Empty Yourself

Some people run at a much higher energy level. They have massive amounts of physical energy or massive amounts of mental energy or emotional energy. It’s hard to control that much energy. They need to find an outlet for it. 

For me, when I have an uncontrollable amount of energy it feels like anger. I’ll pace around the house, feeling like I want to tear all of the cupboards off their hinges for no reason. My wife recognizes it immediately.

“Go exercise.”

When I get home, the energy’s been spent. I can sit down on the couch, veg out and watch a movie. I might even fall asleep early. 

When I have too much mental energy, I usually wake up early, at 3 or 4am. My mind is racing and talking at me a thousand words per minute.

Mental energy I spend by communicating. For me, it’s words. So many words, just blasting into my brain. I need to write them down or speak them at someone to get them out.

Emotional energy is something I can’t put into words. If I’m feeling strong emotions I pick up a guitar and let everything I’m feeling fly out of my fingers. I let the music do the explaining. There are so many shades of feeling in between all of the main emotions and the best way for me to identify what’s going on in me is just to hear it.

These are my coping mechanisms and they work very well. But luckily, my energy is balanced between the physical, intellectual, and emotional. I’m not even close to the highest energy that I’ve seen. For some people, it’s all concentrated in one area, and it’s so intense that the urge to numb it, to at least bring it down to a manageable level, is overwhelming.

One friend of mine is a genius. He has so much mental power it is stunning. But it’s overwhelming for him. It’s exhausting. And he’s had a very hard time controlling it. For a long time he fell into the trap of numbing it. Instead of spending the energy he used drugs and alcohol to numb it. Just to bring the intensity down enough that he could actually think. 

When I think of intellectual superpowers I think of Eminem. He is a freaking supercomputer. Words pour through him and out of him at a rate unknown to the human race prior to his ascent to fame. It’s nearly impossible to comprehend how connections could possibly be made that quickly in his mind and verbalized at that speed. But he has struggled with a pill addiction for his entire life. That makes complete sense to me. Could you imagine how overwhelming it would be to live in that brain? How could you possibly get any sleep when your mind raced like that all of the time? Here are some lyrics from the song Never Enough:

“Sometimes the average listener rewinds and plays me, twenty times, cause I say so many rhymes it may seem, like I’m going too fast, cause my mind is racing.”

Physical superpowers have a different curse. They need to move constantly. They need to be active for many hours every day or they will explode. Their energy, if unused, manifests as anger, so they have to get it out. But there again, they have the option to numb it.

It’s startling how many UFC fighters talk about being an alcoholic when they were younger, before they found fighting. I wonder what the percentage is. I’d like to see that study. They had no outlet for their physical energy, and couldn’t just sit with it, so they drank. They had to, just to douse the fire raging inside. Thankfully, they found fighting. They discovered that when they spend that physical energy every day, the fire dies down. They’ve spent the fuel, and they can get home and relax with only smoldering coals inside.

One of the healthiest examples of a physical superpower that I can think of is Arnold Schwarzenegger. He figured out at a young age that if he spent nearly every waking hour in the gym, he could harness his immense physical energy into a productive outlet. He became a world champion bodybuilder, Hollywood movie star, and then governor of California. In the words of comedian Bill Burr, “He’s been shooting nothing but net for decades.” The reason he’s been so successful is because he harnessed all of his physical power instead of numbing it.

Finally, we have emotional superpowers. Many artists and musicians fall under this category. Pick one. Pick your favorite. The bleeding heart that you listen to when you’re in a mood. They’re an emotional superpower, and they figured out that if they pick up an instrument or a microphone, or a pen or a paintbrush, they can channel the ocean of emotional chaos inside of them into a work of art. They can get rid of it. They can spend it in the exact same way that Arnold spent his physical energy at the gym.

Unfortunately, many emotional superpowers fall into the same trap as physical and intellectual superpowers. They numb it. Whatever your superpower, there is always access to chemicals that will numb the potency of that overwhelming energy. For artists, it feels like emotional chaos. The musician Elliot Smith committed suicide by stabbing himself in the gut, twice. That’s how overwhelming his emotions were. But that same chaos was also his superpower. When he channeled that energy through a guitar and a microphone he created music so hauntingly beautiful that it is used in the saddest scenes of movies to this day. 

No matter which of these superpowers you relate to the most, I want to encourage you to find an outlet that spends that energy, and just attack it. Attack it to exhaustion every day. If you have an overwhelming amount of physical energy, exercise every day. Spend it all.

If you have an overwhelming amount of intellectual energy, apply it to difficult problems every day. Say it, write it, communicate it. Spend it all.

If you have an overwhelming amount of emotional energy, create art every day. Spend it all. 

The alternative, numbing it, is not a long term solution. You have a beast inside of you, a wolf, made of that potent energy. Either you take it for a run every day, or you tie chains around it and stick it in the corner. When you numb potent energy, especially with drugs and alcohol, all you are doing is chaining up that potent energy in the corner. In the dark shadows. Where it waits and builds and grows. The day you run out of whatever you use to numb it, the day you decide to “take a break,” The day you decide to quit, it comes out of the shadows, and it’s bigger now. For every day you didn’t spend it, it grew bigger. It multiplied. And now you have to deal with years of that potent energy all at once. 

This is why people relapse. They don’t have outlets in place to spend their potent energy productively. They don’t have a system and it’s too overwhelming for them. They go back to their regular life, a life where they never had an outlet for it, and they get overwhelmed again. 

What they really need is something new. Something that channels that energy and uses it up, spends it. This is why you’ll see the ex-heroin addict hitting the gym and getting a six pack. It spends the energy he needs to spend. It uses it up.

I want you to find channels to use your energy. You don’t have to be the best for it to be worthwhile. I’m going to say that again because I need to hear it. You don’t have to be the best for it to be worthwhile. An elementary school in my town has a poster on the wall in the cafeteria that I absolutely love. It says, 

“The woods would be quiet indeed if no birds sang except the best.”

What you have to offer is worthwhile. More than you think. You don’t need to be the best. Anyway, you don’t really have control over being the best as much as you think. External forces are as much at play as anything within your control. You only control two things. Finding the most productive outlet for your emotional / mental / physical energy and spending that energy to exhaustion daily. That’s how “the best,” became “the best” if such a thing even exists. I like to think each bird sings their own song, and all songs make the woods a more interesting place. 

The final reason to find an outlet and exhaust your energy into it is because that is the vehicle for your transformation. Picture Arnold Schwarzenegger at 15 years old. Now picture him at 25 years old. The outlet he found for his energy was the vehicle for his transformation. Imagine listening to Eminem in his first rap battle. Now imagine listening to him rap at the height of his career. The outlet he found for his energy was the vehicle for his transformation. How about your favorite artist? Picture them. Did they exhaust themselves into their art and transform, or did they fall prey to the desire to numb the overwhelming chaos?

Art is a vehicle for transformation. For Arnold Shwarzenegger, his body was his art. For Eminem, his words. For Elliot Smith, his music. Find your outlet and you will find the vehicle for your transformation. There is no greater adventure that you could embark on than the adventure of self-transformation through creation. Each bird sings their own song, and I hope I get to hear yours.