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Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

thriveglobal.in

91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#91

The ultimate "tool" for elevated focus for me is napping. A quick 20 min nap completely resets my mind so I don't have whatever random thoughts floating around. If you are more disciplined than me, meditation in place of napping could work. But napping is easier and more enjoyable to me. As for brain fog itself, I think proper nutrition is very important. Our body needs many different micronutrients to operate at opt…

When do you nap? I'm thinking an hour and a half after finishing lunch would be good since it coincides with the afternoon slump

Yeah in my experience that’s about the ideal nap time

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#92

From the same folks: "So you're an Engineer and you think you're burned out?" https://techteam.thriveglobal.com/so-youre-an-engineer-and-y... [am the author]

At the end...“This article was written entirely by GPT-3”...are you also GPT-3?

I'm fairly sure that I am not. But it is possible.

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#93

Thrive Global is Ariana Huffington's vehicle to repackage the last several years of self-care fads and sell them to corporations under the guise of improving employee productivity. It doesn't have anything of value to add to the conversation, as this article makes clear.

[exec at Thrive, about as biased as you can get]

Putting aside whether Thrive is a solution, would you not agree that the forces pushing our corporate culture towards burnout behaviors warrant some push back? And if so, deserve something less like lip-service and more like the tools used to capture our attention?

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#95
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it? As somebody who got involved in the Agile movement before it had that name, I initially thought the productization of the movement was a positive. In retrospect, it was terrible. The packaged version of "Agile" ended up having most of the nutrients and all of the fiber removed. It was empty calories and an organizational sugar high, all the feeling of process improvement with none of the work (and none of the…

Fair enough. Then how would you suggest we raise awareness otherwise? In a celebrity obcessed culture, how do you get "old school" types to appreciate and embrace newer ideas about employees, health, mental health, and so on? I'm not being combative. I'm sincerely looking for a conversation on such things. To me it's all very obvious. But even a pandemic hasn't seemed to change necessary behaviours (e.g., diet).

I think this has to come through a shift in power to employees. Hoping for execs to become enlightened will be a long wait. The way we got things like a 40-hour week and decent labor laws was through large-scale collective action. But in software, I think more local approaches work too.

For example, we recently had an emergency where part of my team had to work on the weekend. So I started the custom of "incident retros". Before the meeting I started an incident timeline and then asked others to contribute. In the meeting, we read through the timeline, queued up discussion topics, and voted on which ones to pursue. As we discussed, we listed possible action items. At the end we voted on those and people volunteered to pick up the ones they thought they could do.

On the one hand, this is a pretty normal technique for improving business processes. On the other, it helped train people that 1) weekend work is not normal and we should prevent it, 2) we as a team have authority over our work conditions, and 3) we can take frequent small action toward more healthy work conditions.

I don't think one of these will make a big difference. But over time I expect we can create a culture where employee health and worker productivity are seen as closely aligned, and where if managers try to order us to do something foolish, the team will feel empowered to push back. If in that push citing wellness pablum helps, I'm happy to do it. But lasting change comes from shifting organizational power.

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#96
post #23

Drink a glass of water and seriously engage in a different activity for 20-30 minutes has worked very well for me.

A different activity: physical/mental or switching context ?

I'm not that person but a 20 minute walk clears up my mind every single time.

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#97
post #38
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you‘ll find a hundred other things more stressful than a messy environment. Fighting with the partner, illness of a relative, someone yelled at me on the street, I slept too little,...

Saying "x is more stressful than y" does not negate that y creates stress

We have limited time available each day, so it’s prudent to focus on solving the most stressful factors first.

Re: Strategies to Reduce Brain Fog and Improve Clear Thinking

#98
post #23

Drink a glass of water and seriously engage in a different activity for 20-30 minutes has worked very well for me.

A different activity: physical/mental or switching context ?

Either works for me, the key is to draw your attention away from the thing you were previously working on as much as possible.
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