Maximum energy leads to maximum progress.
Every person, process, and goal has a bottleneck somewhere in the line because not everything is equal. The pursuit of eliminating bottlenecks just shifts it to a different spot in the line—when capacity in one area outgrows capacity in another, the latter becomes bottlenecked.
Certain things should not be bottlenecks depending on the area; if they are, then measures should be taken to remove it quickly. Time and money are often the bottleneck in growing a startup, as evident by the lack of sleep and (hopefully multiple!) funding rounds the founders go through on their path to glory and riches, both of which are the employees' measures to relieve the time and money constraints, respectively. If they had access to the mythical infinite time and money glitches, then scaling would be easy. But alas, those don't exist, so they're stuck doing things the old-fashioned way.
(This is a blatant message to you, the reader, to take some time to think deeply about your current bottlenecks in life and what you are doing about them, if anything. If you aren't doing anything, then consider why.)
Lacking energy to do things despite knowing what to do and wanting to want to do it is a terrible feeling. The problem is identified, the path clear, but the joules needed just aren't there. And at least for me, there's also a lingering fear that forcing myself to do the thing while motivation and energy are low will breed resentment towards it because of a potential strong negative association that results.
Time or money feels like a better bottleneck. With time, activities can be selectively reduced or discarded altogether to buy back some minutes. It's all in the person's court and up to them. With money, ingenuity and hard work can make up for lack of money. Figure out how to do it cheaper, with what is accessible, ask for a loan, the list goes on. But the options are there.
Energy bottlenecks can be reduced by allocating time and money towards certain areas. The same can be said of time bottlenecks (spend money and energy towards things) and money bottlenecks (spend time and energy towards things). It's almost like a triangle of choices... where you can only pick two...
I try to include literature where possible, but have found that literature isn't everything. If something works, it works! Forget the scientists and "peer-reviewed" journals that claim it doesn't—this is my lived experience, bro. (Half-joking. Replication is important to an extent, but blindly rejecting an already-tried-and-found-effective treatment because some random study said it doesn't work isn't good. They can certainly help to question the efficacy or offer up better solutions, but studies—sometimes even the best of them—can still have gaps.) This post is meant more as a quick reference for me than a holy grail of energy interventions, so some sections may be a bit sparse.
To pre-register my hypothesis, my prediction is that it's easy to raise the floor (i.e., energy improvements by avoiding things that cause lack of energy, e.g., poor sleep, poor lighting, etc.), but difficult to raise the ceiling, at least for extended periods of time. Plenty of quick bumps exist—stimulants, food, cold showers, bright lighting—but they are rarely long-term solutions. The focus should be placed on protecting the downside and strategically supplementing the upside in situations as needed. This will result in the total energy over time still increasing.
Lastly, I'm confident that a SOTA LLM could do a better job than me at compiling all of this and the corresponding literature, running some cost-benefit analysis, and recommending specific interventions based on personal data and background. I still wrote this because it helps me to remember and internalize what works and what doesn't, as well as think about what I'm doing and not doing to increase my energy levels.
See Sleep: Effects and Hygiene.
Hydration is generally accepted as an important health practice, and even if the evidence is scarce, it's probably worth doing regardless for reasons unrelated to sleep. Hydration practices are fairly simple: drink water regularly throughout the day. Following this incredibly generic rule of thumb is probably plenty to check the box.
Literature and resources:
Mild dehydration does not appear to affect sleep measures in healthy adults. However, fluid intake correlates positively with REM sleep length, sleep duration, and sleep efficiency, suggesting that the quantity of water consumed may influence sleep quality.
Our results indicate mild dehydration increased sleep duration because of increased fatigue and decreased perceived ease of falling asleep. This suggests that maintaining euhydration may assist with perceived ease of falling asleep and feelings of fatigue.
Naps, when done correctly, can boost alertness and such, but do not replace a full night's sleep.
Avoid naps within 8 hours of bedtime.
Naps should be less than 30 min or around 90 min to avoid entering and waking up within REM.
