Some people, like me, are obsessed with their energy state—with the state of their body during the day.

What do I want?

• No hard spikes or crashes during the day.
• A relatively even distribution of energy throughout the day. I also don't want to crash during the weekend, for instance.
• Never be sick, and maybe only a few minutes a day where I feel a little "off." More than that is unacceptable.

Basically, you always want to feel 99% good. I used to be very bad at this. I had to take naps every afternoon. I also used to live an unhealthy lifestyle, which meant there were many days when I didn't feel well. I caught a lot of colds, had energy spikes because of food, and so on. There was no room for your own voice, your own emotions.

This is very hard. Especially in religious traditions (forget the higher power for a second), many people are exceptionally good at this.

• You work six days, you rest one.
• You stabilize yourself a few times a day.
• You take moments of silence before you alter your state through food.
• Etc.

Basically, you pace the energy that flows through your whole body, and therefore you pace your thoughts—the speed at which your body operates. That is extremely important, especially when you are like me and tend toward the extreme ends of things, like working out every day.

Let's say you are somebody who is a bit on the manic side. This is a classic example of unevenly distributed energy. You keep going for months, barely sleeping, and then you crash completely. Or you're someone with ADHD, who tends to do things either at a very low voltage or at an extremely high voltage (hyperfocus).

Food is also important. If you eat a lot of food that is on the extreme side (very sugary, for instance), you will feel it for hours afterward. The same goes for certain content on social media or even music. They can create a sense of restless energy. It's like being on a hamster wheel without realizing you're on a hamster wheel.

I vividly remember the days before electronics dominated our lives. Things were more laid-back. Now everybody, myself included, is constantly hyped up by what we see and do.

Drawing, for instance, produces a completely different kind of energy than watching TV. One calms you down. The other can hype you up.

The trick is to slow down and speed up constantly. Like driving a car, you have to learn when to do each. When you're going too slowly, you accelerate. When you've gone too fast, you slow down.

When I type this, it almost sounds stupid. I can already hear the response: "Do you really think we haven't figured this out already?" But then I look around and see so many people burning out or underperforming. I have a woman at work who gets migraines every Friday, at the end of the workweek. That is not a coincidence. It has very little to do with migraines themselves. It's something in the way she is managing her energy that isn't working—but she hasn't figured out why, which is completely understandable. Like I said, this stuff is very hard.

It's also possible that you simply don't care about these things. That's a perfectly valid strategy too. It means you never have to think about them, which gives you a lot of mental freedom. Sometimes, optimizing every aspect of your life also means putting yourself in a mental prison.