Chapter 4: Where Your Energy Went

I used to be able to work until midnight, sleep five hours, and show up the next day ready to go. I remember the feeling. Not just the stamina, but the aliveness. Everything was interesting. Everything had stakes. I wasn't managing my energy because I didn't need to. It was just there.

Somewhere in my late thirties, that changed. Not dramatically. Not overnight. More like a slow leak you don't notice until the tyre is flat. And when I started looking into why time felt like it was accelerating, I found something I hadn't expected: the energy problem and the time problem aren't two separate issues. They're the same issue, viewed from different angles.

Here's the connection. When you're chronically tired, stressed, or depleted, your attention narrows. This is measurable. Under sustained stress, the prefrontal cortex, the part of your brain responsible for planning, perspective, and big-picture thinking, downregulates. The amygdala, your threat-detection system, upregulates. Your brain shifts into a mode optimised for survival. Handle the immediate. Ignore the rest.

Neuroscientists call this narrowing effect "tunneling." Behavioural economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir documented it in their research on scarcity: when any resource feels scarce, whether it's money, food, or time, your cognitive bandwidth contracts. You become focused on the urgent and blind to the important. You can't think past the next deadline because your brain won't let you.

Tunneling doesn't just affect your productivity. It affects your experience of time. When your temporal horizon shrinks to the next task, the next meeting, the next crisis, you lose the ability to perceive longer stretches of time as coherent wholes. The week isn't a week. It's a series of fires. The month isn't a month. It's whatever you can remember from the blur. Your brain is so busy coping that it stops encoding the kind of distinct, meaningful memories that make a period of time feel substantial in retrospect.

Energy depletion feeds time compression. Time compression feeds the sense that life is racing past. And that sense creates a low-grade panic that burns even more energy.

The cycle has a name. Researchers call it allostatic load: the accumulated physiological cost of chronic stress activation. And the numbers are startling. Chronic stress increases cellular energy expenditure by roughly 60%. Your cells are running hot, burning through resources, depleting mitochondria, which are the tiny power plants in every cell of your body. After forty, mitochondrial function naturally declines. Add chronic stress on top of that decline, and you get a compounding problem. Less energy produced, more energy consumed. The result is fatigue that sleep doesn't fully fix and that coffee only masks.

This isn't a character flaw. It's biology. And it explains something that puzzled me for years: why I could look at my schedule, see that I technically had free time, and still feel like I had none. The hours existed. But the energy to use them didn't. Free time without energy isn't leisure. It's recovery. You sit on the couch not because you want to but because you can't do anything else.

There's a social layer to this too. Busyness has become a status symbol. Research shows that in many professional cultures, being busy signals competence and high demand. "How are you?" "Busy." It's the socially acceptable answer. Nobody says "calm" or "unhurried." That would sound lazy. So we perform busyness even when we don't need to, because the performance reinforces our sense of worth.

The result is a paradox. People in developed economies have more leisure time than at any point in history. And yet the majority of working adults report feeling "time-poor." This isn't a scheduling problem. It's a perception problem, driven by stress, status, and the compounding toll of running your nervous system at redline for years on end.

I know this because I lived it. I was away from home a quarter of every year. I was dealing with server outages at 3am and flying to the next city before the adrenaline wore off. None of it felt unsustainable in the moment. Each individual week was manageable. But the compound effect, over years, was a slow draining of the very thing that makes time feel real: the energy to be present inside it.

When I think about people my age who seem to have what I've lost, the ones with the bright smiles who walk their dogs and look healthy, I don't think they have more time. I think they have more energy. Or more precisely, they have less drain. Fewer things pulling at their reserves. Less friction in their daily lives. Less allostatic load.

I once heard someone describe the difference between a good life and an exhausting one as the difference between a clean engine and a dirty one. Same car, same fuel, same road. But one of them is burning clean and the other is choking on its own residue.

That image stuck with me. Because what I want isn't more horsepower. It's less residue.