I’ve always been fascinated with anger.

Not because I enjoy negativity —- but because it’s a source of energy.

It’s something I discovered in one of the darkest periods of my life.

I would wake up completely exhausted, drag myself down to the kitchen and through the entire day.

In the evening I would escape my dull reality with Youtube videos and video games.

Life felt like a gray flash of scenery. I was too tired to experience life.

This was around the time I’d started going to the gym. And my music playlists clearly showed that fact.

One day I went down the rabbit hole of Spotify recommendations down the bottom.

And the music I found there changed everything.

I started to flood my mind with artists like Rage against the machine, Pantera and Metallica.

When I came across the feeling of power and aliveness that anger created — I was hooked.

My energy for life started to return little by little. My motivation and joy were peeking through the gray mass that was my life.

But my interest was a clue to something bigger.

What interested me wasn’t anger itself but the energy behind it.

My complete lack of energy had caused me to cling on to every little bit I could find.

That was the reason anger had caught my attention. 

I started wondering if more people suffered from the dreadful problem of being too tired to experience life.

Were there other people than me who lacked motivation for life itself?

That’s when I made a crucial observation.

Most people live life on low power mode.

Their energy bank accounts can’t afford the resources of motivation, enjoyment or passion.

They dread the mornings, force themself through the day and never let go of the desire to pass out on the couch once it’s all over.

Without energy life becomes stale.

You lose the motivation to pursue your goals, improve your life or even enjoy existence.

Life turns into a monotonous line of mediocrity and life loses its zest.

There is an energy crisis going on. But it’s not physical – it’s mental.

It’s the dreadful problem of being too tired to experience life.

After a lot of pain and exhaustion I saw just how deep the problem goes.

But in doing so, I also found a way out.

My fascination with anger was a clue to the solution. 

To the lost art of never getting tired.

The Dimmer For Your Life

The definition of energy is “the ability to do work”.

In other words, energy is potential.

• It’s that feeling of motivation and enjoyment pulling you towards your goals

• The feeling of aliveness when you’re having the most wonderful conversation

• It’s that sense of amazement when you’re watching your ten thousandth sunset

To put it another way, energy is the essence of life.

People will tell you that motivation and energy is for losers. That you need to discipline yourself and just do the work.

But this is ignoring a fundamental part of life.

First off, you will do worse work and accomplish less because you lack the energy to channel into it.

Energy is potential. It’s the source of your life. The more energy you have, the greater your potential for life is.

Why would you ignore your most potent fuel source for the sake of a desire you most likely didn’t even consciously choose?

Secondly, it doesn’t solve the meaning problem. Which is the biggest problem with relying on discipline and willpower. When you force yourself down a path you hate – you will inevitably end up in a life you despise.

And even if you reach the goal you’ve adopted – you won’t be satisfied with it because you’ve hated the entire process of getting there (which is actually the true reward).

It’s the people who become religious about a diet someone else told them was the only viable one. They turn their life into one giant chore by not allowing themselves to experiment with other paths. Life becomes listless and the goal loses its meaning.

In life, it’s not that the end must justify the means. The means must justify the end.

The goal is always in the present, in the now.

Thirdly, discipline is a positive emotion just like motivation. It’s still energy, just a lower form of it. Telling someone to just be disciplined is like telling your gassed out car to just use fuel. It would work great… if there was any.

Lastly, when you create your life around willpower and discipline — you ‘ll eventually stop enjoying the experience of life.

You won’t find the path you were always meant to go down because you’ll be dead set on moving down one arbitrary goal. All because you convinced yourself that it was the only option for life.

You can’t ignore motivation.

It’s a trap I’ve fallen into many times. Even if it works in the beginning – it will eventually make your life lose meaning.

Discipline is a tool to fight the stupid inclinations of the mind – not your inner self.

If you ignore motivation you’re ignoring your most powerful fuel for life. Accomplishing your goals will become extremely difficult and painful.

We often think of the new year’s resolutioner as foolish for relying on motivation.

We don’t realize that he’s actually relying on discipline.

He isn’t motivated for the training itself, he just likes the idea of a better looking physique.

That’s not true motivation.

True intrinsic motivation should always be your aim in life.

It’s how you make achieving your goals effortless. It’s how you take advantage of your highest form of energy. And it’s how you make the whole process enjoyable (AKA your life).

