25 ms·

Thinking hard makes the brain tired

566 points by gyre007 4y ago

carapace 4y ago
The brain uses something like 20% of the oxygen you breathe. (Sorry for the factoid, I don't have a good source for that at the mo'.)
suzzer99 4y ago
Taken to the extreme - I used to multi-table online poker for a living. 5 hours pretty much turns your brain to mush. 8 hours straight is unthinkable. Pretty much everyone experiences this, even 18-year-olds. The brain has its limits.
- p0nce 4y ago
  5 hours seems to be about the limit of programming one can do without making the next day improductive (at least in my experiece). Walking/running seems to help with that.
  - pastaguy1 4y ago
    I can do more than 5 if I'm able to maintain discipline and work at a normal pace. Normally though, time pressure or "get shit done" pressure gets the better of me, and my brain goes into turbo mode. After about 30 minutes of that, the rest of the day is more or less standby mode
progrus 4y ago
Pooping hard makes the butt tired.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't do this here.
  - progrus 4y ago
    Yeah I know, the only kind of bullying supported here is that good old whiny, passive-aggressive, smug elitism.
    - dang 4y ago
      Sorry but I'm not sure how asking you not to post "pooping hard makes the butt tired" is related to bullying?
JKCalhoun 4y ago
I tell my wife, "My brain hurts, I'm going for a walk." There does appear to be only so much paper shuffling my mind can do when working on programming problems before it requires the drawers be emptied or whatever it is the walk induces.
- jauhnthecossin 4y ago
  Same here. When I try to force it I even get anxiety symptoms (sweating etc.)
- marginalia_nu 4y ago
  I've a hypothesis that a lot of the actual work is done in the background. Focused thinking about a problem just sort of spawns new threads (some of which get OOM-killed if you keep spawning more). The process seems to need not actively thinking about the problem for the jobs to actually resolve. It's like thinking about the problem triggers the background calculations to start, it doesn't actually perform the work. Then you get that famous "aha!" in the shower or when you're off on a walk or whatever.
  - Verdex 4y ago
    The most productive hours at work for me has either been things I'm doing for the third time OR 15 minutes after I've left for the day after 8 hours of going in circles.
    - marginalia_nu 4y ago
      Privately, some of my most productive development has been when my girlfriend and I had separate apartments. I'd spend days working on problems undisturbed at my place, and then I'd go visit her for a few days (bringing no computer). I always came back to my apartment full of inspiration, with half a notebook full of ideas and plans, which I'd spend the next days implementing, while spawning new background jobs that would mature the next time I was AFK. Rinse and repeat. Something about this set-up was just insanely good for my productivity. I was much more productive than periods I didn't have these forced breaks away from input.
Madmallard 4y ago
[flagged]
- majkinetor 4y ago
  Actually, something new appears to be learned. U will have to read the artcile though, not just the title.
  - Madmallard 4y ago
    There is no why answered here just speculation. Anyone with sufficient knowledge of metabolism would think a fatigue process and stress process is happening during heavy thinking just that we lack the specific knowledge of what’s happening. This article has one tiny finding and who knows how reproducible the study is, along with a tautological title.
    - majkinetor 4y ago
      Speculation based on measurements, not based on chit chat... What is your complaint really? That science progresses tiny step by tiny step?
- Y_Y 4y ago
  > What has been will be again, > what has been done will be done again; > there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)
majkinetor 4y ago
https://archive.is/lCPxw https://archive.is/lCPxw
- rosebay 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing
grenoire 4y ago
Our brain simply seems to have a lot of cache misses and bad garbage collection.
- aldanor 4y ago
  I had a similar thought as well. The questions are then, first, how do we think/work in more cache-friendly manner? Do things linearly, plan things ahead, don't branch out on random noise? And, how to minimise allocations? Don't try to ingest more information than what you can fit on your "stack"? // and don't forget about "stack unwinding" before going to bed
  - grenoire 4y ago
    I think of sleep, naps, showers, walks as just giving my brain the rest to do some garbage collection (and set SP to 0).
INTPenis 4y ago
Define hard. A regular work day leaves me noticeably tired, not physically but somehow mentally and it translates to yawning and feeling a bit drowzy. It's like being tired in the head, and sans any bodily aches it feels exactly like a hard days physical work.
naillo 4y ago
Eat more carbs (literally)
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- b0afc375b5 4y ago
  I wonder if there's a connection between thinking a lot and having a sweet tooth. I know that they're generally bad for the health but I can't seem to stop buying them, especially when I expect to grind leetcode later at night.
  - jauhnthecossin 4y ago
    From personal observation (I think it is even backed by research) not having enough sleep causes craving for sweets/junk food.
    - niemal_dev 4y ago
      That's a bit too generic I believe.. What if you don't have a sugar/junk craving in general due to diet? i.e. keto
  - CapsAdmin 4y ago
    I feel like sugar in general makes me tired and makes it difficult to concentrate. Sometimes (though rarely) I consume sugar in the evening to make me tired. I can't help but eat candy if it's available, so I just learned not to buy it in the first place.
  - leobg 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - wuiheerfoj 4y ago
      He ran an authoritarian regime over a large country for 10+ years including through a world war without thinking??
awesomegoat_com 4y ago
[flagged]
- awesomegoat_com 4y ago
  Downvote me all you want. :-)
  - geraldyo 4y ago
    It's just that doesn't even make any sense :(
bennysonething 4y ago
By Friday afternoon I feel sick. I'm wondering if this explains why.
- butterisgood 4y ago
  Sometimes I’m fried by Thursday evening. I don’t think I’m ever “sick” from this in a physical sense but definitely all cylinders in my brain don’t seem to be firing properly.
newsclues 4y ago
Unresolved problems eat away at my mental capacity, as if problems are mentally uncompressed in the mind when it's still an unsolved problem, but when a solution is found it can be compressed and stored without continuing to load the problem into the brain. Once I learn something and it make sense, or solve a problem, it seems like the brain optimizes storage and frees up computational power.
- Verdex 4y ago
  Same. When I'm in the middle of a research topic I find that I have to periodically stop and sort everything out because it gets really hard to me to focus on more mundane work.
deleted 4y ago
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jasfi 4y ago
Exercise can help a lot with this, and getting enough sleep.
- boyka 4y ago
  I can confirm this. In my case I have to exercise at least every 3rd day to maintain a high mental work capacity, and immediately feel the effect of not exercising on my brain fatigue.
butterisgood 4y ago
Depending on how much context switching I do in a day, it can really vary how exhausted I feel at the end of a work day. I get to a point where someone might tell me to remember 3 things at the grocery store and I’ll remember only one. I should note that depending on the level of empathy or understanding of this situation, and argument can ensue after this further piling on the stress. So I think things like this are really important to understand, and appreciate. This is real!
- ChatPGT 4y ago
  context switching is a nightmare
  - zikduruqe 4y ago
    And we as humans are terrible at it. Time yourself writing sequential numbers 1 through X as fast as you can in 30 seconds. And note your results. Then time yourself writing the alphabet A through .... as fast as you can in 30 seconds. Now, in 30 seconds, write A1, B2, C3, D4..... You would think it is easy to do this because you have been writing numbers and the alphabet your whole life, but context switching is hard.
    - ChatPGT 4y ago
      I don't even remember the alphabet completely from A to Z, because in my country they added K, W and Y some years after I had learned it as a child lol, so I never get the right sequence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - grrdotcloud 4y ago
        That's interesting. I show my students that cognitive abilities declined significantly with lack of oxygen. I have them do jumping jacks while reciting the alphabet backwards. There is often a 50% decrease in speed when they are working out. I can recite the reverse alphabet almost as fast as forward without the added stress. While working out I can do it with a10% decrease. This leads me to believe that the additional stress can be compensated through drilling.
arnejenssen 4y ago
So a better way to relax from mental work (between pomodoros), might be to avoid hacker news and social media, and instead do meditation, naps or walk in nature?
- MVissers 4y ago
  Juggling is great as well. Motor activity.
- arnejenssen 4y ago
  My test suite takes about 5 deep breaths to run. An excellent opportunity to close the eyes and take a nano break.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Similarly we’re still using a very slow TFS setup at work and checkins and get latest take forever even for the smallest changes and I turn the frustration into a mini meditation
stbenjam 4y ago
https://archive.is/n81gT https://archive.is/n81gT
quercusa 4y ago
I have a standing desk that I use up about a third of the time. But if there's something that requires a lot of concentration, it always seems to work better if I lower it and sit.
- ScoobleDoodle 4y ago
  I do the same with the same ratio estimate. The two deterring thoughts I notice are: (1) balancing and shifting around when standing is a little disruptive. (2) I don’t want to interrupt my focus to lower the desk as my body physically fatigues from the standing position. Focus is the driving factor in this for me.
Kim_Bruning 4y ago
For comparison, running an internal combustion engine causes chemical changes in the engine. There will be a reduction of certain hydrocarbons in the fuel tank, and an increase in simple hydrocarbons in the exhaust manifold, as well as a reduction of chemicals in the inlet manifold. Perhaps in future scientists will find a way to restore the chemical balance in internal combustion engine systems, thus keeping them at peak performance for longer. (In other words: The Economist's article is rather light on actual useful details. The same kind of story applies to a very wide range of topics. It might be more helpful to read the actual scientific article. ps. For some reason newspapers/magazines never provide a good reference to the actual article and you end up having to go hunting.)
- Dudeman112 4y ago
