5 Ways To Prevent Mental Fatigue at 2 PM
By mid-afternoon, do you feel brain fog rolling in your head? If so, how can you combat this sensation effectively? Be proactively aware of your mental state rather than reactively resort to regular sugar or caffeine highs. This proactive approach to mental energy minimizes early waste, involves strategic use, stabilizes jumbled thoughts, and provides quick boosts to power through the day:
1. Minimize your number of decisions
No matter how seemingly trivial, every decision takes some amount of mental energy. What to wear and eat are examples of daily decisions that most likely take little time for most. However, they needlessly sap energy if you ruminate with indecision.
Some well-known successful people remove any uncertainty from their morning routine by wearing the same thing daily. Mark Zuckerberg wears a grey t-shirt every day. He said, “There’s actually a bunch of psychology theory that even making small decisions, around what you wear or what you eat for breakfast or things like that, they kind of make you tired and consume your energy… and I feel like I’m not doing my job if I spend any of my energy on things that are silly or frivolous about my life.” Steve Jobs similarly wore the same black turtle neck every day.
These wardrobe limitations may be extreme, but they indicate how successful individuals value their limited resources of daily mental energy. Most people are not willing to voluntarily wear a uniform every day. So, the following are things you can do to conserve mental energy and simplify your morning:
· Select your outfit the night before. Avoid the morning rush and free your mind from that little, but sometimes, taxing decision.
· Make or plan your lunch the previous night to avoid further rush and indecision.
· Avoid playing games, like crossword puzzles or Sudoku, until later in the day.
· Avoid rush-hour traffic — even if that means leaving 20 minutes early.
2. Schedule your mentally challenging tasks in the morning
You have your greatest mental energy reserves at the beginning of the day. Why not take advantage of this? Schedule your most thought-provoking tasks and meetings at this time.
Jeff Bezos is known for scheduling meetings involving important decisions in the morning. He said, “I do my high-IQ meetings before lunch. Like anything that’s going to be really mentally challenging, that’s a 10 o’clock meeting.”
3. Practice mindfulness or meditation to improve your focus and concentration
When it comes to preventing mental fatigue, practicing mindfulness or meditation can be incredibly effective. Both of these practices help you focus on the present moment, and they can be a great way to clear your mind and relax your body. Maintaining mental clarity and focus conserves the energy lost when jumping from one shiny object to another.
There are many different approaches to meditation. You may want to experiment with what works best for you. The simplest form is a silent meditation where you focus on your breath and let thoughts come and go without judgment.
Another exercise to consider is practicing mindfulness with audible and visual distractions around you. Simulate your everyday environment where numerous distractions are ongoing, and practice focusing on a single phrase or your breath. You may have to dial down the levels of distraction in your environment initially. But this exercise will prove valuable when everyday commotion attempts to interfere with your concentration.
Meditation may be best at the start of the day. However, a simple 3-minute reboot in the middle of the day may be advantageous to clear out any energy-sapping thoughts brought on by a busy day.
4. Two Minutes Of Exercise
The journal Translational Sports Medicine published a study showing that as little as two minutes of exercise can temporarily boost memory. Some short-form of exercise to increase your blood flow immediately impacts your alertness levels. So a short, brisk walk in the middle of the day will boost your focus.
5. Diet
What we eat directly impacts our mental performance. Poor choices can derail our mental clarity. Why? Our body breaks down food into glucose, our brain’s energy source. Too much glucose gives us a quick high followed by a slump. Too little glucose leaves us sluggish. So the key is to keep your glucose levels within a specific range.
Generally speaking, you know how to maintain this range — eat the right foods. A Big Mac, large fries, and a Coke will slow you down by mid-afternoon. You need to have adequate and nutritious snacks nearby to avoid huge lunches and afternoon vending machine runs. Put orders for some of your favorite healthy snacks on auto-pilot with Amazon.
Closing Thoughts
Just like physical energy, mental energy has a limited supply. Use your mental resources in the following ways to power through the day and the 2 PM mental hurdle:
· Conservation by minimizing early decisions and stress
· Maximization through strategic use
· Stabilization through mindfulness/meditation and diet
· Amplification through brief, brisk exercise
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