I think it's more that after 8 exhausting hours, I don't have energy anymore for anything. The 8 exhausting hours would be a day full of meetings, after which my brain is a mush and doesn't work anymore.

I don’t believe this, if you push yourself to bike through a forrest, run until you’re out of breath, talk a long walk after work… You’ll come back with more energy then when you spend that time on the couch binging Squid Game. There is just no doubt in my mind about this.

But it may start out feeling like a diet for the mind, that I am willing to believe. But like with a healthy diet you’ll benefit immensely over time. But it requires discipline.

I took a 60 mile bike ride yesterday in perfect weather, much of it on a beautiful forest road, and afterwards I was exhausted and it took a huge amount of effort even just to feed myself, and it was totally impossible to summon any motivation to spend 5 minutes to do the dishes afterward. I've been riding a bike for a decades, have crossed continents by bike, and have bike commuted my entire career pre-COVID.

I slept pretty well and feel healthy and energized today and doing the dishes was easy this morning, but it's totally contrary to my entire life experience to claim that doing something physically tiring gives you more energy afterward.

Not that doing nothing all the time feels good— humans just don't have unlimited capacity for output. Taking a leisurely morning walk (or a moderate-distance bike commute) certainly gets my day started on the right foot, but going harder faster longer at physical activity makes me physically tired and less capable of doing other things.

I'll bet there is a curve. My own experiences cycling suggest that a little bit isnt helpful. A good amount is energizing, and too much is exhausting. For me those attachment and detachment points are probably [0;8;20]. Your mileage will absolutely vary.

A great exercise would be to find some causality from Strava data and git commit, both of which I have fairly extensive data on.

Agreed. I have always found that a long run left me tired and a bit sleepy for a while afterward.

Human metabolism, and also the brain, needs rest after exertion in order to be able to do more work. Some people have it easier in that regard, but everybody has their own limits. Discipline in that context means pushing limits, which is not advisable long-term. Every system eventually fails when put under too much ongoing stress - burnout (/overtraining) is one of the lesser problems this can create.

Pushing limits in terms of the brain is binging garbage in stead of looking at trees, listening to birds.

Pushing the limits of a body is sitting in a chair for 8 hours, barely moving, in stead of walking around doing stuff with your hands, taking a swim, climbing a tree picking some nuts.

We should make no mistakes about what the natural actions and states of our minds and bodies are.

Sounds like good advice for people who work out of a cabin in or near the woods, and probably don’t have kids or a partner with their own schedule.

I do workout regularly and I do go for walks. But like a diet, the effect is long term, not immediate.

Yes and imagine an intense level of stress when your partner asks what kind of movie you want to watch. Because, your brain just cannot process a single new decision.

You wrote it as a humour. But I learned that if I minimize an amount of decisions I have to do in my life, that makes me more productive at work. I believe that making a decision is the most exhausting activity, at least for me. I can spend my daily decision limit to choosing a movie or choosing a framework.

I read that Steve Jobs chose one outfit to wear every day. One less choice to make. Rituals/Habits help too. I learned the hard way that organization actually frees yourself to do stuff.

Consider keeping a list of media you want to watch for occasions like this.

Exhausted or not, you’re probably more likely to come across something unexpectedly and write it down than remember them all and offer up something fitting from memory.

Well, the watchlist gets longer and when i want to watch something it is hard to choose.

Having a 15 to 30 minutes nap when my brains is mushy usually allow me to reset and get my mind in a more energized state, might be worth trying for you too.

> once you start going - it becomes easier and easier

This may hold for activities like programming, where every decision follows almost logically from the previous ones. But if you're doing really hard research, with setback after setback, then it's much harder to "ignite" a work appetite.

I used to push paperwork and send out emails, sometimes analyzing drawings, but not actually use my brain too much as a construction project engineer. As a data engineer, it definitely feels more taxing on the mental side.

> once you start going - it becomes easier and easier.

It isn’t just getting going makes the project (hobby) easier.

It is the ability to organize the project into small steps that are relatively easy and yield novel artifacts.

Giving light structure to a hobby or side project (such as using GitHub issues even if it doesn’t involve code) let’s you pick up where you left off and see the incremental progress.

This administration is a practice of itself but the more you do it, the more natural it feels and easier it becomes to see progress.

> Ego depletion as a concept has been challenging to prove, if at all

Isn't this just a problem in trying to reduce the phenomenal experience of self into some objective reality, a quest that reduces to something adjacent to the hard problem of consciousness.