  >For some reason newspapers/magazines never provide a good reference to the actual article and you end up having to go hunting That seriously annoys me to no end Does anyone know why the heck don't they just provide the damn DOI along with it?
29athrowaway 4y ago
After Einstein died, his brain was removed and analyzed. One of the findings was that he had more glials cells than normal people. This means that he probably did not get as tired from thinking as other people do. But he also slept 10 hours per day.
- doodlesdev 4y ago
  > But he also slept 10 hours per day. Wait, is that unusual? If so I might be a genius lol. How much do "normal" people sleep? I thought 10 hours was pretty standard stuff.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    I find that the more sleep I put beyond of threshold of 7-8 hours brings about proportionally more lethargy to my day. If I sleep for 11 hours my day is nearly ruined for heavy mental tasks
  - pcthrowaway 4y ago
    Normal is 7-9 I think
- mjreacher 4y ago
  On the contrary, John von Neumann was not known to sleep much at all and he was well known for being the fastest thinker alive in his time.
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    "You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is" - Fermi on Von Neumann
photochemsyn 4y ago
Here's a non-paywalled article from a few years earlier where this technique was developed: "Working Memory Modulates Glutamate Levels in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex during 1H fMRS" (2018) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845718/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845718/ > "We interpret elevated glutamate levels during working memory task performance to reflect increased metabolic activity and excitatory neurotransmission driven by working memory-related demands." Practically, it might be beneficial to take cognitive breaks before exhaustion sets in, as well as improve blood flow and oxygen delivery - i.e. get up, walk around, drink some water, meditate for a few minutes etc. on a regular basis. I imagine a full eight hours of solid sleep is needed for a complete return to baseline, although vivid dreams might interfere with recovery.
byteware 4y ago
what I noticed is that rubber ducking works kind of like doing a DFS instead of a BFS, even when I can barely think, but I know that a few more lines at just the right places solves the problem and I simply can't let it go, (going for a walk rarely does it for me) so speaking out loud what and why is happening makes all the difference
- JestUM 4y ago
  Yup.
JestUM 4y ago
Give your brain 10 decision points. Aim to finish these by EOD. Repeat.
- Numberwang 4y ago
  [dead]
- chrisweekly 4y ago
  10 decisions in one day? I'd be a relief to have just 10 per hour.
HopenHeyHi 4y ago
[flagged]
cactusplant7374 4y ago
Does it burn more calories? I seem to remember reading somewhere that chess players burn a lot of calories during a match.
Trasmatta 4y ago
I hit some bad burnout last year, and it's become hard to think hard about anything ever since. Like a defense mechanism has been installed in my brain preventing me from hurting myself like that again. When I have to think hard about something for work I have to push past that and then I feel an intense dissociation while I do. It doesn't feel good.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  It took me a year to recover from burnout. Don't underestimate the recovery phase. I was at the point where any cognitive effort caused very similar effects to what you would describe, kind of like the mental equivalent of having lifted weights to failure but with an instantaneous onset. I suspect every case is unique, but I'd suggest thinking very carefully about how you can take an extended break from work. The key distinguishing what I felt with burnout from just being mentally tired is that no problem, no matter how hard it was to solve (or even if I failed miserably at solving it) has ever caused me to instanteously feel 100% mentally exhausted. By contrast, when burnt out, even fairly trivial work tasks would trigger this.
  - stavros 4y ago
    Did you also "hear" a sound in your head like a guitar string breaking when it happened?
    - Trasmatta 4y ago
      I don't think so, but your comment sounds super familiar. I think we may have chatted about burnout before on another thread on HN? I did once have an experience with nitrous oxide where I heard something similar and subsequently had a pretty major shift in my thinking process for awhile.
      - stavros 4y ago
        I think I may have read it on here before, this thread just jogged my memory and I figured I'd ask.
19h 4y ago
Using electricity uses electricity..
hashmap 4y ago
> Their eyes were the clue. The pupil initially constricts when participants are shown the two options. The time it takes for the pupil to subsequently dilate reflects the amount of mental exerted. The pupil-dilation times of participants assigned hard tasks fell off significantly as the experiment progressed Maybe tracking pupil dilation time with your webcam can give you a live reading of how tired you are or how much you're exerting yourself at a given task. I'd pay for this.
marsven_422 4y ago
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kgodey 4y ago
I've been coming to terms with the reality of this recently. I had a concussion and post-concussion syndrome last year which meant my brain got tired extremely quickly for a few months. In order to get work done, I had to pay close attention to what kinds of cognitive tasks would end up being debilitating and make sure to take lots of breaks. I'm mostly recovered now, but I'm more self aware about cognitive fatigue and how to structure my workdays to avoid it. It's decreased my general level of stress measurably.
- nashashmi 4y ago
  What cognitive functions lead to brain fatigue for you?
  - kgodey 4y ago
    Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426378
- aendruk 4y ago
  Same story here. Post-concussion syndrome gave me an exquisite awareness of how different kinds of tasks tax the brain.
  - beefield 4y ago
    I'd be curious to hear examples, especially if there are some tasks that are surpricing to either direction?
    - quackdrake 4y ago
      I also suffered from PCS and I found that tasks where I had to produce language were the most tiring. In order it would be - French lessons - Talking to someone about something techincal - Talking to somebody that I didn't know very well - Talking to a loved one - Reading
    - kgodey 4y ago
optimalsolver 4y ago
It also gives you wrinkles, according to Malibu Stacy.
ModernMech 4y ago
I remember my friend told me her trick during the SAT was to tell them she was hypoglycemic, because otherwise they wouldn’t let her bring in a small snack to eat. Her logic was that during the SAT, the body consumes so much energy that replenishing sugar is necessary half way through for proper brain function, and they won’t let you bring in food unless you have some sort of issue. But the SAT creates the issue! I have no idea if she was right, but she did do better than me on the SAT, and she is a doctor now, so suffice it to say I always have a snack when coding. You know, for thinking.
ilyt 4y ago
I get that with my hobbies vs work. The work is pretty varied so when the work is mentally hard I tend to engage in more brain-simple hobbies, and vice versa.
SirensOfTitan 4y ago
Has anyone successfully introduced a siesta to help combat this effect during a workday? I've tried to do so in the past, after reading some of Piotr Wozniak's writing on the subject: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Healthy_napping https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Healthy_napping ... but I'm relentlessly awake in the afternoon. In fact, I've had an issue with taking breaks from work for years now: once I start I have trouble stopping.
- tayo42 4y ago
  do you drink caffeinated drinks? i do nap in the late afternoon a lot. is it successful? idk i just do it and it feels good.
GeoAtreides 4y ago
I recommend 15-21 minutes naps. After a period of adjustment, they work like magic in resetting mental fatigue. And, bonus points, if the nap period is always the same (21 minutes in my case), you will wake up before the alarm. Speaking of the alarm, I suggest using an alarm that gradually increases in volume, starting from zero.
- cloudripper 4y ago
  Naptime is my favorite pastime. That said, I've also found mindfulness meditation for the same amount of time serves as an equivalent mental reset without the added drowsiness I occasionally get from naps.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Only possible if you’re not required to be in an office
  - cloudripper 4y ago
    Only if your colleagues are suspicious of you sitting painfully still at the computer with sunglasses on and a noodle neck.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      And a single snore can get you fired? I sometimes snore and couldn’t do that. Also knowing it’s culturally not accepted in work environments would not allow me to relax, sleep and recharge.
  - Matumio 4y ago
    Some offices have a separate room for meditation or stretching or a short nap or whatever.
  - zmmmmm 4y ago
    one of my biggest reasons to want to keep WFH! I always think if I ever built a company from ground up we'd have a set of sleeping pods with 15 minute timers in them and actively encourage staff to use them several times a day. If not to sleep, meditate etc.
_Nat_ 4y ago
Corresponding study (paywall'd): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.010 From their summary: > [...] these results support a neuro-metabolic model in which glutamate accumulation triggers a regulation mechanism that makes [lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC)] activation more costly, explaining why cognitive control is harder to mobilize after a strenuous workday.
- knaik94 4y ago
  There's free links if you look on google scholar https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222011113?casa_token=zCLkpfUBQaAAAAAA:aY8tR7TYZnzUjajU4kkhLnXTcuDMGH_P1tlxWmk00UwyXExSXPnQ3pCHI4KlP4GML4j79b7tgOI https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
  - _Nat_ 4y ago
    That link appears to be to a wrapper around the same, including the paywall.
m3kw9 4y ago
I do think this is notbunders well because if there is some activities that you look forward to, most times even if you are tired you would want to do it, say a social activity, video games, something to blow off steam, you are still using the brain but a different activity. So tired is selective
entropicgravity 4y ago
Anyone who does coding for a living will know this. Personally my average thinking to resting ratio is about 90 min thinking to 30 min resting (ie keeping up with tech news).
ilaksh 4y ago
I wonder if GPT4 gets less effective at following directions if you give it too many instructions in a single prompt? I know it doesn't have any fatigue for the next prompt though. So over time it is indefatigable. I wonder what a deep integration of GPT-like technology with the cortex via BCI would look like and if that could reduce mental fatigue. Sometimes I think the next metasystem transition is basically like The Borg except it's a bunch of Mini-Borgs. And at first people will be completely horrified but then overnight it will become normal for a large segment of the population to be attached to an Overmind. I think you would call that transhuman. Pretty sure there would be serious conflict with the normal humans at that point.