A quote you’ve probably heard before sums this up pretty well.

From a more philosophical lens – when you rely on discipline, you don’t enjoy the experience of life. And isn’t that what we’re all trying to do?

Energy is the most worthwhile pursuit you can take on – because it’s the pursuit of more life.

It goes deeper than the practical tools we’ll discuss in the next sections. But for now, you just need to understand that energy is fucking important.

It’s a measure of how alive you are.

How fully you experience life.

Think of energy as the dimmer for your life.

• The more energy you have, the more intense the light becomes.

• The less energy you have, the dimmer it gets.

When you lose your energy you lose your motivation, curiosity and passion.

You no longer experience the highs and lows of life that makes it meaningful. Instead… 

You turn life into one monotonous line of mediocre experience.

You’ll quickly realize that a life without highs and lows is more painful than the low lows in a full experience of life.

You need energy. 

Not just to accomplish your goals…

But to live life (and enjoy it).

You Are Energy

Your life is a result of where you’ve continually invested your energy.

In other words…

The amount of energy you have access to in a lifetime is your potential.

Your ability to nurture and channel this energy into the world will determine the quality of your life.

• Are you investing it into the gym and clean food?

• Or into the couch and your favorite TV show?

People love to preach about the importance of focus and attention. Which are still crucial and you should still pay attention to them (no pun intended).

But they are only possible if there is something to focus.

To put it differently, you need energy.

Energy is the source of your life (it’s also all there is).

Everything you do is a transformation of this energy.

To create something in the universe (work, actions, decisions) you transform the energy from food into energy inside your mind. You then channel this energy into the world by the use of your body.

Everything in life is energy, what’s different is the vibration.

In the same way that a string can produce an infinite amount of frequencies depending on how much energy is applied to it – you can change the frequency of the universe by adding or removing energy to it.

When you do or create something, you’re literally changing the frequency of the universe.

This is also known as string theory (an attempted theory of combining relativity and quantum mechanics).

Life requires energy.

Building your life requires channeling of that energy.

To put it another way…

The more energy you have and the better you are at channeling it – the more control you will gain over your life.

The key to living a life you enjoy is by learning to channel the energy of the universe.

If you want a better experience of life – you need to learn how to increase your energy and channel it into the world.

But to do that, we need to know what it actually is.

Emotion Isn’t A Bug, It’s A Feature

You want more energy.

But the kind of energy matters.

It won’t help you to plug yourself into an electrical outlet.

The only energy you can really use is conscious energy. It’s how you turn thought into action, idea into creation and how you build your life.

It’s also how brightly you experience life.

There are many different names for it, psychic energy, mental energy, conscious energy but the name doesn’t really matter.

It’s all potential for your life.

Let’s go over the science of conscious energy.

Conscious energy is more or less 2 neuro-chemicals:

• Dopamine 

• Adrenaline.

People often confuse adrenaline with stress and dopamine with pleasure (but it’s more complicated than that).

Adrenaline is energy. It’s your brain's ability to do work. Stress creates adrenaline because it’s preparing you to move. In other words, stress creates energy (this will be useful soon).

Dopamine is the molecule of motivation. It’s what gets you to move, explore and act. The molecule dopamine is part of the brain's movement system. When you lose dopamine, you can’t move.

These 2 chemicals are the source of your conscious energy (in order to not go all too deep).

But when energy appears in consciousness, it’s not in the form of pure energy… 

It’s in the form of emotions (motivation, curiosity, interest etc.).

But when we look at what happens when someone is deprived of these chemicals, something interesting happens.

When you deprive someone of dopamine and adrenaline – they don’t experience more negative emotion – they experience apathy.

They lose emotion.

To put it differently… 

Their life becomes dull.

When you lose conscious energy – your experience of life dims (think back to the dimmer of your life).

This is important to you because it means that conscious energy is emotion. It’s the form energy takes in consciousness.

The amount of conscious energy you have – and how focused it is determines the emotion appearing in consciousness:

The highest and most focused forms of conscious energy are peace, joy and love. The lower and less focused forms are apathy, guilt and shame.

This is why you can’t ignore motivation. 

It’s the combination of your highest forms of energy (joy, willingness and love). 

