there's an entire club, actually, on burnout. And I brought you up and I brought David Goggins as the process I go through, which is, my passion goes up and down. It dips. And I don't think I trust my own mind to tell me whether I'm getting close to burnout or exhaustion or not.

I kind of go with the David Goggins model of, I mean, he's probably more applying it to running, but when it feels like your mind can't take any more, that you're just 40% at your capacity. I mean, it's just like an arbitrary level. - It's the Navy SEAL thing, right?

- The Navy SEAL thing. I mean, you could put that at any percent, but it is remarkable that if you just take it one step at a time, just keep going, it's similar to this idea of a process. If you just trust the process and you just keep following, even if the passion goes up and down and so on, then ultimately, if you look in aggregate, the passion will increase.

Your self-satisfaction will increase. - Yeah, I think, and if you have two things, this has been a big strategy of mine, so that you can, what you hope for is off-phase, off-phase alignment. Like that, sometimes it's in-phase and that's a problem, but off-phase alignment's good. So, okay, my research, I'm struggling, but my book stuff is going well, right?

And so when you add those two waves together, it's like, "Oh, we're doing pretty well." And then in other periods, like on my writing, I feel like I'm just not getting anywhere, but oh, I've had some good papers, I'm feeling good over there. So having two things that can counteract each other.

Now, sometimes they fall into sync and then it gets rough, then when everything, because everything for me is cyclical, good periods, bad periods with all this stuff. So typically they don't coincide, so it helps compensate. When they do coincide, you get really high highs, like where everything's clicking, and then you get these really low lows where like your research is not working, your program's not clicking, you feel like you're nowhere with your writing, and then it's a little rougher.

- Is, do you think about the concept of burnout? 'Cause I personally have never experienced burnout in the way that folks talk about, which is like, it's not just the up and down, it's like, you don't wanna do anything ever again. - Yeah. - It's like, for some people it's like physical, like to the hospital kind of thing.

- Yeah, so I do worry about it. So when I used to do student writing, like writing about students and student advice, it came up a lot with students at elite schools, and I used to call it deep procrastination, but it's a real, really vivid, very replicatable syndrome where they stop being able to do schoolwork.

- Yeah. - Like, this is due, and the professor gives you an extension, and the professor gives you an incomplete, and says, you got it, you were gonna fail the course, you have to hand this in, and they can't do it, right? It's like, it's a complete stop on the ability to actually do work.

So I used to counsel students who had that issue, and often it was a combination of, this is my best analysis, is you have just the physical and cognitive difficulties, they're usually under a very hard load, right? They're doing too many majors, too many extracurriculars, just really pushing themselves, and the motivation is not sufficiently intrinsic.

- Right. - So if you have a motivational center that's not completely on board, so a lot of these kids, like when I'm dealing with MIT kids, they would be, their whole town was shooting off fireworks that they got in, everyone's hoped that they were going there, and that they're in three majors, they don't wanna let people down, but they're not really interested in being a doctor or whatever.

So your motivation's not in the right place, the motivational psychologist would say the locus of control was more towards the extrinsic end of the spectrum, and you have hardship. And you could just fritz out the whole system. And so I would always be very worried about that, so I think about that a lot.

I do a lot of multi-phase or multi-scale seasonality. So I'll go hard on something for a while, and then for a few weeks, go easy. I'll have semesters that are hard and semesters that are easy, or I'll take the summer really low. So on multiple scales, and in the day, I'll go really hard on something, but then have a hard cutoff at five.

So every scale, it's all about rest and recovery, because I really wanna avoid that. And I do burn out, I burnt out. Pretty recently, I get minor burnt outs. I got a couple papers that I was trying to work through for a deadline a few weeks ago, and I wasn't sleeping well, and there's some other things going on.

And it knocks it out of me, I get sick usually, is how I know I've pushed myself too far. And so I kind of pulled it back. Now I'm doing this book launch, then after this book launch, I'm pulling it back again. So seasonality for rest and recovery I think is crucial, and at every scale, daily, monthly, and then at the annual scale.

An easy summer, for example, I think is a great idea if that's possible. - Okay, you just made me realize that that's exactly what I do, 'cause I feel like I'm not even close to burning out on anything, even though I'm in chaos. I feel the right exact ways of seasonality is the, not even the seasonality, but you always have multiple seasons operating.

It's like you said, 'cause when you have a lot of cool shit going on, there's always at least one thing that's a source of joy, that there's always a reason. I suppose the fundamental thing, and I've known people that suffer from depression too, the fundamental problem with the experience of depression and burnout is why do, life is meaningless.

