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one of the things that you can I think this heightens the meaning in your life is to try to do difficult things right aim high don't Aim so damn High you can't manage it and make sure you break down your aims into reasonably attainable sub goals but you want to aim high and then you want to see how hyper efficient you can get that's a great thing to do in your early 20s is to see okay like discipline yourself think okay how much work can I do if I load myself right to the maximum how

far do I how far can I work how hard can I work until I exhaust myself and then you back off obviously because the optimal amount of working productive engagement let's say is that which is sustainable across decades so you have to you have to learn that but you don't learn that without stretching yourself to your limits to begin with and you know if your life isn't everything it could be and if you're suffering from an excess of meaninglessness well means you're not oriented in the world of Chaos and Order properly it's like you could

learn to discipline yourself look figure out what figure out what it is that you need to do and that you want to do and then see how efficient you can get because one of the things that's quite fun is to figure out if you have a task I always tell my graduate students this if they're doing an experiment too if you have a task that you have to do it's really interesting to spend a few minutes sometimes hours depending on how long the task is see if you can figure out how to do it from

from five to 10 times fast it means you'll have to rearrange the way you think about it but you can often do it and that's how extremely productive people get so hyper efficient it's unbelievable the degree to which our sanity depends on our functioning sociological structure and and here's why well first of all you kind of need to know what to do every day you have to have a routine CU you're an animal you know and you know if you have a dog or a cat dogs are a really good example of this dogs like

routine they like to be walked the number of times a day that they're supposed to be walked and they get quite sick very rapidly if you don't if you don't routinize their their day children are exactly the same way now you can overdo it right but still you know you need to know approximately when you should get up should be approximately the same every day you need to know approximately you're going when you're going to eat you need to know what you're going to eat you need to know who you're going to eat with you

need to know where to buy your food it's like 80% of your life 70% of your life something like that consists of those things that you do every single day that you repeat well so you need structure you need predictability and you need more of it than you think just to keep you sane now if you're lucky and and maybe a bit odd you can deviate 5% from the norm or 10% from the norm or something like that carefully and cautiously as long as the rest of you is all well ordered in a normative manner

you might be able to get away with that and you might be able to sustain it across time and people might be able to tolerate you if you do it or maybe you'll get really lucky and you happen to be creative but reasonably well put together and people will actually be happy that that there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you but even under those circumstances mostly what you want is to have a routine it's disciplined it's predictable and bloody well stick to it you're going to be way healthier and happier and serer if you do

that and then the other thing that you need because this is one of the things the psychoanalyst got wrong I think is that they overestimated the degree to which sanity was a consequence of internal of being properly structured internally you know because from the psychoanalytic point of view you're sort of an ego and that ego is inside you of course it rests on an unconscious structure but the purpose of psycho analysis is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it and to make you a fully functioning and autonomous individual but

there's a problem with that because the reason that you're saying as a fully functional and autonomous human being isn't because you've organized your psyche even though that's important the reason that you're saying if you're a if you have a well organized unconscious am ego is because other people can tolerate having you around for reasonably extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the back of the head every time you do something so stupid that people will dislike you permanently if you continue and so what people are doing to each other all the time just

nonstop is broadcasting sanity signals back and forth right it's like you smile at people if they're well if they're not not only behaving properly but behaving in a way that you would like to see them continue to behave you frown at them if they're not you ignore them if they're not you shun them you roll your eyes at them you manifest a disgust face you don't listen to them you interrupt them you won't cooperate with them you won't compete with them it's like you're blasting signals at other people about how to regulate their behavior so

frequently well it just makes up all of your social interaction that's why we face each other and we have emotional displays on our face and we're looking at each other's eyes we know exactly we know as much as we can about what's going on with each other given that we don't have immediate access to the contents of their Consciousness so partly what you're doing with your routine is establishing yourself as a credible reliable trustworthy potentially interesting human being who isn't going to do anything too erratic any moment and everyone else is around there taing you

into shape making sure that that's exactly what you are and that's how you stay sa and so what happens to people do they don't have a routine and they get isolated is they start to drift and they drift badly because the world is too complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself you just cannot do it so a lot of our so we Outsource the problem of sanity and it's very intelligent that we Outsource the problem of Sanity because sanity is an impossibly complex problem and so the way that we manage the incredibly

complex problem is we have a very very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time you sight a tired brain foggy thinking as the reason to stop answering questions or giving a talk how do you combat this while working or writing daily um well I eat a big breakfast relatively soon on waking that really helps if any of you out there are anxious and many of you no doubt are there'll be a large number of you who are anxious and don't eat breakfast and there'll be a whole bunch of you out

there who think well I don't eat breakfast it isn't necessary it's like that's wrong it's necessary you fast it all night if you load yourself cognitively or physiologically in the morning your brain stressed will produce um will encourage your body to produce insulin it will take all the blood sugar out of your blood and then you're done for the day and then you'll be anxious and another a lot of the rest of you too you'll find if you're anxious try this it's really really interesting um experiment the next time you're anxious go eat something something

eat like uh eat some protein and fat would be best you could have cheese and crackers I'm not a big fan of carbohydrates but whatever eat whatever you're willing to eat but make it solid don't eat a peanut butter or don't eat a like a chocolate bar or something sweet eat something substantial a piece of meat a piece of cheese some peanut butter something like that and then wait 10 minutes and see if you're less anxious and try that for like 2 weeks every time you get anxious eat something because then you can find out

if your anxiousness if your anxiety is linked to low blood sugar and it's very likely that it is especially if you also get irritable and foggy in your thinking and so and the best way to treat that as far as I've been able to tell and there's a decent literature on this is to make sure that you eat a big breakfast and you might say well I'm not hungry in the morning like who the hell cares if you're hungry I didn't say enjoy your breakfast I said eat it that's not the same thing you know

there's lots of things that you need to do that you don't enjoy to begin with you'll get hungry in 6 months and then you'll start to enjoy it so that's massive difference I take small naps quite frequently if I'm wiped out you know I'll go have a nap for 10 minutes or 15 minutes and then that helps quite a lot um I try to wake up fairly regular on a fairly regular schedule that's another thing I would really recommend for people whose lives are in disarray and who are anxious try to fix your wake time

sleep going when you sleep that's not so important so you can still you know stay up late and have fun and all that but getting up in the morning is really helpful so um you know and you you also have to figure out how much you can work or write I can't write for more than about Max my sustainable maximum for writing is 3 hours a day and if I push it past that then especially if I'm editing I I make mistakes when I'm editing so that's counterproductive and I can't sustain it across time and

so I don't really think you can do more than about 3 hours of extremely intense intellectual work a day although if you have a nap you can stretch that but I think at least I end up paying for it across time so nap make sure you eat and make sure that you get enough sleep so that's that's how I combat it and try to make myself hyper efficient