Reflections on the week
This week was a bit of a rocky start to the experiment – I think I was trying to change too many things at once. I am just beginning to get my sleep schedule back on track, and this will be my focus for the upcoming week.
Other thoughts
Earlier today, I posted some notes on cognitive functions and personality types: On “Personality Type” and “Personality Hacker”. I’ve seen claims in a few places that people with Introverted Intuition as their dominant function can have relatively lower levels of mental energy and will often experience their mental energy becoming depleted quickly. I’ve been wondering about possible reasons for this.
According to the cognitive function model, people with Introverted Intuition as their dominant function will have Extraverted Sensation as their fourth function and Introverted Sensation as their eighth function. I think this has the following consequences: these people have less direct awareness of physical sensations (that is, they tend to “live more in their heads” than other people do), and may also be less likely to notice factors that drain their mental energy. So they may benefit from deliberately paying close attention to how their mental energy fluctuates and trying to identify influential factors. This is part of the inspiration for this experiment: I’m hoping that analysing changes in my mental energy will reveal correlations that I wouldn’t have become consciously aware of otherwise.
As I noted in On “Personality Type” and “Personality Hacker”, I remain somewhat sceptical about how real personality types and cognitive functions are. But I do think it’s plausible that some people need to make more of a conscious effort to track their mental energy and understand what external factors typically increase or decrease it.