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The Nine Habits to Increase Your Energy
Running out of energy too quickly? Try one (or all) of these tricks to boost it
back up and get more out of your day.
Scott Young |
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Energy, not time, is the basis for productivity. Having all the hours in the day
won’t help
you if you’re
exhausted
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Your
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habits
define your energy levels. If you have good habits, you’ll feel
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energized and be more resilient to burn out, both physically and mentally. If your
habits are misaligned, you can
get into a cycleAccept
where you feel worse and worse,
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until your it’s a struggle just to keep up.
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Here are nine habits you can work on this year to increase your energy levels.
Habit #1: Go to Sleep Early
Sleep is the foundation of your energy. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll start
to underperform.
While some people claim to work best on six or less hours of sleep, research says
they’re kidding themselves. Seven to eight hours are pretty much mandatory if
you’re going to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.
For some people the sleep deprivation may have mentally plateaued, meaning
they feel slightly tired all day, but they don’t think they’re getting any worse. An
interesting experiment showed that sleep deprivation caused continuous declines
in mental performance, even though subjects felt like they were holding steady.
Try this: Go to bed by 10pm every night, including weekends, for the next
thirty days.
Habit #2: Exercise Every Day
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Exercise is a long-term investment in your energy levels. It’s easy to cut in the
short-term, but over time you’ll reduce your overall fitness, making it harder to
think straight and stay alert throughout the day.
If you struggle to find time for exercise, don’t make going to the gym your
prerequisite. Make a habit of doing some pushups or burpees every day
throughout the day. These will get your heart pumping and blood moving, and
they don’t require setting aside two hours from your already busy schedule.
You can add gym or fitness classes on top of this foundational habit, but this basic
investment in exercise will keep you sharp when you can’t make it to the gym.
Try this: Do at least 10 burpees every day from your home.
Habit #3: Twenty-Minute Naps
Napping may feel lazy, but there’s research showing it has a range of cognitive
benefits. This is particularly true if you’re doing a lot of learning, since the short
burst of sleep can help with memory.
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I used cookies
to feelonguilty
naps,and
believing
it was
sign of cookies,
weakness.
Now,
I think
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it’s definitely a strength. A short nap can turn you back on for work in the
a ternoon, when you’d normally be exhausted. Even if you work in an office that
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doesn’t encourage napping, you can use a slice of your lunch break, to quickly
rest.
The key is to learn how to take short naps. Many people take naps which are too
long, pushing them into deeper phases of sleep which cause them to feel even
groggier when they wake up (although the benefits to even these naps o ten occur
a ter the initial grogginess wears o ). The key is to wake up immediately with
your alarm. If you start adding more time, a quick nap can become a long sleep.
Try this: Insert a 20 minute nap a ter you eat lunch to recuperate your
energy for the a ternoon.
Habit #4: Do Your Hard Work in the Morning
Aim to get your most important work done in the first four hours of the workday,
starting as soon as possible.
The benefits to your energy here are mostly psychological. My energy levels
depend a lot on my mood. If I’ve gotten some important work done, my mood is
usuallyYour
good
and I feel productive. If I’ve wasted time on emails, meetings, calls
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or failed
something
valuable,
I’m and
o ten
frustrated
exhausted
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The other reason for this approach
is that deep
work isn’t always sustainable for
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the full workday. Better to concentrate it into a specific period than randomly
insert it across chunks of time.
Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.
Habit #5: Set Your Intention the Day Before
Energy is o ten about momentum. Start working hard and you’ll overcome
procrastination and keep going throughout the day. Start slow and you may end
up struggling against your own impulses, wasting the energy on things that aren’t
productive.
One way to avoid this is to set a very clear intention of how your day will go,
particularly in the beginning, the night before. Visualizing this intention and
writing it down into your schedule can make it happen more automatically when
you wake up.
Try this: Before you go to bed, write down your plan for the next day and
visualize it.
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Habitcookies
#6: Sell
Yourself
onand
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Many people simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs: that other people
(marketers) are really good at persuading them to do all sorts of things they
wouldn’t do otherwise, but that they themselves have no ability to change their
own motivation to do the things they have to do.
The truth is, you need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for
other people, but for yourself.
Part of that starts with packaging—how you frame your goals and projects can
have a huge effect on your motivation. Is this something you have to do? Or an
exciting challenge?
Next it comes from refreshing and reminding yourself of your inspirations. Why
did you get started down this path? What were you hoping to achieve. Good
marketers know to focus the customer on visualizing what they want to drive
sales. You can focus yourself on what you want to have the energy to get it done.
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Try this:
aside
ten minutes
every day to think about what today’s actions
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Habit #7: Get Better Friends
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You may not be able to choose your parents, colleagues or your boss. But you do
have some control over the friends in your life.
You know that some friends you leave a conversation with them feeling excited
and energized. Others you leave feeling even worse than you did beforehand.
You don’t need to exclude friends who are going through temporarily rough
times, but you should consider who you spend your time with when there are
people who consistently create one-sided emotional exchanges as the basis for
your relationships. Everyone needs a shoulder to cry on sometimes, but some
people will expect you to be their permanent shoulder.
Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.
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HabitWe#8:
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One of the great benefits of reading books isn’t simply to give you ideas and
information. Rather it’s to reinforce a mentality that o ten occurs at a
subconcious level. The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that
subtly change your entire thinking patterns.
Audio books can be very useful for this, since you can listen to them and re-listen
to them on the go every day. A good book for this is one that, when you listen to
it, automatically adjusts your thinking onto the things you need to work hard on.
Just like a good song can be the background for a particular emotion, a good book
can be the background for a particular energy of thinking.
Try this: Always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your
goals.
Habit #9: Align Your Life
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The last habit isn’t a one-time process, but an ongoing effort to bring the different
elements of your life out of conflict and into alignment with one another.
A lot of energy is squandered because the different parts of our lives, both
internal and external, are in conflict with each other. That could be the colleague
at work who doesn’t want you to get promoted, the friends who make fun of your
goals or even the internal fears and assumptions that keep you hesitating.
Spend some time untangling the different conflicts in your life to see how you
could resolve them. Sometimes that can be done in the short-term, by making a
change. Sometimes, it requires a long-term plan to escape the toxic environment,
social circle or belief system that holds you back.
Try this: Sit down for an hour and brainstorm all the things which assist
your goals and all the things which hold you back. How could you resolve
those tensions?
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This post originally appeared on Scott Young and was published November 17, 2018. This article is republished here with
permission.
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