woolion 4y ago
There is a much more interesting article about the subject, "The metabolic face of migraine" [0]. Besides Glutamate levels, a TL;DR is that migraine is a mechanism to trigger a 'brain shutoff' when brain energy levels are critically low. This happens if you there is a deficit between what can be absorbed and what is consumed. So if you can absorb the energy from sugar, sweets or energy drink do help, as the popular belief goes (caffeine also helps through different mechanisms, including blood flow changes, but can also cause a backlash). If it's not the case it is suggested to go to a ketogenic diet, to provide an alternative brain energy source (knowing that the transition can be particularly hard as the brain needs to adjust, which is known as ketogenic flu). TFA advances that glutamate is a byproduct of brain activity and thus its level correlates with brain fatigue. The Economist article does not link to the original research article [1], and besides adding fluff to the highlights, it makes some outlandish conclusion ("no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue") but it's not clear what comes from the research article. Or, more interestingly, how it is intended to fit in the big picture. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076095 [1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(22)01111-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(...
offsky 4y ago
Can someone please explain the picture at the top of the article?
- khalilravanna 4y ago
  Children sleeping under their desks. Presumably hinting that learning is tiring and/or maybe adults need nap times too.
sandworm101 4y ago
"Thinking" is only one thing that the brain does, and it is actually a very small part of its job. All brain activity causes the brain to get tired and burn out to the point that it needs rest. Try driving a car around a racetrack competatively, even in a simulator. Talk to a ballet dancer about keeping their balance for hours. Talk to a soldier under fire hour after hour. Talk to a pilot trying to negotiate with ATC all during a weather event. All brain activity, even the basic biological stuff we don't classify as "thinking", causes the brain to get tired and eventually lapse into a survival/maintenance mode to handle the stress.
- khalilravanna 4y ago
  The driving one reminds me of how absolutely brain dead I feel after riding a motorcycle for 8-12 hours in a day. Nevermind that my body is rocked from the wind all day but just being able to do basic math or have a conversation with the person at the front desk of the motel I’m staying at becomes difficult. Any sort of sustained concentration obliterates your brain over a long enough time period.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Even driving a car can have similar effects after driving for 8-12 hours sans the wind and elements exhausting the body or the uncomfortable motorcycle posture
    - dron57 4y ago
      The wind and the posture aren't as much of a problem as the mental strain of riding a motorcycle. It is simply more difficult than driving, the constant gear shifting, cancelling turn lights manually and always being in a kind of defensive posture where you assume that you are invisible and someone might run into you. I've always gotten into a kind of flow state while riding a bike. The exhaustion after hours of riding felt very similar to studying or coding all day.
- quickthrower2 4y ago
  Would the amount of brain power to do activity X decrease as you get experienced at it though? Not to zero of course (the long drive is tiring even for an experienced driver).
vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago
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deleted 4y ago
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jkettle 4y ago
I think this number will probably stay the same or perhaps decrease a little for the short-medium term, but will most likely explode in the long term to maybe 60% because of the all the AI content. With GPT-# and all of the new mid-tier content thats now floating around, its almost impossible, even today to tell whats actually valuable content, so I've been going online less. I think most people feel the same uncanny Vally feeling when they realise that most of the content the view is not human created.
Ezku 4y ago
Is it really considered acceptable not to link to the scientific research you are basing your news on? Pubmed link (with abstract); full text is paywalled: > A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions. Curr Biol. 2022 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35961314/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35961314/
kmod 4y ago
I also discovered a parallel effect that at least in my case is a bigger issue: if you strain while thinking, you can end up engaging head muscles which can fatigue quickly and become painful. For me, thinking hard hurts and I thought it was a brain thing, but now I think it's primarily strain-related tension headaches, which oddly can feel like a brain thing. So from my experience there seems to be a possibility that when you think you are having brain tiredness you're actually having a physical headache.
- karl42 4y ago
  I have that problem, too. Can you recommend any counter-measures?
mlhpdx 4y ago
I’m reading through the comments carefully because this is something I think about literally every day (and I mean literally, not figuratively). For my health and performance, yes, but even more so for the health of people around me (employees, family, friends, etc.). I remind myself that I have no idea what other people are thinking - only what I think of their actions, the signals from my senses. That may be a weird way to work, but for whatever reason it helps me slow down and reason more carefully about the nature of situations. As for my own habits, I find concentration and focus addictive. I don’t burn out from thinking deeply and working on intricate solutions. The more I do the better it feels and around the spiral I go. Unfortunately the further I go the less “room” is available for other, often more important, things. So I’m also constantly reminding myself that my brain is a machine that adapts so I need to be careful how I use it. If I train my brain to resist certain tasks by rewarding it for avoiding them, it will become harder over time to perform those tasks. And vice versa. Brains are fun. :)
- mieubrisse 4y ago
  I have exactly the same. Unlike some friends, I don't seem to get a negative feedback loop to focusing. When I do it, I want more of it - to the detriment of showering, sleep, food, romance, etc. I really like the modelling of "if I train my brain to resist tasks by rewarding it for avoiding them, it becomes harder to perform them".
- dollo_7 4y ago
  I have sometimes found myself into that situation. I have to be careful not to overthink where to put my "brain room" for that day, otherwise I carry this overhead burden that rumbles all day long, questioning if I should be putting that effort elsewhere. Definitely, brains are fun. They can be your best ally and worst enemy.
- stephendause 4y ago
  Are you saying that you don't suffer (or at least consciously feel the effects of) cognitive fatigue? If I am interested in something, I like to focus on it for quite a while, but after enough time passes, I just can't any more. I do think that there are some people who can naturally last much longer doing cognitive work than is the norm, though, much like some athletes are natural ultramarathoners. So perhaps you are one of those people.
findthewords 4y ago
There are three ways to flush acute glutamate buildup from the brain: 1. Exercise. The brain can direct glutamate to be used as an energy source to dispose of excess amounts. Glutamate naturally flows by diffusion from areas of high concentration (in blood vessel wall cells) through the blood vessel wall into the circulating bloodstream, where the concentration is lower. 2. Eat a tuna sandwich or drink an energy drink. Vitamin B6 is a a coenzyme in the synthesis of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA from glutamate. Thinking jobs is also coincident with rising popularity of energy drinks from 2000s onwards. The Economist is most likely regurgitating Nature: 11 August 2022 Why thinking hard makes us feel tired https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02161-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02161-5
- aftergibson 4y ago
  What's the 3rd way?
  - cesaref 4y ago
    I was just saying the same thing :)
  - baby 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - notfed 4y ago
      I hope we're still talking about exercise...
    - rayrey 4y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 4y ago
        Please don't do this here.
  - 4y ago
Avlin67 4y ago
nothing better than 2g taurine / black tea 500mg aspirin stack
provenance 4y ago
After falling on hard times post failed-startup/implosion/burnout (years ago), tried getting back into coding/hacking/sw dev last summer. I reached out here on hn, and was given help (thank you to everyone who helped: as my survival was in question, your help truly got me through). Did a few projects, did a ctf, and my brain started hurting and I imploded again. I finally got another laptop a few months ago. Local guy brings me his Flutter codebase. Good chance to learn a new tech. It was going ok: I was superman for a few days learning the flutter/dart tooling, solving dependency hacks, getting it to compile, fixing bugs, and then, Bam. Can't code any more. Backed away. Now, still burned out and homeless, but trying to start (another) hackerspace. Good distraction from the ashes of devastation. I am unsure if I can write software for any sustained period of time ever again. It's scary since that's my only marketable skill and I'm still homeless and constantly scrapping for food money. Some backstory: Despite repeated insistence from peers, skipped investing in bitcoin and ethereum at their beginnings and repeately thereafter, instead plugging away non stop on a dead SaaS product for a startup for years, which slowly failed; lost my partner, the life I had built, reputation, assets. Probably dealing with some trauma burn-in from this. As for last summer, I distinctly remember the headaches from participating in the CTF. I had to, you know, think! Cool, solving tasks. Then, Bam! Splitting headaches.. :( I still wonder if there's some zen place where one can focus intensely on a problem while remaining calm and at peace - never was able to find such a state of mind..
- kapperchino 4y ago
  That does not sound normal, you need to get this checked out. Meanwhile do work that doesn’t require too much thinking until you can get it checked.
  - provenance 4y ago
    I suspect that, under such conditions, the headaches are normal for someone at my age. I can go from 0-100mph on a dime, which may have led to the headaches. I'm not passionate about coding, so I dive in without being warmed up. Contrarily, with passion and a slow pre-heat, the headaches probably wouldn't happen. But I am not a passionate coder. I may need to strongly consider nurturing non-coding tech skills. I'm doing some (very part time) engineering research for food money. No headaches. Coding may be out for me, that's all. I can still participate in tech otherwise.
