Most malignant feelings and behaviours in an otherwise well-regulated human psyche can be characterised by malignant flow of energy. I do not mean this in a voodoo "energy of the universe" or "spiritual energy" way - when I say energy, I am directly referring to the human capacity for doing work. There are further divisions to this categorisation in the forms of the different types of energy possessed by every individual human, be they mental, physical, emotional or any other rationally conceivable type of energy, but for our purposes we can refer to all these disparate types as one entity.
There are two distinct characteristics that are important to us when trying to articulate the relationship between this energy and day-to-day human experience - i) the amount of energy an individual possesses, and ii) their ability to direct this energy towards chosen means and ends. Both of these characteristics can be changed through focused practice and the development of habits and behaviours to supplement this practice.
To increase your internal stores of energy, the best advice is the most clichéd, because it works - sleep well, drink water, eat enough food to fuel your body and spend time engaging in experiences and activities that give you back more energy than they take. Once all these low hanging fruit are picked clean, the next step to increasing your effective energy stores is by plugging any subconscious leakages that may be taking place passively or actively - these include, but are not limited to, minimising the time you spend in places that enrage or agitate you and make you spend energy to either endure or retaliate to the stimuli from these environments, getting rid of as many cheap sources of dopamine as possible, and reducing time spent dreaming or procrastinating instead of actually doing the thing.
This step is where most people falter, since they are now left with a bunch of excess energy that has nowhere else to go, that simply falls back into the same patterns of allocation with the passage of time, leaving the individual no better than when they began. The ideal approach to reconfiguring your energy flows is to simultaneously remove them from places of waste and redirect them to activities and experiences that mean more to you. Finding these activities is in itself a great ordeal, but here's the short and dirty version: either i) find a purpose and then work your way back to figure out which activities embody this purpose and then engage in them, or ii) try as many different things as possible to find out what you genuinely enjoy and then do that. Using this approach, you minimise and effectively redirect the excess amount of energy that builds up in your system that would have otherwise escaped through the easiest possible channels, which tend to be mindless consumption and cheap pleasure.
These are all changes that you primarily make consciously. Another avenue through which you can increase and better manage your stores of energy is by reducing the amount of energy spent haphazardly at a background level every day - through pointless internal monologues, anxiety, overthinking, and much more. The best way I have found to do this is to simply meditate. It reduces the amount of background static in your life, allows you much more precise control over your thoughts, and when done for long enough even increases your energy stores by affording you truly insane levels of focus. A short term solution might be to take stimulants, but I do not recommend this both due to the difficulty of getting a prescription and due to the possible dependencies it may engender. Unless you are 100% confident you have exhausted all regular avenues to better channel and increase your energy, nootropics and stimulants should be a last resort. If you do decide to give them a try, Gwern is a good place to start safely.
If you are extremely ambitious yet painfully ineffective, a large amount of your energy might be spent in dreaming of futures and coming up with plans and excuses that simply heighten cognitive load without getting any actual work done. This, combined with addictive tendencies, if left unchecked, will lose you any chance of actually making a dent in the universe. I understand this at a very personal level, and I am writing this essay to share a mental model of what has worked for me when thinking of how to effectively channel all this extra energy.
To start, think of the possible space of energy-allocation as having two dimensions - time, and space. Along the space axis, you have all possible things you could ever think about - spaceships, dinosaurs, Napoleon, other people, status games, you name it. Along the time axis, you have the different times at which you can think of these things. Obsession with one's own path combined with excess energy tends to have one thinking of possible futures a lot, along with thinking of how the future might look with regards to what an individual cares about.
To take all the energy that was previously spread diffusely throughout this massive problem space and condense it into a single moment seems almost impossible - how in the world are you supposed to do this without some mental energy leaking out unless you completely silence your mind or enter the flow state? The key lies in loosening your grip on the conceptual. This sounds a bit vague and very mystical, but I promise you it's not.
Essentially what you're doing is ceasing to think of the present moment in concrete terms (I am writing an essay, doing my homework, running a marathon etc) and instead trying to engage with the experience of the present moment itself. In every moment there is a whole barrage of sensory information that we simply filter out because living moment-to-moment would be too inconvenient otherwise, but if you explicitly try to pay attention to all of the incoming sensory information, I guarantee that all of your mental energy will be more than occupied with making sense of what your senses are telling you.
But completely indexing on stimuli from the real world can also be messy and completely wreck the level of abstraction that is required to function in the day to day world, so another alternative when engaging in activities that bring out strong emotions in you is to loosen your grip on the conceptual trappings of how you feel, and instead just really feel what your internal state is like in the moment.
Words and concepts are really just extremely dense compressions of information that we use to represent experiences at high levels of abstraction, and thus as a requirement do not take up much mental bandwidth. This means that you can never completely occupy yourself with the current moment if you keep narrating it like you always have, and will always end up narrating some far off future or musing about past possibilities again.
By letting go of the abstractions and instead directly engaging with what they are meant to represent, you not only enrich the intensity and level of engagement you have in the present moment, you also give all that energy inside you a place to spend itself.
This technique was heavily inspired by my limited knowledge of Zen Buddhism and its emphasis on first-person experience - there's probably already an equivalent for what I'm talking about in the scriptures, but this is a quick hack that has worked remarkably well for me in recent times.
The most helpful mental models in this essay are those of energy flow and the distinction between conception and experience.
Let me leave you with some words from the first Chinese patriarch of Zen buddhism, Bodhidharma.
"A special transmission outside the scriptures;
no reliance on words and letters;
directly pointing to the human mind;
seeing one's nature and becoming Buddha."
Thank you.