memes

The strategy is called recognizing when the battery is at 10%.

It’s a scientifically established fact that higher levels of exhaustion take a disproportionately greater amount of recovery time.

If you use 10% of your tank you can recover in an hour. But if you use 80% of your tank it might take 48 hours (instead of the linearly-expected 8) to recover.

So the trick is to draw the line earlier. Meditation can be great for developing this kind of awareness. More time spent paying attention to something recruits more neurons into the perception of that thing. More neurons means higher resolution. Higher resolution means seeing things you couldn’t see before.

The body is like a TV show that’s always playing in the background of our lives. If we stop and actually watch that TV for a while, we can get a better sense of the characters and the plot.

Drugs are handy too. Drugs alter physiological state in relatively predictable ways, so with some refined self awareness and a drug that say blocks adrenaline from binding, you can learn to pick out the effect of adrenaline on your consciousness, and differentiate that from cortisol or dopamine or glutamate. You can learn exactly how systemic inflammation feels by experimenting with ibuprofen.

TL;DR take breaks before you need them