I realized something today as I reflected on how blogging hurts my journaling. I realized that I have many different kinds of energies.
I have writing energy, but I also have…
- Reading energy
- Arguing energy
- Leisure energy
- Physical labor energy
- Exercise energy
- Arithmetic energy
- Musical energy
- Social energy
- Paperwork energy
I have others too, but these came to mind immediately.
Each of these energies is separate from the others. Perhaps they’re not completely separate – there’s overlap and some definitely affect others – but in general they’re each distinct.
That’s different from how we normally think of it. Normally, we assume we only have one energy that’s either up or down. Or we might think we can be somewhere in the middle. But we don’t usually assume we have different kinds of energies.
I remember in college thinking, I can’t finish this homework right now. I’m out of energy. Then I’d go play Ultimate Frisbee for three hours straight.
At first, that might seem like the difference between physical energy and mental energy, which is a common distinction. But I think it goes further than that. The different energies are more granular.
Studying for an exam requires a different energy than writing a blog post even though those both would fit in the mental energy category. Writing lyrics for a song even requires a different energy than writing the music.
Again, one type of energy might affect another – for example, depleting my physical labor energy might take away from my exercise energy – but they don’t necessarily and certainly don’t directly do that.
I’d like to learn more about this. Specifically, I’d like to learn how to spend my different energies to get the best result overall. It seems like this might lead to more fruitful results than working under the assumption that I only have one general “energy” that’s either up, down, or somewhere in the middle.
But what do you think?
