It's the Energy Changing the Frames

I think so much of winning at life comes down to something that's hard to conceptualize. And I guess the way I encapsulate it is energy management.

As I've gotten older and wiser, I have started noticing a pattern where my creativity and my positivity, and therefore my output and outlook and attitude and everything, are all based around how energized I feel. For me, when I have energy and I'm excited, I have all the answers.

All sorts of positive outcomes come from it. These are things like wanting to help people, and wanting to make more stuff, and wanting to write more, and wanting to do art, and wanting to be more productive, and just absolutely loving my entire day, and my projects, and my work, and my partner, and my friends, and basically everything. I'm basically just so enthused about life and excited and positive.

And it doesn't mean I lose my realism, or my understanding of how bad things are or how bad things can get. It's not like mania. But it has a lot of the positives of mania, and I think it's really powerful.

The low-energy version of me

The opposite of this is basically low energy. In this mood:

• I am more concerned about what others think about my work.
• I am more worried about losing things than gaining or producing.
• I tend to consume more versus create more in this mode.
• I tend to think more about myself and less about others.

And overall I just have low mood and low output. So it's very much not just a work output thing.

It's the energy changing the frames

If you remember what I talked about with frames are everything, that's commentary on life outlook. Frames meaning perspectives and ways that we view the world.

What I'm really saying is that when I'm low energy, it's not just my energy that changes. All my frames change, like the way I perceive everything, including input from others and how I talk to myself. They all fundamentally change because of these frame shifts.

So in other words, I just have a dramatically different life experience when I am high energy versus low energy.

Same problems, different energy

It's not that you can solve all your problems at a higher energy state. It's that you see the problems completely differently.

When I switch energy states, my problems don't change. I still have the same challenges and problems, but when I am in a low energy state, and therefore negative framing, those same problems feel insurmountable, numerous, and essentially unsolvable.

And when I switch energy states, I just see the problems completely differently. I see them as tractable, soluble, and things that I can deal with. And I dare say, even exciting.

And this change in perspective on how one observes adversity just cannot be overstated.

What produces one or the other

So that raises the question of, okay, well, what are the things that produce one or the other? And this is where a daily routine and discipline and habits and all these things start to make a massive difference. The things are fairly obvious, with some nuances, but in general it starts with exercise, sleep, and diet.

📚 I wrote about this same pattern in 2016: How to Handle a Dip in Creativity and Productivity.

I already have a routine myself, which I am able to stick to when I am on routine. And when I am off routine, that's when my energy drops. When I am on routine, my energy is absolutely, insanely high.

When I stop exercising my creative energy drops by probably 50-75%. And the more sedentary I am, the worse the effect. How to Handle a Dip in Creativity and Productivity (2016)

You can't see it from inside

And so, my whole game recently has become basically trying to understand what my current energy state is, what my current creativity state is, and what my current mood state is. So much so that I actually have these things which I try to log daily inside of my AI harness, LifeOS. And it also displays them along with my Oura readiness score, which is kind of a proxy for predicting the energy level I'm likely to have, because it includes sleep and restfulness and stuff like that.

💍 Oura's readiness score combines sleep, resting heart rate and recovery into one number each morning, so a low score is an early hint of a low-energy day.

Essentially, I've tried to make this very visible to myself in order to be able to self-detect as accurately as possible when I am low energy. Because the problem is, when I'm in my low energy state, my frames have shifted. Therefore, I'm not thinking about causes, and I'm not thinking about, "Hey, I need to change my state."

What I'm instead doing is reacting to inputs and the lack of inputs, and negativity affects me quite a bit more, and criticism affects me quite a bit more.

Change the state first

So my goal there is to basically say, okay, look: when my frames are shifted in that way, when I am low energy and responding to the world and consuming the world and I'm not in my positive creative mode, my priority should not be responding to all the negativity and working within the low energy and negative frames. My priority should be to change my energy state.

• Do I need to have a high quality meal?
• Do I need to sleep?
• Do I need to take a nap?
• Do I need to basically do a cleanse?
• Have I not been resting properly?
• Have I been eating a bunch of garbage?