sershe 4y ago
I typically (especially on the weekend, since at work I somehow have higher motivation to push myself) go down a "thinking cascade" to adapt to this, where I'd code for some time, then when my brain gets tired go do something involved but not too involved (like figure out how to do something with Linux or whatever, or read a book that is actually useful), then when I get tired of that go read medium-effort stuff, like history or check how to do some project around the house, then when my brain is completely fried I'd go comment on hacker news :) Or eventually just go exercise and do chores... I find I can reset to the beginning of the cycle in an hour or so.
markus_zhang 4y ago
I suspect geniuses have a much larger tolerance than ordinary people, plus a much larger memory pool so that they rarely go OOM.
DonHopkins 4y ago
"I'm tryin' to think, but nothin' happens!" -Curly Joe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlejsgxOxrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlejsgxOxrU
BiteCode_dev 4y ago
Context switching burns people out and geeks don't notice how much they force themselves into too much of it. E.G: I have a friend that went full nerd on his coding setup. Dvorak keyboard, Full Arch Linux with tiling windows manager. Everything in the terminal, all dev through vim. If it's not a religion, it's at least a lifestyle. He is very happy with it: the keyboard is so ergonomic, he barely has to move the hand of it. Every task can be controlled out of a few key strokes Except he didn't notice how much of a burden he put on himself. Even for very simple tasks I see him struggling because of all the context switching. If you have to copy/paste something from your web browser to your editor, it may require you to select with a mouse, and ctrl+c, then alt-tab a bit, click on the IDE tab and ctrl+v. Not instant, but this procedure is the same for everything, so it doesn't take much brain to do it. For him, it's a whole guacamole, because there is a special shortcut to get to the browser, another one to get to the text, then copy/paste, then go to vim with another shortcut, select the proper buffer, paste with a yet another shortcut and make sure he uses the proper mode. Since Dvorak is a different layout than his phone keyboard or his client keyboards, the shortcuts don't perfectly rely on muscle memory. Every simple task in his setup like that: it requires a lot of effort. And his whole life outside of the computer is like that too, because he has very high moral standards, so he lives a constrained life in society that is optimized for a totally different life style. However he never cuts himself a slack. Multiply that by a hundred times a day, a hundred days a year. He burnt out. And he has no idea why: all the reasons he gave me were external factor, blaming other people a lot. But it was not. He killed himself with a thousand paper cuts, chasing an ideal he theorized in his head but could not only never reached, but could not even assess the real cost on his life.
- strus 4y ago
  > For him, it's a whole guacamole, because there is a special shortcut to get to the browser, another one to get to the text, then copy/paste, then go to vim with another shortcut, select the proper buffer, paste with a yet another shortcut and make sure he uses the proper mode. Since Dvorak is a different layout than his phone keyboard or his client keyboards, the shortcuts don't perfectly rely on muscle memory. I think you are over-estimating the effort. Most experienced Vim users not even think about motions when they use them, it's just the muscle memory.
karmelapple 4y ago
Every full-day on-site interview for an engineering role I’ve done results in me being pretty exhausted, even when there’s minimal technical questions. My theory, which maybe is slightly related to this article, is that thinking through all the potential future things that might happen as a result of choosing this job is mentally draining. Your brain is evaluating what you might be working on, what the future boss might be like, what your coworkers are like and if any seem particularly compatible or not with you, etc. That sounds like some hard thinking to me.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  Handling social situations is one of the most energy intensive tasks our brain does, I think. Meeting new people, thinking about how to present yourself and how to understand others, is an intense social activity.
xkcd1963 4y ago
This pop-psychology stuff has been dismissed some 10 years ago
stasmo 4y ago
Is this why MSG makes people feel sleepy?
amai 4y ago
But the reverse is not necessary true: Just because you are tired doesn’t mean you thought hard.
xivzgrev 4y ago
This makes sense. I think hard in my job, and by the end of the day I end up taking the night east - long dinner, a workout, talk with wife. I have many personal “to dos” I’d like to do, but it has been really challenging for me to consistently set time for them during the work week because I’m so “tired” from work.
lanstin 4y ago
In other news, physics is the basis for human intelligence. There are also interesting sub cases of this: exercising self control or will power fatigues the ability to exercise self control. Making important decisions (as in by a judge judging) fatigues the ability to make important decisions. “Religions of the World” speculates that one of the keys to Buddhas long and productive life was partially a result of his taking time each day for quiet non-action, each week , and for a portion of each year (the rainy season). High productive humans are in it for the long haul and plan for that. Short term, high productive corporations are good at making people feel that everything is a life or death emergency and when the humans burn out, they hire more.
zh3 4y ago
Doesn't seem to happen to people who love their work. Wouldn't that suggest it's less of a physical thing?
andy_ppp 4y ago
I wonder if not thinking hard makes the brain atrophy? What is the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases amongst chess grand masters or some other intense psychological activity, I wonder if the studies have been conducted on this.
makach 4y ago
Everyone playing chess knows this!
einpoklum 4y ago
Obligatory Monty Python reference: My brain hurts! https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcl8qr https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcl8qr
jongjong 4y ago
Thinking and doing gets you nowhere. What works is talking.
fullsend 4y ago
Recently got burned out for the first time. Context switching and constant hard thinking were a direct cause. I unofficially took on a chief architect’s role doing design and planning for a huge project, was doing some managerial work assigning tasks and mentoring younger team members through it, and was writing code as an individual contributor. I just wanted it to succeed so badly, I took on an absolute ton without any systems in place in my own habits and daily life to protect me. I would be in a conference room tracking ten different threads of work day in and day out. Making decisions for every component, directing people, debugging…at first I felt like a god. Everyone was looking to me, we made more progress in six months than the last two years, meetings would get cancelled because I couldn’t be there to make a decision (should have been a massive red flag but it fed my ego). But the way I work is to put my head down and get addicted to a problem in some sense. I can’t stop until it’s done. I think of these as loops in my brain, and I deeply need to close them. It is both a strength and tremendous weakness. As I climbed to principle engineer and above, this was a huge boon. A few weeks of nonstop coding, then crash for a couple weeks till the next tasks come along. But at a certain level, I stopped having clear cut tasks. The work had huge scope and was totally open ended. I was doing quarterly planning and this quarter’s work wasn’t done yet, etc. I got lost pushing to be “done” and it never came. One day my brain started hurting all the time. I started crying when I had to think about work, out of nowhere…really scary for me who always thought I was rock solid even after months of long days doing nothing but thinking hard. I tried to push through, ask for more money to soothe my pain, the company offered me a sort of break. But I had to quit cold turkey. Now I am taking a real break and the thought of that work makes my body tense up. I get tearful again. I am going to take a lot of time to build some workout habits, some set hours of the day where I will never “work”, and do some emotional digging into my loops. Thanks for sharing! It is so nice to hear everyone’s stories.
- vimwizard 4y ago
  Exercise helps a lot in my experience. I also got stuck in a position of "Context switching and constant hard thinking" for a long time. Just stepped back and let it burn because it was also an "unofficial" position.
  - 4y ago
dhab 4y ago
Does it make it stronger over time? Is it like muscles- pain few days after exercise but over 6mos, significant difference?
hyperthesis 4y ago
When you exercise, your fitness does not improve during it, but afterwards. When you think intensely, your key insights do not coming during it, but afterwards. Rest is as important as work.
WalterBright 4y ago
After exam week in college, I'd go home and just sit in front of the TV for a week and veg. Then I was ready to go back and get back to work. (Exam week is more or less studying from wake up to going back to sleep, with exams in between.)
- tintedfireglass 4y ago
  whenever I had holidays I'd go home from uni and just feel sleepy all day. My family always wanted to go out but would cancel plan because of me. I never felt that sleepy back at uni tho.
  - WalterBright 4y ago
    Oh, I had enormous fun in college. Didn't get much sleep, there were always fun things to do. I don't recall ever being bored for 4 years.
Herval_freire 4y ago
The real cure for burnout is labor unions. Given how long this thread is and the recent layoffs, it's pretty much time.
dools 4y ago
The HN headline rule being applied to this headline make the article sound so stupidly obvious that I didn’t even click it at first.
baccheion 4y ago
Such can be muted with proper nutrition. The brain runs on carbs. Efficient diet keeps blood from being redirected to digestion while still getting energy and nutrition? Further, acetylcholine and nootropics switch to protein burning (makes more carbs instead of burning fat) when carbs run low. That is, the brain has better and more consistent fuel. Steady blood sugar, stable digestion, easy digestion, and acetylcholine/protein- based backup fueling, and proper nutrition makes it easier to work through marathons. Same with creating a good work environment. Many aren't even nutrient sufficient. That is, they have deficiencies and aren't meeting all RDAs. See: CRON-o-meter. Common ones are vitamin D3 (+ K2) and magnesium, net alkaline PRAL score, and more calcium than phosphorus.

