Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and Iām always like āwhy am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.ā
But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because youāre inside the car, inside the situation, itās easy not to notice all the extra work youāre doing just to maintain the status quo.
Thereās all sorts of type of work that we think of as āfreeā that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.
The next time you think youāre tired from ānothingā, consider instead that youāre probably in situation where youāre doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.
opening my bodyās task manager to see whatās taking up all my cpu
Also, just to add: we should not lose sight of the fact that the mammalian brain is a ridiculouslyĀ energy-hungry organ. A human brain makes up 2% of the bodyās weight and volume and 20%Ā of its caloric requirement. Thinking is physical work.
Competitive chess players carb-load before tournaments. And lose weight in the process.
It took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that thinking physically takes up energy. I would be like āwhy donāt i have energy Iāve been sitting inside studying all dayā ma'am itās because the phrasings, evidences and vocabularies in your brain are eating the energy
