by Brandon Chun | Jun 16, 2017 | Advice, Goals, Guest Post, Productivity, Psychology, Self Improvement
There’s a wealth of information out there about health and fitness, both in and out of the workplace. But I see a deficit in training programmers’ minds for greater focus and productivity.
Training the body is definitely important, don’t get me wrong. Training the mind, though, is paramount for productivity and living the life you want to live, but it’s underemphasized among programmers and society at large.
Why is mind training important? Because as Bruce Lee said in Enter the Dragon, “There is no opponent.” There are multiple interpretations, but this one is most applicable to us:
Accomplishing any endeavor, like losing weight, finishing a marathon, building a successful side business, or beating your opponent in a martial arts match, requires you to consistently follow a set plan, method, training, or strategy. “Trust the process,” right?
The obstacles in front of you, like losing 50 pounds of fat, finishing that marathon, building a business, and becoming a more productive programmer, are all tests to see how successfully you can create and adhere to a process for defeating them. They are ultimately tools to help you grow as a person.
What’s the most common reason for failing to follow your process? Yourself. Your nervousness, doubt, skepticism, negativity, laziness, impatience, and lack of focus. For example, countless people fail to stick to their diets long term because they didn’t feel like exercising one day, and one day snowballed into one week, one month, etc.
This makes your mind both your most trustworthy ally and your greatest enemy.
Effective mind training is accomplished through meditation and, believe it or not, video games. When done right, meditation can prevent distractions and give you internal validation, a sense of victory and triumph, from being productive. Video games can help you think faster, focus more, improve multitasking, and increase mental discipline.
Meditation
Meditation is a form of mind training meant to help you gain better control and understanding of your mind. With it, you’ll be able to focus and stay on task more effectively, overcome negative feelings, and avoid laziness and procrastination.
This is the secret to effective meditation. You have to view it as exerting control and dominance over yourself. Every meditation session is essentially a battle with your mind.
Right now, try to not think about anything. More than likely, this is difficult.
There are seemingly always thoughts racing through your mind. You may regularly have negative feelings like stress, anxiety, and anger. You may feel tired all the time. Our minds are normally chaotic, especially in our high-speed, instant gratification society.
When someone cuts you off in traffic, you may feel volcanic levels of rage. You know that it’s not helpful to get riled up like this, but you can’t help yourself. Or you might feel anxiety, and even have panic attacks, when talking to strangers.
Your goal with meditation is to silence this chaotic whirlwind of thoughts. You shouldn’t be relaxed, but you shouldn’t be tense either. You have to find and maintain that contradictory state of calm stillness and energetic engagement. This balance is where you’re at your most creative, productive, and efficient.
Productivity in all its forms hinges on your ability to focus. Productivity methods like The Pomodoro Technique (something that John himself advocates), listening to music, keeping your environment organized, etc. are all techniques to help you focus.
Meditation helps productivity because it generally involves blocking out thoughts for a given period of time. Regular meditation will refine your skill at blocking out unwanted thoughts and distractions, which will improve your ability to focus and stay on task.
If you adopt the mentality that meditation is a battle with your mind, and that your mind is both your most trustworthy ally and greatest enemy, every time you fail to focus is a battle against your mind that you lose.
You feel it, too. You feel that loss when you couldn’t debug the code because you were trolling social media. You feel defeated when you know that your code probably has flaws that’ll screw something up somewhere down the line.
But when you’re able to focus and be productive, when you finally debug the code after hours of unrelenting effort, when you finally get your fine-tuned code past the quality assurance (QA) tester after a dozen revisions and a lot of haggling, you feel it. You feel that sense of triumph and victory.
Meditation can help you focus so you will be productive and better able to create that sense of triumph and victory.
Step-by-Step Guide to Meditation
I’ve experienced far greater benefits from night meditation, so I prefer to meditate before going to bed.
Many people, including me, become sleepy during meditation at first, so it’s more beneficial to meditate before going to bed than in the morning right before starting your day. Try night meditation for a week, and if it doesn’t do anything for you, switch to mornings just after waking up.
Make your environment as quiet as possible. The raging thunderstorm of thoughts in your mind is already distracting, and you don’t want to add fuel to the fire. Use earplugs if necessary.
Sit in whatever position is most comfortable. You can sit in the classic legs-crossed on the ground position, but it’s not a requirement.
To begin, breathe in and tense up your entire body and mind for five seconds. Breathe out. Repeat this two more times.
