Key Take-Aways

• Lower daily minimums.
• Solve exhaustion with recovery, not stimulation.
• Protect your mental energy because it’s finite.

Overview

Winston Churchill attributed his productivity and longevity to the “Conservation of Energy”, and through this trip I have gotten a glimpse into his mindset.

Taking the space needed to see what’s important, and how unimportant some other things are.

I’m wrapping up this trip with 12 days of no weed, manga/anime/youtube, or sugar.

Throughout this trip I noticed how often my attention wanted to drift elsewhere.
Our brains are constantly chasing novelty and if we aren’t careful, distraction becomes our default state.

Deep Work by Cal Newport teaches us to protect our attention, and I realized that protecting attention starts with protecting our mental energy.

Your attention and mental energy are finite resources. Build your life in a way that preserves them for what matters most.

The Lowered Daily Minimum

On this trip I’ve been working on doing fewer things better.
I took a page from Deep Work and I’ve been refining my systems and routines.

Our daily routines should be locked in and streamlined to encourage follow through.
To know where to start, prioritize your biggest impacts, the routines done daily.

In my case that meant revisiting my morning routine, evening routine, deep work blocks, social time, and weekly review system.
You can’t rush this process.
These routines will shape your future days, so take time to test them and make sure they fit.

Along with that, I asked myself: what is the minimum work I can do each day to strengthen the identities I’m building without losing sight of this trip and its priorities?

So I focused on my major priorities:
My blog, my portfolio project, content creation, my connections and reflection.

Solve Exhaustion With Recovery, not Stimulation

Instead of drowning out the quiet with weed, manga/anime and sugar, I chose to focus on more gentle and subtle forms of dopamine on this trip.

Conversing with the people I’m staying with, reading and rereading the Tao Te Ching, journaling and reflecting, planning my next trip, building my new routines for when I come back.

I realized I treated manga and weed as forms of rest after difficult work.
In reality, it was an escape. It never solved the exhaustion or the challenge itself.

I wasn’t recovering. I was postponing exhaustion until bedtime.

Science consistently points to sleep as one of the strongest predictors of long-term health and cognitive performance.

Arthur Schopenhauer says it well:

“Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed. ”

Your brain needs sleep. Without it, your decisions deteriorate and your outlook on the day worsens.

This busy week came with a lot less sleep.
I noticed my irritation was more easily triggered.

Thankfully I’ve been working on my self-control, self-awareness and impulse control, so I noticed the irritation and let it pass, otherwise who knows.

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Protect Your Mental Energy, Because It’s Finite

No matter how much food you eat, coffee you drink, you only have so much energy in a day.

Worrying about the future, replaying the past, or obsessing over what others think all cost energy.
Multiply those tiny moments across an entire day and you’ve burned through your reserves before noon.

Marcus Aurelius reminds us that our job is not to become slaves to our impulses, but to exercise reason over them.

Unlike animals we can practice delayed gratification and self control.
Yet we often surrender that ability and allow our impulses to make decisions for us.

These impulses won’t ever stop.
They’re indicators from your brain, and your brain will keep braining until you’re dead.
You’ll never attain perfect self control.

Instead you create a gap from the emotion and impulses.
Allowing yourself to feel and make a conscious and conservative decision based on that, instead of needlessly reacting and wasting energy.

Back to Reality

I was out to dinner with some friends during this week, and they got to asking me a question that I’ve just started to think about myself – “Are you happy?”

What does happiness even mean?
Everyone is different, same with their version of happy.

With a long enough vacation you forget what your normal was, or even what made you happy.
Despite that, there’s many things you have to get back to.

Depending on the type of trip and your goals, you may plan on coming back from your vacation with a new sense of self and goals you want to achieve.
This is where you decide what your new normal is going to be.

I have been working on my daily routines and figuring out how I want to spend my days.
The point of my trip was reconnecting and self-reflection.
Through reflecting I found some of my old habits aren’t going to fit into my new daily life.

This is good because now we can cut things out.

We already have enough things demanding our attention each day. We don’t need to create more for ourselves. Protect your energy, recover when you’re exhausted, and spend your limited attention on the things that truly matter.

I’d love to hear what value you got from my journey and if there’s anything you plan to take with you moving forward as well.