And I always have an answer of why today could be cool. - And you have to contrive it. If you don't have it, you have to contrive it. I think it's really important. Like, okay, well, this is going bad, so now is the time to start thinking about, I mean, look, I started a podcast during the pandemic.

It's like, this is going pretty bad, but you know what, this could be something really interesting. - Deep questions with Kyle Newport. - I do it all in that voice. - I love the podcast by the way. But yeah, I think David Foster Wallace said, "The key to life is to be unboreable." I've always kind of taken that to heart, which is like, you should be able to, maybe artificially generate anything, like find something in your environment, in your surroundings, that's a source of joy.

Like everything is fun. - Yeah, did you read "The Pale King"? It goes deep on boredom. It's like uncomfortable. It's like an uncomfortable meditation on boredom. Like the characters in that are just driven to the extremes of, I just bought three books on boredom the other day. So now I'm really interested in this topic because I was anxious about my book launch happening this week.

I was like, okay, I need something else. So I have this idea for a, I might do it as an article first, but as a book. Like, okay, I need something cool to be thinking about because I was worried about like, I don't know if the launch gonna work, the pandemic, what's gonna happen.

I don't know if it's gonna get there. So this is exactly what we're talking about. So I went out and I bought a bunch of books and I'm beginning like a whole sort of intellectual exploration. - Well, I think that's one of the profound ideas in deep work that you don't expand on too much is boredom.

- Yeah, well, so deep work had a superficial idea about boredom, which was, I had this chapter called "Embrace Boredom" and a very functionalist idea was basically, you have to have some boredom in your regular schedule or your mind is gonna form a Pavlovian connection between as soon as I feel boredom, I get stimuli.

And once it forms that connection, it's never gonna tolerate deep work. So there's this very pragmatic treatment of boredom of your mind better be used to the idea that sometimes you don't get stimuli because otherwise you can't write for three hours. Like it's just not gonna tolerate it. But more recently, what I'm really interested in boredom is it as a fundamental human drive, right?

Because it's incredibly uncomfortable. And think about the other things that are incredibly uncomfortable, like hunger or thirst, they serve a really important purpose for our species, right? Like if something is really distressing, there's a reason. Pain is really uncomfortable because we need to worry about getting injured. Thirst is really uncomfortable because we need water to survive.

So what's boredom? Why is that uncomfortable? And I've been interested in this notion that boredom is about driving us towards productive action. Like as a species, I mean, think about it. Like what got us to actually take advantage of these brains? What got us to actually work with fire?

What got us to start shaping stones and the hand axes and figuring out if we could actually sharpen a stick sharp enough that we could throw it as a melee weapon or a distance weapon for hunting mammoth, right? Boredom drives us towards action. So now I'm fascinated by this fundamental action instinct because I have this theory that I'm working on that we're out of sync with it.

Just like we have this drive for hunger, but then we introduced junk food and got out of sync with hunger and it makes us really unhealthy. We have this drive towards action, but then we overload ourselves and we have all of these distractions. And then that causes, it's like a cognitive action obesity type things because it short circuits the system that wants us to do things, but we put more things on our plate than we can possibly do.

And then we're really frustrated we can't do them. And we're short circuiting all of our wires. So it all comes back to this question, well, what would be the ideal amount of stuff to do and type of things to do? Like if we wanted to look back at our ancestral environment and say, if I could just build from scratch, how much work I do and what I work on to be as in touch with that as like paleo people are trying to get their diets in touch with that.

And so now I'm just, but see, it's something I made up. But now I'm going deep on it. And one of my podcast listeners, I was talking about on the show and I was like, well, I keep trying to learn about animals and boredom. And she sent me this cool article from an animal behaviorist journal about what we know about human boredom versus animal boredom.

So trying to figure out that puzzle is the wave that's high. So I can get through the wave that's low of like, I don't know about this pandemic book launch. And my research is stumbling a little bit because of the pandemic. And so I needed a nice high. So there we go, there's a case study.

- Well, it's both a case study and a very interesting set of concepts 'cause I didn't even realize that it's so simple. I'm one of the people that has a interesting push and pull dynamic with hunger, trying to understand the hunger with myself. Like I probably have an unhealthy relationship with food.

I don't know, but there's probably a perfect, that's a nice way to think about diet as action. There's probably an optimal diet response to the experience that our body's telling us, the signal that our body's sending, which is hunger. And in that same way, boredom is sending a signal.

