3 » Energia & Mental Focus

Algunos consejos para tener Energia

Take a power nap.

But do it in your chair. Don’t lie down on the sofa or you won’t get back up. Keep it short: 5-10 minutes max. Any longer and it will have the opposite effect of knocking you out for the rest of the day.

Aromatherapy with lavender.

Research has shown that the lavender scent increases alertness. Test subjects were given math tests before and after 3 minutes of lavender aromatherapy. The group completed the tests faster and more accurately after aromatherapy.

Wake up at the same time everyday.

Including weekends. This sets your body clock. Otherwise, you’ll be wide awake when you should be asleep. Or worse, asleep when you should be awake (dozing off in a meeting is embarrassing). The key is to go to bed at the same time every night. If you need to reset your sleep cycle in one day, stop eating for the 16 hours before the time you want to wake up.

Eat more soluble fiber.

Soluble fiber is the kind that slows down the rate of absorption of sugars. It evens out your energy levels by preventing a sugar high and crash. (By the way, insoluble fiber is the kind that prevents constipation.) Don’t worry too much about which kind of fiber you’re getting — they’re both good for you. Rotate more high soluble fiber foods like nuts, grains, fruits, plant matter (vegetables), beans, and oats into your diet.

Eat smaller, more frequent meals.

Snack throughout the day. By eating smaller but more frequent “meals”, you will maintain a steady dose of energy instead of experiencing food comas. Don’t snack on fatty and sugar laden junk food though. You may get a short 30 minute burst of hyperalertness, but it’ll be quickly followed by a debilitating crash.

Splash some water on your face.

Just letting the cool water hit your face washes off the grime and stresses of the day. You could also jump in the pool or take a shower for the same effect. Showers stimulates the circulatory system and metabolism. Get wet to feel more energetic.

Stand up, stretch and take a couple of deep breaths.

Stretch your arms, back, legs, and neck. Take a deep breath through your nose, hold it, and let it out slowly and forcefully. Repeat several times. This will take 30 seconds and will be an instant fix. When you sit back down, you’ll have the clear head and fresh feeling needed to power through the tough/boring task in front of you.

Get your world organized.

When your world is organized, you don’t have to expend mental energy keeping track of a million things. Here’s how to take back control of your time and productivity:
The Getting Things Done (GTD) FAQ – Beginner’s guide to GTD
Zen to Done (ZTD): The Ultimate Simple Productivity System – Leo’s even simpler system
7 Productivity Tips for People that Hate GTD

Take a mini-vacation.

Take one day and just do whatever you want. No work, no chores, no errands. Enjoy your one full day of vacation, then come back to work more motivated and energetic.

Eat a satisfying breakfast but a light lunch.

A heavy lunch, especially one with lots of carbs or fat (like a burger combo) will hit you as soon as you get back to the office. And it’ll be a sluggishness that lasts to the end of the day. Eat a big breakfast instead. It provides the fuel you need for the day, at the time when your body needs it the most. Not only will you avoid the afternoon food coma, the big breakfast will make you more productive in the mornings. Double win.

Move gym time to the morning.

A lot of people go to the gym after work. Try going to the gym in the morning instead to get energy that lasts all day. Sure, you’ll have to wake up an hour or two earlier, but you get that time back at night. That exercise in the morning gets the endorphins flowing, which keeps you happy and productive the rest of the day. By exercising in the morning instead of at night, you spend the same amount of time at the gym, but get the added benefit of having more energy at work.

Dress up.

Feeling better about yourself has a magical way of giving you more energy. Put just a tad more effort into looking your best for work, and you’ll get compliments from coworkers that will make you feel better — and make you a perkier, more energetic worker bee.

Take a walk outside.

Getting outside for some fresh air, a change of scenery, and a quick walk to get your blood going will do wonders for your mood and motivation. Seeing the sun is a signal to your body that it’s not bedtime yet.

Rotate yogurt into your diet.

Yogurt with live cultures keep your digestive system clean, which helps your body absorb all the nutrients from food. That makes you healthier and more energetic. Yogurt is also a good low-fat snack.

Change your socks for refreshment.

It’s an amazing trick. Bring a change of socks to work, and change your socks midway through the day (say, after lunch). You’ll be amazed at how much fresher you’ll feel. This trick is especially handy on days with lots of walking — like during a hike or family outing to the amusement park.

Stress Food

In order to understand what role foods play in your productivity, you first have to understand what (nutritional) stress is and how this plays a role in your body (and your productivity).

