The Cycle That Governs My Life
Over the course of days, weeks, or months, 2 major measures change in my life — energy and positivity. Energy is my level of activity and presence, while positivity is whether I perceive myself to be happy. There are fluctuations to both moment to moment throughout any given day, but on a general life scale, these measures govern my state. The different combinations of these two measures create 4 states that tend to cycle into one another.
Joy — high energy and positive. This is where I’d like to be as much as possible. I’m joyous when I am actively thinking about what I want to do and then doing it; when I sleep, exercise, meditate, journal and read; and when I’m having fun, empathetic, and present conversations with people I love and people I think I could love.
This is when I feel clear, powerful, and generous. I am confident that I have and am enough, I look to give, and I feel ready to take on internal and external challenges. I still experience sadness, depression, and other negative emotions in this state, but I receive them well, like cranky relatives visiting for the holidays. When I’m joyous, even the little things in life are often suffuse with meaning.
Pleasure — low energy and positive. This is pleasant comfort, and where I tend to regress to from joy. It’s not nearly as active, feels nice for a while, but somehow doesn’t recover me back towards joy — it’s not as restful as I’d expect it to be. For me this is watching YouTube, staying up late doing shit on a whim with friends, not being disciplined with my sleep or schedule, snacking, and having ideas for fun but not doing much with them.
Pleasure is contentment, it’s instant gratification, it’s the warm fuzzy feeling of being under blankets but all the time. When I’m like this I don’t want to do much, and usually don’t — I have unplanned and unproductive but generally enjoyable days. I move to pleasure from joy for many reasons, but chiefly because I stop doing the things that bring me joy and convince myself that I don’t need to.
Malaise — low energy and negative. This is where I usually go to from pleasure, and for a long time I thought it was because I was “judging myself for taking a break” or something to that effect. This period is characterized by sleep deprivation, an overwhelming and disorganized schedule that induces procrastination via much of the stuff I did for pleasure, wanting this period of life to be over, increased susceptibility to depression, shallow and egocentric conversations, feeling like time is slipping through my fingers (“where’d the day go?”), avoidance of introspection due to low-grade shame, and a general feeling of ickiness.
Pleasure leads to this not because we can’t have nice things, but because of the associated lack of sleep/habit discipline and task completion inevitably leading to low willpower, worse mood, lack of structure, and a backlog of work.
Anger — high energy and negative. This is what snaps me out of malaise, and is often a precursor to joy. It’s usually initiated when I have a moment of self-reflection on who I am in a period of malaise, and realize both how far that person is from who I want to be, that I’ve been much better, and that the difference is mostly in my control. That combination of dissatisfaction and awareness of personal responsibility makes me mad at myself, which gives me the energy I need to break the malaise.
Anger is characterized by precise planning, ruthless prioritization and task completion, cancellation of non-necessary social engagements, small healthy-but-masochistic actions like super hard workouts and cold showers, and strict adherence to routine. Thankfully, anger is usually short-lived — a few hours to 2 days — and while I’m rarely a fun person when angry, it really gets the job done.
Rigging The Game
I would of course like to spend as much time as possible in a state of joy, but reliance solely on constant, strict adherence is foolhardy — a static system is a brittle one. What has worked for me instead is identifying pitfalls in the cycle and rigging the game in my favour.
Firstly, recognizing that the difference between staying in joy and slipping into pleasure is a specific set of grounding behaviours. For me, these are:
- Planning the week — Sunday planning is the week’s most important hour. It’s often the difference between a week I’m proud of and a week I have to recover from.
- Sleeping enough — this is something I’ve struggled with for years, and I’m still surprised by the jump in my quality of life from 4 to 6 hours of sleep, and then from 6 to 8. The boost to clarity of thought, mood, and willpower is hilarious, and makes me feel very stupid for trading sleep off for anything but a genuine crisis.
- Journaling — self-reflection is self-correction, and without it I can rarely hop back on the horse once I’ve fallen off, or improve in any way. This is as simple as 5–10 minutes of writing out what happened today, how I feel about it, and what needs improvement.
- Meditating — if I don’t have 10 minutes to sit with my eyes closed and breathe, something is very wrong in my life. If you want to learn more, my brother wrote a great article on how meditation changes you.
- Working out/running — improves mood, reveals most problems as fake, and gives the energy and willpower to meaningfully address the real ones.
While other elements of life may present as more urgent, these are the most important and need to be prioritized. By providing structure, promoting self-reflection and presence, and maintaining physical health, these practices allow me to access and express happiness, enriching both my life and the lives of those I care about — for their sake and mine, these actions need fighting for. This recognition lets me stay in a state of joy for much longer stretches — .
Secondly, acknowledging that there is no such thing as sustainable pleasure and that without an active, conscious return to the grounding behaviours, it only leads to malaise. Even if pleasure feels good to start, it doesn’t bring energy back, and hedonic adaptation sets in soon enough. Knowing this lets me use adherence to the grounding behaviours as a clear, objective measure of whether I’m slipping into pleasure, and gives me a much better chance to move back to joy rather than slipping further into malaise.
Finally, if/when I end up in malaise, knowing the signs — shitty conversations, reticence to self-reflect, lack of schedule — and then seeing anger as an ally to lead me to a better place. In most other life circumstances I avoid anger, but in a malaise, moving towards anything that sparks it can greatly reduce the amount of time I spend in the sunken place.
There’s an important distinction to be made here between anger and rage — anger is focused, rage is not. Rage is a wildfire that burns indiscriminately in all directions, while anger is a controlled burn that seems scary but, if properly directed, clears away the underbrush to make room for new life. Practically, anger can be sparked by a 10-minute free association writing session (it’s hard to hide on paper), media that explores passion or creativity (this induces jealousy of a state I am far from in that moment, and jealousy is anger’s sneakier cousin), or by reflecting on a recent distracted/egotistical conversation. The key has been not to suppress anger, but use it as a signal and to kickstart energy.
With these simple (but rarely easy) changes, the outlook is decidedly rosier. While the cycle is not fundamentally different, I end up spending far more time in a state of joy via the previously listed changes:
- Grounding behaviours slow down the slip from joy into pleasure and greatly improve my chances of moving from pleasure into joy
- Recognizing pleasure as unsustainable prevents me from clinging to it, improving my chances of going from pleasure to joy rather than malaise
- Identifying malaise and seeing rage as an ally lets me spend far less time in malaise, using rage to get back to joy
If this resonated with you but you’re feeling overwhelmed, I’d humbly suggest starting with journaling — this is how I first became conscious of the patterns in my life. The simple (but often difficult) act of writing out how you feel/what you’re thinking about at the end of a day, and what (if anything) you’d like to do about it, is an unmatched tool for discovering, accepting, and changing yourself.
While the prolonged sameness of routine and environment forced upon us by the pandemic is a drag in most regards, it has its silver linings — the ability to see higher-level patterns in our lives, which existed before but were obscured by life’s details, is one of them. If nothing else, I hope we take this newfound awareness with us into whatever comes next.
Thank you for reading! If any of this resonates, let me know with a comment or shoot me an email at ilyakreynin1@gmail.com.
Thank you to Tom Kreynin and Ajay for reading and improving early drafts of this.
