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I'm a cyclist and a PhD student, and I've noticed some patterns in the way that my exercise habits affect my productivity. I get a lot of data from every ride. While I'm riding, I measure heart rate and power, and if I'm outside, I also measure distance and speed. I've found that the total amount of energy that I produce, as measured by the power meter on my bike, is a useful metric for how I should expect to feel the rest of the day and the next day. In particular, if I generate between 800 kJ and 1000 kJ, I usually feel alert, but not worn out. If I do less, I feel like I've not had enough exercise, and I either feel restless or like my body is in lazy recovery mode. If I do more, I feel physically worn out enough that it's hard to work for an extended period of time, especially on the days that I am working in the lab.
What I think is most curious about this is that it is relatively independent of my fitness or the intensity of the ride. If I go balls-out the whole time, it takes slightly fewer kJ to make it hard to focus, and if I go super easy, it takes a bit more. It's the same with fitness. The difference between the power I can sustain for an hour when I'm in form for racing vs when I've barely been riding at all is about 25-30%, but the difference in the amount of mechanical work to make me unproductive is about 10%. (You might notice this gives me an incentive to stay in shape; I can do the same amount of work for the same productivity boost in less time when I'm more fit.)
So, what's definitely true is that the amount of work I put in on the bike is a useful metric for maximizing my productivity. What's unclear is if the amount of work is in some way fundamental to the mental state that it puts me in. The most obvious possibility is that it mainly has to do with the number of calories I burn; this is consistent with the finding that I need to do more work to feel tired when I'm more fit, since training will make you more efficient. But it's not obvious to me why this would be the case. When I'm in poor shape, an 800 kJ ride will have a much more drastic effect on my blood sugar than it will when I'm fit enough to race. It would be useful to venture outside the 800-1000 kJ range on days when I need to get work done.
I don't really know enough physiology to get any further than this. Does anybody else have experience with this sort of thing? Does anyone have empirically testable hypotheses? (Non-testable or not-testable-for-me hypotheses may be interesting as well.)
People like to think of their brains as some kind of separate regulating thing compared to the rest of their bodies. They're not. Everything is mushed together in a common mileu and the sheer degree of crosstalk between your nervous system and everything else is enormous, through both the general chemical environment and fibers that have nothing to do with the consciously available senses.
Humans did not evolve sitting around writing theses. They evolved spending energy in an active way, possibly with wide variation from day to day. It is completely uns... (read more)