Hi! I’m Dr. Chris Masterjohn
of ChrisMasterjohnPhD.Com and
you're watching Chris Masterjohn Lite
where the name of the game is “Details? Shmetails."
"Just tell me what works!”
And today we’re talking about how to get over that
afternoon crash. Here are a few tips I have.
Number one. Eat a meal for lunch
that is relatively modest in size,
relatively high in protein,
and relatively low in carbohydrate.
And what I mean by that is 30 to 40 g of protein,
10 to 20 g of carbs,
and fill the remainder with fat make it
just large enough to
take the edge off of your hunger and no more than that,
and make sure it's foods you digest well.
The reasons are protein stimulates the waking signal in your brain,
and carbohydrate shuts it down.
Now of course when you wake up in the morning you may feel like
carbs wake you up a little bit and that's because you need to get your blood sugar up,
but in the afternoon when the waking
signal in your brain is already taking a dip, because
maybe we’re hardwired to take a siesta at that time,
and then we throw a bunch of carbohydrate on it
and make it dip even more and we’ve been working all day
and so the pressure to need some sleep is building,
that can be the perfect storm to make us crash in the afternoon.
So that's a time when you want to try to up
the protein, take away some of the carbs
and of course you don’t want the meal to be so full
that that weighs you down you don’t want it to be things that are hard to digest
because that’s going to direct your energy towards digestion.
Now that's step one.
Step two is a cold shower. I take a cold shower almost every morning
and I don’t usually take one in the afternoon
but on rare occasions when I’m
feeling an afternoon crash and I really need to
power through it, nothing is anywhere near as effective
as a cold shower It boosts my mood wakes me up
Be forewarned it's rather intense
If you're not used to it make sure you don't have any
medical conditions that would interfere with it
if you're frail or you have a slippery shower floor and you could get surprised
and go “ahhh!” and fall, take
proper precautions.
But a cold shower is a great way to wake up from a crash
and hey desperate times call for desperate measures .
Now there's a few tips
I have that maybe you want to hear
but I’m gonna give ‘em anyway.
Number one: sleep more.
I think a lot of us aren't sleeping
well and we’re not sleeping enough and
we may feel that we have so much to do we just can't afford
to sleep the one or two extra hours of the morning
that our bodies are telling us it wants,
but part of the reason that we
have an afternoon crash is because we have cumulative sleep pressure
that’s building and we’re not sleeping enough to get rid of it.
So while the cold shower
and the meal that I recommended may help,
we still need to address the fundamentals and that’s
sleeping enough and sleeping well. Number two:
take a nap. Maybe you don't
want to hear that because you want to be really productive
in the afternoon and maybe your boss doesn't want you to hear that because
your boss doesn’t want you taking a nap in the office but still
hey if you’re sleepy in the afternoon, that’s your body
telling you it’s time to take a nap.
So I think it's great to try to design meals and to try to
design showers around powering through the afternoon nap
and yeah when I’m working on a creative project
I want to power through it but I don't think we should always be
trying to power through every time our body makes us feel sleepy.
At some point we need to say hey, I powered
through it enough, now I’m going to start giving the body the rest that it needs,
and that's when at least some of the time you want to take
a nap when your body’s telling you it wants a nap.
And the last tip is, have a cup of coffee.
Well I mean maybe you wanted to hear that,
but maybe it didn't help that much because you were probably
already doing that, but hey, I love coffee so
have a cup of coffee. All right that’s it. You’ve been watching
Chris Masterjohn Lite, I will see you in the next video.