Whenever you eat something, your body has to digest the food to turn it into energy. This process requires a lot of energy. In fact, your digestive system is one of the biggest energy suckers in your body.

Have you ever had a meal where you felt tired and sluggish after eating? Do you remember being super productive after that big meal? Of course not. This is a very common problem and a form of stress on the body that tempers your thinking and focus abilities.

What happens is when you eat poorly digestible foods it will cost your body a lot of energy to digest it. Blood is drawn to parts of the body where it is needed the most. Thus, when you eat a heavy meal, blood is drawn to the stomach to help the digestion process. When there is not enough blood in the head, that means not enough nutrients will go to the brain. In other words, heavy meals deprive your brain from glucose and oxygen it needs to function at its best.

Another form of stress is the lack of nutrients in your foods. Your body wants to extract all nutrients from food in the most efficient way. Whenever the body doesn’t get enough nutrients, it causes a stress response. Stress is a state where the body thinks it’s in danger and it will give you a temporary boost to ensure your survival.

Nutritional stress, as Brendan calls it, is the body’s response to food that is void of nutrition. What happens then is that your body’s adrenal glands will produce a stress hormone, cortisol, to make up for the lack of energy it got from digestion. It’s a temporary fix to give you some extra energy. The problem is, too much (pertained) cortisol in your body is not a good thing. It eats away muscle tissue, causes hormonal imbalance, makes sleeping more difficult, and it burns fuel inefficiently.

The problem with most foods today is that they cause this stress response because they contain very few nutrients. This is not just the case for junk food. Take white bread for example. It’s a staple in most Western diets and we wouldn’t consider this junk food. However, white bread contains very little nutrients and thus causes a stress response as your body tries to digest it.

Ideally you want to eat as much nutrient-dense food as possible so you avoid this stress response. When the body is stressed, it can’t be productive nor perform at its best. It’s that simple.

Conceptos
The core driver of enhancement of intelligence is the ability to ignore distractions and selectively focus.
People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information.

Lecturas

Algunos consejos para mejorar el Mental Focus

Revisar esto, no estoy de acuerdo con todos los puntos.

What tricks do you know for maximising your mental energy?

Build habits and routines: this reduces the number of superfluous decisions that you need to make on a daily basis, especially involving recurring temptations.
Avoid temptation in the first place: for example, when I buy food, I intentionally buy only healthy items. Then later at home, I never have to use any willpower to convince myself not to eat unhealthy food, as all the choices are healthy.
Make unimportant decisions quickly: a decision that is thought about for a long time is likely to be slightly more accurate than the same decision made quickly, although vastly more expensive for the mind. So trivial decisions, such as which colour shirt to wear [like Obama: 2], or which dish to order from a menu, are best made quickly even if this risks overlooking a slightly better alternative.
Get out of bed soon after waking up: this helps for two reasons. Firstly, it teaches your body to transition properly from “asleep” to “awake”, and I’ve found this gives you better quality of sleep and better wakefulness during the day. Secondly, if you have a tendency to laze around for a long time after waking up, then every morning you’re losing the fight against the temptation to stay in bed several times before getting up, throwing mental energy down the drain before your feet have even touched the floor!
Focus on one complicated task at a time: I used to improvise on the piano during breaks from work, until eventually, I realised how expensive it was to switch back to “proper” work afterwards! Every time I switched from playing the piano to whatever work I was supposed to be doing, my mind would still be naturally trying to think about piano, and so it required mental effort to refocus on the new task.
WTF??? Keep your blood sugar moderately high: Psychologists have done many experiments on the effect of sugar on willpower depletion, and the results are conclusive: people have more willpower when they have been given sugar. The reasoning is simple: the only fuel that the brain can use is glucose, so if your blood sugar is low, then your mind can’t do its job properly. When I feel my mental energy waning, I often take a glucose tablet to revert my blood sugar to “enough” (followed by a drink of water to avoid tooth decay!)
WTF??? Avoid sugar crashes: conversely, if your blood sugar is too high, then it will soon be enthusiastically removed to be stored for times of famine, leaving your mind with too little again.
Avoid food that’s difficult to digest: after eating heavy, carbohydrate-rich foods, your body makes its digestive system a priority, so the brain doesn’t get as much glucose as it deserves.
Keep active as you work: even light physical activity such as walking around will keep your blood flowing well, supplying your mind with a steady stream of fuel.
Spend time only on activities that deserve your mental energy
Sleep at the same time every night: The best way to replenish mental energy reserves is by sleeping well, and sleeping at the same time is an effective way to sleep better.
Work with the right amount of background noise/music: For some activities, I prefer to work in silence. For example if I’m doing a maths exam paper, any music and any sounds distract me and I would have to expend effort focusing away from them. Other times, if the work is less demanding then my mind will wander, and I have to expend effort focusing back to the work. Then, music or background noise can be useful as it’s the first thing my mind will wander to, so it won’t wander far! For me, metal and foreign pop music are the easiest genres to work along to, but Classical distracts me too much so I avoid it. For you, it may work completely differently, so it’s worth experimenting with.
Write down information to free your short-term memory: This is just one reason why to-do lists are so powerful – they save our minds from spending their energy on making sure we remember to do everything.
Take “real” breaks: especially those which require no conscious decisions – long showers and team sports work well for me.
For difficult decisions, write down a short list of options and work from that: this allows the mind to focus quickly on choosing the best option rather than holding various options its memory.
Make travelling less effortful: I used to wonder why travelling would make me so tired – after all, most of the time is spent just sitting around on a train or at an airport! However, the whole time our minds are on alert, checking whether we have all our belongings, whether we’re on the correct platform, whether we’re running late etc. A little planning well before the journey can help here.
Be a little more extroverted: one difference between extroverts and introverts is that introverts typically monitor details of their social interaction much more than extroverts do[3]. As a result, extroverts can survive and enjoy social activity for much longer before their mental energy starts running dry. Mentally switching off some of the superfluous self-monitoring saves you energy for later.
Be less perfectionist: similarly, perfectionists can encounter decision fatigue from aggressive monitoring of
their work. (Of course, there are both benefits and drawbacks to being perfectionist!)
Work and live in a comfortable environment: otherwise you’ll often have to distract yourself from these discomforts to concentrate on anything else.
Choose to spend more time on activities that absorb your attention: in other words, seek flow[4] activities.

