Welcome to the Week Two lesson. Energy Management Energy is a huge part of successful learning. If you don t have energy, how are you going to be able to get all the stuff done that you planned out in your project? In this lesson I'm going to be following the model of Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr s energy management and focusing on their four dimensions of energy so you can see how you can improve them. I like this four dimensional model, because it covers all the aspects that affect how much energy we have to bring to our learning, to our work. And if you can focus on these four dimensions and see how to improve them, you can get good results. 1) Physical energy 2) Mental energy 3) Emotional energy 4) Spiritual energy However if you want to think of spiritual energy in a non religious or non spiritual terms it could be seen as your purpose, your sense of meaning about the work that you're doing. These four dimensions each act on different parts of your life. They involve different habits. But they all come together in what eventually will be how much energy, motivation and enthusiasm you have for the work and learning that you're doing. Improving Physical Energy The first and easiest thing to improve is your physical energy. Physical energy is the base of the pyramid. It s roughly the quantity of energy that you have available. You can improve it by doing three main things. 1) Get enough sleep so that you aren t tired after waking up My rule of thumb is that if you wake up and without having coffee or some kind of stimulant you are still exhausted after being up for about an hour, you're not getting enough sleep. If you wake up and you have half an hour where you're a little groggy, you're not quite there yet, you d like to keep sleeping, but then after that you're up, you're fine, you don't need coffee, then you're probably getting enough sleep. Use this as the judgment for your body, if you're not feeling like you're getting enough sleep, sleep more. Some people have poor sleep quality. They have maybe some sleep conditions which cause them to wake up or not get high quality sleep so they need more hours than someone who can sleep more efficiently. You know yourself. If you are tired after you wake up, get more sleep. I can think of very few situations in the long term where losing sleep benefits learning. It just does not. It destroys your energy, and it destroys a lot of the functions it provides in consolidating memory, which we ll be talking about in Week Three. 1 of 7
2) Exercise at least three to four times a week Not only does this improve your energy, but it has demonstrably positive effects on your overall cognition, your overall ability to learn. In fact, if there s one habit that was suggested for being able to learn better, it is getting enough exercise. What I recommend is exercising at least three to four times a week. Obviously if you have possible poor health, see a doctor before you start any exercise program to make sure that it s OK. But if you're already exercising, but you're not doing it frequently enough, I recommend setting a habit of exercising seven days a week. I know that sounds difficult, but the idea is to exercise seven days a week, but to keep the amount of exercise quite minimal, let s say, 15, 20 minutes. That is a lot more doable than trying to exercise for an hour, hour and a half three to four times per week. The reason why is that it s hard to sustain a habit that you're doing on some days but not on other days. You can make it more consistent if it s locked in with your schedule, but if you ve had trouble sustaining an exercise habit, I highly recommend exercising every single day. If you exercise every single day, not only will that have broad benefits in your energy, in your cognitive performance, but it also will be much easier to sustain as a habit until you get to a point where once you ve been exercising for a couple of months consistently, then you might want to switch to three or four times a week if you don t have time to do it. 3) Eat healthy The next step is to eat healthy. This goes without saying that if you're putting crap in your body, you're not going to be able to perform mentally in the way that you d like to. I m not going to suggest a specific diet. I think you can do the research on that and find a healthy eating strategy that works for you. I think most of us know what is healthy food and what s not healthy food, so we don t need a specific prescription. However, what I would recommend in particular is avoiding high glycemic index foods. These are refined carbohydrates, sugars, sodas, these kinds of things. The body processes the glucose in it because it gets a sudden crash, a sudden boost in the sugar levels, it suddenly creates insulin to match, and then it results in a crash. You have this quick boost of energy followed by this delayed crash of energy. Whereas if you take lower glycemic index foods, these are things like whole grains, things that are not as processed, what s going to happen is it s going to take longer to digest, your rise in glucose is going to be slower. The corresponding rise in insulin is also going to be slower so you're not going to have this crash after. It s good on a short term basis if you're trying to get some studying done, is not to drink a lot of soda or eat sugary foods because they're going to cause that boost, but they're also going to cause a crash. Whereas if you eat healthy and you're eating small meals, you're spreading it out throughout the day, you can have those stable energy levels that are conducive to good learning. One common objection is, I don t have time to do this. I m too busy, I have too much studying to do. I have too much work to be able to do this. This is complete garbage. You do have time to do this. In fact, you don t have time not to do this. 2 of 7