566 points by gyre007 4y ago

The brain uses something like 20% of the oxygen you breathe. (Sorry for the factoid, I don't have a good source for that at the mo'.)

suzzer99 4y ago

Taken to the extreme - I used to multi-table online poker for a living. 5 hours pretty much turns your brain to mush. 8 hours straight is unthinkable. Pretty much everyone experiences this, even 18-year-olds. The brain has its limits.

p0nce 4y ago
5 hours seems to be about the limit of programming one can do without making the next day improductive (at least in my experiece). Walking/running seems to help with that.
- pastaguy1 4y ago
  I can do more than 5 if I'm able to maintain discipline and work at a normal pace. Normally though, time pressure or "get shit done" pressure gets the better of me, and my brain goes into turbo mode. After about 30 minutes of that, the rest of the day is more or less standby mode

progrus 4y ago

Pooping hard makes the butt tired.

dang 4y ago
Please don't do this here.
- progrus 4y ago
  Yeah I know, the only kind of bullying supported here is that good old whiny, passive-aggressive, smug elitism.
  - dang 4y ago
    Sorry but I'm not sure how asking you not to post "pooping hard makes the butt tired" is related to bullying?

JKCalhoun 4y ago

I tell my wife, "My brain hurts, I'm going for a walk." There does appear to be only so much paper shuffling my mind can do when working on programming problems before it requires the drawers be emptied or whatever it is the walk induces.

jauhnthecossin 4y ago
Same here. When I try to force it I even get anxiety symptoms (sweating etc.)
marginalia_nu 4y ago
I've a hypothesis that a lot of the actual work is done in the background. Focused thinking about a problem just sort of spawns new threads (some of which get OOM-killed if you keep spawning more). The process seems to need not actively thinking about the problem for the jobs to actually resolve. It's like thinking about the problem triggers the background calculations to start, it doesn't actually perform the work. Then you get that famous "aha!" in the shower or when you're off on a walk or whatever.
- Verdex 4y ago
  The most productive hours at work for me has either been things I'm doing for the third time OR 15 minutes after I've left for the day after 8 hours of going in circles.
  - marginalia_nu 4y ago
    Privately, some of my most productive development has been when my girlfriend and I had separate apartments. I'd spend days working on problems undisturbed at my place, and then I'd go visit her for a few days (bringing no computer). I always came back to my apartment full of inspiration, with half a notebook full of ideas and plans, which I'd spend the next days implementing, while spawning new background jobs that would mature the next time I was AFK. Rinse and repeat. Something about this set-up was just insanely good for my productivity. I was much more productive than periods I didn't have these forced breaks away from input.

Madmallard 4y ago

[flagged]

majkinetor 4y ago
Actually, something new appears to be learned. U will have to read the artcile though, not just the title.
- Madmallard 4y ago
  There is no why answered here just speculation. Anyone with sufficient knowledge of metabolism would think a fatigue process and stress process is happening during heavy thinking just that we lack the specific knowledge of what’s happening. This article has one tiny finding and who knows how reproducible the study is, along with a tautological title.
  - majkinetor 4y ago
    Speculation based on measurements, not based on chit chat... What is your complaint really? That science progresses tiny step by tiny step?
Y_Y 4y ago
> What has been will be again, > what has been done will be done again; > there is nothing new under the sun. Ecclesiastes 1:9 (NIV)

majkinetor 4y ago

https://archive.is/lCPxw https://archive.is/lCPxw

rosebay 4y ago
Thanks for sharing

grenoire 4y ago

Our brain simply seems to have a lot of cache misses and bad garbage collection.

aldanor 4y ago
I had a similar thought as well. The questions are then, first, how do we think/work in more cache-friendly manner? Do things linearly, plan things ahead, don't branch out on random noise? And, how to minimise allocations? Don't try to ingest more information than what you can fit on your "stack"? // and don't forget about "stack unwinding" before going to bed
- grenoire 4y ago
  I think of sleep, naps, showers, walks as just giving my brain the rest to do some garbage collection (and set SP to 0).

INTPenis 4y ago

Define hard. A regular work day leaves me noticeably tired, not physically but somehow mentally and it translates to yawning and feeling a bit drowzy. It's like being tired in the head, and sans any bodily aches it feels exactly like a hard days physical work.

naillo 4y ago

Eat more carbs (literally)

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
b0afc375b5 4y ago
I wonder if there's a connection between thinking a lot and having a sweet tooth. I know that they're generally bad for the health but I can't seem to stop buying them, especially when I expect to grind leetcode later at night.
- jauhnthecossin 4y ago
  From personal observation (I think it is even backed by research) not having enough sleep causes craving for sweets/junk food.
  - niemal_dev 4y ago
    That's a bit too generic I believe.. What if you don't have a sugar/junk craving in general due to diet? i.e. keto
- CapsAdmin 4y ago
  I feel like sugar in general makes me tired and makes it difficult to concentrate. Sometimes (though rarely) I consume sugar in the evening to make me tired. I can't help but eat candy if it's available, so I just learned not to buy it in the first place.
- leobg 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - wuiheerfoj 4y ago
    He ran an authoritarian regime over a large country for 10+ years including through a world war without thinking??

awesomegoat_com 4y ago

[flagged]

awesomegoat_com 4y ago
Downvote me all you want. :-)
- geraldyo 4y ago
  It's just that doesn't even make any sense :(

bennysonething 4y ago

By Friday afternoon I feel sick. I'm wondering if this explains why.

butterisgood 4y ago
Sometimes I’m fried by Thursday evening. I don’t think I’m ever “sick” from this in a physical sense but definitely all cylinders in my brain don’t seem to be firing properly.

newsclues 4y ago

Unresolved problems eat away at my mental capacity, as if problems are mentally uncompressed in the mind when it's still an unsolved problem, but when a solution is found it can be compressed and stored without continuing to load the problem into the brain. Once I learn something and it make sense, or solve a problem, it seems like the brain optimizes storage and frees up computational power.

Verdex 4y ago
Same. When I'm in the middle of a research topic I find that I have to periodically stop and sort everything out because it gets really hard to me to focus on more mundane work.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jasfi 4y ago

Exercise can help a lot with this, and getting enough sleep.

boyka 4y ago
I can confirm this. In my case I have to exercise at least every 3rd day to maintain a high mental work capacity, and immediately feel the effect of not exercising on my brain fatigue.

butterisgood 4y ago

Depending on how much context switching I do in a day, it can really vary how exhausted I feel at the end of a work day. I get to a point where someone might tell me to remember 3 things at the grocery store and I’ll remember only one. I should note that depending on the level of empathy or understanding of this situation, and argument can ensue after this further piling on the stress. So I think things like this are really important to understand, and appreciate. This is real!

ChatPGT 4y ago
context switching is a nightmare
- zikduruqe 4y ago
  And we as humans are terrible at it. Time yourself writing sequential numbers 1 through X as fast as you can in 30 seconds. And note your results. Then time yourself writing the alphabet A through .... as fast as you can in 30 seconds. Now, in 30 seconds, write A1, B2, C3, D4..... You would think it is easy to do this because you have been writing numbers and the alphabet your whole life, but context switching is hard.
  - ChatPGT 4y ago
    I don't even remember the alphabet completely from A to Z, because in my country they added K, W and Y some years after I had learned it as a child lol, so I never get the right sequence. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - grrdotcloud 4y ago
      That's interesting. I show my students that cognitive abilities declined significantly with lack of oxygen. I have them do jumping jacks while reciting the alphabet backwards. There is often a 50% decrease in speed when they are working out. I can recite the reverse alphabet almost as fast as forward without the added stress. While working out I can do it with a10% decrease. This leads me to believe that the additional stress can be compensated through drilling.

arnejenssen 4y ago

So a better way to relax from mental work (between pomodoros), might be to avoid hacker news and social media, and instead do meditation, naps or walk in nature?

MVissers 4y ago
Juggling is great as well. Motor activity.
arnejenssen 4y ago
My test suite takes about 5 deep breaths to run. An excellent opportunity to close the eyes and take a nano break.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Similarly we’re still using a very slow TFS setup at work and checkins and get latest take forever even for the smallest changes and I turn the frustration into a mini meditation

stbenjam 4y ago

https://archive.is/n81gT https://archive.is/n81gT

quercusa 4y ago

I have a standing desk that I use up about a third of the time. But if there's something that requires a lot of concentration, it always seems to work better if I lower it and sit.

ScoobleDoodle 4y ago
I do the same with the same ratio estimate. The two deterring thoughts I notice are: (1) balancing and shifting around when standing is a little disruptive. (2) I don’t want to interrupt my focus to lower the desk as my body physically fatigues from the standing position. Focus is the driving factor in this for me.

Kim_Bruning 4y ago

For comparison, running an internal combustion engine causes chemical changes in the engine. There will be a reduction of certain hydrocarbons in the fuel tank, and an increase in simple hydrocarbons in the exhaust manifold, as well as a reduction of chemicals in the inlet manifold. Perhaps in future scientists will find a way to restore the chemical balance in internal combustion engine systems, thus keeping them at peak performance for longer. (In other words: The Economist's article is rather light on actual useful details. The same kind of story applies to a very wide range of topics. It might be more helpful to read the actual scientific article. ps. For some reason newspapers/magazines never provide a good reference to the actual article and you end up having to go hunting.)

