kind of work that doesn’t exist. The transactionalist attitude negates the possibility of meaning in work, with everybody working for the weekend.

What’s needed is a philosophy of work that grounds work in a stable appreciation of its value. Ultimately, the value of our work, and the meanings that will sustain a life of flourishing, are not limited to a few rare professions. It is something available to us all, provided we are able to see it.

If you’ve enjoyed this lesson series and would like to go deeper, I’m opening registration for Everyday Energy on Monday. The course will dive deeper into the biology, psychology and philosophy of energy, and help you cultivate enduring practices for a flourishing life. I hope to see you there!

The post Lesson Four: The Opposite of Burnout appeared first on Scott H Young.

Registration for my new course, Everyday Energy opens next week. In anticipation, I’ve written an essay series covering the central philosophy of the course. If you’re just joining us, check out the first essay on why we’re living through a human energy crisis, and an essay on the biological roots of our exhaustion, which we cover in more depth in the first month of the course.

Nature works in rhythms. Machines work non-stop. Many of our psychological difficulties with work—procrastination, burnout, strain and exhaustion—reflect a misguided attempt to use the logic of machines instead of the logic of nature in guiding human effort.

It wasn’t always this way. Early human existence was rarely easy, but it did follow the logic of nature’s rhythms.

Anthropological research into hunter-gatherer communities, often used as a stand-in for our Paleolithic ancestors, shows that they work much harder than we do, physically. The Hadza in southern Africa, for instance, engage in a little more than two hours of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day. That’s roughly 4x the standard recommendation for health, and as much as 14x the amount we typically get in Western countries.



But while this lifestyle is laborious, it isn’t unceasing. Other researchers, looking at a !Kung tribe found that they only “worked” an average of two and a half days per week. Even the most industrious member studied, who went hunting over half of the days researchers recorded, put in a little less than 32 hours per week.

The invention of farming, and our exit from the proverbial Eden of our Paleolithic ancestors, left us relatively poorer, with worse diets, shortened stature and new diseases.

But despite the poorer material conditions, we still worked within natural rhythms. Days began at dawn and ended at sundown, often with a rest during midday. Effort was seasonal, with intense periods during harvest and lighter efforts in winter. In as much as a third of the year, work was restricted due to feast days, festivals and religious observations.

The Invention of Clock Time

This changed with the invention of clock time. Before clocks, our understanding of time was intrinsically tied to nature’s rhythms. Even the length of an hour could vary, depending on the amount of daylight in each season.

With clocks came a new understanding of duration. Instead of flexible rhythms, time now had a fixed, unvarying duration, untethered from the natural world. With clock time came new possibilities to regulate labor and demand more machine-like adherence to a schedule.

Clock time’s dominance became complete during the Industrial Revolution. Workers put in 12–16 hour days, with few breaks and no vacations. In the course of a year, a medieval peasant might have worked 1200 to 1800 hours. In contrast, an early factory worker might have put in over 3000 hours.

Today, few of us have the same grueling schedule as an early Industrial-era factory worker. But while we may have gained perks in the form of better pay, free coffee and comfortable chairs, we have only become increasingly alienated from natural rhythms of work and rest.

Smartphones and email mean that work doesn’t end when we leave the office. Work projects and meetings spill into evenings and weekends. Deadlines and performance reviews leave us wary of taking too many days of vacation.

A Return to Rhythm

The way we work is unhealthy and unnatural. By replacing our prior rhythms with clock time, we’ve severed the traditional cycles of work and recovery. As a result, we feel squeezed between procrastination and frenzy, exhaustion and apathy.

The solution is a return to rhythms. Not simply working less (although, for many of us, it would be an improvement) but switching from an unceasing pace to a work routine characterized by periods of effort followed by recovery.

Unfortunately, any would-be reformer of our current system runs into two problems.

The first is that, despite its unsuitability as a model for human work, the machine-logic of unceasing effort is embedded in our economy. While I think we would be healthier and happier if we had working rhythms tied to nature, as our ancestors did, I don’t long for a return to the days before antibiotics, indoor plumbing and refrigerators.

Is our machine-like approach to work simply a necessity to maintain our modern standard of living?

I believe not. There is considerable cultural variation in our approach to work, from the extreme workaholism of white-collar Japan, to the leisurely lunch hours taken in France. Despite this, it’s the French, not the Japanese, who have higher labor productivity.

This suggests to me that the way we work is a product of culture, rather than a natural result of some path to ever-increasing optimization. Office workers in Japan put in heroic hours because it is expected of them, not because it maximizes useful work. We do what is “normal”, even if what is “normal” is deeply unnatural.