Spending 40 minutes exercising easily pays back for itself. Getting enough sleep, spending an extra hour sleeping so you're not tired when you wake up, easily pays for itself. The only situations where damaging your physical energy can help you get more work done is if the work is so easy, so mentally undemanding that you don t need to have a lot of energy to get through it. If that s not the case, then you need to do this. You can squeeze it into your schedule. If you don t have time to do a full hour of exercise every day, do a little bit of exercise in five or 10 minute bursts. If you really don t have time to sleep, maybe you're doing a medical residency and you're working weird hours, take naps. Do these kinds of things. They re going to pay off in your improved energy, your improved ability to learn and study later. Improving Mental Energy Next is your mental energy. One kind of conception is, I want to conserve my mental energy. I want to do un strenuous mental activities when I'm going to be having my time off, because I want to conserve it for my learning time. This kind of logic doesn t apply. You don t increase your mental energy by doing less mentally strenuous activities. It s just the opposite. Like physical exercise, your mind needs mental exercise. If a person told you, I go to the gym four hours a day. Would you expect this person to be exhausted or would you expect this person to be in great shape and have a lot of energy? It s just the same way. If you do more mental exercise, in the short term you might feel a little bit of drain, but in the long term doing more mental exercise, making that mental muscle stronger, you're going to be able to do more in the future. If you're learning full time, it s probably not an issue for you. You're probably doing a lot of strenuous mental activity. Although if you do have a lot of spare time you may want to also reshape that spare time to increase your mental energy. However, there is always the ability to retool. If you're having some spare time, you can make it more mentally engaging. You can learn things in your spare time. Even when I was learning things in school, I would often learn other things in my spare time. You need to make them a priority. You don t need to make them something that s going to conflict with your schedule, your project, that s going to get you derailed, but you can do it as a pastime. When you have a little bit of spare time, read a book. Go on a Coursera course. Try to learn a new language. Do something like that. You can play cognitively demanding games. This can be a good form of entertainment that s mentally strenuous. Things like chess or Go. I think even video games can be cognitively demanding. Things like StarCraft or things that aren t just reflexes but actually require you to think and go through a game, they can be cognitively demanding. 3 of 7
What I want to stress is when I'm suggesting you do mentally engaging activities to form a mental exercise, I'm not suggesting you have to remove all the fun from your activities. You don t have to do boring things that you don t enjoy, that you think, Ugh. This is so awful. I wish I could just watch TV. Rather, pick things that you enjoy but do have a component of mental strain that is cognitively demanding. I think that if you pick things that you do enjoy, this can be a great way to relax. A lot of people who have stressful jobs, who have difficult course loads, they do enjoy playing cognitively demanding video games, because they re entertaining. I recommend the same thing for you. Do things that engage your mind rather than just passively flowing over you, consumption of information. Improving Emotional Energy Next is emotional energy. Stress is one of those big killers of productivity. If you're stressed out, it s difficult to work and focus on learning. Similarly if you feel anxiety, depression, anger or other negative moods with high frequency, it can help to try to resolve the underlying emotional issues that you're having before you're moving forward with other productivity tools. If you can improve your stress levels, that can have an enormous impact on the quality of your studying. Much more so than anything that we can be talking about in the rest of the week or the later weeks of this course. I m not suggesting that this is easy to do, but there are some steps you can take to try to improve things at the margins, make it a little better than it is right now, maybe even if you don t have the full license to make full changes. One thing I recommend starting with is building healthy relationships. Having good relationships with your friends, with your family, with the people in your life, having people in your life, is a huge thing that can be an emotional reservoir of energy. However, if you have negative or destructive relationships, it can drain it, it can be a vampire on you. When I give this advice to people I often get these long emails from people saying, Nobody supports me in my life. I have all of these problems with my family. My significant other is cheating on me, and all of these things are happening. I feel like I do everything for my friends, and they don t care about me. I feel for these people. Unfortunately, there isn t that much I can help them with. I can t solve the emotional problems in their relationships, because they re their relationships, they re not mine, and I don t know the details. What I'm recommending to you is if you feel like that describes you, you feel like you have a lot of negative relationships in your life that are draining your energy, it s not an easy step. I m not suggesting that it s as quick as flipping a button and now everybody s going to be positive in your life. But you can take steps to make positive changes. If you feel like you have a negative relationship with someone who has to be in your life, you can try talking to them. Let them know how you feel. See if you can try to move toward a more healthy path. If 4 of 7
