Energy Is the Precondition for Living Well

Three Days of Qingming

The day before the Qingming holiday (a Chinese spring festival for tending ancestors' graves), I went to bed half an hour early. On the first morning of the holiday I was bursting with energy and raring to go, and even dashed off a blog post, A Wrong Map Is Better Than No Map.

I thought, if half an hour early makes this much difference, imagine what happens if I go to bed even earlier. I'll take off.
So that day I tried sleeping at nine. I woke up at three in the morning and could not for the life of me fall back asleep, scrolled my phone for half an hour, and then managed to sleep through to seven.

I figured that with all that sleep I'd be full of energy yesterday. Instead, after breakfast and a coffee, I sat down at my desk and started nodding off, yawning nonstop. I flipped through a few ebooks and felt like I couldn't catch my breath, then picked up a paper book on alternative data and found it dull too.

So I stopped pretending and went back to sleep a little after ten in the morning, drifting in and out until noon. I got up, had lunch, and thought, surely I've slept enough now; I'll grab a coffee and grind straight through to dinner. But I was in the same state as in the morning, couldn't even hold a book, and before three I couldn't hold out any longer. I even had a bit of a physical headache. Damn it. Back to fucking sleep.

I drifted along until after five, then biked out for some Henan food. Riding past the bustling Big Roof, I finally felt a little bit alive again.
I was still sleepy in the evening, but to get back to a normal rhythm I forced myself to stay up until eleven, then slept straight through to seven-thirty.

When I woke up this morning, that muddled feeling from yesterday was finally gone. I was raring to go again and spent a very productive morning reading.

Comparing these three days, I really felt how important it is to look after your energy. Being driven and clear-headed versus being drowsy and worn out, with your head under a slow fog: those are two completely different people.
Yesterday I even started to suspect I'd gone lazy again, that Lu Shen's influence had worn off, and for a while I felt a real fear of backsliding. But comparing it with today, I'm sure it was only an energy problem, not a willingness problem.

Your body clock is hard to break casually. Right now the sleep window that suits me best is from eleven at night to seven-thirty in the morning. Minus the time it takes to fall asleep, that's just about eight hours. Once I drift outside that window, even drinking coffee like water doesn't do shit.

Lazy men and lazy women may just be products of low energy

Lazy men and lazy women are probably the most off-putting creatures in this world. Even when you want to help them, it feels like trying to prop up a pile of mud against the wall.

I'm not naturally a very energetic person. According to my BaZi (Chinese birth-chart astrology), I'm short on Fire among the five elements, so my spirit tends to turn inward.
In my own experience this actually matched up, and so it quietly became a self-fulfilling prophecy. In the past I often felt low on energy and assumed it was just my constitution. But comparing different ways of living over the past few years has convinced me that's really not the case. Without the comparison, you simply can't tell what a good state of living feels like.

Enough sleep at the right time (7 to 8 hours) + consistent exercise (for me, biking to and from work when it isn't raining, 25 km round trip): keep it up for half a year and your cardiovascular fitness and energy go up a level. As long as you don't break the routine on a whim, most days you'll have plenty of energy.

The old habits of only wanting to lie down on holidays, not being able to sit still at my desk, and not bothering with housework, all more or less learned helplessness, have completely disappeared, and I've come to experience the steady, always-improving way of living that Lu Shen has.
So much so that these days I really can't stand the lazy-man, lazy-woman state, including but not limited to:

1. Staying up late at night, numbly scrolling your phone and binge-watching shows
2. Lazing around in the morning and not being able to get out of bed
3. Being listless all day, never sitting when you could lie down
4. Doing housework sloppily, for example washing the dishes but not cleaning the sink, leaving paper towels everywhere, closing the window but not the screen, always doing only 80%. This matters especially for keeping a clean and tidy home: let that remaining 20% pile up for three days and the place becomes a nightmare.
5. Reading, studying and working in fits and starts: fishing for three days, drying the nets for two
6. ...

But all of these problems can be fixed bit by bit as long as you stay energetic.
And to stay energetic, a certain amount of self-discipline is indispensable. Especially for people who lack a sense of meaning and mission, it may even take some external constraint to complete the "enlightenment" process.

And once someone has experienced the contrast between the two states, I don't think anyone would fail to prefer a tidier, fuller life.