Learn to Manage your Personal Energy
Tell me if this sounds familiar — you get up around 9 to 10 am. You roll around for half an hour in bed, checking up on your social media. Then you get up, still drowsy, take care of your morning duties at home, and sit down at your computer — all the while wishing you could just sleep a bit more.
The nigh times though, are a totally different story.
You start to feel fully energised by evening. It is then that you start to take things seriously — you start working around late evening, and you prefer to continue well past midnight. After work, half an hour more of social scrolling, and then a few rounds of multiplayer games, sometimes continuing well into daybreak.
You might be thinking that you’re getting all work done for the day, every day, no matter how late it might get — and hence you’re very efficient and productive.
Let’s just say, no. You’re not.
Not by a long shot.
Through this piece, you should understand how to be able to manage your personal energy, the way it was always meant to be.
Continuing with the starting example we were talking of, what we’re doing when we follow such a lifestyle, is borrowing against our future self, by mismanaging our energy.
Poorly protecting our present self for long periods of time, has two very predictable outcomes — either you slowly run out of gas, or, you prematurely crash and burn-out big time.
Now you might say in your defence, Elon Musk sleeps only a maximum of 6 hours a day, he is one of the coolest and richest guys you know. Yes, all true. But if you’ve seen a few of his interviews — one quote from him stands out very prominently.
When asked, how it feels being The Elon Musk — he himself stated that it didn’t feel good, that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be who he is, if given another choice to go back and start from the top.
Yes, he is really cool, he is very wealthy — but at what cost — scrolling through his tweets from a few years back, you’ll find him saying that he regularly needs medium to high doses of sleeping pills — and even then its often ineffective. The overall moral is that — if you try to go for success, by sacrificing your health — the costs you have to pay are extremely high.
But there is a way to achieve big and maintain a very healthy lifestyle — you need good daily habits.
Begin early in the day — as early as Your body permits — it need not be 5 AM, it could be 7:30 to 8 AM. But anything after that will only mess up your body’s biological cycle. Eat right early in the morning, do some brisk exercises, have conversations with your loved ones — smile and laugh, look up your day’s goals and plans to reach those goals — and then don’t loiter around — get to work.
All this is nothing that you have not heard previously, it’s just that you heard only up till here — and that was the mistake.
You see as fascinating it is to watch morning routines of millionaires and CEO’s on YouTube, it won’t work for you most of the time for two reasons — the first, is that their lifestyle and your lifestyle will hardly ever match. And the second — you get to watch only one half of the routine — the morning half.
That morning routine would be moot without the night time routine applied the previous night.
When these people claim to get up at 5 AM to go for a run, unless they are delusional or just trying to show-off, they have just woken up from a sound 8 hour sleep. That means they went to bed by 8:30 PM the previous night — another misconception that we tend to have is that 8 hours in bed equals 8 hours of sleep, which is hardly ever true. Often, 8 and a half to 9 hours in bed, equal 8 hours of sleep.
But why eight hours? Can’t you do with just 7 or 6?
Well, you can for sure — but only if, either, your day’s work is shallow, and not really of much value in the bigger picture; or, if you’re just trying to look cool, while doing damage to your health. You see, big train engines, require a lot of time to cool down and rest after a journey, before taking off again. Its the same with your brain and your body.
But all this is not to make sure that you have a perfect day, But to have an energised start to the day after a proper cool-down from the previous day. Personal energy management is crucial.
So I’ll end this one with a question for you —
If You don’t take care of Your body, where will you live?
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