And most of our intellectual activities in this world, our creative activities, are essentially a response to that signal. - Yeah, and think about this analogy that we have this hunger instinct that junk food short circuits, right? It's like, oh, we'll satisfy that hyper-palatably and it doesn't end up well.

Now think about modern attention engineered, digitally mediated entertainment. We have this boredom instinct. Oh, we can take care of that with a hyper-palatable alternative. Is that gonna lead to a similar problem? - So I've been fasting a lot lately. Like I'm doing eating once a day. I've been doing that for over a month.

Just eating one meal a day and primarily meat. But it's very, fasting has been incredible for me, for focus, for well-being, for a few, I don't know, just for feeling good. Okay, we'll put on a chart what makes me feel good. And that fasting and eating primarily a meat-based diet makes me feel really good.

And so, but that ultimately, what fasting did, I haven't fasted super long yet, like a seven-day diet, which I really like to do. But even just fasting for a day, for 24 hours, gets you in touch with the signal. It's fascinating. Like you get to listen to your, learn to listen to your body that like, you know, it's okay to be hungry.

It's like a little signal that sends you stuff. And then I get to listen to how it responds when I put food in my body. Like, and I get to like, okay, cool. So like food is a thing that pacifies the signal. Like, it sounds ridiculous, okay? You could do that with-- - And do different types of food.

It feels different. So you learn about what your body wants. - For some reason, fasting, it's similar to the deep work, embrace boredom. Fasting allowed me to go into mode of listening, of trying to understand the signal, that I could say I have an unhealthy appreciation of fruit. - Okay.

- I love apples and cherries. Like, I don't know how to moderate them. So if you take just same amount of calories, I don't know, calories matter, but they say calories, 2000 calories of cherries versus 2000 calories of steak. If I eat 2000 calories of steak, maybe with just a little bit of like green beans or cauliflower, I'm going to feel really good, fulfilled, focused, and happy.

If I eat cherries, I'm going to be, I'm going to wake up behind a dumpster, crying with like naked, and like, it's just-- - Shit's all around. - Yeah, with everything, and just like bloated, just not, and unhappy, and also the mood swings up and down. I don't know.

And I'll be much hungrier the next day. Sometimes it takes a couple of days, but when I introduce carbs into the system, too many carbs, it starts, it's just unhealthy. I go into this rollercoaster as opposed to a calm boat ride along the river in the Amazon or something like that.

And so fasting was the mechanism for me to start listening to the body. I wonder if you can do that same kind of, I guess that's what meditation a little bit is. - A little bit, but yeah, listen to boredom. But so two years ago, I had a book out called "Digital Minimalism." And one of the things I was recommending that people do is basically a 30-day fast, but from digital personal entertainment, social media, online videos, anything that captures your attention and dispels boredom.

And people were thinking like, oh, this is a detox. Like, I just wanna teach your body not to need the distraction or this or that, but it really wasn't what I was interested in. I wanted there to be space that you could listen to your boredom. Like, okay, I can't just dispel it.

I can't just look at the screen. And revel in it a little bit and start to listen to it and say, what is this really pushing me towards? And you take the new stuff, the new technology off the table and sort of ask, what is this, what am I craving?

Like, what's the activity equivalent of 2,000 calories of meat with a little bit of green beans on the side? And I had 1,700 people go through this experiment, like spend 30 days doing this. And it's hard at first, but then they get used to listening to themselves and sort of seeking out what is this really pushing me towards?

And it was pushing people towards connection. It was pushing people towards, I just wanna go be around other people. It was pushing people towards high quality leisure activities like I wanna go do something that's complicated. And it took weeks sometimes for them to get in touch with their boredom, but then it completely rewired how they thought about, what do I wanna do with my time outside of work?

And then the idea is when you're done with that, then it was much easier to go back and completely change your digital life because you have alternatives, right? You're not just trying to abstain from things you don't like but that's basically a listening to boredom experiment. And like, just be there with the boredom and see where it drives you when you don't have the digital cheez-its.

Okay, so if I can't do that, where is it gonna drive me? Well, I guess I kinda wanna go to the library, which came up a lot, by the way. A lot of people rediscovered the library. - With physical books. - Physical books, so you can just go borrow 'em.

And there's low pressure and you can explore and you bring 'em home and then you read 'em and you can sit by the window and read 'em and it's nice weather outside. And I used to do that 20 years ago. They're listening to boredom. Hey, if you like this video, I think you'll really like this one as well.