In researching for The Philosophy of Exuberance, I started looking at the concept of “mental energy.” There was more research than I expected, with investigators working hard to find ways to measure the level of someone’s mental energy. What struck me going through the articles was that there seem to be two camps: one looking at increasing mental energy and another looking at ways to manage mental energy. Those two approaches brought me back to Exuberance, with one approach seeing mental energy as something that can increase (or decrease) and one that sees a limited pool of mental energy that could be used up.
Exuberance is a life-affirming and abundance-recognizing way of being in the world; and is full of positive energy — even when one becomes utterly still in the presence of Wonder. Meh is the feeling that there is nothing interesting or important at the moment, and draws down the mental, emotional, and physical energy of the person experiencing it.
We’ve all experienced times when we’ve been so into what we’re doing that concepts like time and effort don’t apply. Of course what we do takes time and requires energy, but it doesn’t seem like it does. Oddly, after doing something so intense we find that we have more energy than when we started.
We’ve also all experienced times when we began a task with an abundance of energy only to find that we grow quickly tired and start asking how much longer it will take. Time passes slowly, and we are aware of the diminishing energy we have for whatever we’re doing. This is meh.
In the first example, something is happening where what we put out into the world comes back to us as something more. (Not more in a quantitative way, but a qualitative way such as the difference between store-bought cookies made and homemade cookies.) As we continue the process, so do we give more and receive more back, being in a state of Exuberance.
In the second example, something is happening where what we put out seems to go into a void, nothing comes back. Something is holding us back, an intuition of Meh — the energy-sapping state that is the opposite of Exuberance.
Why? How can we know before we begin whether an experience is going to energizing or draining?
Here is an exercise: Think about what you are about to do, and say or think these words: “I get to do this.” If you feel yourself getting excited by the prospect of the doing that is likely something that would allow you be in an Exuberant space. If you feel Meh, you have a sense that is is something that will take more out of you than it gives. It is as if our intuition is urging us toward Exuberance and away from Meh.
To make this more concrete and to give an example that shows how mental energy translates into physical energy, I recommend this article that shows a simple and well-designed experiment on the link between Exuberance, Meh, and energy. (Though the article doesn’t use those words, it is not hard to see how those terms apply.)
In the study one question arises that has meaning here: how do we know if something we want to do is possible? The answer is that we cannot know, but we can believe that it is possible. Believing in the possibility literally made people in the study more likely to have the energy to achieve their goal.