you can t move it toward a more healthy path, then try to minimize your involvement with that person. Spend less time with them. Reduce the extent of their relationship. Try to form other more positive relationships. There are lots of support groups out there for specific issues if you are facing one of those. Even something like joining a self help group. I found when I was dealing with these kinds of issues in my own life, joining Toastmasters really helped me, because it was positive and group oriented toward personal development. The people who were there were interested in getting better, and it was a positive source of energy in my life. I m not suggesting that there s a one size fits all solution to fix the relationships in your life, and it s a little trite for me to put it as a bullet point in this slideshow and expect that you be able to take action quickly. Rather, I want to push you in that direction. If there are some ways you can improve the relationships in your life, that is going to have a spillover in your energy. Next, I also recommend focusing on meditation and mindfulness practice. This can be powerful to deal with anxiety, feelings of anger or even possibly depression because they can help bring out some of these ideas, help quell the mind and help make you feel a little bit less stressed. There are lots of different sources for meditation and mindfulness. I, in particular, like a lot of the Buddhist meditation practices. They have a nice, I think, philosophical system to go along with it, however there are completely secular, completely a religious mindfulness practice courses that you can take if that s not your cup of tea, if you don t like the more spiritual aspects of it, you can also do those, and I think that they are also valuable practicing meditation every day is something that can have a huge impact on your emotional energy. Again, even if it s just 10 or 15 minutes. Improving Spiritual Energy Finally, spiritual energy. This is what Schwartz and Loehr call spiritual energy, but what they re really talking about is this sense of meaning and purpose you have in your life. If you're not religions or you don t feel like that s an important part of your life, the idea is still there. It s still about what is the purpose in your life? What is the meaning of the things that you are doing? Do those things resonate with you on a deep level? Do you feel like the actions you're taking are important or are they just a way to fill up time, busying yourself so you can avoid some kind of existential crisis? If you have spiritual energy, if you have this in abundance in one dimension, it can almost make up for the other three. I feel like if you are aligned with your goals, if what you're doing on a daily basis and what you feel you need to be doing in your life are aligned, this aspect is going to be higher. If you feel like, Yes, this is exactly what I need to be working on. This is exactly what I need to be learning. Even if it s hard, even if it s frustrating, I know this is what I need to be doing in my life, then you're going to have a lot of spiritual energy. You're going to be able to overcome a lot of the obstacles in the other forms of energy. Sometimes this quality of energy can override the other three. 5 of 7
I highly recommend reading the book by Viktor Frankl called Man s Search for Meaning. It s about his experience in the concentration camps in World War II. It s a heartbreaking story, but it s also an inspiring one, because not only do you see the depths of suffering that people can go through and the challenges that people can face, but you can also see at the same time those difficulties, those great struggles can become a source of meaning. That means that no matter what you're going through, there is a possible way to find meaning in your life, and if you find that meaning, to orient your behavior around that, and that can be a powerful source. I do feel that spiritual energy is important and if you can align yourself better you can get more motivated about your goals. If you feel like they re what you need to be doing at a deep level, they re not just something shallow, they re not just something you're pursuing to busy yourself, those kinds of reasons. If you feel that way, then you can have a lot of motivation. On the contrary, if you lack that, if you feel like what you're doing does not have any meaning. If you feel like the direction you're going in your life does not matter, then it s going to result in that deep procrastination. We talked about this in the lesson on Killing Procrastination, so if you haven't seen that, I recommend watching it after this, because we talk a little bit more about deep procrastination, but I think it's important to draw in that connection to deep procrastination and energy. Essentially if you don t have that connection, if you have a disconnect between what you're doing and what you feel you should be doing in your life or what you're doing and you're not sure what you should be doing in your life, you should confront that disconnect. Only through confronting it, only through dealing with the fact that there is this misalignment, do all of these other ideas, all of these other tactics, will they start to come into place. Think about that. As you finish this lesson, as I'm wrapping up here, I want you to think about those four dimensions of energy and see how you can improve it. Everyone can make improvements in that, even myself. Even as I'm going through this, giving this lesson with you, I'm thinking of ways that I can improve my energy. This isn t something that you do once and forget it, it s a constant process of trying to set good habits to structure the energy in your life. Think about your physical energy. Are you sleeping enough? Exercising enough? Eating healthy? Think about your mental energy. Are you doing things that involve mental and cognitive challenge or are you basically becoming a passive lump, you're not challenging yourself, you're not straining yourself in any way. Emotional energy. Do you have a lot of negative emotions with high frequency? Anger, depression, anxiety, stress? In those cases, try to work on the root problems that you're facing in there. If they re severe problems, I suggest seeking counseling or another type of help, because that can also help you deal with those situations. At the very minimum, even if they re minor, doing things like improving the relationships in your life, doing things like meditation and mindfulness can improve that aspect of your energy. Finally, do you feel like what you're doing has purpose and meaning, and if it doesn t, confront that disconnect. Think about it, self reflect. You may not be coming to some easy answers, but you may realize you need to be 6 of 7
doing something different, that you can t keep going down the path you're going down, and by thinking about it in that way, you're going to be able to improve your energy in the long run. 7 of 7