Mental Currency
Why You're Probably Spending it Wrong
Hey Currency Collective!
Welcome to this week’s newsletter. I want to share something with you that has genuinely shaped the way I think about everything from my time to my relationships.
It started during my master’s thesis. I was deep in the neuroscience of attention and decision-making when something hit me like a ton of bricks.
Imagine all the books I could read, all the things I could learn, all the experiences I could have…if I could stop wasting energy on things that don’t matter and stop spending it on people who don’t deserve it!
That realization is where the concept of Mental Currency was born. And it’s also the foundation of my upcoming book, Mental Currency, which I cannot wait to share with you. More on that soon. But first, let me explain what this concept actually means.
What Is Mental Currency?
Mental Currency is the total amount of cognitive and emotional energy your brain has available at any given time. It is a finite resource. And just like money, you are spending it whether you intend to or not.
Mental Currency refers to your attention, focus, emotional regulation, decision-making capacity, self-control, and motivation. Every thought, choice, worry, and emotion uses some of it. Every act of focus, reasoning, or self-control is powered by neurons firing in the prefrontal cortex, the brain’s centre for planning, impulse control, and complex decision-making. And every one of those neural events has a biological cost.
The question is not whether you’re spending Mental Currency, because you are, constantly. The question is: are you spending it on things that give you a return?
The Drain vs The Investment
I speak with people who have told me that for years, sometimes even decades, they forfeit their goals every single year. Not because they lack ambition or capability. But because their Mental Currency is already spoken for before they’ve had a chance to direct it consciously.
This is what Bronnie Ware, a palliative care nurse, captured so powerfully in The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. The people she cared for regretted not living true to themselves; spending years conforming to others’ expectations, working too hard at the expense of meaningful experiences, not expressing what they felt, missing the connections they could have had.
Our default mode is a return to automatic patterns of thinking, and for many people these are rumination, comparison, guilt, shame, worry spirals, people-pleasing, scrolling. These patterns feel passive, but they are not. They are consuming your Mental Currency in real time.
If something consumes your energy without creating a return, that’s a drain.
If something gives you clarity, builds a skill, strengthens your emotional regulation, that’s an investment.
In my new book, I outline how to turn Mental Currency drains into Mental Currency investments, so you can live true to yourself until the very end.
Your Brain Has a Daily Energy Budget
A landmark paper published in Current Biology in 2022 by Wiehler and colleagues offered a neuro-metabolic explanation for why prolonged mental effort makes us cognitively exhausted¹. Their conclusion: the brain actively downregulates cognitive control when the metabolic cost becomes too high. Mental fatigue is a protective feature of the brain: when the cost of running gets too high, the brain starts to preserve itself.
The research team used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) and fMRI to track metabolic changes during six hours of demanding cognitive tasks. What they found was that the lateral prefrontal cortex, the region responsible for the kind of high-effort, goal-directed thinking we associate with making good decisions, accumulated significantly more glutamate over time than a reference brain region. Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter, and too much of it outside the neuron can disrupt signaling and threaten neural integrity. So, the brain reduces activity in the prefrontal cortex to protect itself.
If you don’t give your brain a break, it takes one for you.
As glutamate accumulates and prefrontal activity declines, people shift away from high-effort, goal-oriented choices and toward low-effort, instantly rewarding ones. Hard decisions drop toward zero. Easy, impulsive choices rise. In real life: you scroll instead of working. You reach for crisps instead of cooking the meal you planned. You agree to something you didn’t want to, because evaluating it properly costs more than you have left.
This happens to all of us, daily, and most of us have no idea, because nobody taught us that the brain has a daily budget. We don’t plan our lives around it. So, patterns and behaviours creep in that slowly drain our funds without us realising, leaving us unable to direct energy toward the things that would actually give us a return.
How do we change this? How do we start investing instead of draining?
Attractor Basins and Why the Brain Gets Stuck
I want to introduce you to one of the most useful concepts from neuroscience for understanding why change feels so hard: the energy landscape.
Imagine the brain’s patterns of activity as a terrain. Rolling hills and valleys representing all the possible states your mind can occupy. The valleys are the low-energy, stable states your brain naturally gravitates toward: familiar thought patterns, habitual emotional responses, automatic ways of interpreting the world. The hills are the high-energy, less stable states that require effort to reach: new perspectives, flexible thinking, behavioural change.
Neuroscientists call the valleys attractor basins. And the brain, because it loves efficiency, tends to settle into them.
Some valleys are shallow, so you can move in and out of them easily. But others become deep over time through repetition: worry, self-criticism, resentment, pessimism, rigid certainty. The more often you think a particular thought, the deeper the groove becomes, and the harder it is to climb out. This is neuroplasticity in action; the brain learns whatever it repeats.
And as I’m sure you already know, berating yourself for being stuck doesn’t pull you out. If it did, none of us would have attractor basins at all.
When we find ourselves trapped in these deep basins, we often internalize the experience and conclude that something is fundamentally wrong with us, which then becomes part of our narrative. But understanding these basins gives us something better than shame: compassion and a realistic strategy.
Shifting your thinking is about supplying the brain with enough energy and new input to climb out of an old valley and form a new one. Small, repeated actions are what reshape the terrain. Reframing a thought, trying something new, moving your body, slowing your breath, challenging your first interpretation of a situation. Each of these is a tiny nudge. Over time, old grooves flatten. New paths form.
Mental Currency is coming soon, and I genuinely believe it will change how you think about your most finite resource. Stay tuned. You’ll be the first to know.
Until next week,
Nic x
P.S. Pay attention this week to where your energy actually goes. Most people are surprised. That awareness is the very beginning of spending it differently.
References
Wiehler A et al. A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions. Current Biology. 2022. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35961314/
Ware, B. The Top Five Regrets of the Dying. Hay House, 2012.
Cocchi L et al. Criticality in the brain: A synthesis of neurodevelopment, cognition, and disease. Progress in Neurobiology. 2017.
I love reading this ! Change suddenly feels right and exciting.
Great analogies , thank you kindly for your generosity and modest simplicities in conveying excellent information ...
I live far far away in Africa...one day I hope I find your books
Go well and blessed