Next, relax your body and mind, starting with the legs. Breathe in, breathe out, and relax your legs. At the same time, imagine a clenched fist becoming relaxed and opening up. Work your way up by doing the same thing with your stomach, chest, back, arms, neck, face, and finally your mind.
Starting from a state of high tension and gradually relaxing your body from the legs up makes relaxing your mind easier. Maintain this state of physical and mental stillness for as long as possible. If any thoughts enter your mind, force yourself to get back to this stillness. If you start feeling sleepy, force yourself to stay awake. Repeat the relaxing process from the legs up as many times as needed.
I recommend doing this for 10 to 20 minutes, five to seven nights a week.
But if meditation just doesn’t do it for you, there’s something else to consider. And if you’re anything like me and a lot of software developers, you’re already excited about it.
Video Games
Common wisdom says that playing video games is bad for you, right? They take time away from socializing and making friends, they kill your attention span, they hurt your eyes, they get you addicted to Mountain Dew and Red Bull, and they ruin your physical health.
Believe it or not, reading was the equivalent of video games decades ago. Common wisdom used to say that reading for enjoyment was bad for you. It didn’t teach you anything useful or train your mind. Books put elaborate stories and fantasies in your head that detract from your ability to perceive and live in reality, and they distract you from doing work.
Now, reading books is considered a great mental habit for the sustained attention it requires. Teachers and parents actively encourage kids to read books.
Video games have taken the place of books. People demonize the hell out of them, blaming them for all the issues and woes of kids and young people. Now, there’s scientific evidence that shows the benefits of video games and they’re being considered for various training and rehabilitation purposes.
Just like reading, playing video games is an effective way of training your mind. The mental benefits include faster reaction speed, improved focus and multitasking ability, and greater mental discipline—all beneficial for productivity.
Faster Reaction Speed
Imagine Call of Duty. To a large extent, the player with the faster reaction speed will outshoot the other players and is more likely to win.
Shooting games like Call of Duty, fighting games like Street Fighter, and real-time strategy games like StarCraft require fast reaction speed. Regularly playing these kinds of games with focused effort will increase reaction speed, just like regularly lifting weights with focused effort will increase your physical strength.
When driving, a faster reaction speed can be the difference between a narrowly avoided collision and a frontline story on the evening news. Have you ever almost dropped something, but managed to catch it in time? Imagine being able to do that all the time.
Do you want to be productive? Faster reaction speed is the mark of an overall faster thinking process. It means your mind works faster and more efficiently.
As a programmer, you’ll devote ample time to thinking. Thinking through bugs in the code. Thinking how to structure code. A faster, more efficient thought process will make you that much better at it.
Improved Focus and Multitasking Ability
There’s no definitive proof that video games destroy your attention span. It could be that fast-paced video games simply have more appeal for kids with attention difficulties; correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation.
Also, a study by the University of Toronto reveals that playing first-person shooter video games creates a noticeable increase in visual attention span and decrease in distraction.
First person shooter players also show greater multitasking ability, which makes sense. You’re constantly bombarded with chaotic, constantly changing circumstances that require you to be able to abruptly switch to different tasks and keep track of multiple actions, people, and movements.
How is this useful for productivity, you ask?
Most productivity methods like The Pomodoro Technique advise focusing intently on a single task. This is due to a human limitation: effective multitasking is mostly a myth. To paraphrase Sun Tzu, he who tries to accomplish everything accomplishes nothing.
But if you could multitask even somewhat effectively, you’d reap massive benefits from doing so. Take meetings, for example. As a programmer, meetings are generally time and productivity destroyers. But, it’s also bad practice to ditch too many of them. And in a Scrum-style software development methodology, you actually do need to go to the meetings.
The productivity solution? Multitasking. Bring your laptop with you and do your work during the meeting. Just say that you want to take meeting notes for yourself if anyone tries to hassle you. With your refined multitasking skill, you’ll be able to pay attention to the meeting and get work done. Two birds with one stone!
Mental Discipline
First-person shooters are essentially simulated life-or-death gun battles. Yes, it’s just a game. But subconsciously, your mind can’t always tell the difference. The sheer volcanic rage commonly associated with getting pwn’d repeatedly in Call of Duty is, other than ego, a natural fight-or-flight instinct.
The biggest benefit of video games is that they allow you to be immersed in these tense, stressful situations safely, so you can train your mind without any risk of death or injury. You can develop a much greater level of mental discipline, self-control, and stress management. And this practice will carry over to other aspects of your life as a programmer.
