Instead of talking about the usual energy habits such as sleep, exercise, and nutrition, I’ll share some of the more unusual daily habits I practice to keep fatigue and low energy at bay.

These three habits might not be at the top of most people’s minds, but they make an enormous difference in how charged (or drained) your mental- and physical batteries are.

Following A ‘Low-Information’ Diet

Studies have shown that each year, our brain has to process about 5% more information than the year before.

Nowadays, an average person processes roughly 74 gigabytes of information per day, whereas 500 years ago, that would be the total amount of information consumed in a lifetime.

To compare this to some more recent years, in 2011, the average person took in roughly 5x more information per day than the average person in 1986.

Even though society has evolved in all these years, our brains run on pretty much the same software as thousands of years ago. Simply put, processing so much information is hard work for the brain — which drains mental energy.

As Daniel J. Levitin, author of The Organized Mind, said, “Our brains have the ability to process the information we take in, but at a cost: We can have trouble separating the trivial from the important, and all this information processing makes us tired.”

Again, processing so much information is hard work for the brain. Neurons are living cells that need oxygen and glucose to work. The harder they have to work, the more resources they require — and the more fatigue you’ll experience.

This means that for every email, opinion on social media, TikTok video, Instagram post, and news item you consume, your brain uses valuable resources to process all this data and information. The more content you consume, the faster you experience ‘information fatigue’.

The problem arises when information fatigue prevents you from making much more important life decisions (such as what investments to make or which next steps to take with your work-related project) because of information fatigue caused by social media, email, or the news.

To protect my mental energy for the truly important stuff such as my health, work, and relationship, I follow a low-information diet. These are the rules I follow in my low-information diet:

• No phone for the first hour of the day
• No phone, email, and social media during morning deep work hours
• Don’t check the news more than twice a day
• Don’t check email more than twice a day
• Replace mindless phone scrolling for flow state activities (such as exercise, walking, deep conversations with loved ones, reading)

I find that by limiting the amount of shallow information I consume, the less fatigued I am and the more mental resources I have left for processing deep information from books, research reports, and articles.

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