How You Work Is How You Eat
Relationship between food choices and work quality
The type of food you crave after an activity tells a lot about how enjoyable 🤩 or boring 😑 the activity was for you. The more boring your experience, the higher your craving for unhealthy foods afterward.
The activity could be anything like attending a work meeting, attending a class, going for a long walk, etc.
If you have to sit through an hour of listening to a boring boss or a teacher, you need to exert self-control. Self-control requires mental energy.
There’s another thing that goes on (or at least it should be going on) while you are attending that meeting or the class…
Deliberate thinking
It’s thinking beyond the words that you are listening to while you are in a meeting or a lecture. Thoughts like, “Oh, the speaker made a good point!” or “I don’t agree with it.” or “It’s like what happened in the TV series I’m watching”, and so on.
While you are listening to the speaker, your brain is making a lot of connections with your past experiences and knowledge. It’s a smart thing to do. Your brain isn’t a dumb robot who’s fed step-by-step instructions. It’s more like a smart AI. Your intelligence grows as you learn more.
Deliberate thinking is how we learn.
Deliberate thinking also requires mental energy.
You might think, so what? There’s enough mental energy to draw from. Isn’t our brain full of mental energy?
The problem is both self-control and deliberate thinking share the pool of mental energy. And it’s a limited pool.
If you have to exert self-control into sitting in a boring class or a meeting, it will eat up all your mental energy. Your deliberate thinking ability will go for a toss.
There was a study conducted on 8 judges in Israel. Their day-long job was to review applications for parole and either approve or deny them. The default decision was denial, only 35% were approved (that required deliberate thinking on their part).
Researchers noted down the timings of all the approved requests. When they plotted that against the timings of their food breaks, they found a disturbing pattern. Two hours or so after a meal break, approval requests dropped steadily to about zero before the meal. As their mental energy depleted, judges would fall back on the easier decisions of denying requests that didn’t involve any deliberate thinking. Soon after the meal, there was a spike in approved requests.
What happened during the food breaks?
Our brain is a hungry monster!
We need to understand that mental energy isn’t just a metaphor. Our nervous system consumes more glucose than other parts of the body. With food breaks came the glucose that refueled their mental energy reserves.
Our brain has a sweet tooth. Sweeter than any other organ in the body. The brain consumes 20% of the total energy in the body, an avg of 400–500 calories a day.
The more boring an experience is, the unhealthier you eat afterward. It’s because there’s no mental energy left for making healthy food choices.
Given a choice between junky cookies and a bowl of salad, you are more likely to pick the cookies after a mentally exhausting experience. Instead, if you are just out of an enjoyable activity where just time flew by, you are more likely to go for the healthier choice. This was confirmed in a series of experiments conducted by psychologist Roy Baumeister and his colleagues.
If the wise judges can get derailed by difficult cognitive tasks, imagine what happens to people who need to hop from one boring meeting to another? Imagine what happens to people who have to spend their entire workday doing redundant, non-creative tasks? Imagine what happens to kids when they sit through a rigid timetable of back-to-back classes that are not of their interest?
The more boring their learning experiences, the more they gravitate towards junk food. The more boring our work experience, the more we make unhealthier food choices.
Fortunately, there is a kind of cognitive effort that doesn’t require us to exert self-control. It’s the cognitive effort involved in the flow state. If you are working on something that’s interesting and a little challenging, time seems to fly by. You don’t need self-control. The entire pool of mental energy is free for deliberate thinking. One more reason to make learning interesting for kids. One more reason to quit that boring job 😉.
Resources:
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