Dudeman112 4y ago
>For some reason newspapers/magazines never provide a good reference to the actual article and you end up having to go hunting That seriously annoys me to no end Does anyone know why the heck don't they just provide the damn DOI along with it?

29athrowaway 4y ago

After Einstein died, his brain was removed and analyzed. One of the findings was that he had more glials cells than normal people. This means that he probably did not get as tired from thinking as other people do. But he also slept 10 hours per day.

doodlesdev 4y ago
> But he also slept 10 hours per day. Wait, is that unusual? If so I might be a genius lol. How much do "normal" people sleep? I thought 10 hours was pretty standard stuff.
- grugagag 4y ago
  I find that the more sleep I put beyond of threshold of 7-8 hours brings about proportionally more lethargy to my day. If I sleep for 11 hours my day is nearly ruined for heavy mental tasks
- pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Normal is 7-9 I think
mjreacher 4y ago
On the contrary, John von Neumann was not known to sleep much at all and he was well known for being the fastest thinker alive in his time.
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  "You know, Herb, Johnny can do calculations in his head ten times as fast as I can. And I can do them ten times as fast as you can, so you can see how impressive Johnny is" - Fermi on Von Neumann

photochemsyn 4y ago

Here's a non-paywalled article from a few years earlier where this technique was developed: "Working Memory Modulates Glutamate Levels in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex during 1H fMRS" (2018) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845718/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5845718/ > "We interpret elevated glutamate levels during working memory task performance to reflect increased metabolic activity and excitatory neurotransmission driven by working memory-related demands." Practically, it might be beneficial to take cognitive breaks before exhaustion sets in, as well as improve blood flow and oxygen delivery - i.e. get up, walk around, drink some water, meditate for a few minutes etc. on a regular basis. I imagine a full eight hours of solid sleep is needed for a complete return to baseline, although vivid dreams might interfere with recovery.

byteware 4y ago

what I noticed is that rubber ducking works kind of like doing a DFS instead of a BFS, even when I can barely think, but I know that a few more lines at just the right places solves the problem and I simply can't let it go, (going for a walk rarely does it for me) so speaking out loud what and why is happening makes all the difference

JestUM 4y ago
Yup.

JestUM 4y ago

Give your brain 10 decision points. Aim to finish these by EOD. Repeat.

Numberwang 4y ago
[dead]
chrisweekly 4y ago
10 decisions in one day? I'd be a relief to have just 10 per hour.

HopenHeyHi 4y ago

[flagged]

cactusplant7374 4y ago

Does it burn more calories? I seem to remember reading somewhere that chess players burn a lot of calories during a match.

Trasmatta 4y ago

I hit some bad burnout last year, and it's become hard to think hard about anything ever since. Like a defense mechanism has been installed in my brain preventing me from hurting myself like that again. When I have to think hard about something for work I have to push past that and then I feel an intense dissociation while I do. It doesn't feel good.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
It took me a year to recover from burnout. Don't underestimate the recovery phase. I was at the point where any cognitive effort caused very similar effects to what you would describe, kind of like the mental equivalent of having lifted weights to failure but with an instantaneous onset. I suspect every case is unique, but I'd suggest thinking very carefully about how you can take an extended break from work. The key distinguishing what I felt with burnout from just being mentally tired is that no problem, no matter how hard it was to solve (or even if I failed miserably at solving it) has ever caused me to instanteously feel 100% mentally exhausted. By contrast, when burnt out, even fairly trivial work tasks would trigger this.
- stavros 4y ago
  Did you also "hear" a sound in your head like a guitar string breaking when it happened?
  - Trasmatta 4y ago
    I don't think so, but your comment sounds super familiar. I think we may have chatted about burnout before on another thread on HN? I did once have an experience with nitrous oxide where I heard something similar and subsequently had a pretty major shift in my thinking process for awhile.
    - stavros 4y ago
      I think I may have read it on here before, this thread just jogged my memory and I figured I'd ask.

19h 4y ago

Using electricity uses electricity..

hashmap 4y ago

> Their eyes were the clue. The pupil initially constricts when participants are shown the two options. The time it takes for the pupil to subsequently dilate reflects the amount of mental exerted. The pupil-dilation times of participants assigned hard tasks fell off significantly as the experiment progressed Maybe tracking pupil dilation time with your webcam can give you a live reading of how tired you are or how much you're exerting yourself at a given task. I'd pay for this.

marsven_422 4y ago

[dead]

kgodey 4y ago

I've been coming to terms with the reality of this recently. I had a concussion and post-concussion syndrome last year which meant my brain got tired extremely quickly for a few months. In order to get work done, I had to pay close attention to what kinds of cognitive tasks would end up being debilitating and make sure to take lots of breaks. I'm mostly recovered now, but I'm more self aware about cognitive fatigue and how to structure my workdays to avoid it. It's decreased my general level of stress measurably.

nashashmi 4y ago
What cognitive functions lead to brain fatigue for you?
- kgodey 4y ago
  Answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426378 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35426378
aendruk 4y ago
Same story here. Post-concussion syndrome gave me an exquisite awareness of how different kinds of tasks tax the brain.
- beefield 4y ago
  I'd be curious to hear examples, especially if there are some tasks that are surpricing to either direction?
  - quackdrake 4y ago
    I also suffered from PCS and I found that tasks where I had to produce language were the most tiring. In order it would be - French lessons - Talking to someone about something techincal - Talking to somebody that I didn't know very well - Talking to a loved one - Reading
  - kgodey 4y ago

optimalsolver 4y ago

It also gives you wrinkles, according to Malibu Stacy.

ModernMech 4y ago

I remember my friend told me her trick during the SAT was to tell them she was hypoglycemic, because otherwise they wouldn’t let her bring in a small snack to eat. Her logic was that during the SAT, the body consumes so much energy that replenishing sugar is necessary half way through for proper brain function, and they won’t let you bring in food unless you have some sort of issue. But the SAT creates the issue! I have no idea if she was right, but she did do better than me on the SAT, and she is a doctor now, so suffice it to say I always have a snack when coding. You know, for thinking.

ilyt 4y ago

I get that with my hobbies vs work. The work is pretty varied so when the work is mentally hard I tend to engage in more brain-simple hobbies, and vice versa.

SirensOfTitan 4y ago

Has anyone successfully introduced a siesta to help combat this effect during a workday? I've tried to do so in the past, after reading some of Piotr Wozniak's writing on the subject: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Healthy_napping https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Healthy_napping ... but I'm relentlessly awake in the afternoon. In fact, I've had an issue with taking breaks from work for years now: once I start I have trouble stopping.

tayo42 4y ago
do you drink caffeinated drinks? i do nap in the late afternoon a lot. is it successful? idk i just do it and it feels good.

GeoAtreides 4y ago

I recommend 15-21 minutes naps. After a period of adjustment, they work like magic in resetting mental fatigue. And, bonus points, if the nap period is always the same (21 minutes in my case), you will wake up before the alarm. Speaking of the alarm, I suggest using an alarm that gradually increases in volume, starting from zero.

cloudripper 4y ago
Naptime is my favorite pastime. That said, I've also found mindfulness meditation for the same amount of time serves as an equivalent mental reset without the added drowsiness I occasionally get from naps.
grugagag 4y ago
Only possible if you’re not required to be in an office
- cloudripper 4y ago
  Only if your colleagues are suspicious of you sitting painfully still at the computer with sunglasses on and a noodle neck.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    And a single snore can get you fired? I sometimes snore and couldn’t do that. Also knowing it’s culturally not accepted in work environments would not allow me to relax, sleep and recharge.
- Matumio 4y ago
  Some offices have a separate room for meditation or stretching or a short nap or whatever.
- zmmmmm 4y ago
  one of my biggest reasons to want to keep WFH! I always think if I ever built a company from ground up we'd have a set of sleeping pods with 15 minute timers in them and actively encourage staff to use them several times a day. If not to sleep, meditate etc.

