Exercise is a long-term investment in your energy levels. It’s easy to cut in the short-term, but over time you’ll reduce your overall fitness, making it harder to think straight and stay alert throughout the day.Make a habit of doing some pushups or burpees every day throughout the day. These will get your heart pumping and blood moving, and they don’t require setting aside two hours from your already busy schedule.Try this: Do at least 10 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burpee_(exercise)">burpees </a>every day from your home.

Habit #2: Exercise Every Day

Sleep is the foundation of your energy. If you don’t get enough sleep, you’ll start to underperform.Seven to eight hours are pretty much mandatory if you’re going to stay cognitively sharp in the long-run.An <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVQlcxiQlzI">interesting experiment </a>showed tat sleep deprivation caused continuous declines in mental performance, even though subjects felt like they were holding steady.Try this: Go to bed by 10pm every night, including weekends, for the next thirty days.

Habit #1: Go to Sleep Early

You may not be able to choose your parents, colleagues or your boss. But you do have some control over the friends in your life.You don’t need to exclude friends who are going through temporarily rough times, but you should consider who you spend your time with when there are people who consistently create one-sided emotional exchanges as the basis for your relationships. Try this: Set a time limit on friends who leave you feeling drained.

Habit #7: Get Better Friends

Napping may feel lazy, but there’s research showing it has a range of <a href="https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/291282.php">cognitive benefits </a>. This is particularly true if you’re doing a lot of learning, since the short burst of sleep can <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleep_and_memory">help with memory </a>.Even if you work in an office that doesn’t encourage napping, you can use a slice of your lunch break, to quickly rest.The key is to learn how to take short naps. Many people take naps which are too long, pushing them into deeper phases of sleep which cause them to feel even groggier when they wake up.If you start adding more time, a quick nap can become a long sleep.

Habit #3: Twenty-Minute Naps

Aim to get your most important work done in the first four hours of the workday, starting as soon as possible.The benefits to your energy here are mostly psychological. The other reason for this approach is that deep work isn’t always sustainable for the full workday. Better to concentrate it into a specific period than randomly insert it across chunks of time.Try this: Make the first four hours of your morning a quiet, deep work zone.

Habit #4: Do Your Hard Work in the Morning

Many people simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs: that other people (marketers) are really good at persuading them to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t do otherwise, but that they themselves have no ability to change their own motivation to do the things they have to do.The truth is, you need to become the salesperson for your own goals. Not for other people, but for yourself.Try this: Set aside ten minutes every day to think about what today’s actions are helping you build towards.﻿

Habit #6: Sell Yourself on Your Goals

Energy, not time, is the <a href="https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2006/07/14/energy-management/">basis for productivity </a>. Having all the hours in the day won’t help you if you’re exhausted for most of it.Your habits define your energy levels. If you have good habits, you’ll feel energized and be more resilient to burn out, both physically and mentally. If your habits are misaligned, you can get into a cycle where you feel worse and worse, until your it’s a struggle just to keep up.Here are nine habits you can work on this year to increase your energy levels.

Increase Your Energy

Energy is often about momentum. Start working hard and you’ll overcome procrastination and keep going throughout the day. Start slow and you may end up struggling against your own impulses, wasting the energy on things that aren’t productive.One way to avoid this is to set a very clear intention of how your day will go, particularly in the beginning, the night before. Visualizing this intention and writing it down into your schedule can make it happen more automatically when you wake up.Try this: Before you go to bed, write down your plan for the next day and visualize it.

Habit #5: Set Your Intention the Day Before

One of the great benefits of reading books isn’t simply to give you ideas and information. Rather it’s to reinforce a mentality that often occurs at a subconcious level. The best books aren’t those that teach you facts, but those that subtly change your entire thinking patterns.Just like a good song can be the background for a particular emotion, a good book can be the background for a particular energy of thinking.Try this: Always have an audio book that motivates you to work on your goals.

Habit #8: Read Better Books

A lot of energy is squandered because the different parts of our lives, both internal and external, are in conflict with each other. Spend some time untangling the different conflicts in your life to see how you could resolve them. Sometimes that can be done in the short-term, by making a change. Sometimes, it requires a long-term plan to escape the toxic environment, social circle or belief system that holds you back.Try this: Sit down for an hour and brainstorm all the things which assist your goals and all the things which hold you back. How could you resolve those tensions?

Habit #9: Align Your Life

Running out of energy too quickly? Try one (or all) of these tricks to boost it back up and get more out of your day.

Habit #8: Read Better Books

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