Why you fall apart at 2 pm

Read time: 5 minutes

There are very few things in life that are certain, but we can bank on a few:

Death

Taxes

And your football team letting you down on the first game of the season 🫠

I was absolutely buzzing at Saturday lunchtime; the football had finally come back.

But by the afternoon, I was three pints of Guinness and about £30 in football bets down, so I did what any emotionally strong adult would do...

I went home and took an afternoon nap with my dog 😂

I don't know if it was an adrenaline dump, the alcohol, or the 32-degree heat, but something in there made me exhausted - hence the nap.

It was a Saturday after all, so I just went with it.

But what if that afternoon crash hits you and you can't take a nap?

What if it's a consistent fixture in your life?

What can you do about it?

Well, keep on reading because that's exactly where I'm going with this week's newsletter. Let's get cracking...

First, let's kick things off with some good news about an afternoon crash.

You are NOT lazy, and you are NOT broken.

The afternoon dip is a documented physiological event.

Timothy Monk spent his career at the University of Pittsburgh studying body clocks and how human performance rises and falls across the day.

In 2005, he compiled that evidence into a review for Clinics in Sports Medicine and reported something that surprises most people:

The mid-afternoon drop in alertness and performance appears even in people who have eaten no lunch at all, and even when they have no idea what time it is (1).

So the sandwich isn't the villain.

Like, c'mon, how could something so delicious be so evil?

Your body clock schedules a dip in the early afternoon whether you feed it or not.

What you actually control is the depth of that dip. Whether it's a shallow twenty minutes where you switch to easier work, or a two-hour shutdown where you read the same paragraph four times and start googling flights to somewhere quiet.

There are five habits that decide which scenario you get.

Habit One: Protect The Night Before

The crash you feel at 2 pm was largely decided at 11 pm the previous night.

Hans Van Dongen and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania conducted one of the most-cited sleep studies ever published in the journal Sleep in 2003.

Forty-eight healthy adults were randomly assigned to 4, 6, or 8 hours in bed per night for 14 consecutive nights, under continuous laboratory monitoring (2).

Restricting sleep to 6 hours or less produced cognitive performance deficits equivalent to up to two nights of total sleep deprivation.

Not one bad night. Two!

The part that should make you sit up straight and take notice is what the participants reported ⤵

Their subjective sleepiness ratings rose sharply at first, then more or less plateaued, while their actual performance continued to decline day after day.

They felt roughly the same, but they were not the same.

You cannot self-assess your way out of this one.

Six hours feels survivable, which is exactly why it's so easy to keep doing.

Most people can survive on 6 hours of sleep per night, but there's a gigantic chasm between surviving and thriving!

What to do: treat your bedtime as a fixed appointment rather than whatever's left over after the day finishes with you.

A minimum of 7 hours at a consistent time is your benchmark. It is the single highest-leverage thing on this list, and it's also the one everybody skips because it doesn't feel like doing something.

So get your butt to bed and sleep at a reasonable hour. That's the best piece of advice I'll ever give you, mostly because going to sleep as an adult feels like a legit drug 😂

Habit Two: Choose a Breakfast That Doesn't Set a Trap

There's a specific pattern behind much of the afternoon fatigue, and researchers have now measured it in ridiculous detail.

Patrick Wyatt and his team analysed data from 1,070 people who took part in the PREDICT trial, which was published in Nature Metabolism in 2021.

Everyone wore a continuous glucose monitor, and between them they ate over 8,600 standardised meals (3).

That's a lot of meals!

What they found had very little to do with the sugar spike everyone worries about. It was about what happens after it ⤵

The dip in blood glucose 2 to 3 hours after a meal predicted what came next far better than the peak did.

Compared with those who had the smallest dips, those with the largest dips reported about 9% more hunger, ate their next meal roughly 24 minutes sooner, put away about 75 extra calories at that meal, and about 312 extra calories over the following 24 hours.

They also rated themselves as slightly less alert.

A rise, a dip, then hunger and fog.

Which is a pretty accurate description of how most people feel three hours after a bowl of cereal or a smoothie that's basically pudding in a cup.

Protein changes the shape of that curve.

