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Midday Slump
Take a moment, please, and help me out. Around 4 PM every day — sometimes it hits as early as 2:30 PM — I hit a wall.
It’s not really fatigue, exactly. It’s more just a puttering-out of energy. Here’s a message from the Harvard Business Review — I mean, they must know how to beat this, right? — on ways to overcome the afternoon out-of-gas feeling:
https://twitter.com/HarvardBiz/status/656435538589782016/photo/1
Two items struck me as weird. The first, “Tailor your tasks to your energy” seems like one of those pie-in-the-sky suggestions people make who have never really worked for a living. It’s like when super-fit people who hate food tell me to “avoid breads and sugars, load up on fresh vegetables and salad” as if that’s even something a decent person would be able to do.
I spend my afternoons, more often than not, catching up to what I didn’t do in the morning or responding to disasters that have arisen since then. What I cannot do, under any normal circumstances, is “tailor” anything to anything.
And then there’s “Meditate.”
Which is something — Surprise! Betcha didn’t expect it from the West Coast RINO! — I’ve done from time to time. Most of the time, I just fell asleep. Occasionally I’d actually come back to consciousness feeling relaxed and rejuvenated, but even on those occasions I came back to a full email inbox and a sense of being even further behind.
So I’m stuck with my 3 PM espresso, which they imply is some kind of a crutch.
They’re right. It is. So what?
Published in Culture
Sugar has a lot to do with it. Avoiding a lot of carbs and sugar at lunch, esp white bread and pasta, can help avoid the rush and the crash.
Try watching a re-run of the Democrat debates. Rarely are sleeping people angry.
A 15 minute micro-nap does the trick for me.
Consider retirement. You can get tired, sleep, zone out in front of a recorded football game, etc. Nobody cares what you do.
Taking a walk would help. Coffee, not so much. Caffeine hangs around in your system and screws up your sleep patterns later. There is, however, a Mexican tea made from hibiscus blossoms, “jamaica” pronounced (ha-my-ca) or known in the hippy days as Red Zinger. I don’t know through what mechanism, but it does give you some pep.
I prescribe a 45 minute nap. It works for me.
When you get tired just set your smartphones alarm for 45 minutes and get your snooze on.
On a previous job I had a brutal work-pace and usually didn’t leave the office until 10 PM on weekdays. If I didn’t take a mid-day nap I paid a price in fatigue and productivity. If I did I could power through until 10 PM.
Meditate… sure. I try my best to fall into a “trance” sometime in the afternoon, if at all possible. Even just a 20 or 30 minute “trance” over the lunch hour.
It’s waking up from a “trance” that’s sometimes kind of difficult.
To Marion Evans point, I used to have a huge problem with that. No longer.
If you have a glucose-based fueling strategy you’ll suffer these crashes, which are akin to the “bonk” that runners suffer from when they run low on blood glucose.
You need to fix your metabolism with a low-carb diet, and exercise when in a fasted state. This will force your body to build its fat-burning system, which is a steady fuel source. No highs and lows.
They can actually measure this (if you want to get really anal about it) by doing a test that measures Respiratory Quotient, which tells them how much glucose vs. fat your body uses for fuel. But it’s not necessary, as the fix is easy enough.
RQ is a very powerful thing to understand, as RQ predicts both weight gain and weight loss. Which makes perfect sense, of course: if your body can’t use fat for fuel fat builds up and cannot be burned off.
Napping or eating more glucose contributes to the problem by ameliorating the symptoms, sort of like giving an alcoholic more booze to get them through the hangover.