Hey guys! It’s wonderful to be back after a lengthy hiatus. Admittedly we almost lost this site thanks to pure negligence on my end. I’m somewhat thrilled that this unfortunate event has inspired a bit of a renaissance, in both website design (thanks to my amazing girlfriend!) and our motivation to produce content again! For now, here’s a post on mental energy. We really do hope you enjoy what’s to come. Stay tuned!
What the heck is mental energy?
Recently I have been feeling hesitant about engaging in my usual tasks. When writing about it in my journal, I struggled to come up with a precise reason as to why this was the case. I decided to rule out the usual suspects: lack of interest/boredom, no obvious benefit to performing the tasks, and simply overall laziness. Instead, the overhanging feeling in my mind was that this was down to some sort of mental fatigue. That’s when the term ‘mental energy’ popped into my head.
In my mind, mental energy can be likened to physical energy (the energy needed to perform physically straining tasks). In essence, you have a limited capacity to perform cognitive tasks day-to-day. Some cognitive tasks are more straining on mental energy than others, e.g. studying, decision-making, blog writing, dealing with stubborn people(!) etc. Like with physical work, I believe our bodies prefer doing less draining tasks for most of the day; we would even be sedentary most of the time if we could.
For me, consuming content on my phone is one way I typically defer from doing mentally straining tasks. The reason is simple: it consumes very little mental energy while still giving me sufficient enjoyment. My brain knows that performing productive tasks instead will be tiring, just like how doing exercise instead of sitting around is too. That is in spite of knowing that those productive tasks are just as pleasurable, way more gratifying, and most importantly, are in line with my future goals!
Building endurance
Analogising mental energy with physical energy makes contriving ways to build it quite simple. Here are the next steps:
- Understand your limit.
This is arguably the most important thing to get right. You must first understand that you have a limited capacity. Just like when you start out with exercise, you need to know how much you can do. Overworking leads to injury, or in this case, stress!
I know, I know, it really is such a cliché at this point. But have you ever thought about framing it in the form of doing exercise? Don’t expect to do everything you wish to do if you don’t have the capacity for it! It’s like expecting to be able to run a marathon before even hitting the treadmill. It’s all about showing up and building endurance bit by bit. Do a little bit more, push a little bit more, run a little bit more each time, consistently.
- Take breaks.
Once you understand your limit, you need to take short, frequent breaks as necessary. It protects you from stress and rebuilds your endurance, plus a little more. Sometimes that means absolutely zero output! Taking a break doesn’t always mean doing a lower energy task like doomscrolling your phone. It sometimes means doing absolutely nothing, and thinking about absolutely nothing.
- Set short term and long term goals.
The big picture is important too. Where do you want to be in a few weeks time? In a year’s time? How much do you want to be able to do each day? How many blog posts? Videos? This is great for knowing whether you are building that endurance and how much you are improving by. Keep it going!
And that’s all from me for now!
Comment below how you’re going to be building your mental energy and endurance. Thank you so much for reading this blog again!
– Verrel
Featured image by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash
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