Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means? For example, if you do not have enough sleep, then you could simply go sleep sooner, or take a nap in the middle of the day. If it’s just mental fatigue, you could take a walk in a park.
My personal objection to reading web is that it requires almost zero energy to do, but on the other hand it does not let you replenish the energy. You start reading tired, and you end up just as tired. That’s why talking a walk is better, because it liberates your mind a bit.
For this purpose there are two related dynamics. How much activation energy it takes to start, and how much energy it takes to leave (usually inversely related). Like an object in a potential energy landscape, being in a low energy state makes it harder to move to a high energy state. I agree there’s a surprising lack of correlation between low energy states and relaxing states. Meditating is a clear example of a high energy state, but it is pretty restorative. I don’t find binge watching restorative after maybe the first episode or so, but I do find reading a blog for 10 minutes to be so*.
*Possibly because by “blog” you’re thinking “intellectual blog like SSC”, and I’m talking about what’s half the time a tumblr blog.
Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means?
I’m not jp, but:
too awake to sleep
too brain-fogged to do thinking work
possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I’ve been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to
Meanwhile, here’s what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don’t want to):
balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly n hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe n/10 hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I’d need to get my inbox to zero
get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I’ll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I’ll want to use to retrieve it later
Would it be useful to examine what exactly “low energy” means? For example, if you do not have enough sleep, then you could simply go sleep sooner, or take a nap in the middle of the day. If it’s just mental fatigue, you could take a walk in a park.
My personal objection to reading web is that it requires almost zero energy to do, but on the other hand it does not let you replenish the energy. You start reading tired, and you end up just as tired. That’s why talking a walk is better, because it liberates your mind a bit.
For this purpose there are two related dynamics. How much activation energy it takes to start, and how much energy it takes to leave (usually inversely related). Like an object in a potential energy landscape, being in a low energy state makes it harder to move to a high energy state. I agree there’s a surprising lack of correlation between low energy states and relaxing states. Meditating is a clear example of a high energy state, but it is pretty restorative. I don’t find binge watching restorative after maybe the first episode or so, but I do find reading a blog for 10 minutes to be so*.
*Possibly because by “blog” you’re thinking “intellectual blog like SSC”, and I’m talking about what’s half the time a tumblr blog.
I’m not jp, but:
too awake to sleep
too brain-fogged to do thinking work
possibly too brain-fogged to listen to a podcast and retain anything from it
too physically tired to go for a walk or do other similar low-intensity exercise, like easy yoga
probably too brain-fogged to read — and really digest — the web articles that I’ve been postponing for months because they seem great, but I can never get around to
Meanwhile, here’s what I can do in a low-energy state, some of the time (but I frequently don’t want to):
balance a checkbook, but it seems like I get roughly n hours/week of low-energy time, but maybe n/10 hours/week of time that I need to spend balancing checkbooks
delete e-mails, but not be able to think of a couple good new categories that I’d need to get my inbox to zero
get photos off my phone and file them appropriately, but possibly spend a little too long thinking of good, descriptive filenames that I’ll be able to use to search for them later, or just fail to have a name with the words that I’ll want to use to retrieve it later
I think you and the previous commenter would both do well to read the short, hyperlinked definition. (Sorry.)
Oh, that’s something significantly different from what I had in mind. Thanks for pointing me to the page that explains the concept.