Stress happens. As a programmer, you’re going to have to work with people you don’t get along with. Some of your coworkers will tie their egos to their jobs, and they’ll get combative whenever you or anyone else tries to give constructive criticism on their buggy, comment-less, jumbled mess of a code. QA testers will break your code and make you revise it over and over again, sometimes for legit reasons, sometimes just for shits and giggles.
These things will happen, and you can’t necessarily control that. But, you can control how you react in these situations. You know, from a logical and rational viewpoint, that starting an argument with a QA tester is not productive or helpful. You’re only antagonizing them, and they’ll be even harder to work with next time. But, you may not be able to help yourself.
Learning how to handle stress helps you maintain a calm, cool, and productive attitude in these kinds of situations.
Bonus: Improved Vision
This isn’t related to mind training, but it is a profound benefit of video games that I wanted to include. Studies reveal that playing shooting games will improve vision. The benefits to vision are so potent, shooter games are being considered for rehabilitation for the visually impaired.
This makes sense. A first-person shooter game like Call of Duty requires you to be able to quickly spot enemy players, essentially moving shapes on a screen. Thanks to the grayish background of the levels and the usually dull colors of the player characters’ appearances, your eyes have to work at it. As a programmer, you sit in front of a computer screen for most of your time, which can be damaging to your eyes. The improved vision from video games can effectively compensate for this vision deterioration.
Programmer’s Guide for Maximizing Video Games Benefits
Benefiting from video games is tricky. You need to go in with the right mindset and select the right kinds of games. Otherwise, you’ll waste your time, neglect other vital aspects of your life, produce a net loss for yourself, and overall just shoot yourself in the foot.
Stick mainly to first- and third-person shooters. They give you the best bang for your buck in regard to mind training: faster reaction speed, improved focus/multitasking, mental discipline, and improved vision. Fighting games are a solid alternative.
First, don’t play video games for enjoyment or ego. Your goal is to train your mind. Enjoyment is an unintended consequence. Ego is one of the reasons for the volcanic rage a lot of gamers exhibit during intense matches.
Whenever your ego rage is getting the better of you, stop playing for an hour and take a walk outside to clear your head.
Second, focus on multiplayer. The AI enemies you face in single-player can never match up to the adaptability and unpredictability of other real players. After replaying a level a few times, you’ll know when and where the AI enemies will spawn and how they’ll react to you. Every real player, from the first-time noob to the seasoned pro, offers different challenges.
Instead of mindlessly drooling in front of the screen, aim to win every match. In team-based matches, work to maintain the highest Kill/Death ratio on your team.
For frequency, I recommend playing two to three sessions a week of only 30 to 60 minutes each and one long, marathon session of several hours. The best time to play is on a weekend evening or whenever you don’t have a pressing obligation the next day. The evening is often when the greatest number of players are on and playing multiplayer. During the long session, take a 10-minute break every one to two hours to let your eyes and hands rest.
Any kind of exercise, whether for the body or mind, needs to be done with intensity and consistency, but it also shouldn’t take away too much time from other vital areas of your life. Start from this baseline frequency, then you can adjust the times and frequencies to your personal preferences.
Your mind is generally able to handle more than your body, so you stand to benefit more from a long, marathon gaming session as opposed to an actual physical marathon.
Final Words
The way I see it, your body is a car and your mind is the driver. You can have a suped-up Lamborghini with less than a hundred miles on the engine, but a 16-year-old driving for the first time in their life isn’t going to do much with it. On the other hand, Jason Bourne was able to successfully use a MINI in a car chase.
Meditation is a useful and underrated tool for gaining control over your mind. It doesn’t take a lot of time, but it provides great benefits for productivity and every aspect of your life.
Contrary to popular opinion, video games can be a great tool for mind training if the right games are selected and if it’s done with the right mindset.
Now go get training!
by Brandon Chun | Mar 29, 2017 | Advice, Communication, Ethics, Fitness, Goals, Guest Post, People, Self Improvement, Stress
You’re in your twenties and you’ve never had a girlfriend. I get it. I can’t throw women in your path, but I can tell you why it’s so important to you and how you can get better control over your life, so that you’re either ready for a relationship or to live happily on your own.
I’ve been a subscriber to the Simple Programmer YouTube channel for over six months. I’m a mechanical engineer, but a lot of John’s content is applicable to anyone in any walk of life, and he’s had a strong influence on my views, attitude, and overall outlook.
