You are not hungry, not tired either, and it’s been less than 3 hours since you started to work on that project. Yet, you feel the sudden loss of concentration.
In other words, you’re feeling sleepy, anxiously, cannot focus on anything anymore and your thoughts are in mess.
What’s happening? What caused loss of concentration?
It’s called ego energy and it is known to scientific community only for the last few decades.
Simply put, when you feel an unexplainable and sudden loss of concentration, your brain is left without the fuel essential for the intellectual tasks.
Every activity that requires advanced mental efforts such as math consumes an immense amount of energy.
Our advanced thinking capabilities are still the new evolutionary wonder.
Try this:
- Walk slowly and multiply 30×33
- Now increase your pace and try to multiply 24×24
You will have to come to a standstill in order to do the calculation. Your body simply cannot provide the excess of the energy for you to do both actions simultaneously.
It is the main reason why all complex mental activities are done in stationary positions.
Moving and complex thinking just isn’t working together.
One of the main reasons behind the occasional loss of concentration and general interest for the task we are working on lies in a fact that your natural reserves of energy cannot breach the blood-brain barrier. Thus, you are seriously limited in one sense.
Lipid drops, the main energy reserves that are accommodated in your adipose (fat) tissue, once converted to fatty acids provide 3 times more potential energy than glucose or proteins.
But that energy cannot be used by the brain. It’s a little glitch in evolution as far as we know.
In the same time, glucose is the most preferred source of energy for your locomotive system because it is easier for your body to burn it into energy and will always be in use.
And this is where we come to the problem:
At any given time, your body can store only 1000 grams of glycogen (a form of glucose to be stored as a reserve, metabolized by your liver).
Whenever you are not feeding your system with the direct source of glucose, your body will start using the reserves.
Since your brain demands high amounts of energy for advanced intellectual tasks, those reserves are rapidly depleted.
When the critical point is reached, the brain has to make a decision:
- To continue with the secondary processes (thinking) or to preserve the rest of it for the primal use (survival)?
It’s an easy choice since your brain is programmed to keep you alive using minimum resources possible.
It seems that the human body still hasn’t reached the point of certain evolutionary development in this segment.
Our brain is capable of ordering simultaneous production of energy originating from lipid drops and glucose but, at the same time, it cannot divide those two and dispatch each in a preferred direction.
In addition, the fact that fatty acids cannot pass the blood-brain barrier only confirms that we are still far from evolutionary perfection.
As a species, we are still under development and for now, we cannot run and do complex math at the same time.
And due to our limited storage potentials, any advanced thinking will burn the reserves of glycogen in no time.
How can you resolve this issue and avoid loss of concentration?
It’s simple. All you have to do is to have something sweet by your side at all times.
As soon as you feel you are losing it, take a break, stretch a bit and have something that contains glucose (sugar). In just a few moments you’ll get back to the track.
This is why it is common to see people who are spending their days working their minds off eat chocolate and energy bars. They are simply aware of this fact and by eating chocolate and sugars they are preventing the rapid deflation of glycogen reserves.
As soon as you ingest sugar, you’ll spike your insulin levels and your cells will be fed almost immediately.
Once a cell signals that it had enough, insulin will order liver to convert all excess of glucose into glycogen and the entire process starts again.
So now you know why you are losing your concentration even though you are seemingly not “burning calories.” You think thus; you burn energy. Have something sweet from time to time. Ideally a nice, sweet and juicy fruit.
