How you work is how you eat

Relationship between work quality and food choices

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 more you crave for unhealthy foods afterward 🍟.

Why is that?

If you have to sit through an hour of a boring work meeting, you need to exert self-control. Self-control requires mental energy.

Mental energy isn’t just a metaphor. Our nervous system consumes more glucose than other parts of the body.

In other words, 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.

There’s another infamous study conducted on eight judges in Israel. Their day-long job was to review applications for parole and either approve or deny them. One after the other, non-stop. Boring...😑

Mostly, parole was denied. Only 35% were approved, the ones that needed extra thinking.

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 extra thinking.

Soon after the meal, there was a spike in approved requests! How so? With food breaks came the glucose that refueled their mental energy reserves 😇.

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 kids 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 at your disposal for creative thinking. That’s when creativity and productivity coexist.

One more reason to quit a boring job and do what your heart mind desires.

Follow your passion → 10x your mind 🙌