So how about you? Suggestions about meditation or sport or travelling would be particularly useful, as I haven’t covered them much here!

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_fatigue

[2] http://99u.com/tips/7223/How-Barack-Obama-Gets-Things-Done

[3] http://twentytwowords.com/2012/08/29/a-simple-explanation-of-how-to-interact-with-introverts/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)

Otros Articulos, procesar

Laughter is good medicine: For some, laughing and smiling can energize their mood almost instantly. Even if you have to force yourself out of a bad mood by faking laughter it can help. In other words, just the act of smiling or laughing can lift our spirits. To learn more about the positive effects of smiling, read Nature’s A serious article about laughter.

Break the monotony: As we have discussed in the previous blog article Does Your Brain Need to Go Back to School?, small changes in your routine – like taking a new route to work – can trigger new neural pathways to fire. When you engage your brain in things that are not routine, you increase your brain activity which gives you a natural energy boost.

Drink small amounts of caffeine throughout the day: We are actually doing ourselves a disservice by getting that big cup of coffee in the morning. Multiple research studies have shown that the amount of caffeine we need to receive to get a boost is far less than what the normal person consumes. Getting a little bit of caffeine throughout the day instead of one big dose in the morning has proven to be a far better strategy for people looking to maintain their energy levels. To learn more about caffeine check out Coffee: A Little Really Does Go a Long Way from NPR.

Make sure to take a mental health break: Workaholics that naively believe skipping lunch and staying glued to their chair will increase productivity are most likely actually getting less done than their relaxed counterparts. One CSU Long Beach study on energy shows that if you get up to take a 10-minute walk, it is enough to boost your energy level for up to two hours. Second, our body simply needs recovery. Most of us are familiar with the 24 hour sleep cycle, but many are not unaware that our mind and body also are wired to need a break about every 2 hours. Making sure you get this break will help you maintain your energy level and likely increase your productivity. Suffering workaholics will likely benefit from reading the article Stop That Wandering Mind!from Entrepreneur Magazine.

Listen to inspiring music: The power of music is well documented. Not only is positive music enjoyable, but music with a fast tempo can really get us going when our energy is low. Music also engages one of our five senses. For a fun mental exercise, listen to your favorite music and then consciously take note of the various smells around you. Training your brain to be fully aware of two mental stimuli at the same time is a good way to exercise the brain.

Stay hydrated: In a study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition entitled Impaired cognitive function and mental performance in mild dehydration it was found that even mild dehydration is a reliable predictor of impaired cognitive status. Remember to get plenty of fluids throughout the day. If you are using caffeine, make sure to drink extra fluids to counteract caffeine’s diuretic effect. Staying hydrated is another great way to keep your energy level up and you mental focus sharp.

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