The way I differentiate is to think of a four quadrant matrix, happiness with low to high on the vertical axis and chance of success low to high on the horizontal. If you're happy and there's a good chance of success then it's a mission (im)possible. Low happiness and low chance of success then it's a death march. If you're happy but the odds are way against you that's a kamikaze run (development projects) which can be fun.
]]>Less caffeine, more often. For me, weak black tea were best, 2oz once every two hours.
Mild opiates for pain (twice death-marched with a tooth---not the same tooth both times---that had to be pulled, once with back-spasms ab initio).
Watch your blood glucose carefully if you're diabetic or pre-.
Catnap before your head hits the keyboard.
Sex is iffy: can cheer you up, can wake you up, can screw-up your back royally, can put you to sleep.
Martial arts practice is good, but stick to basics and to forms you've internalised---give your neo-cortex a rest.
]]>I'd like to second the work standing up approach. It's a recent innovation for me. After spending literally years occasionally wondering about elevator desks or even a taller desk, one day about a month ago I made it happen: two large, sturdy cardboard boxes gaffataped together and covered with a cloth on top of my regular working desk. It works a treat. Improves circulation, alertness, focus and over the last 4 weeks or so it has eliminated back pain. It forces me to take more breaks (if only to walk around a few times in a circle or to fetch another coffee). Happy all round. My wife is a sensory integration therapist so we have quite a few odd bits of equipment lying around: I can work standing on a single-person see-saw, and when I'm watching video, I can even play around on the wobbly thing which only has a single point of contact with the ground. Balancing on that (for 10-15 seconds at a time, admittedly) appears to be excellent exercise.
]]>This relates to decisions about life and having children. I want to smack folks up side the head who talk about waiting till their 30s or 40s to have kids. For me it wasn't a conscious decision. I just didn't get married till I was 33. And guess what. An all nighter with a sick kid when you're in your late 30s or 40 is incredibly draining compared to when you are in your 20s.
]]>But actually, speaking from experience, working all night while minding a sick kid was only easier in my twenties because all-nighters in general were easier. As my fondness for extreme bouts of self-inflicted heroism waned, I honed my planning skills... a little bit.
]]>That's commonly-repeated nonsense, sorry. Neurons (or, more probably, their supporting glial cells) call for oxygen as they need it, on a timescale of tens to hundreds of milliseconds: tracking that is how PET scanners work, using a short-lived radioisotope of oxygen as its tracer.
The brain gets all the oxygen it needs almost all the time: it gets priority on oxygen shipments from the lungs, as it were. If you don't get enough oxygen, you become lightheaded, possibly start to hallucinate, and pass out. You don't just think less clearly.
It is not clear why exercise improves thinking on a timescale of minutes. It is even less clear why exercise improves thinking on a timescale of months to years, though here it is possible that brain capillary health may play a role, as exercise improves circulatory function on those timescales. It's almost certainly not just oxygen, since if that were true all exercise would improve thinking in the same way, which is not the case. (For me, running worsens thinking: walking improves it drastically. If oxygen perfusion was the cause, the opposite would be true.)
]]>But we don't need unions now, esp. in the tech industry, we love death marches, "no formal comp time policy", or salaried == billable time, and anything else you make up, or use your vacation (all time off is "vacation time", including sick time).
In the mid-nineties, I worked for Ameritech, one of the Baby Bells (since swallowed by the Evil Empire, SBC, er, now "AT&T" (no, it isn't)). For about a year and a quarter, I was doing 45, 50, 55 60 hours/week, and the one that I broke 70, I swore I'd never do again. And I was wearing a pager (remember them?) 24x7x365.25 (except for the couple months I wore two of them). And they used them - one Sunday I got seven pages....
But at the same job, one young consultant (Anderson, now "Accenture" - who treat their people as consumables) told me that one week, he did 119 hours. No, there's no typo there. He also was working for another consulting company a year later.
They treat us as consumables. Think about that. And all the stuff about surviving a death march? How many times does the death march end in failure (a lot). Oh, and how about your life - do you even have one? My ...late wife..., partway through that, semi-jokingly threatened to sue Ameritech for alienation of affection.
But seriously, you HAVE NO LIFE on a death march. You're not working to live, you're living to work for your management. Are you really being repaid what all that's worth? Really?
If you're reading this, the odds are 99.99% you ain't a millionaire... so the answer is not just no, but FUCK no.
mark ]]>How about dopamine? Is that still tied to exercise and improved learning, cognitive performance - or has that fallen by the wayside?
There's so much research being done in neuro, it's hard for mere lay folks to stay current.
]]>My personal take? Well, as already said, I guess the short-term boost by the usual catecholamines, e.g. adrenaline and noradrenaline, is to blame. Also, fatigue is somewhat task-specific, which explains why you can still play computer or frequent OGH's blog after getting tired of work. In the long term, it seems like exercise has some effects of BDNF levels, which might also explain why it helps with depression in some. Taken together with indications brain mass is highly fluid in singing birds during mating season, we might guess it's something of a mechanism to cope with annual rhythms; in winter there is little to do, you don't move, and it's best not to waste energy on thinking. Come spring, you move more, and it's important to put resources to work. Which might indicate the issue might be somewhat tied to SAD.
]]>Quite likely, if nothing else because dopamine is tied with about anything; I guess it's somewhat tied to opposite, e.g. sleeping (Parkinson's leads quite often to sleeping problems) or impaired learning and cognitive performance (some dopamine agonists can have funny behavioural effects, like gambling).
What exactly happens depends on a plethora of factors, for starters, there are at least five dopamine receptors, not counting splice variants,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopamine_receptor
with different affinities and sometimes opposite effects on second messengers.
And then, these same receptors are part of neuronal structures, both on a synaptical (autorecpetors, for starters) and somewhat larger level.
So, well, dopamine has likely something to do with learning, but so do serotonin, opioids, GABA, you name it.
Also, it might be interesting that most things raising dopamine also rise the other catecholamines, especially noradrenaline, and it seems some alpha2 receptors for the latter are quite important for learning and behavioural control.
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