_Nat_ 4y ago

Corresponding study (paywall'd): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.010 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.07.010 From their summary: > [...] these results support a neuro-metabolic model in which glutamate accumulation triggers a regulation mechanism that makes [lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC)] activation more costly, explaining why cognitive control is harder to mobilize after a strenuous workday.

knaik94 4y ago
There's free links if you look on google scholar https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222011113?casa_token=zCLkpfUBQaAAAAAA:aY8tR7TYZnzUjajU4kkhLnXTcuDMGH_P1tlxWmk00UwyXExSXPnQ3pCHI4KlP4GML4j79b7tgOI https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098222...
- _Nat_ 4y ago
  That link appears to be to a wrapper around the same, including the paywall.

m3kw9 4y ago

I do think this is notbunders well because if there is some activities that you look forward to, most times even if you are tired you would want to do it, say a social activity, video games, something to blow off steam, you are still using the brain but a different activity. So tired is selective

entropicgravity 4y ago

Anyone who does coding for a living will know this. Personally my average thinking to resting ratio is about 90 min thinking to 30 min resting (ie keeping up with tech news).

ilaksh 4y ago

I wonder if GPT4 gets less effective at following directions if you give it too many instructions in a single prompt? I know it doesn't have any fatigue for the next prompt though. So over time it is indefatigable. I wonder what a deep integration of GPT-like technology with the cortex via BCI would look like and if that could reduce mental fatigue. Sometimes I think the next metasystem transition is basically like The Borg except it's a bunch of Mini-Borgs. And at first people will be completely horrified but then overnight it will become normal for a large segment of the population to be attached to an Overmind. I think you would call that transhuman. Pretty sure there would be serious conflict with the normal humans at that point.

woolion 4y ago

There is a much more interesting article about the subject, "The metabolic face of migraine" [0]. Besides Glutamate levels, a TL;DR is that migraine is a mechanism to trigger a 'brain shutoff' when brain energy levels are critically low. This happens if you there is a deficit between what can be absorbed and what is consumed. So if you can absorb the energy from sugar, sweets or energy drink do help, as the popular belief goes (caffeine also helps through different mechanisms, including blood flow changes, but can also cause a backlash). If it's not the case it is suggested to go to a ketogenic diet, to provide an alternative brain energy source (knowing that the transition can be particularly hard as the brain needs to adjust, which is known as ketogenic flu). TFA advances that glutamate is a byproduct of brain activity and thus its level correlates with brain fatigue. The Economist article does not link to the original research article [1], and besides adding fluff to the highlights, it makes some outlandish conclusion ("no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue") but it's not clear what comes from the research article. Or, more interestingly, how it is intended to fit in the big picture. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076095 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27076095 [1] https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(22)01111-3 https://www.cell.com/current-biology/pdfExtended/S0960-9822(...

offsky 4y ago

Can someone please explain the picture at the top of the article?

khalilravanna 4y ago
Children sleeping under their desks. Presumably hinting that learning is tiring and/or maybe adults need nap times too.

sandworm101 4y ago

"Thinking" is only one thing that the brain does, and it is actually a very small part of its job. All brain activity causes the brain to get tired and burn out to the point that it needs rest. Try driving a car around a racetrack competatively, even in a simulator. Talk to a ballet dancer about keeping their balance for hours. Talk to a soldier under fire hour after hour. Talk to a pilot trying to negotiate with ATC all during a weather event. All brain activity, even the basic biological stuff we don't classify as "thinking", causes the brain to get tired and eventually lapse into a survival/maintenance mode to handle the stress.

khalilravanna 4y ago
The driving one reminds me of how absolutely brain dead I feel after riding a motorcycle for 8-12 hours in a day. Nevermind that my body is rocked from the wind all day but just being able to do basic math or have a conversation with the person at the front desk of the motel I’m staying at becomes difficult. Any sort of sustained concentration obliterates your brain over a long enough time period.
- grugagag 4y ago
  Even driving a car can have similar effects after driving for 8-12 hours sans the wind and elements exhausting the body or the uncomfortable motorcycle posture
  - dron57 4y ago
    The wind and the posture aren't as much of a problem as the mental strain of riding a motorcycle. It is simply more difficult than driving, the constant gear shifting, cancelling turn lights manually and always being in a kind of defensive posture where you assume that you are invisible and someone might run into you. I've always gotten into a kind of flow state while riding a bike. The exhaustion after hours of riding felt very similar to studying or coding all day.
quickthrower2 4y ago
Would the amount of brain power to do activity X decrease as you get experienced at it though? Not to zero of course (the long drive is tiring even for an experienced driver).

vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago

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jkettle 4y ago

I think this number will probably stay the same or perhaps decrease a little for the short-medium term, but will most likely explode in the long term to maybe 60% because of the all the AI content. With GPT-# and all of the new mid-tier content thats now floating around, its almost impossible, even today to tell whats actually valuable content, so I've been going online less. I think most people feel the same uncanny Vally feeling when they realise that most of the content the view is not human created.

Ezku 4y ago

Is it really considered acceptable not to link to the scientific research you are basing your news on? Pubmed link (with abstract); full text is paywalled: > A neuro-metabolic account of why daylong cognitive work alters the control of economic decisions. Curr Biol. 2022 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35961314/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35961314/

kmod 4y ago

I also discovered a parallel effect that at least in my case is a bigger issue: if you strain while thinking, you can end up engaging head muscles which can fatigue quickly and become painful. For me, thinking hard hurts and I thought it was a brain thing, but now I think it's primarily strain-related tension headaches, which oddly can feel like a brain thing. So from my experience there seems to be a possibility that when you think you are having brain tiredness you're actually having a physical headache.

karl42 4y ago
I have that problem, too. Can you recommend any counter-measures?

mlhpdx 4y ago

I’m reading through the comments carefully because this is something I think about literally every day (and I mean literally, not figuratively). For my health and performance, yes, but even more so for the health of people around me (employees, family, friends, etc.). I remind myself that I have no idea what other people are thinking - only what I think of their actions, the signals from my senses. That may be a weird way to work, but for whatever reason it helps me slow down and reason more carefully about the nature of situations. As for my own habits, I find concentration and focus addictive. I don’t burn out from thinking deeply and working on intricate solutions. The more I do the better it feels and around the spiral I go. Unfortunately the further I go the less “room” is available for other, often more important, things. So I’m also constantly reminding myself that my brain is a machine that adapts so I need to be careful how I use it. If I train my brain to resist certain tasks by rewarding it for avoiding them, it will become harder over time to perform those tasks. And vice versa. Brains are fun. :)

mieubrisse 4y ago
I have exactly the same. Unlike some friends, I don't seem to get a negative feedback loop to focusing. When I do it, I want more of it - to the detriment of showering, sleep, food, romance, etc. I really like the modelling of "if I train my brain to resist tasks by rewarding it for avoiding them, it becomes harder to perform them".
dollo_7 4y ago
I have sometimes found myself into that situation. I have to be careful not to overthink where to put my "brain room" for that day, otherwise I carry this overhead burden that rumbles all day long, questioning if I should be putting that effort elsewhere. Definitely, brains are fun. They can be your best ally and worst enemy.
stephendause 4y ago
Are you saying that you don't suffer (or at least consciously feel the effects of) cognitive fatigue? If I am interested in something, I like to focus on it for quite a while, but after enough time passes, I just can't any more. I do think that there are some people who can naturally last much longer doing cognitive work than is the norm, though, much like some athletes are natural ultramarathoners. So perhaps you are one of those people.

findthewords 4y ago

There are three ways to flush acute glutamate buildup from the brain: 1. Exercise. The brain can direct glutamate to be used as an energy source to dispose of excess amounts. Glutamate naturally flows by diffusion from areas of high concentration (in blood vessel wall cells) through the blood vessel wall into the circulating bloodstream, where the concentration is lower. 2. Eat a tuna sandwich or drink an energy drink. Vitamin B6 is a a coenzyme in the synthesis of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA from glutamate. Thinking jobs is also coincident with rising popularity of energy drinks from 2000s onwards. The Economist is most likely regurgitating Nature: 11 August 2022 Why thinking hard makes us feel tired https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02161-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-02161-5

aftergibson 4y ago
What's the 3rd way?
- cesaref 4y ago
  I was just saying the same thing :)
- baby 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - notfed 4y ago
    I hope we're still talking about exercise...
  - rayrey 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 4y ago
      Please don't do this here.
- 4y ago

Avlin67 4y ago

nothing better than 2g taurine / black tea 500mg aspirin stack

provenance 4y ago

After falling on hard times post failed-startup/implosion/burnout (years ago), tried getting back into coding/hacking/sw dev last summer. I reached out here on hn, and was given help (thank you to everyone who helped: as my survival was in question, your help truly got me through). Did a few projects, did a ctf, and my brain started hurting and I imploded again. I finally got another laptop a few months ago. Local guy brings me his Flutter codebase. Good chance to learn a new tech. It was going ok: I was superman for a few days learning the flutter/dart tooling, solving dependency hacks, getting it to compile, fixing bugs, and then, Bam. Can't code any more. Backed away. Now, still burned out and homeless, but trying to start (another) hackerspace. Good distraction from the ashes of devastation. I am unsure if I can write software for any sustained period of time ever again. It's scary since that's my only marketable skill and I'm still homeless and constantly scrapping for food money. Some backstory: Despite repeated insistence from peers, skipped investing in bitcoin and ethereum at their beginnings and repeately thereafter, instead plugging away non stop on a dead SaaS product for a startup for years, which slowly failed; lost my partner, the life I had built, reputation, assets. Probably dealing with some trauma burn-in from this. As for last summer, I distinctly remember the headaches from participating in the CTF. I had to, you know, think! Cool, solving tasks. Then, Bam! Splitting headaches.. :( I still wonder if there's some zen place where one can focus intensely on a problem while remaining calm and at peace - never was able to find such a state of mind..

kapperchino 4y ago
That does not sound normal, you need to get this checked out. Meanwhile do work that doesn’t require too much thinking until you can get it checked.
- provenance 4y ago
  I suspect that, under such conditions, the headaches are normal for someone at my age. I can go from 0-100mph on a dime, which may have led to the headaches. I'm not passionate about coding, so I dive in without being warmed up. Contrarily, with passion and a slow pre-heat, the headaches probably wouldn't happen. But I am not a passionate coder. I may need to strongly consider nurturing non-coding tech skills. I'm doing some (very part time) engineering research for food money. No headaches. Coding may be out for me, that's all. I can still participate in tech otherwise.

sershe 4y ago

I typically (especially on the weekend, since at work I somehow have higher motivation to push myself) go down a "thinking cascade" to adapt to this, where I'd code for some time, then when my brain gets tired go do something involved but not too involved (like figure out how to do something with Linux or whatever, or read a book that is actually useful), then when I get tired of that go read medium-effort stuff, like history or check how to do some project around the house, then when my brain is completely fried I'd go comment on hacker news :) Or eventually just go exercise and do chores... I find I can reset to the beginning of the cycle in an hour or so.

markus_zhang 4y ago

I suspect geniuses have a much larger tolerance than ordinary people, plus a much larger memory pool so that they rarely go OOM.