A randomised crossover trial with 35 participants, published in Nutrition Journal in 2015, compared breakfasts containing 30 g and 39 g of protein against a low-protein pancake breakfast with just 3 g (4).

The higher-protein meals produced smaller glucose and insulin swings across the morning, and people felt noticeably fuller.

There's a signal worth hanging your hat on.

Then a randomised crossover study in the Journal of Dairy Science in 2024 took 30 young women who ate either a high-protein dairy breakfast, a carb-heavy breakfast of identical calories, or nothing at all (5).

Concentration test scores were 3.5 percentage points higher after the protein breakfast than after skipping it.

The carb-heavy breakfast?

No such benefit.

Now, that's one study, in one group of people, with a modest effect.

So I'm not going to oversell it, but it's pointing in exactly the same direction as everything else, so it's helping us get closer to 2+2=4.

What to do: aim for 30 to 40 g of protein at breakfast and let your carbs turn up with some fibre attached.

Eggs, Greek yoghurt, cottage cheese, last night's leftovers, or a protein shake if your mornings are chaos.

Quick test for you... If your breakfast could plausibly be served as a dessert, that's your first lever to yank on 😂

As delicious as those breakfast cereals are, or a scrumptious croissant, it's not ideal first thing. Unless you're on holidays, then croissants are mandatory.

Habit Three: Move Before You Snack

When the crash lands, the vending machine starts making a genuinely persuasive argument.

Fun story...

Back when I worked in a gym in Clapham, London, the vending machine got refilled with protein bars. Now you'd think this was common practice for a gym; well, you'd be wrong.

But the best part is that they were cheap; I wanna say something like £1.50. When I noticed, I stood there for 10 minutes and emptied the machine 😂

Weeks later, I did it again. Yes, bit of a c*nt move, but I was young and obsessed with protein 😂

Getting back to the serious stuff.

There's a brilliant old experiment that settles it.

Robert Thayer, a psychologist at California State University, published a study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1987 (6).

So we're going back almost 40 years.

18 volunteers, on 12 randomly chosen days, either ate a candy bar or walked briskly for 10 minutes.

They then rated their energy, tiredness and tension over the following 2 hours while going about their normal day.

The results ⤵

Walking produced higher energy and lower tension, and the effect held for the full 2 hours.

The candy bar gave a quick energy lift and a drop in tiredness.

An hour later, however, that had completely flipped.

More tired, less energy, and more tension than the walk.

It's a small self-report study from the eighties, so I'm not putting all my eggs into a hypothetical basket, but it captures something you already know in your bones.

The sugary snack pays out instantly but charges interest within the hour.

The walk does the opposite.

What to do: when the crash hits, set a 10-minute timer and get outside before you decide whether you actually want the biscuit.

More often than not, you won't.

And if you still do, at least you've earned it 😉

Habit Four: Get Some Real Light Into Your Eyes

That 10-minute walk is also quietly doing a second job.

Light is the main signal your body clock uses to work out what time it is and whether you're supposed to be alert or winding down.

Yep, it ain't your brain reading your watch; it's light.

And where do most of us spend the entire afternoon?

Indoors. Under a ceiling. Effectively telling our brain that dusk arrived early.

So researchers asked an obvious question.

If you flood that moment with light instead, can you pull someone back out of the dip?

A team in Brussels ran exactly that experiment and published the results in PLOS ONE in 2015 (7).

25 healthy, well-rested adults were tested on a task-switching challenge three times in a single day. Morning, after lunch, and late afternoon.

In the control conditions, accuracy dropped after lunch exactly as you'd expect.

Two things wiped that drop out ⤵

A 30-minute nap.

Or 30 minutes of bright light.

Both came with less fatigue and steadier attention, and the light also improved how fast people switched between tasks.

Worth knowing before you glance up at your office lights and decide you're already covered...

Indoor lighting sits at a tiny fraction of outdoor daylight, even on a miserable grey day in February.

What to do: get outside for 10 minutes somewhere between midday and 2 pm.

Eat lunch outdoors, take a call while walking, or just stand there like a slightly odd person absorbing the sun's rays.

If you genuinely can't get out, park yourself next to the brightest window you own and stare out longingly like you're missing your favourite TV show.

Habit Five: Give Caffeine a Curfew

Right, let's wrap things up with the fifth and final habit.