Chronotypes are a thing. Determining which applies and leveraging it will ensure waking hours are productive and alert. Substantial time can be lost by trying to be productive when the body just isn't into it. Motivation also wanes during these times and can negatively reinforce whatever behavior or task was being worked, making future sessions less productive.
Newsflash: stimulants are a thing and they work! And are very easy to get! And very cheap!
Gwern's Caffeine page.
Michael Dickens' posts:
On a not-directly-related note, if you have trouble waking up, there are rich-man and poor-man solutions:
Caffine is insanely cheap: at the time of writing (August 2026), 250 100-mg pills costs a whopping $12, or $0.05 per pill. If you're drinking coffee for the caffeine, save yourself $5 a coffee and buy a bunch of caffeine pills instead.
I recommend using any caffeine half-life calculator to correctly time doses to avoid negatively affecting sleep.
Gwern's Modafinil page is the best page on the internet regarding modafinil. He describes its advantages over other common stimulants as:
more powerful and less addictive & tolerating than caffeine or khat; much longer-lasting than nicotine; less likely to alter mood or produce ‘tweaking’ behavior than Adderall or Vyvanse; and much more legal & with almost no side-effects compared to methamphetamine or cocaine. On any specific aspect, there may be a stimulant superior to modafinil, but few stimulants come close to modafinil’s overall package of being a long-lasting, safe, effective, non-mood-altering, quasi-legal stimulant, and that is why it has become so popular.
From my friends' experiences—both diagnosed with ADHD and not—ADHD meds are very effective at increasing their productivity through focus, which I'd argue is a different form of energy.
See also: Lorien Psychiatry notes
Quickly recovering from exercise, especially very hard days (100s of TSS, for those who know), is important because a) being absolutely smoked post ride/run/lift/climb is just not fun and prevents other things from happening, and b) it may hinder or altogether prevent training sessions in the next few days, resulting in a lower total TSS dose than just going easier in order to exercise the following few days.
Recovering quickly is primarily a function of carbs to replenish glycogen stores, protein to repair muscles, and sleep. None of them can be ignored. Inadequate amounts of any will prolong recovery and decrease overall efficiency.
Training for the New Alpinism claims the 30-to-60-minute post-exercise window is critical for recovery:
- Carbohydrate: A 150-pound climber needs 270–400 calories (70-100 g) of carbohydrate during this post-exercise window. For best recovery repeat this every two hours to re-stimulate glycogen resynthesis for up to six hours.
- Protein: Consuming protein after a workout is useful to help the body repair damaged muscle, but studies are inconclusive about whether or not the timing is as important as it is for carbohydrate consumption.
- Fluid. Drink water and replace electrolytes. Adjust your intake to match the temperature and the amount you’ve sweated.
Improving circulation/blood flow will remove waste from muscles to facilitate recovery (see above bullet point). It also delivers fresh oxygen to the brain, resulting in a boost in energy.
Activities to promote circulation include massage and easy activities (walking, cycling, swimming).
Calories are literally energy. Eat them. But be aware they may not all be equal—see below for information on the glycemic index.
Alcohol is a depressant. It increases drowsiness, negatively impacts sleep, and dehydrates the body. It is extremely counter-productive to increasing or even maintaining energy levels.
Poor digestion can cause the body to focus on digestion, sapping the body of important resources, leading to fatigue.
High glycemic index (GI) foods will cause blood sugar (glucose) to spike, likely leading to an energy crash later. Eating low GI foods allows a slower, steadier release of glucose via carbs into the bloodstream, preventing a crash and providing lasting energy.
High GI foods can sometimes be substituted for low GI foods:
From Claude Sonnet 4.6:
On ripeness: unripe fruit has more starch, ripe fruit has more sugar (mostly as free glucose/fructose), so GI climbs as fruit ripens.
On cooking method: the longer and wetter the cooking, the more the starch gelatinizes and the higher the GI. Al dente pasta has a lower GI than soft-cooked pasta.
On storage/cooling: cooking and then cooling starchy foods (rice, potatoes, pasta) converts some of the starch into resistant starch, which digests more slowly and doesn't spike blood sugar the same way. [This is why I prefer frozen rice.]