DonHopkins 4y ago

"I'm tryin' to think, but nothin' happens!" -Curly Joe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlejsgxOxrU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlejsgxOxrU

BiteCode_dev 4y ago

Context switching burns people out and geeks don't notice how much they force themselves into too much of it. E.G: I have a friend that went full nerd on his coding setup. Dvorak keyboard, Full Arch Linux with tiling windows manager. Everything in the terminal, all dev through vim. If it's not a religion, it's at least a lifestyle. He is very happy with it: the keyboard is so ergonomic, he barely has to move the hand of it. Every task can be controlled out of a few key strokes Except he didn't notice how much of a burden he put on himself. Even for very simple tasks I see him struggling because of all the context switching. If you have to copy/paste something from your web browser to your editor, it may require you to select with a mouse, and ctrl+c, then alt-tab a bit, click on the IDE tab and ctrl+v. Not instant, but this procedure is the same for everything, so it doesn't take much brain to do it. For him, it's a whole guacamole, because there is a special shortcut to get to the browser, another one to get to the text, then copy/paste, then go to vim with another shortcut, select the proper buffer, paste with a yet another shortcut and make sure he uses the proper mode. Since Dvorak is a different layout than his phone keyboard or his client keyboards, the shortcuts don't perfectly rely on muscle memory. Every simple task in his setup like that: it requires a lot of effort. And his whole life outside of the computer is like that too, because he has very high moral standards, so he lives a constrained life in society that is optimized for a totally different life style. However he never cuts himself a slack. Multiply that by a hundred times a day, a hundred days a year. He burnt out. And he has no idea why: all the reasons he gave me were external factor, blaming other people a lot. But it was not. He killed himself with a thousand paper cuts, chasing an ideal he theorized in his head but could not only never reached, but could not even assess the real cost on his life.

strus 4y ago
> For him, it's a whole guacamole, because there is a special shortcut to get to the browser, another one to get to the text, then copy/paste, then go to vim with another shortcut, select the proper buffer, paste with a yet another shortcut and make sure he uses the proper mode. Since Dvorak is a different layout than his phone keyboard or his client keyboards, the shortcuts don't perfectly rely on muscle memory. I think you are over-estimating the effort. Most experienced Vim users not even think about motions when they use them, it's just the muscle memory.

karmelapple 4y ago

Every full-day on-site interview for an engineering role I’ve done results in me being pretty exhausted, even when there’s minimal technical questions. My theory, which maybe is slightly related to this article, is that thinking through all the potential future things that might happen as a result of choosing this job is mentally draining. Your brain is evaluating what you might be working on, what the future boss might be like, what your coworkers are like and if any seem particularly compatible or not with you, etc. That sounds like some hard thinking to me.

kzrdude 4y ago
Handling social situations is one of the most energy intensive tasks our brain does, I think. Meeting new people, thinking about how to present yourself and how to understand others, is an intense social activity.

xkcd1963 4y ago

This pop-psychology stuff has been dismissed some 10 years ago

stasmo 4y ago

Is this why MSG makes people feel sleepy?

amai 4y ago

But the reverse is not necessary true: Just because you are tired doesn’t mean you thought hard.

xivzgrev 4y ago

This makes sense. I think hard in my job, and by the end of the day I end up taking the night east - long dinner, a workout, talk with wife. I have many personal “to dos” I’d like to do, but it has been really challenging for me to consistently set time for them during the work week because I’m so “tired” from work.

lanstin 4y ago

In other news, physics is the basis for human intelligence. There are also interesting sub cases of this: exercising self control or will power fatigues the ability to exercise self control. Making important decisions (as in by a judge judging) fatigues the ability to make important decisions. “Religions of the World” speculates that one of the keys to Buddhas long and productive life was partially a result of his taking time each day for quiet non-action, each week , and for a portion of each year (the rainy season). High productive humans are in it for the long haul and plan for that. Short term, high productive corporations are good at making people feel that everything is a life or death emergency and when the humans burn out, they hire more.

zh3 4y ago

Doesn't seem to happen to people who love their work. Wouldn't that suggest it's less of a physical thing?

andy_ppp 4y ago

I wonder if not thinking hard makes the brain atrophy? What is the prevalence of neurodegenerative diseases amongst chess grand masters or some other intense psychological activity, I wonder if the studies have been conducted on this.

makach 4y ago

Everyone playing chess knows this!

einpoklum 4y ago

Obligatory Monty Python reference: My brain hurts! https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcl8qr https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xcl8qr

jongjong 4y ago

Thinking and doing gets you nowhere. What works is talking.

fullsend 4y ago

Recently got burned out for the first time. Context switching and constant hard thinking were a direct cause. I unofficially took on a chief architect’s role doing design and planning for a huge project, was doing some managerial work assigning tasks and mentoring younger team members through it, and was writing code as an individual contributor. I just wanted it to succeed so badly, I took on an absolute ton without any systems in place in my own habits and daily life to protect me. I would be in a conference room tracking ten different threads of work day in and day out. Making decisions for every component, directing people, debugging…at first I felt like a god. Everyone was looking to me, we made more progress in six months than the last two years, meetings would get cancelled because I couldn’t be there to make a decision (should have been a massive red flag but it fed my ego). But the way I work is to put my head down and get addicted to a problem in some sense. I can’t stop until it’s done. I think of these as loops in my brain, and I deeply need to close them. It is both a strength and tremendous weakness. As I climbed to principle engineer and above, this was a huge boon. A few weeks of nonstop coding, then crash for a couple weeks till the next tasks come along. But at a certain level, I stopped having clear cut tasks. The work had huge scope and was totally open ended. I was doing quarterly planning and this quarter’s work wasn’t done yet, etc. I got lost pushing to be “done” and it never came. One day my brain started hurting all the time. I started crying when I had to think about work, out of nowhere…really scary for me who always thought I was rock solid even after months of long days doing nothing but thinking hard. I tried to push through, ask for more money to soothe my pain, the company offered me a sort of break. But I had to quit cold turkey. Now I am taking a real break and the thought of that work makes my body tense up. I get tearful again. I am going to take a lot of time to build some workout habits, some set hours of the day where I will never “work”, and do some emotional digging into my loops. Thanks for sharing! It is so nice to hear everyone’s stories.

vimwizard 4y ago
Exercise helps a lot in my experience. I also got stuck in a position of "Context switching and constant hard thinking" for a long time. Just stepped back and let it burn because it was also an "unofficial" position.
- 4y ago

dhab 4y ago

Does it make it stronger over time? Is it like muscles- pain few days after exercise but over 6mos, significant difference?

hyperthesis 4y ago

When you exercise, your fitness does not improve during it, but afterwards. When you think intensely, your key insights do not coming during it, but afterwards. Rest is as important as work.

WalterBright 4y ago

After exam week in college, I'd go home and just sit in front of the TV for a week and veg. Then I was ready to go back and get back to work. (Exam week is more or less studying from wake up to going back to sleep, with exams in between.)

tintedfireglass 4y ago
whenever I had holidays I'd go home from uni and just feel sleepy all day. My family always wanted to go out but would cancel plan because of me. I never felt that sleepy back at uni tho.
- WalterBright 4y ago
  Oh, I had enormous fun in college. Didn't get much sleep, there were always fun things to do. I don't recall ever being bored for 4 years.

Herval_freire 4y ago

The real cure for burnout is labor unions. Given how long this thread is and the recent layoffs, it's pretty much time.

dools 4y ago

The HN headline rule being applied to this headline make the article sound so stupidly obvious that I didn’t even click it at first.

baccheion 4y ago

Such can be muted with proper nutrition. The brain runs on carbs. Efficient diet keeps blood from being redirected to digestion while still getting energy and nutrition? Further, acetylcholine and nootropics switch to protein burning (makes more carbs instead of burning fat) when carbs run low. That is, the brain has better and more consistent fuel. Steady blood sugar, stable digestion, easy digestion, and acetylcholine/protein- based backup fueling, and proper nutrition makes it easier to work through marathons. Same with creating a good work environment. Many aren't even nutrient sufficient. That is, they have deficiencies and aren't meeting all RDAs. See: CRON-o-meter. Common ones are vitamin D3 (+ K2) and magnesium, net alkaline PRAL score, and more calcium than phosphorus.