In stage 2 I provide you with some simple actions that will further rise and stabilize your levels of motivation and energy. You are ready for stage 2 when you are able to actually follow advice. If you find yourself unable to follow the advice it means you should moderate your quick fixes a bit longer and just wait for your energy and motivation to rise enough.

Your motivation is like camp fire. When it’s small, your motivation is low and you are capable of very little. When your fire is big, you feel raging motivation inside you, making you want more and more action.

Raising your motivation works the same way burning a big fire does. With every productive action, your motivation will grow. This happens because productive actions don’t rapidly spike your dopamine levels, but rather grow it slowly. This means that after you finish productive task, your dopamine will not crash immediatelly, but will stay up for a while before slowly moving back to base line. This gives you time to use this additional motivation to move on to next, perhaps even more challenging task. Riding this upward trajectory of dopamine level is called the flow state.

So at any time you are kinda motivated but still cannot make yourself begin working on desired task, try doing something easier but productive. It doesn’t matter if it is not directly related task. As long you are being productive, your motivation will only grow.

Anyway, as you will learn in the rest of the book, motivation once stabilized is usually not the most important cause that is preventing you from taking action.

When you are tired and lacking energy, it is understandable that you cannot get yourself to do productive stuff. Brain needs energy to focus, process (good) decisions and take action. No matter how high your motivation is, without energy you will not be able to do anything.

There are 2 factors that define your level of energy: how much you sleep and how much energy (fuel) you have stored in brain cells.

In this book I will not overwhelm you with advice on how to sleep better. Reason behind this is that your sleep will itself get much better once you apply all the steps I suggest.

So the only remaining factor that defines your general level of energy, most importantly mental energy is amount of fuel in your brain cells. Amount of fuel in your system depends on:

1. How much fuel you are supplying to your brain
2. How much fuel you spend

When you are so tired that you cannot get yourself to do anything, your main priority is to recharge yourself with energy. If your car is low on gas, no repairs, cleaning or anything else will make it run again until you refuel it.

This is what you must understand about re-fueling your body and brain:

• When you eat food, your stomach will extract nutrients and send them into cells in your body and brain. The more nutrients your food has, the more fuel will be sent to your brain. Also higher quality food means higher quality fuel in your brain.
  
  
• Just having the fuel in your brain is not enough. You also need to burn the fuel for it to have effect. And you burn things by adding oxygen. The more oxygen you supply to your system, the more fuel in your brain will turn into energy.
  
  

You get more oxygen by breathing the air. Simple huh? If you just sit and breathe, oxygen will be absorbed by your lungs and be sent via blood vessels to your brain to burn the fuel. But if you start moving your body, your breathing will increase, also your blood flow from lungs to brain will be faster.

So, in stage 1 you moderate your quick fixes which provides you with extra motivation and energy. In stage 2 all you must remember is to use this extra motivation and energy to move your body at least for a few minutes. Maybe you are reading this and thinking to yourself “I’ve seen this advice so many times already, If it was only that easy”. The one thing you are forgetting here is:

If you are unable to go outside for 10 minute walk at the moment, this is because you have skipped stage 1. Again, if you have to force yourself to go for a short walk, it means you are still in stage 1. Don’t try to go out for a walk or even exercise unless it feels something you truly feel like doing.

Stage 2 is about prioritizing exercise over other productive activities like work. This means that when moderation from stage 1 provides you some additional energy and motivation, you use this energy and motivation for exercise before trying to do anything else productive.

Don’t worry, if you follow the advice from stage 1, you will have no problems going out for a short exercise. The only pitfal here is that you will be so excited (because of newly gained energy and motivation) to jump right into your work instead of eating and exercising first. What happens then is that after a hour or two of productive working, you will run out of energy and be back in procrastination rut again.