11 Ways to Increase Your Energy

11 Ways to Increase Your Energy...

Vitality doesn’t come in pills. You have to change your daily habits. In the commencement address he gave to graduates of Kenyon College in 2005, award-winning novelist David Foster Wallace talked about fish: “Two young fish are swimming along when they happen to meet an older fish swimming in the opposite direction. The older fish nods at them and says: ‘Morning, boys. How’s the water?’ The two young fish swim on for a bit. Eventually one of them looks over at the other and says, ‘What the hell is water?’ That was Wallace’s example of how when something is always present in your life, you don’t notice it. Well, it’s the same for energy. Much like the water in Wallace’s parable, energy is something you take for granted — until you don’t have it. What’s more, you can’t get it, at least not in the traditional sense. Trying to do so is like trying to grasp water in your hand: It just slips through your fingers and splatters on the ground. However, if you cup your palm, water can sit in it, unperturbed. Consider this: You don’t have to teach 2-year-olds ways to have more energy; that’s the way they come out of the box. So really, it’s not that we don’t have energy; it’s that we’ve created conditions — often by many years of bad lifestyle choices — that make it almost impossible for energy to show up. After spending years constructing all kinds of roadblocks to that energy, now we wonder how to get it back. The answer is to remove the conditions that keep it from surfacing. Some of the ways to do that are common sense. Others require that we change some of our daily habits....