Dating, love, and becoming a better man are some of the topics Simple Programmer creates content on, including how to start a relationship.
Even with all the great advice, getting a girlfriend is something you don’t have full control over because it takes both people to consent to having a relationship together. Even if you’re great relationship material, it still may not happen because of factors beyond your control.
With that in mind, I’d like to address why I think guys in our situation want a girlfriend so badly and things you can do to help make a relationship happen and/or to live happily without one.
We usually want girlfriends for a few, basic reasons: validation (you’re such a great guy), emotional relief (affection as comfort), expectations set on us by society (shouldn’t you have a girlfriend by now?), and external pressures set on us by media and well-meaning family and friends (I just want you to meet someone nice).
Or, you’re just really pent up.
All these reasons have one root cause: poor control over yourself and your life. A lack of control over yourself creates a sense of neediness in you; you need a girlfriend to improve your life since you’re unable to improve it yourself.
I didn’t want to say you lack self-control, because that may have brought back kindergarten memories of timeouts, high chairs, and standing in the corner of the room. What I mean is a lack of control over your energy.
Your energy is made up of four parts.
Physical energy is your physical health and ability. It determines if you can walk up a flight of stairs without getting winded, how quickly you recover from injury or intense exercise, how easily you get sick, etc.
Mental energy is your mental and cognitive ability. It determines your ability to concentrate, memorize information, and apply your knowledge to solving problems and accomplishing difficult tasks.
Emotional energy consists of your thoughts, feelings, attitude, and mood. It is heavily influenced by physical and mental energy, as well as the people in your life.
Spiritual energy is your overall outlook, the meaning and direction of your life, and your overall view of yourself. It strongly influences the other three energies.
Therefore, the solution to creating a more self-reliant you is to start practicing better energy control and thereby gain control over your life.
Energy control is more of a mindset, not an actual hard science or health plan. But I still consider it the single most influential thing you can do to promote wellness, self-confidence, and self-assurance.
Principles of Energy Control
Energy control requires a balancing act between heavy use and sufficient, not excessive, rest. You go all out, you rest and recover, and your energy returns more abundantly than before.
Human beings evolved to behave this way: bouts of intense, all-out activity followed by idle rest. Think back to prehistoric times. Human beings were generally idle and at rest whenever possible, with bursts of intense activity when running away from a predatory animal, hunting, or fighting a rival tribe.
Energy is lowered both when it’s used too much and when it’s not used enough. For example, exercising too much will make you tired and weak, but so will exercising too little.
If one of the four energies is low, it’ll lower the other three; you can’t concentrate effectively or be in a good mood if you’re sick. If you can’t concentrate, you won’t be able to physically perform at your best or overcome feelings of negativity.
However, increasing one of your energies won’t necessarily raise the others; becoming strong, healthy, and athletic doesn’t necessarily mean your mental sharpness or emotional resilience will increase with it. You need to work to individually boost all four of your energies.
Resting to Regain Energy
Sleep. The quantity of time slept is not nearly as important as the quality; four hours of quality sleep is better than eight hours of poor sleep. Maximizing sleep quality requires a few things:
- The right temperature. The ideal sleep temperature is between 70-75 degrees Fahrenheit.
- Sleeping in light, breathable fabric. You could also opt to sleep naked. I personally sleep shirtless.
- Absolute darkness. It may take some getting used to, but absolute darkness is the best condition to sleep in. Put up blackout curtains in front of your bedroom windows.
- Silence. Make your sleeping environment as quiet as possible. Wear earplugs if necessary.
Learn to rest intermittently as much as possible during idle moments like waiting for a file to download, waiting for class to start, waiting in line at a food stand, etc.
Rest by slowing your breathing. Breathing in for two seconds, hold for two seconds, then breathe out. Relax your whole body, especially the muscles of your back, neck, stomach, and shoulders, but don’t let yourself fall if you’re standing. Quiet your mind: don’t think about anything, but don’t put any effort into suppressing your thoughts. If a thought enters your mind, relax and let it fade away. Don’t commit any effort to it.
Stress
People allow their stress to destroy them. Stress is a natural human response to dangerous situations. In the prehistoric period, you experienced stress when a saber-toothed tiger wants to make you its dinner, or when you’re in a life-or-death struggle with a rival tribesman; it’s your flight-or-fight response. Once you’re able to resolve the dangerous situation (escape from or kill the saber-toothed tiger; defeat the rival tribesman), your body relaxes; heavy use is followed by rest.
The problem is that you experience this same flight-or-fight response even during non-life-threatening situations. You hit traffic and you’re going to be late for work, your alarm didn’t go off, you have a project deadline in less than 24 hours, and you have 48 hours’ worth of work left to do, etc. People don’t properly use the energy they gain from the stress, and the energy festers within them. It’s like a pipe that has too much air pressure built up and is about to burst.
Imagine any stress or frustration you’re feeling as a concentrated ball of energy located at your center. Most people let this energy build up pressure. They expend valuable willpower to suppress this energy and let it writhe within them. Suppressed energy can easily become toxic and harm you.
Instead, you’re going to use this energy and make it work for you. As you breathe, imagine the energy circulating and spreading throughout your whole body, powering and energizing you.
Use this newfound energy to accomplish your goals: go to the gym and lift like a madman, put on some boxing gloves and wail on a heavy bag, or complete your work with absolute focus and commitment. Once you’ve expended all of your energy, rest to regain it — heavy use is followed by sufficient rest.
Physical Energy
Physical energy is controlled through diet and exercise.
For boosting physical energy, exactly what you eat and when you eat it isn’t too important. Most people have a reasonable idea of what’s good and bad for them. You know that eating McDonald’s every day isn’t good for you. I encourage experimentation to figure out what works best for you and to follow your common sense.
There’s the camp that supports eating six small meals throughout the day, and there’s the camp that supports only eating one large meal a day, and everything in-between. This isn’t too important either.
The only important aspect of diet is to not eat too much. To prevent overeating, eat slowly and stop once you’re satisfied. Don’t feel the need to continue eating just to finish everything in front of you. It’s better to throw away remaining food or save it for later than to gorge yourself.
I recommend restricting coffee to one to two cups a day and to drink all of it before midday. Otherwise, your returns will start to diminish, and you won’t be able to adequately rest and sleep well that night.
Exercise is the main method of expending physical energy. Push yourself hard during exercise sessions, and rest sufficiently between sessions to boost your physical energy.
I recommend weightlifting to accomplish this because of its simplicity and effectiveness. Bodyweight exercises are comparatively complex and tricky to increase difficulty, especially for beginners.
Competitive athletes can go through Central Nervous System (CNS) fatigue if they train too hard without enough rest. They feel weakness, muscle and joint soreness, headaches, exhaustion, and illness.
They also feel their mental and emotional energy suffer and can experience depression, moodiness and irritability, loss of enthusiasm, and the inability to focus or memorize effectively.
CNS fatigue is actually a good thing because you’ve accomplished the heavy use part of energy cultivation. Next step is to rest. Take about a week off from any training and follow my resting instructions. Your physical energy will build back up stronger than before, and your mental and emotional energy will be restored as well.
For beginners’ weightlifting regimens, check out Stronglifts 5×5 and Mark Rippetoe’s Starting Strength.
Mental Energy
Mental energy is cultivated through regularly performing tasks requiring concentration, memorization, and the application of knowledge toward solving problems, then allowing for proper rest.
Programmers and software developers generally have intellectually demanding lifestyles, so working hard and committing yourself at your job will be enough to exercise your mental energy. College students should focus on studying, doing homework, completing projects, joining clubs and organizations that can give them marketable credentials and skills, and looking for internships/full-time jobs, if they don’t have one already.
Reading books is another great mental energy training method. Articles on the internet are written with readability in mind. They have short sentences and paragraphs and heavily use bolding and/or colored font. Books have little to none of these readability techniques, making them more mentally demanding to read.
If you own a smartphone, there are free jigsaw puzzle apps available for download. Solving jigsaw puzzles is a great way to exercise mental energy.
Try reading for 30 to 60 minutes and solving one jigsaw puzzle a day.
Mental Rest and Burnout
Now, you may not want to hear this, but using your phone, watching TV or YouTube videos, and browsing social media is NOT rest. Those activities still take a degree of mental effort, and it creates the illusion of work in your mind. You’re not adequately resting and regaining mental energy.
The best way to rest and regain mental energy specifically is to not use electronic devices and do very brief exercise, as well as follow my resting instructions. Unlike with physical energy, the purpose of exercise in this case is to boost mental energy. Human beings evolved to associate physical movement with a need for alertness and awareness. During prehistoric times, humans were idle and at rest whenever possible. They only moved when they had to run away from a predatory animal, hunt, or fight someone. Movement = greater mental energy.