And essentially get my basics back on routine as quickly as possible to get my state raised.

And obviously there are other ways to do that artificially, with caffeine or nootropics or other methods for raising energy, especially mental energy. But I find that really tactical ways to do this are to take a nap, or go for a walk outside.

Usually, if I get into one of these states, especially if it lasts a couple days or more, it's because I've stopped exercising. Maybe I've been stressed because of work, maybe I've been traveling, or whatever it is, but I'm locked into a spiral where I'm forgetting to do the basics.

🔄 Skipping exercise and eating badly hurts sleep, and bad sleep makes it more likely you skip exercise and eat badly again.

So, I'm literally by definition now off of routine, which means I'm not walking, I'm not exercising, I'm not lifting weights, I'm eating like shit, which all of those then hit my sleep, then my sleep is bad, which magnifies the chances that I'm going to repeat those spiraling behaviors.

So the way to break out of it and get into a high energy state is to immediately reverse that. Immediately go for a walk, immediately lift heavy, especially deadlifts. And essentially, you know, a somewhat full-body workout is as quick as 10 minutes, 20 minutes, right?

I can get a lot of blood moving through my muscles and circulating in my body, and combine that with a walk, which will get some sunlight, combine that with eating some proper food and taking a nap, and holy crap. Within the matter of an hour or two hours, my energy goes up, my creativity goes up, all my frames shift into positive ones, and I am back in operation.

A friend and my mom

I also want to mention a couple of other personal details here.

I have a friend who is often exhibiting negative behaviors. He is often bad to people, is often selfish, is often negative, and is perceived by others to be very self-centered.

And he went to a Tony Robbins thing many years ago, and Tony Robbins does a lot of physical stuff. The thing was in Florida, so it was three hours later. And I was getting blocks of texts from him, because it's this long, full-day motivation thing, but there's lots of standing and jumping and moving and dancing and yelling.

🎤 Tony Robbins events keep people standing, jumping, shouting and dancing for hours at a time.

And I got more texts from him during this stretch of many hours than I have in the last several years from him. It was absolutely extraordinary. And then I started getting something from him which I had never seen, which was this kindness and positivity and plans and ideas and looking forward to the future.

It was an unbelievably colossal difference in his entire mentality and approach to life and behaviors. So in my language, all his frames shifted instantly. This is in the course of a few hours.

The workshop went on for another day and this continued, and in fact he actually brought it back home as well. His energy was extremely high, he established a number of patterns and habits, and they persisted. And I told him, "You're a completely changed person, this is amazing, you absolutely must keep doing this physical stuff, otherwise this will go away." And he's like, "Yes, absolutely."

And that lasted for a number of weeks, which tapered off after a few months, and then he pretty much returned to baseline because he wasn't doing any of the physical stuff.

My second example is my mother, who, before she died of cancer, was doing cancer treatments.

In the later years of her life, and especially when she was going through the cancer stuff, she had become somewhat of a bitter person in many of her moods, and was kind of blaming a lot of people for a lot of things. And this was before she even got sick. There was essentially a tone of criticism and blame and self-centeredness in a lot of her outlooks. Not always, but often.

And I would have regular calls with her, especially after she got sick. And I started noticing this extraordinary pattern.

Sometimes I would call her, and I would be constantly having to defend my psyche against negativity. Blame and anger and all sorts of things, some of which was justified, because someone who has a terminal illness, of course, can be angry, and that's completely understood. I'm speaking more of the other stuff that was there before she got sick: this constant stream of self-focus and negativity and blame of others that had been characteristic of the last 10 years or so.

And those would be difficult calls for me. I would still do them, because she's my mom and we need to talk, and I need to talk to her in this difficult time.

But on some calls, she was a completely different person. She was full of gratitude and thankfulness, and I'm not talking about mania either. I'm talking about clarity of mind. I'm talking about high intelligence, which she has always had. Extremely high kindness, which she has always had. And this is kind of one of the things that everyone loves about her, is how kind and nice she was to basically everyone, before the last 10 years or so.

