Mental Energy: How are you good at spending it ?

Your Mental Energy is like Money

As the title of this section suggests, your dopamine levels (or mental energy to make it simpler) is just like having money, except the payday every day once you finish sleeping.

So you wake up, you got a good night sleep, and it's payday, you have 100% of your daily brain money to spend throughout the day. If you follow the Pomodoro workflow to the letter for 2 whole Working sessions, you should be able to work as described above, with a total of 8 Working Cycles, that are 25 minutes long each.

In the end, you responsibly spent your money gradually throughout the day, because you didn't seek pleasure, you only worked and whenever you needed to rest you correctly did the mental reset to make sure you could do the next work cycle without overworking yourself.

To seek pleasure, is to spend your money irresponsibly

Now it's the next day, you got a good night sleep and started to work, after a while you reset, then you work again, but this time you take a wrong turn and you feel like you need to escape the discomfort.

This time you didn't correct yourself to switch back to the "I need to reset" mindset, you've entered the addiction cycle, essentially you're giving in to the pursuit of pleasure.

The problem is that when you are seeking pleasure, when you do get that spike in dopamine (meaning you are feeling alot of pleasure in one go), it's as if you are burning alot of money in one go. After you've felt that big amount of pleasure, that mental money you had before is gone, you now have to go through the day with less mental energy.

In other words, by seeking pleasure you just spent your money irresponsibly, and now it's going to be much harder and discouraging to keep working the rest of the day, unlike how it would have been if you didn't indulge in addiction.

How to invest the money and reap the benefits ?

Now it's the next day again, you got a good night sleep, you have 100% of your brain energy to use for the day. But there's an evolutionary trick that you can do to get even more money, at a cost. The trick is to do cold exposure, for example to take a cold shower right after waking up:

Essentially you can see this as investing your brain money, rather than burning it away. This damn cold shower definitely does not feel good, hence it temporarily lowers your dopamine levels, as if you were spending it, but rather you are investing it, because you're going to reap the benefits of a 250% dopamine boost which will last for at least 2 hours (source).

This means, that if you're willing to bear with that extra discomfort of the cold shower right after waking up, you're going to be able to start your day with more than twice more mental energy than you normally would, this means that you're going to be able to get alot more done during the day than you normally would if you hadn't taken the cold shower.