Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

I have a problem. It's an interesting problem, and one that I might have found a solution to.

My problem is this - "How do I make sustainable progress towards my goals each day without exhausting myself and burning out?"

As we all know (I think?), my productivity is tied to inertia.

The more consistent I am, the easier it is to be consistent.

The lazier I am, the harder it is to get myself going.

This self-awareness has helped me avoid falling into many traps over the years, but the one consistent problem I face several times a year is that I struggle to maintain inertia without burning myself out.

I write all the time about the critical importance of building habits, about being consistent, about showing the f*ck up before optimizing.

Those things solve my inertia problem in the macro, or at a larger scale.

What I have needed for a long time was a way to help alleviate fatigue on a day-to-day basis so that I have more time in a clear mindset to get the things done that I care about. I can brute force this by sacrificing my mental well-being, but again, that eventually leaves to a major burnout.

I don't want a burnout!

I want the skills to maintain my inertia while maintaining my physical, emotional, and mental energy.

I'm tired of sprinting throughout the marathon of life.

So today I write about how to combine several tricks to pace myself on a daily basis.

Let's get into it.

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🦉 Wise Owl Thought(s) of The Week: How To Make Life Less Exhausting

While this week's newsletter is about how to be less exhausted, I am not going to be writing about the following obvious things

• Daily exercise
• Sleeping enough
• Working less
• Playing more

Those are obvious and too broad in their scope to help me when I am in the trenches each day.

What I will be writing about are the following five areas that I knew of, but did not do enough of on a daily basis.

1. Mental Priming
2. Self-compassion
3. Intentional "noticing"
4. Mental Neutrality
5. Intentional Giving

The order of these matters to me, too.

You can try to do them in whatever order works for you, but I wrote them in the order of need. Each day I need to do much more mental priming than I need to intentionally give.

This is because I already do a lot of intentional giving and nowhere near enough mental priming.

Feel free to pick and choose what you're lacking in so that we can all have better days.

🧠Mental Priming

I've written about this before, but at the time I hadn't realized the obvious broader applications.

In a prior newsletter I mentioned that I had created a "motivation bank" playlist that I used to listen to when I wanted to motivate myself.

That is called mental priming.

At any point during the day you can prime your mind to boost your emotional and mental energy.

I kid you not, I have a meditation app on my phone called PRIMED mind, and this concept still eluded me. 😂 This is a severe lack of "intentional noticing" on my part. We will cover intentional noticing later on.

As I wrote above, you can prime your mind with great music. Millions of people do this everyday to get better workouts, to enjoy their commutes, etc.

But this is not the only way to prime your mind (duh).

Another fun trick is to listen to comedy or watch funny videos before you start doing a task that you normally find difficult to get started. The laughter and enjoyment you take away from that comedy or video will carry over to whatever task you're doing and everything gets easier.

I like to watch a motivational sports speech before I play online poker. In my mind playing online poker is a lot like going to war, so going into an online session with an ironclad mindset is pretty essential.

You can also use mental priming to break out of a funk.

It's true. In a bad mood? Try smiling for a few minutes.

Your brain associates smiling with a good mood, so if you just force your face muscles to imitate a smile, your brain will recognize that pattern and slowly but surely your mood will improve.

Pair this with a motivating song or video. That bad mood didn't have a chance.

🥰 Self-compassion

Compassion matters, but it can be hard to find some external compassion when we are having a shitty moment during the day.

This is where self-compassion comes in!

This is a more focused version of mental priming where you use your own rational mind to give yourself a break.

You do this using the following framework pioneered by a fellow Austinite Kristin Neffs who teaches at the University of Texas in Austin:

1. Admit you're experiencing pain. Allow yourself to experience the suck for a few moments. Don't hide from it or suppress it. Label the emotion you're feeling.
2. Remind yourself that pain, even this particular pain, is a shared human experience. You aren't a special pain snowflake. Your struggles aren't unique. Others have been there before you, and many others will go there after you. You are not alone, friend. Humans tend to isolate when we are in pain. You need to reconnect to start healing.
3. Take a small action to feel better. Once you've admitted you're on the struggle bus 🚌, acknowledged it's a public bus everyone has ridden before, then it's time to get off the struggle bus by doing something that gives you a little relief. Perhaps prime your mind by playing with an animal, listening to music, going for a walk, or doing all three of those things at the same time by taking your pet for a walk (over achiever). Whatever you need to do to give yourself some relief, you have my permission.

Priming your mind is a way to get into the healthy mental space that doesn't exhaust you.

Self-compassion is a way to get yourself out of a toxic mental space that will exhaust you.

Are you noticing a pattern here?

👀 Intentional "Noticing"

This is an interesting one for me, personally.

It's interesting to me because I had never thought about this in an intentional way before.

Humans have a tendency to get into rigid thought patterns.

Rigid anything is not good for handling the fluid and chaotic life of the modern world we live in.

