There is a time of day I considered cursed for many years. About an hour after lunch. A head that in the morning easily held the architecture of a large system suddenly turns to cotton wool. Thoughts flow slowly, you want to lean back in your chair and watch something pointless. I blamed it on age, the weather, biorhythms, anything but the obvious. And the obvious was lying on my plate. I am not a nutritionist or a doctor, and if you have questions about your own health, discuss them with a specialist. But as someone who has worked with his head all his life, I have made enough observations of myself to say this: food affects the quality of work far more than our profession tends to think.
Fuel and engine
Nobody fills a racing car with whatever fuel happens to be at hand and then wonders why it lurches along. Yet that is exactly what we do with our own brains. The brain is very hungry: for its modest weight it consumes a noticeable share of the body's entire energy, and it runs on it non-stop. It depends on how evenly that energy arrives. Feed it in bursts, with large portions of fast carbohydrates, and the brain gets a spike first and a crash after. That crash is the very post-lunch dullness we have come to regard as a natural part of the working day.
Food is not just calories. It is also a set of signals to the whole hormonal system, which decides how to distribute your strength. A large amount of heavy, fatty food makes the body take digestion seriously, and it diverts resources to it, leaving the head with whatever is left. The body always sets priorities correctly from the point of view of survival: digesting matters more than designing a database. Our job is not to argue with it, but to avoid putting it in front of that choice in the middle of the working day.
A scene from team life
I have watched the same picture many times. An important release, the team works late, and to support people someone orders pizza for everyone. A kind gesture, I have done it myself. And an hour after the pizza the team's productivity drops, people start making small mistakes, and in the end the evening that was supposed to be the final push turns into an evening of fixing the mistakes made after dinner. Now in such situations I ask for something light to be ordered. People first look at me as if I were a bore, and then notice that the evening went quite differently.
We spend years optimising code, servers and processes, yet rarely optimise what the company's main processor runs on: people.
What I noticed in myself
I will not hand out recipes or tell you what exactly to eat, that is not my profession. But I will share observations anyone can check on themselves within a couple of weeks.
- Portion size matters more than it seems. A heavy lunch almost guarantees the loss of a couple of hours of productive work afterwards. Several small meals keep the head steadier than one enormous one.
- Sweets work like a loan. A chocolate bar before a hard task gives a quick lift and an equally quick drop. It is the same mechanism as stimulants, only in a mild form.
- Water is nutrition too. Mild dehydration feels like fatigue and distraction, and it is very easy to miss when you are deep in a task.
- The hardest tasks are better scheduled outside the post-lunch hours. If the slump does come after lunch, let it fall on routine work, and let architecture and important decisions live in the hours when your head is clear.
- Coffee is not a substitute for food. Many programmers in crunch mode live on coffee until evening and then eat everything at once. That is the worst possible schedule for steady work.
Food as part of the system
As an architect, I am used to looking at everything as a system with inputs and outputs. A person is a system too, and food is one of its main inputs. If the input is chaos, the output will be chaos as well, no matter how much we tune processes and tools. This does not mean turning lunch into a scientific experiment with scales and spreadsheets, although some people enjoy that. It means at least noticing the link between what is on the plate and what happens in your head an hour later.
There is a practical conclusion for managers here too. The food culture in an office or a team affects results no less than the meeting culture. Endless pizza at deadlines, sweets in every corner, lunch eaten on the run at the keyboard create an environment in which it is objectively harder for people to think well. Small changes, a proper lunch break, light food on crunch evenings, water within reach, cost next to nothing compared with the price of mistakes made by a tired head.
Ingello's mission includes radical longevity, and I am more and more convinced that it begins not with futuristic technology but with very simple everyday decisions. What we eat today affects not only this evening but also how many years we will be able to work with a clear head.
What to do tomorrow
Run a simple experiment for a week. Write down what you had for lunch and how you felt an hour later on a scale from one to five. Change nothing, just observe. At the end of the week, look at your notes. You will almost certainly see a pattern you used to blame on the weather or biorhythms. After that you will make your own decision, like an engineer who has finally seen the logs.