And during these calls, I was literally interacting with my mom, my real mom, the best version of herself.

And this went on for many months at least. I can't actually remember, but it went on for a very long time, and I could not figure it out. It was a complete hit-or-miss, was I going to have one kind of conversation or was I going to have the other.

And then one day, on one of these brilliant calls, she said the thing that made it click for me. The day before, she had gotten her steroid injection, which has to do with inflammation, something to do with the cancer therapy. I can't remember exactly, but these injections are steroids, and it provides energy as one of the side effects. So in some sense she was a little bit high, right?

💉 Corticosteroids are common in cancer treatment for inflammation and nausea, and extra energy and better mood are known side effects.

And what I noticed was it was a general energy, right? It was tidying up the house. It was going into the garden. It was doing physical activities. It was going to take the grandkids out for ice cream. It was going to the local store where she worked and doing activities. So it's physical energy in addition to mental energy.

And she was just absolutely thriving for one, two, or three days. I can't remember how long it really lasted, but then it would return back to baseline.

Three examples

So, my read of this, both with my friend and with my mom, is that these were external inputs, in one case exercise, in the other case a steroid injection, which took the person from a low energy state into a high energy state, and in which their entire set of life frames completely shifted.

So that's two examples. Then you have me as another example, which obviously I know and am most familiar with. So here we have three anecdotal examples of where changing the energy level leads to dramatic improvement in life experience.

And so I'm essentially writing this to say that I think this is one of the most under-discussed things. I don't hear this being talked about. I watch a million podcasts around supplements and health and routines and all sorts of stuff in that whole space. And I don't hear people talking about controlling your energy level and maintaining a high energy level to massively improve the quality of your life. And the mechanism by which this happens, which in my opinion has to do with these frame changes.

What I'd do about it

So my tactical advice here is to ask yourself what you think your baseline energy level is, and if you have noticed in others or in yourself that when this changes, a lot of your life changes. And basically this is a prod, or a prompt, for you to try to do things that raise your level.

I think cardio and lifting weights are really good ones. Walking is a really good one. I think sun is a component of this, especially sleep, and then diet on top of that.

And my recommendation is essentially to build a routine similar to the one that I have, which has all these components, where you don't have to think; you simply execute that routine. Which means going to bed at a certain time. Which means eating certain things, keeping the amount that you eat fairly low: always slightly hungry, not really actually hungry, but never overly hungry.

The exercise massively helps. The walking, the interacting with my friends and family, all these things are part of the routine. And I would recommend that you basically build one quickly. You can find one online, you can ask AI, you can do whatever, or maybe you already have one.

But my main statement is: if you find yourself in low mood with low output, basically feeling bad about the world, I think that changing your energy state could alter your frames and put you in a drastically improved position to be able to improve your life.

Now, this won't solve everything, because the world is currently going crazy in a thousand different ways. So it's not going to just fix the world for you. It's not going to fix a bad job, or a lack of a job, or relationship troubles, or people in your life who are struggling, or any of that.

But fixing frames can dramatically improve all those things, because it makes you feel empowered to actually help and improve things, as opposed to feeling like you are simply having life happen to you.

So I recommend you think about this idea, this concept of energy state being supremely important, and hopefully it helps you.

Summary

1. Basically, how much energy I have changes how I see pretty much everything
2. When my energy is low, I worry more, consume more, and think about myself more
3. My problems don't change when my energy goes up; they just start looking solvable, even exciting
4. It's hard to notice a low state from inside it, so I log my energy and mood every day
5. Getting out is usually simple: go for a walk, lift something heavy, get some sun, eat real food, take a nap
6. I saw this with a friend and with my mom, and I almost never hear anyone talk about it

Notes

1. 🤖 AIL 2: Daniel dictated this post as a voice note, plus a follow-up a few minutes later. I (Kai, his AI assistant) assembled the transcript into order with his words kept, and added the section headings, the definition, the asides, the summary, the links, the subtitle and the header image. Learn more about AIL.