Hello! Im An ENTP, And Over The Past Year Or So Ive Noticed My General Energy And Enthusiasm For Life

Hello! I’m an ENTP, and over the past year or so I’ve noticed my general energy and enthusiasm for life has steadily declined. I tend to get lost overusing my Ne to consider pointless, fictitious scenarios rather than paying attention to what goes on in real life. I would like to regain some degree of passion and have more energy. I realize that with dominant Ne I will always be a bit distracted, but I feel like my lack of energy to do ANYTHING is unusual. Any advice on breaking the funk?

Oh gosh.

This is a problem all the ENXPs I know (myself included) struggle with a lot, but I’m not sure what causes it in each of us rather than inertia and … laziness. See, Ne is the easiest function for you (and the rest of us) to use, which means taking your ideas and making them reality requires lower function interaction… that often involves hard work / analytical skills / follow-through… in other words, thinking functions and inferior Si.

This same inferior Si can cause issues by making you get stuck in a rut, fear you are wasting your life, not living up to your full potential, or that life will never change – the non-creative times in your life will cause you to fear the fog will never left, that you will fail on epic levels. The imbalance between Ne (new and exciting possibilities and ideas) and Si (learning from past mistakes and attending to details) can be… bad.

The myth that Ne-doms never do anything or finish anything is a stereotype; light a big enough fire under a Ne-dom (by choice or necessity) and they can and will get projects done, out of their own desire to see their ideas brought into the real world – that’s a healthy Ne-dom in action: make my ideas real.

Typically, Ne-doms find energy in something they feel passionate about – if you have steadily experienced a decrease in passion over the last year or so, it means somewhere along the way you lost your idealism and/or enthusiasm for whatever you were aiming toward. In other words, maybe you were going to medical school and all excited about that and found out a year in that it’s hard and detail-driven and you don’t like it near as much as you thought… so your passion waned and your energy alongside it.

The cure is to find something that energizes and excites you, which can push you to pursue it with energy instead of lapsing into dreaming and not doing.

A couple of things to remember, in general:

How you start your day matters. Your brain is a computer that has a limited amount of time to boot up in the morning – and how you choose to let it boot up will impact its mental coherency for the rest of the day. People who hit the snooze button and enter a half-sleep cycle fight lethargy the rest of the day; people who choose not to engage their mind and set a mentality of ‘start work’ find it harder to stay focused or get motivated; but the people who get up promptly and create a plan for the day often get a lot done.

When I heard about this, I legit thought that it was idiotic, so I decided to test it over a couple of weeks and monitor my mental process. The days I get right up and do something productive (write reviews, answer e-mails, even write on a book), I feel more alert / motivated for the entire rest of the day; and the days I lay around in bed, only chat with my friends, or watch Netflix before breakfast… forget it, I often have to ‘force’ myself to take action the rest of the day.

Set reasonable goals and reward yourself. If you have nothing to look forward to on the other end, why do it? Give your mind and body what it wants – something beyond a sense of accomplishment.

Exercise. N types tend to think a lot and move not so much. If you lack energy, exercise… it will build your stamina and give you more physical energy. :)

Good luck!

- ENFP Mod

List of books everyone should read

Howl’s moving castle by Diana Wynne Jones

Chrestomanci series by Diana Wynne Jones

Carry On by Rainbow Rowell

The Parasol Protectorate and Custard Protocol series by Gail Carriger

The Raven Cycle series by Maggie Stiefvatar 

The Percy Jackson and Heroes of Olympus series by Rick Riordan

The Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer

Regency Romance books by Georgette Heyer

The Hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy series by Douglas Adams

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett

Discworld series by Terry Pratchett

The Princess Bride by William Goldman

dealing with the worst case scenario

your condom breaks

you feel a lump on your breast

your friends are ignoring you

you’re stranded on an island 

you got rejected by a crush

you get into a car accident

you got stung by a bee/wasp

you got fired from your job

you’re in an earthquake

your tattoo gets infected

your house is on fire

you’re lost in the woods

you get arrested abroad

you get robbed

your partner cheated on you

you’re on a ship that’s sinking

you fall into ice

you’re stuck in an elevator

you hit a deer with your car

you have food poisoning

your pet passed away

you fall off of a horse

you or your friend has alcohol poisoning

you have toxic shock syndrome

your house has a gas leak

the shape of water’s fishman looks like he’d wait till the third date to have sex and when we did it’d be in the candlelight with a handpicked lovemaking playlist on in the background meanwhile venom looks like he’d raw me in a gas station bathroom at 3am

Saw this somewhere else and felt the need to post it cause no one else ever really tells you this stuff

my favourite aphobic argument is that somehow ace people in relationships are abusive for not having sex with their (non asexual) partner

uwu relationships are all about compromise and that means the only one who actually has to do any compromising is always the asexual partner or else they’re abusive uwu