What if you could do your most challenging and/or rewarding work when your mind and body is best equipped to handle it?

Andrew Huberman coined a term he calls "limbic friction", which helps explain just that. In short, limbic friction is a term used to describe the amount of effort you need to engage in a certain behavior. For example, trying to write an essay on a scientific topic at 10:00pm, I am experiencing quite a bit of limbic friction.

This means I am fighting against my mind and body rather than working with them.

Most people feel more alert in the mornings and tend to get more tired throughout the day. Of course there are exceptions to that rule. It is important to understand where you fall on that spectrum to determine when you are operating at your highest level.

This is an important function of building habits and structuring your day.

If you are wanting to get into a habit of say, writing, and you know your peak mental hours are earlier in the morning, then it might be beneficial to schedule your writing sessions during those hours and not when you are half asleep and your eyes are burning from looking at a screen all day. Hypothetically speaking. On the other hand, there is something to be said about fighting through limbic friction and completing a task in spite of it.

The more you fight against it and succeed, the less friction there is for that specific activity in the future.

If you could schedule your most important work to function better with your natural rhythms, then think about the overall improvement. 1% better work each day? Over a year? Ten years?

Surely this essay would be at least 10% better if I wrote it when I was better equipped (it probably wouldn't be 10% better, and stop calling me Shirley!).