Happy Tuesday!

I’ll be keeping today’s newsletter short—I’m still recovering from a bad bundle of menstrual symptoms.

Your mind and body are like bank accounts

You make deposits when you take care of them:

• 🥐 Eating the right amount of healthy food
• 🛏️ Sleeping enough and sleeping well
• 🧘‍♂️ Letting your mind rest
• 🏋️ Exercising

Since you use energy every day, you also make withdrawals every day.

Withdrawals aren’t correlated with productivity or exertion.

In fact, some withdrawals feel good in the moment, but use up a lot of energy later on.

• Example: Eating fast food feels good and energizing in the moment.
• Afterward: Your body has to work harder to digest the food.

Overdrafting comes with interest

When your withdrawals exceed your deposits, you go into overdraft.

It’s usually unnoticeable at first.

Maybe you pulled a successful all-nighter, and feel like a superhero.

Slowly, it becomes easy to continue pulling all-nighters to get work done.

The overdraft interest silently accumulates.

Then, one day, you start feeling “off”. Something’s not right.

If you don’t listen to your body at this stage, the interest snowballs…

…until it hits you like a truck.

And you’re forced to stop whatever you’re doing to recuperate.

How to balance deposits and withdrawals

Strive for regular, consistent deposits.

And reduce how often you make mega-withdrawals, such as:

• Binge-eating for multiple days in a row
• Having long movie marathons
• Eating fast food often
• Pulling all-nighters

This is because it’s not possible to make effective mega-deposits:

• Sleeping 18 hours after an all-nighter doesn’t restore your energy
• Eating only salads after days of fast food isn’t enjoyable nor sustainable
• Doing silent meditations for 10 days straight is impossible without proper pre-planning (especially if you have a job)

I’ll leave you with a mantra I’ve been using since my migraine attack in late February: