How To Hack Your Lunch
To avoid excessive daytime drowsiness
Like most people I know, lunch is my favourite meal of the day. It’s usually our first big meal of the day, and one that we’re always looking forward to, especially after an energy-draining first half of the day. Naturally I gravitated towards heavy lunches.
The things in my lunch menu included creamy spaghetti, double cheeseburgers, and the occasional pad thai on the more adventurous days. I liked to keep my lunch meals variegated, but one thing struck a common thread. No matter what I had for lunch, I’d always feel lethargic and drowsy afterwards.
For me, this lead to a downward spiral in post-lunch productivity, which was quite annoying. Fortunately for me, I came across an article by the New York Times not so long ago that demystified this vexing phenomenon.
For one, it is a natural human tendency to feel sleepy around lunch hours. Our Circadian rhythm is engineered to undergo a dip about 7 hours into waking up. This particular process is embedded within the deep recesses of our primitive brain and is therefore very difficult to suppress. One way to mitigate this problem is by maintaining a good sleep-wake schedule and to get adequate rest during the night.
The second reason heavy lunches make people feel drowsy goes down to our body’s physiological processes following meals. After a particularly heavy meal, our blood flow diverts from the brain and into the gut as our body’s parasympathetic nervous system kicks into ‘rest and digest’ mode. This diversion in blood flow is responsible for making us feel a downslope in alertness, productive output and a blunted creative tendency.
This same process, in reverse, causes blood to divert from the gut and into the muscles and brain when one is exposed to a threatening stimulus, which triggers the ‘fight or flight’ response. This is carried out by the sympathetic nervous system. Your muscles go into full alert mode, putting whatever process is currently undertaking in your digestive tract on hold.
The entire process is regulated by the autonomic nervous system in the brain and spinal cord, and is particularly useful when it comes to prioritising tasks in your body. Because it’s practically impossible for parasympathetic and sympathetic activities to occur simultaneously, this system acts like a sorting machine to ensure the right task is performed during the right circumstances.
Unlike the fully autopilot nature of our Circadian rhythm, we at least get to control what enters our digestive system. By the mere virtue of quantity, a heavier meal will cause an increased parasympathetic response, and hence worsen an already present propensity to slump on your chair during the afternoon hours.
A lighter meal, in contrast, lessens our digestive burden and therefore dampens the effects of parasympathetic overload. In return, they have the potential to improve post-prandial productivity and reduce daytime sleepiness.
I experienced the benefits that lighter meals proffered first hand and found that switching my lunch regimen to a simpler, calorie-lighter diet made me less drowsy in the afternoon, and vastly improved my post-lunch energy levels. Nowadays, I opt for a small pasta with some grilled chicken shreds or a simple green pea-and-chicken salad and a glass of water.
I no longer need my ration of coffee in the afternoon to keep me awake and perform my tasks. The additional boost of energy also created for me the illusion of adding more hours to the day, as it meant I was more active on more hours than I was used to having.
These days, I’m an evangelist for light lunch regimens. Besides the occasional burgers and burritos that I dig into during my photoshoot days, I consistently stick to modest lunch portions while ensuring my macronutrient balance is still kept on check.
If you’re a fan of heavy lunches like I was, and feel the subsequent lethargy take a huge toll on your afternoons, you should definitely try switching to this routine and see the changes it brings to your office table.
This last piece may be a bit of a long-shot, but if you really capitalise on your enhanced productivity, perhaps you’ll impress your employers and see yourself bringing home an additional wad of cash every month. Now that’s a true hack.