If your life is a result of where and how much energy you’ve invested – why would you rely  on a lower form of energy like willpower and fear?

It doesn’t make sense.

It’s the difference between charging your electric car with triple A or lithium batteries. Your car still might work with the triple A’s but definitely not as well.

A life of peace and joy is also a lot more enjoyable than one spent in pain and fear.

The 3 Way Gate To More Energy

Energy is a 3 way gate.

You need:

• A fuel source

• A way to focus it

• A way to channel it

This should ring some bells to what we’ve gone over so far:

1. Conscious energy is adrenaline and dopamine.

2. Behavior is the signal that brings it forth.

3. Emotion is how this energy appears in consciousness.

To brighten your experience of life and build it to your liking – you need to know:

• How to increase your energy

• How to focus your energy

• How to leverage emotion

In other words, you need a source of energy, a way to focus it and a way to channel it.

Let’s dive in:

Your Conscious Fuel Tank

To craft your life, accomplish your goals and enjoy life…

You need a source of energy to pull from.

This is created by prioritizing:

• Diet

• Sleep

• Exercise

• Energy habits

The combination of these 4 is your “energy circuit”. 

It’s the foundation for your conscious energy and can’t be ignored.

This is how you create an almost unlimited source of energy to pull from in everything you do.

Let’s break them down.

1. Diet

Diet is a fundamental pillar of your being.

In other words, you are what you eat. 

To increase your energy, you need to create the environment that allows for it.

Your conscious energy is created from the energy and nutrients in the food you consume.

You need a high quality diet with an emphasis on a certain amino acid… 

Dopamine and adrenaline are both derived from the amino acid tyrosine.

You can just make a search for “tyrosine rich foods” but here are some examples:

• Turkey

• Chicken

• Milk

• Cheese

• Yoghurt

• Fish 

• Avocado

This will create the foundation for your energy source.

But to actually pull out the energy, you can’t eat food that will create a civil war inside your belly.

In other words, avoid inflammatory foods like:

• Ultra processed foods

• Seed oils

• Pasta

I go over this in depth in “Your diet is your destiny” (Read that one after you’re done with this).

But this is basically what you need to know:

Get a healthy diet, get enough tyrosine and avoid inflammatory food.

Now you’ve got a source of energy.

You just need to make it useful.

2. Sleep

Sleep is how you prevent conscious chaos.

It’s how you prevent your conscious energy from becoming chaotic and unusable (I go over this in depth in “how intelligent people use sleep”, read that one after this).

But more than that, sleep is the most anabolic process you will ever experience.

Your body turns into a giant construction site.

• Muscle is built

• Diseases are fought

• Energy is created

It’s during sleep your body makes the majority of your conscious energy. It packs you a “lunch box full of energy” so that you can survive another bout of wakefulness.

It also clears out the waste products wakefulness creates. 

Sleep is the foundation for your energy – it’s how your energy becomes useful.

If you want to perfect your sleep, again, check out “how intelligent people use sleep”.

Once you have a source of energy and made it useful.

You need to focus it and make it controllable.

3. Exercise

Working out is spiritual.

It’s also the last piece in your conscious fuel tank.

It focuses the energy by making it flow. 

This has a lot to do with entropy and mechanical systems (believe it or not) but that’s too much to go over in one section.

What you need to understand: Implementing exercise in your daily routine will prevent your conscious energy from going crazy and becoming chaotic.

To do this you need to create a holistic workout routine.

I explain the steps an context to this in “working out is spiritual” but I’ll give you a brief summary here:

A holistic workout routine consists of 3 pillars:

• Walking

• Accidental calisthenics

• Mental resets

To make this practical:

• Walk in between mental work

• Do accidental calisthenics

• Reset your mind with high intensity exercise (gym, sprinting, cycling)

If you want to dive deep into this stuff, again, check out  “working out is spiritual” after you’re done with this one.

4. Energy Habits

When you’ve charged up your conscious battery with diet, sleep & exercise…

There are a number of energy boosting habits you’ll want to know.

Some of these are optional, others not so much.

Combining all of them is acting in accordance with your biology — it’s creating the perfect environment to fuel your energy levels.

Let’s break them down:

Light

Any discussion about energy would be inadequate without mentioning sunlight (as I’m sure Andrew Huberman would say).

Light rules your body. 

