And thus, in the past 30 minutes, as I have eaten my cereal with fresh peaches and drunk my 3 cups of tea with soymilk, I have already used up a lot of mental energy thinking about these things and then deciding. Bike ride: later. Blog: now. Which work task first? Ah well, push that decision off for a few minutes.
Good thing I didn’t have to decide what to eat for breakfast or I would have used up even more mental energy. Routines like a regular breakfast menu are ways to conserve mental energy because you don’t have to think about them. Besides, breakfast is important for mental energy in another way: it feeds the brain a surge of glucose so you can carry on with the normal decision requirements of the day.
According to the article, scientists are discovering that mental energy is not a metaphor. It is real, that is, a physiological phenomenon that can be measured. Huh. Coulda told them that. When you’re tired you know your brain is tired, too. Can’t think straight, can’t make good decisions, and heaven knows, willpower is down the drain.
Willpower, in fact, is how these scientists are measuring mental energy. What is your biggest temptation? For me, food. I know that I snack when I’m tired. I have no willpower about resisting cheese and crackers in the evening. Snacking is also hard to avoid after I’ve done a difficult piece of mental work. However, it’s not really about physical fatigue because exercise can leave me pooped out but I don’t shovel popcorn into my mouth afterward.
Well they now know why that is. For a long time researchers didn’t believe in the phenomenon of mental energy or its inverse, mental fatigue, because they observed that the level of brain activity stayed pretty constant no matter what your physical state or what kind of mental work you were doing. However, when they looked more closely at what parts of the brain were working hardest, as measured by glucose uptake, they saw what was happening.
When you spend too much time making decisions (i.e. carrying on almost any kind of mental activity), after a while the glucose flow to those areas runs down and instead the glucose goes to the parts of the brain that govern survival: those primitive parts that yell, “I want food now!” “I feel bad! Make me feel better now!”
What kind of decisions wear you down? Any kind, apparently. Including the zillion little decisions involved in shopping for groceries in a big supermarket (I coulda told them that, too). Or deciding on the accoutrements for your new computer. Or what cable channel to watch. Or which blog to read.
The lesson is to make the important decisions and do willpower-requiring tasks when you have plenty of energy and set up routines to cut down on the number of decisions you have to make in a given day. Coulda told them that, too.
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