I remember about a year ago, making a huge effort to carve out the time and sapce to attend a one-day silent Vipassana course in my city. It was a whole coordinated thing as a household since my daughter was just a few months old, and I didn’t wanna bail on my wife.
I went into this course with about three hours of sleep the night before. The course was one of the most excrutiating experiences of my life. Not like the ten-day Vipassana course is; that one is tough to get through, but it was clear how much value my pain created. This one-day course was this weird place between exhaustion and boredom.
I was confused, and my confusion quickly turned into worry. Has my ability to be deeply present almost completely atrophied since becoming a dad? It took me eight years to get to this level of consistent presence day-in, day-out…and now it seems to have disappeared in a matter of 100 days.
This motivated me to start meditating regularly again. I noticed that when I was rested, I was able to be quite present for my entire meditation sit.
Conversely, when I was sleep-deprived, it was virtually impossible for me to have a fruitful meditation sit. And I get the whole “showing up to the cushion every day is the real practice” thing. I know that the value comes from consistency of practice. But when I was new-father sleep deprived, I was simply lacking the awakeness to even apply a diligent attempt at observing or noticing anything.
I learned that awareness or attention, requires energy. Without being rested, I simply cannot apply attention in any given moment, but as soon as I am rested and firing on all cylinders, it becomes relatively smooth to be deeply present.
I recently learned about the importance of our resting heart rate (RHR) as a proxy for overall health. The way this works is when our RHR is low our sleep improves, and when our sleep improves our willpower improves. When our willpower improves, we make really good choices; we are able to pay attention to our default, unconscious diet, whether it be food or online content consumption, or movement. This happens because our prefrontal cortex apparently is more or less turned off when our sleep is bad.
Unhealthy choices don’t require much energy because unhealthy choices have been designed in a way where the hurdle to clear is extremely low, and the dopamine payoff is extremely high. We’re basically set up for failure any time we navigate the world, whether through the grocery store or on our phone.
Healthy choices require a higher activation energy. It’s like the whole type 2 fun thing; it’s perhaps less immediately pleasurable because of less dopamine flowing in this very moment, but we derive deep satisfaction and contentment from knowing how it’s moving us toward the life we want, toward the person we want to become.
In order to override our desire for the huge hit of pleasure from unhealthy choices, and actually follow through on healthy choices (like me typing this blog instead of watching more Montreal Canadiens coverage), we need enough energy such that we can meet the activation energy threshold required for healthier choices to be actioned.
This is the case for focusing on restedness: by being more rested, we make higher leverage decisions and follow through on robust actions, but also avoid the toxic actions that don’t just hold us back, but dig us into a hole of feeling lethargic, depleted, and eventually depressed.
But rest doesn’t just come from focusing on sleep. It comes from other sources, many of which are nonobvious, the biggest meta source being conservation of energy. Instead of focusing on adding energy, I find it easier to find more energy by focusing on making my energy expenditure more efficient.
Authenticity, for example, is a huge energy saver: it requires drastically more energy to perform for others, to fit a certain image that I need to uphold, than it does to freely be myself.
Another one is general anxiety: the constant buzz of worry or fear is the equivalent of a hole causing energy to slowly leak throughout the day. To further the analogy, when we’re sleeping and restoring our energy, we aren’t able to restore it to 100% because of the leak, so we wake up feeling less energized than we’d expect from eight hours of sleep (or in my case, nine).
In contrast, being in a relaxed state as much as possible, is not equal to laziness; it might be the most productive thing you can do. Save your energy for the few high leverage tasks that matter each day, and mentally rest for other tasks that don’t require your full intensity.
This leaves you with the energy required to be attentive throughout the entire day for all of the decisions you make, to increase your willpower and achieve the activation energy for doing the things that matter to you most.
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