Do less, and you’ll end up exhausted all the time, no matter how much, how hard, or how long you rest. The answer is always, to do more, no matter what.

The thing that is making you have no energy or motivation all the time is not lack of enough rest. It’s lack of progress in solving the problems that are making your life miserable. As long as you don’t have your life together, you will feel drained all the time, even if you’re doing everything right.

You don’t understand how energy works.

You think it’s like a pile of money that if you spend some of, you’d end up having less money.

The more money you spend, the less money you’ll have left.

You think energy works the same way.

I understand that you need to be well-rested, and sleep enough hours every single day, and never wake up unless you feel you’re fully rested, with disregard to how many hours you’ve slept.

But beyond that, beyond your brain and body being structurally fully recovered and repaired, and becoming good as new, you need to do more and accomplish more, in order to have more energy.

In other words, it will be as if you make more money, the more money you spend, as long as you spend that money on something that feels like an accomplishment and a great achievement.

If you spend your energy doing more, but what you have done does not feel like an accomplishment or an achievement to you, you’d end up drained, frustrated, depressed, demotivated, and feeling fully exhausted. You will end up having less energy, both in the short-term, and the long-term.

What makes people freak out when I tell them they need to do more in order to have more energy, is that they believe that this means if they have a boring job that they hate, that they have to do for like eight hours a day every single day, that they’d have more energy, if they worked twelve hours a day instead.

That’s the exact opposite of what I meant.

This will be spending more time and energy doing what does not matter, what does not make any difference whatsoever, and what does not give you a sense of fulfillment, or satisfaction, and does not feel like it was a huge accomplishment or achievement to you.

Which also means, you did less of the stuff that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something great today.

You need to do more, of the things that give you more energy, the things that energize you, and make you feel alive. The things that give you a sense of reward, fulfillment, satisfaction, and happiness afterwards. The things that register as an amazing and great accomplishment and achievement in your mind. The things that truly matter. The things that are worth it. The things that make a difference. The things that you truly want, according to your core values and what’s truly important to you. And then you’ll have more energy.

Do less, and you’d end up having less energy, both in the short-term and the long-term, even if you sleep every day until fully rested. Even if you meditate for two hours every single day. Even if you exercise every day like there’s no tomorrow.

You will feel exhausted all the time, and like you have no energy at all, because even if you have all the energy in the world, you have done nothing.