Neuro Athletes,

Guess where I am right now? I am currently in Cyprus which is the country of my parents and grandparents. It is so beautiful to be back and I’m sorry if I spam you with all of my Greece content over the next week!

Moving on, it’s another beautiful day to learn about the brain, your brain. If you’re anything like me, you start your work day, sitting at your desk, checking emails and then never leaving. Some days, my schedule is so backed up that I forget to eat, stretch, or take my eyes off the screen.

Yes, I too forget to do all the things I preach about but hey, that’s life. We all have good days and then, we have some not so good days but let me explain how small behaviors like stretching or ingesting caffeine can make a drastic difference in your mental performance.

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STRETCHING

Sitting in front of a computer can have you curl up like a shrimp and before the end of day, you’ll start feeling the aches. Not surprisingly, pain and fatigue have been proven to lead to work-related injury and burnout. A study published in the Annals of Surgery (2017) focused on the shortening career life of a surgeon due work-related pain. Their aim was to (1) quantify the physical strains posed during practice of open and minimally invasive surgery (MIS) while characterizing their impact on the professional and personal lives of surgical practitioners, and (2) determine how micro breaks with stretch exercises affected pain, physical function, and mental focus of surgeons performing procedures.

Surgeons and operating room staff from 4 medical centers rated pain/fatigue, physical, and mental performance during 2 operative days: 1 day without implementing targeted stretching microbreaks (TSMB), the other including standardized (1.5 to 2 minutes) guided TSMB at appropriate 20 to 40-minute intervals throughout each case. Case type and duration were recorded as were surgeon pain data before and after each procedure and at the end of the surgical day.

Sixty-six participants (69% men, 31% women; mean 47 years) completed 193 “non-TSMB” and 148 “TSMB” procedures. TSMB improved surgeon postprocedure pain scores in the neck, lower back, shoulders, upper back, wrists/hands, knees, and ankles. Taking mircobreaks did not have any effect on the duration of the operation (P> 0.05). Improved pain scores with TSMB were statistically equivalent (P > 0.05) for invasive and non-invasive procedures. Surgeons perceived improvements in physical performance (57%) and mental focus (38%); 87% of respondents planned to continue TSMB.

Since you don’t need to be a surgeon or on your feet all day to feel pain, TSMIB may represent a practical and effective means to reduce pain, enhance performance and increase mental focus without extending work time.

As an added benefit…

The image above shows the left insular GM volume was positively correlated with the number of years of yoga practice in yogis. Brain volume increases from stretching and yoga practises.

CAFFEINE 

The most popular pick-me-up at work is coffee. Some people I know say that having that morning sip wakes up their soul. Those same friends of mine also end up having their third cup of coffee by 3PM, which has me thinking, why do people need it so much?

Does caffeine actually help you recover from sleep deprivation or does it make you more alert? A study by Quiquempoix et al. 2022 suggested that total sleep deprivation (TSD) and extended task engagement (Time-On-Task, TOT) can induce a cognitive fatigue state in healthy subjects. They performed a double-blind counter-balanced (placebo (PCBO) and caffeine (CAF) - 2×2.5 mg/kg/24 h)) study on 24 healthy subjects (33.7 ± 5.9 y), to show the differential contributions of TSD and TOT on deficits in sustained attention and executive processes. 

They found that caffeine consumption significantly reduced sustained attention deficits (number of Lapses) related to TSD without any reduction due to TOT. In fact, a caffeine subject that has not slept will degrade at the same rate but starting from a lower level, so caffeine delays the onset of sustained attention deficits due to TOT. A low dose of caffeine (2.5 mg/kg) is only beneficial for sustained attention deficits related to TSD per-se, by slowing down the trigger due to the TOT factor. Such dose of caffeine was neither efficient to counteract sustained attention deficits related to TOT nor executive processes deficits that seem mainly affected by TOT and thus less dependent on the wakefulness instability state due to an increase of the homeostatic sleep pressure.

So what does that mean? Basically, the fatigue you experience at work is rooted in your lack of sleep and triggered by the time you spend on focusing on a single task. Caffeine can help you delay the fatigue you experience from being sleep deprived but it does not have any beneficial effect on executive (inhibition and working memory) deficits. Ultimately, caffeine isn't going to help you make better work decisions, it'll just delay the crash you're bound to have. So the better thing to do is sleep more, drink less.

I hope you enjoyed this one.

Until next time,

- Louisa