This leads us to our second problem: if the ways we work are part of our culture, how can an individual buck the trend? How can we have healthy cycles of work and rest when surrounded by a culture that operates on the machine metaphor?

This is a tricky problem, but not an insurmountable one. It goes without saying that some compromise is necessary. We always flow, in part, to the rhythms dictated by the broader society. Depending on our position, that may be a gently nudging tide or a rushing rapid.

Yet we’re not entirely at the mercy of our environment. Compared to our factory-working forebears, most knowledge workers have considerable autonomy in many dimensions of our work. We can create healthier rhythms, even as the broader work culture persists in its ceaseless flow.

In my upcoming course, Everyday Energy, we will spend a month working on exactly this problem: how do you carve out natural cycles of rest and recovery within the constraints imposed by your job? We may not be able to return to the past, but we can return to a rhythm of life that is humane and sustainable.

In the next essay, I’ll talk about how the meaning of work has flattened, and the problem of burnout and disillusion that this entails. After that, I’ll open registration for the full three-month course, Everyday Energy. I hope you’ll join me!

The post Lesson Three: Rhythmic Productivity—A More Humane Way to Work appeared first on Scott H Young.

Next week, I’m opening registration for my new course Everyday Energy. In the last essay, I discussed why we’re living through a crisis of human energy. Today, I’d like to share some thoughts on how to fix that, with insights drawn from the first month of the three-month curriculum.

Energy starts with biology. All human physical and cognitive performance is constrained by the fundamental reality that each of us exists as a biological system. When we incur debts—in sleep, stamina or stress—that remain unpaid for too long, the result is breakdown of that system.

Data show that, biologically-speaking, there’s a lot we could be doing better to enjoy greater vitality.

We’re in denial about our fitness. According to self-reports, over half of Americans meet the recommended amounts of weekly exercise. But, when that figure was measured objectively using wearable devices, only one-in-ten actually met the recommendation.

And the recommendations aren’t even optimal! Indeed, while most of us would benefit from exercising more (and a few extreme individuals would benefit from exercising less), the recommended amount of exercise is still below the amount where health benefits plateau.

We sleep poorly. Roughly a third of us fail to get enough sleep. One in ten of us have insomnia. Even worse, our sleep consistency is a disaster. Nearly 85% of people exhibit some degree of “social jet lag” with diverging weekend and weekday sleep rhythms that have a negative impact on health and energy.

The culprit is biological. The clock cells in our brains run slightly longer than a normal twenty-four hour day. Strong light cues provided by the sun constantly adjust that clock backwards. But, in our environment of bright indoor lights, insufficient daytime sunshine, and non-stop screens, we don’t get the resetting signal. Instead, we live in a state of perpetual jet lag.

Our food is fast and low-quality. While our ancestors had to worry about caloric deficits, for most of us the problem is caloric excess. Ultra-processed diets lead to energy that spikes and crashes, and subtle micronutrient deficiencies can leave us tired all the time without us knowing why.

We live in an era of anxiety. Stress in bursts energizes us, but sustained stress leaves us exhausted. Non-stop psychological threats, increasing social isolation, and fewer outlets for coping have resulted in an explosion of mental health diagnoses, and the energy-sapping effects they entail.

Turning Back the Cycle

Worse, these continual shocks to our system can form a vicious cycle. We get overwhelmed at work, so we cut back on exercise. This degrades our body’s ability to turn down the stress response. The increase in stress causes us to eat more junk food and keeps us up at night. The cycle turns, and we end up even more exhausted than we were before.

The self-reinforcing cycle of fatigue can be debilitating. We lack the very energy we need to do the things we need to gain greater energy!

The solution is to take small steps to turn the vicious cycle of energy sapping into a virtuous cycle of energy replenishment. Go to sleep ten minutes earlier. Take a brief daily walk. Learn some relaxation exercises. Switch from a late-afternoon energy drink to a healthy snack.

Small changes, implemented consistently, can build up to a great deal more energy. While the overall trends undermining the biological sources of our energy are dire, they are not destiny. Each of us has the power to live in the way our body and brain were designed—even in our modern world.

In my upcoming course, Everyday Energy, we will spend the first month making concrete changes in our daily practices to build more energy. You’ll learn the science of caffeine, the biology of stress, the neuroscience of light, and even researched-based answers to questions like whether standing desks work or which dietary changes science backs as actually boosting energy.

Energy starts with biology, but it doesn’t stop there. In the next lesson, I’ll cover some ideas drawn from the second month of the course, flow, where we dive into the psychology of work and rest, and how we can build sustainable rhythms to do the work we need to get done.

The post Lesson Two: Life Doesn’t Need to Be Exhausting appeared first on Scott H Young.

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.

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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.

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