It’s one of the only constant evolutionary factors.

It only makes sense that our bodies have become accustomed to it.

The role sunlight plays in energy can’t be overstated.

Without it, your energy will literally become less useful.

Let me paint you a picture.

Everyday you have a set amount of energy at your disposal (which is determined by your conscious fuel tank, diet, sleep, exercise).

But depending on the light signals to your brain – the energy will either peak in the morning and taper off towards the evening — or remain low and constant the whole day.

Seeing sunlight early in the day will send signals to your brain to spike cortisol (this is one of those instances when cortisol is actually beneficial). This will take your daily energy and explode it to unproportional levels in the beginning of the day.

As the day goes by, your energy will drop until the evening comes and you’re actually able to sleep.

If you don’t get this signal early in the day – your energy will remain low during your entire day but not be low enough for you to fall asleep when the evening comes.

In other words, you’ll take the energy out of the day and the tiredness out of the evening.

If you don’t get this right, your amount of energy or how you channel it won’t matter — you’ll still feel groggy the whole day.

Getting sunlight is non negotiable.

This is the protocol:

Look in the direction of the sun for 10 minutes on sunny days and 20 minutes on overcast days.

Important: Sunglasses and getting it through windows will take away the effect.

My favorite way of doing this: Put on some music or an audio-book and carve out 10-20 minutes of your morning to take a walk and ponder life & the day ahead.

This way you set yourself up for success the rest of the day.

You start the day with motivation, joy and a good mood.

Note: If you miss one day it’s not the end of the world.

But make sure to get 2 times as much the following day.

Now that we have our fuel source, have timed it with sunlight…

We can learn to control it.

Induced stress

Stress creates adrenaline and adrenaline creates energy.

By exposing yourself to stress voluntarily you can increase your energy while keeping your mind ordered.

The key word here is voluntary.

If it just happens to you, you will get an increase in energy but it will be extremely difficult to keep the peace inside your head.

Let’s go over some ways you can do this:

• Cold Showers – I’ve taken cold showers everyday for 4 years. It forces you into motion first thing in the morning and feels amazing. The increase in adrenaline and most of all dopamine lasts for 2 hours afterwards.

• Cyclic hyperventilation – This technique, also known as the Wim Hoff method, will boost your adrenaline and energy significantly. The practice is taking 1 forceful deep breath through your nose and then letting go of all the air in a short out breath. Repeat this 30 times and hold your breath for as long as you feel comfortable when you’re done.

• Caffeine – Caffeine will raise your adrenaline and dopamine levels. Just make sure to not drink too much or too close to bed. It’s truly a double edged sword for your health. (Again, check out “how intelligent people use sleep” to learn more).

The key here is to increase adrenaline in your body without letting the stress scramble your conscious energy.

Practice staying calm in situations with high adrenaline with whatever method you prefer.

This will make you able to tolerate more stress and make you capable of handling more energy.

Stress yourself out, but not mentally.

Your Source Of Life

When you connect diet, sleep and exercise – you create a source of high quality energy to pull from.

But if you don’t know how to channel it — it will become chaotic (psychic entropy).

This is anxiety, pain and worry.

To solve this you need to learn how to channel your energy towards your goals. 

There are 2 solutions to this:

• Following the rules for flow (but we’ve already talked about this)

• Leveraging emotions

Let’s explore:

How To Leverage Emotion

Your mind is an ocean.

The winds, currents and waves are your emotions.

Your job is to use the waves of the storm to get where you want to go.

Just as a skilled sailor uses every direction of wind to reach his destination – you can use every emotion to achieve your goals.

• Joy for creativity

• Anger for productivity

• Sadness for perspective

It’s all conscious energy that can be used to brighten your experience and achieve your goals.

The difference between you and the sailor is that you have some power over the storm.

Even if you’re not a Buddhist who’s dedicated 70 years to emotional control – you can still influence the shape of your psychic energy.

This doesn’t mean that you should aim to live in constant joy and ecstasy. That’s how life becomes a stagnant line.

You need to use all emotions (because they’re all useful)

Living in chronic depression will suck all motivation and potential out of you. Living in joy will turn life into a blend of meaningless events (even though aiming for joy is a worthwhile goal).

Living life in constant rage will eat you up from the inside. Living in untamed fear will poison your soul.