Pairing high GI and other foods together can reduce the blood sugar spike.
Stress releases cortisol. High cortisol levels lead to fatigue. Stop being stressed!
Cold showers work by triggering a norepinephrine and cortisol response, both of which provide a short-lived boost of energy. I used to shower cold every day and didn't notice a long-term benefit to them, but also wasn't tracking any metrics diligently. (If anything, it's worth dialing down shower temperature because too hot of water damages skin.)
Literature and resources:
The most commonly reported beneficial effect was an increase in perceived energy levels (including many reported comparisons to the effect of caffeine).
Bright lighting—either from the sun or high-power lamps—suppresses melatonin secretion and helps to regulate the circadian rhythm. The former effect staves off drowsiness, the latter improves sleep regularity and quality. This works in my experience and is well worth investing in.
Blog posts (with some literature embedded inside of them):
Literature (with no blog posts included):
Keeping a bunch of information in your working memory requires mental effort.
Literature and resources:
"Sleepy triggers" should be avoided. These may manifest themselves as:
Literature and resources:
I will kindly redirect readers to Energetic Aliens to learn how passion and energy relate to one another.
Being ambitious (startup founder), excited (nerd who just got an update on his favorite package), or scared shitless (junior investment banker) about something helps to unlock some hidden stores of energy. Find that thing and push for it.
The NoFap cult will have you believe that abstaining from masturbation is the key to unlimited energy (example 1, example 2). Pseudoscience aside, the anecdata seems to suggest that chronic masturbation leads to general fatigue, whereas infrequent masturbation does not.
Literature and resources:
I'm doubtful that commitment devices such as Focusmate and Beeminder will increase physical energy in a true, biological sense, but they serve as a concrete goal, and that drives something.
Anecdotally, I've found Focusmate to work when I'm low on energy. Beeminder is much more spread out, so I can't use it tactically in the same way I can Focusmate, but when coming up on a derail I suddenly feel a boost in energy as a result of my precious money being threatened.
Indoor CO2 levels can affect cognitive performance and tiredness levels.
Solutions are centered around improving ventilation by opening windows or doors, adding fans, or improving recirculation capabilities of the HVAC system. While plants do absorb some CO2, an indoor jungle would be required to appreciably decrease levels. Improving ventilation is the cheapest, easiest, and most effective solution.
Literature and resources:
Relative to 600 ppm, at 1,000 ppm CO2, moderate and statistically significant decrements occurred in six of nine scales of decision-making performance. At 2,500 ppm, large and statistically significant reductions occurred in seven scales of decision-making performance (raw score ratios, 0.06–0.56), but performance on the focused activity scale increased.
On average, cognitive scores were 61% higher on the Green building day and 101% higher on the two Green+ building days than on the Conventional building day (p < 0.0001). VOCs and CO2 were independently associated with cognitive scores. ["Conventional" had high VOCs, "green" had lows VOCs.]
Eisenhower's important-urgent matrix (or any sorted to-do list, for that matter) could take on a third or replacement of dimension of energy requirement.
Replacing urgent with energy and prioritizing the four quadrants results in the following rank:
Delegation ensures the correct person is doing the job. Specialization exists for a reason and should be abided by.
The primary challenge with using the above methods is, well, actually using them! They take some sort of effort to implement. Thankfully a lot of them can be done with little to no cost and concurrently with one another.
Here's my vibe-ordered list from most to least effective:
The remaining ones that were listed in their own section but not included in the list all feel of similar value.
Of course stamina isn’t the only thing you need. It also helps to have motive, drive, intelligence, beauty, connections, charm, and many other things. But without stamina, you won’t be able to use those other things as many hours a day, which in close contests can make all the difference.
You have to figure out how to work hard without burning out. People find their own strategies for this, but one that almost always works is to find work you like doing with people you enjoy spending a lot of time with.
I think people who pretend you can be super successful professionally without working most of the time (for some period of your life) are doing a disservice. In fact, work stamina seems to be one of the biggest predictors of long-term success.