Brief, mildly intense exercise like jogging in place, doing some jumping jacks, and stretching will be enough movement to regain mental energy; there’s no need to physically push yourself beyond this. There are also free downloadable mobile apps for brief seven-minute workouts that are great for restoring mental energy. Here’s the one I use:
The result of excessive mental energy use is burnout. If you’re a software developer or CS student, you’ve likely felt burnout. You’re unable to concentrate, memorize, or effectively apply your knowledge to solving the problems in front of you. Burnout also reduces your physical, emotional, and spiritual energy. Just like overdoing it physically, you can experience moodiness and irritability, reduced enthusiasm and motivation, a sense of loss of control or helplessness, and exhaustion.
Just like CNS fatigue, burnout can be a good thing since it accomplishes the heavy use stage of energy cultivation. All you need to do next is rest and rejuvenate your mental energy.
Emotional Energy
Emotional energy consists of positive emotions (such as compassion, vigor, joy, motivation, enthusiasm) and negative emotions (such as rage, jealousy, depression). Positive emotions boost your emotional energy. Negative emotions strain emotional energy, just like how weightlifting strains physical energy and studying or reading strain mental energy. Emotional energy is boosted from enduring and overcoming negative emotions and intentionally bringing out positive emotions.
Emotional energy control is built on:
- How your life is going: You might be in a great relationship, or you might have just gone through a breakup. You might have just landed your dream job, or maybe you’ve been unable to find a job for a year.
- Your physical and mental wellness.
- The people surrounding you.
You may not have absolute control over the first part. So, you should focus on the second and third parts as much as possible.
Fostering physical wellness (rigorous exercise, eating correctly), having mentally engaging hobbies (reading books, solving jigsaw puzzles), and proper rest can significantly improve your emotional energy by fostering positive emotions and diminishing negative ones. It also strengthens your ability to overcome negative emotions and bring out positive ones.
You should also become friends with the right people. The people surrounding you can heavily influence whether you regain emotional energy or expend it. Would you rather be friends with someone like John, or someone who looks and acts like they’re suffering from lifetime constipation? Who’s more likely to make you feel better after a five-minute conversation? Surround yourself with people who help foster positive emotions and motivation in you.
“But you are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.”
― Timothy Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek
Spiritual Energy
For boosting energy, spiritual energy is the overall direction, purpose, and control you have over your life. A lack of direction, purpose, and control lowers spiritual energy. A clearly defined purpose and control over your life boosts spiritual energy.
Your direction and purpose could be to become an entrepreneur, create the next big mobile app game, become the best in the world at something, become a published author, or to provide the best possible life for your family.
I can’t tell you what your direction and purpose should be. This is something only you can decide for yourself, and it’ll be one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make. I can tell you that once you’ve found your direction, your overall energy will become much higher. You’ll feel stronger, your mind will sharpen, you’ll experience more positive emotions, you’ll be more motivated, and you’ll gain a greater sense of control over your life.
Unbridled Energy
Remember the last reason I gave about why you might want a girlfriend? You’re just too pent up? That seemingly unbearable tension and energy can lead to great accomplishments and creations if you can learn to channel that unbridled energy and use it productively. Don’t just suppress it or sit around doing nothing while it writhes within you.
I would go as far as asserting that, to an extent, everything that any man in any culture has accomplished or created throughout human history, like creating works of art or building civilizations, was borne out of channeling that unbridled sexual energy productively. This is why the coaches and trainers of elite athletes forbid sex in the days and weeks leading up to a major competition. This energy is a gift.
Final Words
In my view, feeling bad for not having a girlfriend is a symptom of a bigger problem: a lack of control over yourself and your life. You develop control over yourself and your life by first learning to control your energy.
Energy is controlled and built through heavy use followed by sufficient rest. Your energy has four parts.
Physical energy is built by avoiding excess eating and recovering from intense exercise.
Mental energy is built from regularly performing tasks that require concentration, memorization, and applying knowledge to solving problems, such as reading books or solving puzzles.
Emotional energy is built from enduring and overcoming negative emotions like rage, jealousy, and sadness.
Spiritual energy is built from setting a clearly defined purpose or direction for your life.
I strongly believe gaining control over your energy is the single most influential thing you can do to become confident, self-assured, happier, and to help make the people in your life happier, too.
