Define your own life symmetry

Anyone know how many hours a week on average we work in the U.S.? It's 47. 47 is the average.

But here's the weird thing. It's 100 years later. Most of us here have pretty different workplaces, right? And we're still using the 40/60 [working/free hours per week].

There's a lot of neuroscientists that essentially think of symmetry as these two things...dopamine and endorphins...and then on the other side...serotonin and oxytocin.

Psychologists kind of think about it as growth versus restorative states. I call it progress and self-care.

In case restorative and growth don't really fit how your brain thinks of those two states, I encourage you to come up with your own words.

Don't just think of work things, think of any activity that makes you feel pumped. Or your version of pumped.

It helped me realize that so many of the details of my life...I'd advocated and I'd gotten creative about how to get them in my life.

Some part of my brain understands that taking a two-week vacation in the Bahamas or whatever, some sunny, beautiful place, isn't going to make up for the things that are massively missing in my life.

It's like saying, you know what? My life is crazy right now, so I'm not gonna sleep for five days, but then I have a two-day window where I'm just gonna sleep the whole time for two days, 48 hours, done, catch up.

We understand the frequency, the cycle, of that restoration activity with sleep. And I realized it is the same with some of these other things.

We seem to really like to grip about time management with people, but it's very rare that I overhear co-workers or colleagues being like, "so how do you fit in alone time?"