Resolving Energy Bottlenecks
Maximum energy leads to maximum progress.
Bottlenecks to Goals
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.)
Energy Bottlenecks Are Especially Bad
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.
Methods to Reduce Energy Bottlenecks
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.
Sleep
Sleep Hygiene
See Sleep: Effects and Hygiene.
Hydration
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:
Effects of Fluid Intake on Sleep Duration and Quality Among Healthy Adults:
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
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.
Find Your Chronotype and Exploit It
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.
Drugs
Newsflash: stimulants are a thing and they work! And are very easy to get! And very cheap!
Caffeine
Gwern’s Caffeine page.
Michael Dickens’ posts:
Avoiding Caffeine Tolerance: Self-explanatory title. Michael finds that his research suggest his “approach [of taking caffeine MWF] was reasonable and there’s not compelling evidence for taking caffeine more or less often” and “taking caffeine more frequently, there’s a good chance that I will develop a tolerance”.
Caffeine Cycling Self-Experiment: Michael finds that he developed no tolerance from MWF caffeine usage and it maintained, if not improved, its effectiveness.
Continuing My Caffeine Self-Experiment: Michael finds that he developed no tolerance from MWThF caffeine usage and vows to continue with four days a week of usage.
On a not-directly-related note, if you have trouble waking up, there are rich-man and poor-man solutions:
Rich: Take a delayed-release caffeine pill (example here) before bed to have it hit around your wake-up time. I’d be slightly worried about “microdosing” caffeine throughout the night and that leading to worse sleep quality.
Poor: Wake up at t minus 30 minutes, take a caffeine pill, then go back to bed until actual wake up time. Caffeine effects start around 15 minutes after taking it, so 30 minutes is plenty and will help with waking up alert.
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.
Modafinil
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.
ADHD Medication
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
Exercise
Fast(er) Recovery
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.
Blood Flow
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).
Diet
Calories
Calories are literally energy. Eat them. But be aware they may not all be equal—see below for information on the glycemic index.
Alcohol
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.
Digestion
Poor digestion can cause the body to focus on digestion, sapping the body of important resources, leading to fatigue.
Glyemic Index Notes
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:
White rice → brown rice, basmati rice
White bread (are you sensing a pattern here??) → wheat or rye bread
Cornflakes/sugary cereal → steel-cut oats, bran cereal, or muesli
Mashed potatoes → lentils or chickpeas, mashed
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.
Miscellaneous
Stress
Stress releases cortisol. High cortisol levels lead to fatigue. Stop being stressed!
Cold Showers
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 Effect of Cold Showering on Health and Work: A Randomized Controlled Trial:
The most commonly reported beneficial effect was an increase in perceived energy levels (including many reported comparisons to the effect of caffeine).
Sunlight and Bright (Indoor) Lighting
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):
Brighter Lamp: 60,000 lumens in a single lamp. Holy shit!
Literature (with no blog posts included):
Physical and Mental Decluttering
Keeping a bunch of information in your working memory requires mental effort.
Literature and resources:
The Magical Mystery Four: How is Working Memory Capacity Limited, and Why?
How to deal with working memory exhaustion and mental fatigue?
Sleepy Triggers
“Sleepy triggers” should be avoided. These may manifest themselves as:
Lying horizontally in a way that signals the body that it’s time to sleep
Spending time in bed, even if not lying horizontally. The bed is for sleep and sex, nothing else!
Dark rooms. See Lighting.
Physical touch (back or head scratches, massage)
Anything associated with tiredness or sleep
Literature and resources:
None, but seems very sensible to me
Mindsets
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.
Masturbation
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 couldn’t find any actual studies that weren’t NoFap coded
Commitment Devices
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.
CO2 Levels
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.]
Prioritization and Outsourcing
Sort by Importance and Required Energy
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:
High-energy, high-importance: Ensures there’s enough in the tank to complete the activity
Low-energy, high-importance: Ensures the important things get out the door first
High-energy, low-importance and low-energy, low-importance: eliminate or outsource if possible. Shouldn’t all activities be somewhat important?
Outsource Where It Makes Sense
Delegation ensures the correct person is doing the job. Specialization exists for a reason and should be abided by.
Other Interventions I Didn’t Feel Like Researching Because They Felt Like Low Expected Value
Screen time: Is screen time inversely proportional to energy? Does all the context switching between work and personal and social media take a toll? Does it lead to eye fatigue, which in turn leads to physical fatigue? Becoming bored on the phone isn’t uncommon given how easy it is to doomscroll to the end of the new, exciting stuff, so wouldn’t that lead to lack of energy? See Smartphone dependence and its influence on physical and mental health.
Associations: Does your physical space actually help in locking in? I’m of the opinion that my apartment office should be done for office-like work and the rest of the place is for not-office-like work. Thus when I enter the office physically I also enter it mentally. Same for clothes: does wearing a certain style of clothing tell your body “hey it’s go time”, whether it’s a suit or joggers?
Temperature: Both temperature extremes appear to cause fatigue. Cold causes cellular activity to slow in an effort to save energy, while hot leads to an effort to cool off. I assume every person has an optimal temperature. How do we find that? Has it been found?
Ranking and Integrating Methods Into Everyday Life
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:
Sleep
Passion
Diet
Exercise
Drugs (stimulants)
Bright lighting
The remaining ones that were listed in their own section but not included in the list all feel of similar value.
See Also
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.
Very helpful list! Two small comments
I’ve found eating during long sessions (think 90+ minutes) really helps reduce fatigue in the following days. This also reduces the effectiveness of fat burning training however so YMMV.
Think there’s a small mistake in the stress section. Low cortisol does not induce fatigue: consistent high cortisol will do this but in a wired/tired kind of way rather than sleepy. Worth checking the logical flow of this section.