Many of us perceive the evening as a “second chance” to finish everything that we didn’t manage to do during the day. It seems that when the city quiets down, it’s the perfect time to concentrate. However, neuroscientists and performance experts say otherwise. Transferring important tasks to the dark is not just poor time management, but biological trapwhich over time reduces cognitive abilities and increases anxiety levels.
The illusion of evening productivity
Our brains have a limited supply of “fuel” for making decisions. By the end of the day, this resource, known as willpoweris inevitably depleted. When you put off difficult tasks until the evening, you try to complete them using your residual energy. This leads to the fact that the work takes twice as long, and the quality of the result decreases. The phenomenon called decision fatiguemakes us make mistakes in simple things or procrastinate, scrolling through the news feed instead of working.
Conflict with the hormonal system
The main reason why you shouldn’t drag things out until night lies in our physiology. Active mental activity in the evening artificially increases cortisol levels – stress hormone. Normally, in the evening its level should decrease, giving way to melatonin, which prepares the body for sleep.
Forcing your brain to work in afterburner mode after sunset, you knock down circadian rhythms. This not only leads to insomnia, but also to waking up tired the next morning. It turns out to be a vicious circle: you don’t get enough sleep, you work slowly during the day, again you don’t have time, and again you postpone things to the evening.
The hidden price of “revenge” for lack of free time
There is a psychological phenomenon called sleep procrastination. If the whole day has been busy with routine and work, and the evening is again devoted to business, the psyche begins to rebel. She’s missing personal time and dopamine.
As a result, having finished things late at night, a person does not go to bed, but begins to “get” joy through TV series or social networks. This steals the recovery hours needed to neuroplasticity brain and processing information received during the day.
How rearranging the graph changes the results
Moving priority tasks to the first half of the day uses natural peak cognitive activity. For most people, it occurs between 2 and 4 hours after waking up. At this time, the prefrontal cortex of the brain works as efficiently as possible, allowing you to enter into flow state and solve problems faster.
By leaving the evening free, you give your brain the opportunity to switch to the default system. It is in moments of relaxation, walks or quiet reading that the best ideas and insights come that cannot be generated by an effort of will in front of a monitor screen.
Proper distribution of workload and refusal of evening overtime is not a matter of discipline, but of respect for one’s own biology. True productivity lies not in the number of hours you work, but in the ability to stop on time. Full recovery in the evening is the only guarantee of high efficiency the next day.
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