When you think in the same rigid thought patterns your scope of reality shrinks.

If your scope of reality is small and something bad happens to you, it can become your entire world.

If one bad day becomes your entire world, you are going to quickly become immensely exhausted.

It's also much harder to prime a mind that has boxed itself in with rigid thinking.

Intentional Noticing is an exercise to loosen up the training wheels on your mind and allow you to, surprise, start noticing more about the world around you.

Intentional Noticing is the exercise of asking yourself open ended questions when your mind runs out of ideas. When you ask yourself open ended questions your free your brain to think and find connections between bits of information that have never connected before.

A few great open ended questions to ask yourself:

• What is the one thing I haven't been doing that is making this situation harder?
• If I were to experience this situation differently, what would that look like?
• What is my goal in this situation?
• What are my choices in this moment?
• If this super hard task was actually a series of easy tasks, what would the first task be?
• What is the best outcome of this situation? Is that the actual best outcome?

The more you ask yourself these open ended question, you force your brain to pivot, to think about a situation differently. You move yourself out of the corner you boxed yourself in. It gets easier to breathe and think.

When you aren't boxed into a corner (of your own making) it is much easier to move yourself out of a toxic mindset and into a healthy mindset.

Which is essential if you want to achieve a place of mental neutrality.

🧘🏼 Mental Neutrality

Quick question - which humans are the least judgmental?

The answer is babies. Babies are the least judgmental because they haven't learned how to be judgmental yet. Babies exist in the existential promise land of mental neutrality, and this amazing mental headspace is what we are going to try to find.

We've spoken about how to prime our minds to get into a healthy headspace. We learned about self-compassion so we can escape from toxic mindsets.

Then we learned about breaking out of our rigid thought processes to empower us to notice more in the world.

Each of these steps make it easier for us to take a mentally neutral stance more often throughout my daily life.

When I can find a position of neutrality in my mind, I can stop caring too much about various things. I can let go of mental baggage I didn't realize I had.

Finding a space of mental neutrality allows me to:

• Get over it when my favorite MMA fighters lose
• Get over it when my favorite sports teams lose
• Play better poker by focusing on making the best decisions instead of worrying about the outcome
• Be more creative by not limiting myself with preconceived notions of what can and cannot be
• Admit I am wrong when I have royally screwed up

It is honestly incredibly helpful in getting out of my own way. I often think that the "flow state" high achievers are always seeking is a form of mental neutrality.

But how can we get to this place?

We do this by asking ourselves more open ended questions!

• If I was a neutral third party on this subject, would I notice anything different?
• What is the problem I am actually trying to solve?
• Am I coming from a place of "me vs. them" or from a place of "us vs. the problem"?
• What is the base principle that is most appropriate for this situation?
• Am I focusing on anything outside of my control?
• What questions would my Mom ask about this? (A variation of the first bullet point. Also hi mom!)

These questions help pull me out of whatever train of thought I am in so that I can shift my perspective. If I do this enough times I can find the neutral point of view and start to operate from there.

This is a hard step to achieve, I admit, but it gets easier with practice.

It also gets easier when you have some help from people you care about.

🎁 Intentional Giving

When I first started drafting this newsletter two hours ago, I wasn't sure if I should include this section. Then as I've started writing this long winded article, I decided to include this last section.

I decided to include it for a few reasons.

1. You don't sustain hard work and effort without other people
2. Generosity as a daily practice is mentally rewarding and stimulating
3. The more you do it, the more others will give back, creating a support network you and I both need.

Then I realized that this whole damn newsletter is about intentional giving. Writing about this stuff in this way helps me internalize it, and reminds me to keep pushing. It is invigorating and fun.

Also, apparently the happiest people are those at the center of a network that they are constantly giving to. 🤷🏼‍♂️

By intentional giving I mean that you intentionally add value to your network via introductions, a skill, an act of service, an outlet for someone to vent to, etc.

It is helpful to have other human brains involved in your daily thought process too. Having additional perspectives can dramatically assist you with noticing, neutrality, and the self-awareness you need to step up your self-compassion.

One of the ways I practice intentional giving is by setting up a weekly Mastermind of a few people. Once a week we meet up and discuss the wins of the previous week, talk about our progress towards goals, discuss any issues we have, and solicit feedback from each other. I am intentionally giving my time to these two friends so that we all have a sounding board for our thoughts and ideas each week. We know we aren't alone and have support.

Their perspectives are always so much different from my own and talking to them is invaluable.

I also notice that when I am not reaching out to them on a daily basis for casual conversation or to check in, I am objectively less happy. It's actually become somewhat of a funk indicator when I ignore that group chat for any period of time.

Talking to these friends is such an easy way to keep my mind in a rejuvenated state so that I can avoid the mental exhaustion that is always so persistent in seeking me out.

Quote/Meme of the week:

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter.

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.