Just as you can’t have the top of a wave without the trough, all your energy can’t be positive emotion.

You can’t have the yin without the yang.

All emotions have use cases (or they wouldn’t exist).

But leaving your emotional state and psychic energy to chance isn’t a sustainable approach either (you’ll become a feather in the wind).

You need to use something I like to call “strategic emotion”.

Strategic Emotion

You can’t get rid of emotion.

But what you think, do and believe will influence the shape they take.

With one mindset, sadness becomes a destructive force wreaking havoc on your life.

With another, it becomes a tool to gain perspective and create your best work.

Strategic emotion is about influencing your emotional state to channel the energy towards your goals.

To use it, you need to understand the nature of emotions.

But first, you need to understand the nature of energy. 

A rule of thumb that applies to all of life:

Energy is only useful when it’s focused.

Think of the difference between heat energy and electricity.

Heat energy is the most chaotic and scattered form of energy there is, it takes extreme measures to convert it into something focused and useful.

Electricity on the other hand is the most focused form of energy. It can be used for almost everything and with extremely high efficiency.

In exactly the same way, conscious energy is only useful when it’s focused.

If you don’t take measures to focus it (internal or external) it will follow the fundamental law of the universe, entropy (the tendency for energy to become chaotic).

If any emotion is left to itself, it will inevitably become anxiety and worry (because it’s the most disordered form of emotion).

Contrary to other emotions, anxiety and worry have NO use cases.

The only way to use them is by learning to focus your conscious energy.

Let’s set the stage for implementing this tactic.

All emotions exist on a spectrum of the 8 core emotions (joy, trust, fear,surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation).

This is called an emotion wheel.

Each emotion has an opposite emotion (fear and anger, joy and sadness).

Take a moment to study this graphic before we continue.

There are 2 keys to leveraging emotions for energy:

1. Thought

2. Presence

Let’s break them down.

1. Leveraging Thinking

“As man thinketh, so is he.”

Thoughts are powerful.

You can think of them as code for your mind.

The right series of thoughts can change your whole life.

In the case of energy, the right series of thoughts can shape your conscious energy.

Studies have shown that when you think happy or sad thoughts, your brain produces the corresponding neurochemicals in the brain.

Meaning, if you were to think about puppies and rainbows, your brain would produce serotonin (the well-being chemical).

And if you thought about rain puddles and dirty dishes, your brain would produce a balance of chemicals that made you sad.

(It’s a LOT more complicated than this, but we’re mainly interested in the practical aspect here)

The trick then, is to use this to your advantage.

Sometimes the spell of the mind can’t be broken.

Sometimes you can’t get out of an emotional state.

Sometimes you need to fight fire with fire.

When emotions are too strong to deal with or if you haven’t leveled up your consciousness to the level of being able to disassociate with your mind… 

This is a powerful method.

It involves creating thought patterns through thought to overpower other emotions or to create enough energy to push through obstacles.

It’s about promoting certain types of emotions.

Tactical Rage

I used to be terrified of public speaking.

My throat and tongue would stiff up like they had suddenly turned to stone. 

My whole body would shake like I’d been electrified and my heartbeat would get up to 180 (I actually confirmed this once).

No matter how much I tried to calm myself down – presentations would always scare the living crap out of me.

But one day I accidentally found the cure. I found a way to turn the tables on my mind.

This was right at the time I’d just started going to the gym and was listening to a lot of metal songs.

Rage against the machine, Pantera and Slipknot would always be blasted through my beige on-ear headset.

While I sat and waited for my turn to present, I was playing the heaviest and most rage inducing music I could find.

I played through scenarios of ripping demons’ heads off in my mind theater. I lit the firewood for my anger and poured gasoline on it.

When it was time for me to present… I went up to the podium and held the greatest presentation of my life.

Why am I telling you this?

Because that day I discovered a way to beat emotion.

To fight fire with fire.

The opposite emotion of fear is anger.

By blasting music, visualizing and thinking thoughts all in alignment with anger, I was moving my emotional state away from fear and towards anger.

By triggering an opposite emotion I moved closer to a neutral state of energy.

It’s a powerful concept that can be used to overpower anxiety, procrastination or any other mental obstacle.

This was how my fascination with anger began.

And it’s still a tool I use (but very sparingly).

There is power in anger.

It has the ability to overpower almost every other emotion. 

Because it gives you a feeling of control and that resistance is being overcome.

Nietzsche would say that power is rising.

Whenever I start procrastinating or get a kind of yucky feeling towards the things I need to do — I start creating rage inside me.

Don’t feel like going to the gym? Blast some angry fucking music.

Doubting your abilities? Stare into the mirror imagining the most furious visions you can muster.

Fighting fire with fire, emotion with emotion works because it’s easier to overpower an emotion than to extinguish it.

It takes a lot of practice to be able to extinguish anxious thoughts with just meditation.

It’s way easier to blast “Bullet in the head” at full volume.

But this isn’t to say it’s better.

There is one important thing you need to keep in mind about this tactic.

Negative emotion is powerful – but it easily becomes toxic.

When you’re overpowering emotions like sadness with anger, you’re essentially drowning it with rage (but it’s still there).

You will still have to deal with it at some point.

This is why you have to use strategic emotion sparingly.

Tactical rage is a dangerous method to get out of a rut or overcome mental obstacles.

But it’s not sustainable fuel.

Anger is great for overcoming initial resistance, but you need a more sustainable fuel source.

Relying on anger is like fueling a fire with paper towels.

The fire is intense but burns out quickly (the fumes are also not that nice).

The way to sustain a fire is with something that lasts longer.

Tactical Joy

Your most sustainable and powerful form of energy is joy, peace and love.

This is the firewood that burns long and fiercely. 

But lighting it requires a lot of effort and practice.

Creating sustainable joy in your life should be a goal you have top of mind. It’s powerful, sustainable and improves your life and everyone else’s.

Tactical joy is training your brain to think positively. Your job is to create a positive tetris effect. 

To program your mind for positivity.

This is how you do it:

Force yourself into positive thought habits:

• Write 3 things down that you’re grateful for everyday

• Force yourself to see the positive side in every situation

• Listen to harmony inducing music

After a while, positivity will become effortless.

This will focus your conscious energy in a way that is most useful to you.

The most useful emotion is joy (it’s also one of the most enjoyable).

It’s the highest form of conscious energy and the most focused.

To channel your energy, use tactical rage to get over obstacles and tactical joy to sustain your journey.

2. Presence

Even the most skilled sailor can’t tame the most wrathful storm.

The same goes for your mind.

When your psyche is nothing but a blend of anxious thoughts about future and past events — the energy is completely useless.

You need to calm the sea (or at least turn the storm into one direction).

The now is powerful.

By observing the chaos of the mind you gain control over it.

When you do nothing but watch the winds of the storm, it settles and rearranges.

This is how you find clarity. By realizing there is nothing but the now (this is also known as meditation).

Make it a habit to observe your emotional state on a daily basis.

Once it starts to settle, the energy inside your head will start becoming more focused so that you can use it.

It will turn into joy and motivation.

This is the ultimate way to channel conscious energy, but it’s also the hardest.

It’s a daily struggle, but the more you do it the more you realize it’s worth it.

Learn to disassociate from your mind and unlock the highest forms of your conscious energy.

In other words, “start meditating bro”.

The Road To A Brighter Life

Energy is the source of your life.

When you understand how to create and channel it – you literally unlock your potential.

You unlock a brighter way of life.

Increasing your energy is:

• Finding motivation in your day to day actions.

• Accomplishing the things you want with power and speed

• Enjoy the highs and lows of life

When you start feeling tired, when life becomes gray – analyze your life on the points we’ve gone over:

• Are you prioritizing diet, sleep and exercise to lay the foundation for energy?

• Are you performing the energy habits, sunlight, cold showers & induced stress?

• Are you noticing your emotions and leveraging your thoughts to use them?

• Are you becoming present and disassociating from your mind regularly?

Whenever life becomes dull or chaotic — always go back to the basics. 

Are you really considering switching the entire trajectory of your life because it’s draining your soul?

Or are you just tired?

When you take some time to detach, rest and gather energy – clarity often reveals itself.

You’ll find that life is pretty great and more often than not, worth continuing and improving.

Take care of your energy.

That’s it for this one.

Thanks for reading, like this post, subscribe to the newsletter and read through previous letters etc.

Have a good one!

- Simon