The 3 pm coffee that rescues today is very often the reason tomorrow needs rescuing.

Let me explain...

Christopher Drake and colleagues at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit gave 12 healthy sleepers 400 mg of caffeine, roughly 2 to 3 cups of coffee, either at bedtime, 3 hours before bed, or 6 hours before bed (9).

That's a hefty f*cking dose of caffeine!!

I can imagine they looked something like this.

Caffeine taken a full 6 hours before bedtime reduced objectively measured total sleep by more than an hour.

And the pattern from habit one shows up again ⤵

Their own sleep diaries suggested they hadn't noticed a thing.

They felt like they'd slept fine, but their sleep monitors disagreed.

So the afternoon coffee 'fixes' today's crash, but quietly shortens tonight's sleep, which deepens tomorrow's crash, and then justifies tomorrow's coffee.

It's a very polite little trap.

What to do: set a cut-off around 8 hours before bed and hold the line.

In bed at 10:30 pm? That's a 2:30 pm last call.

If caffeine hits you hard, pull it earlier still.

Yes, this one hurts. As a fully paid-up coffee obsessive, I'm aware I've just made an enemy of half of you ☕

Where this leaves you

Notice that habits one and five are the same habit viewed from opposite ends of the day.

The crash isn't a moment; it's a loop.

You don't need a continuous glucose monitor, a wearable, or a spreadsheet to run this.

Information is useful, and I'll always take more of it over less, but the data exists to inform your decisions, not to make them for you.

If you fix your sleep, front-load your protein, walk in daylight, and stop drinking coffee at teatime, you will know within a fortnight whether it worked.

Your own attention span will tell you.

Start with one. Probably the night before, and remember...

If you've got any questions or want some advice, just hit that reply button and I'll get back to you.

I'll catch you next time.

Have a cracking week!

My next email will no doubt be coming from a cold and rainy Ireland... the joys.

Take care,

Mark ✌️

Quote for the day

Mark Gray

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References

1. Monk, Timothy H. "The Post-Lunch Dip in Performance." Clinics in Sports Medicine, vol. 24, no. 2, 2005, pp. e15–e23.
2. Van Dongen, Hans P. A., et al. "The Cumulative Cost of Additional Wakefulness: Dose-Response Effects on Neurobehavioral Functions and Sleep Physiology from Chronic Sleep Restriction and Total Sleep Deprivation." Sleep, vol. 26, no. 2, 2003, pp. 117–126.
3. Wyatt, Patrick, et al. "Postprandial Glycaemic Dips Predict Appetite and Energy Intake in Healthy Individuals." Nature Metabolism, vol. 3, no. 4, 2021, pp. 523–529.
4. Rains, Tia M., et al. "A Randomized, Controlled, Crossover Trial to Assess the Acute Appetitive and Metabolic Effects of Sausage and Egg-Based Convenience Breakfast Meals in Overweight Premenopausal Women." Nutrition Journal, vol. 14, 2015, article 17.
5. Dalgaard, Line B., et al. "A Dairy-Based, Protein-Rich Breakfast Enhances Satiety and Cognitive Concentration Before Lunch in Overweight to Obese Young Females: A Randomized Controlled Crossover Study." Journal of Dairy Science, vol. 107, no. 5, 2024, pp. 2653–2667.
6. Thayer, Robert E. "Energy, Tiredness, and Tension Effects of a Sugar Snack Versus Moderate Exercise." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol. 52, no. 1, 1987, pp. 119–125.
7. Slama, Hichem, et al. "Afternoon Nap and Bright Light Exposure Improve Cognitive Flexibility Post Lunch." PLOS ONE, vol. 10, no. 5, 2015, e0125359.
8. Zhou, Ying, et al. "Does Bright Light Counteract the Post-Lunch Dip in Subjective States and Cognitive Performance Among Undergraduate Students?" Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 9, 2021, article 652849.
9. Drake, Christopher, et al. "Caffeine Effects on Sleep Taken 0, 3, or 6 Hours Before Going to Bed." Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, vol. 9, no. 11, 2013, pp. 1195–1200.

Disclaimer: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Any guidance related to training, nutrition, supplementation, or lifestyle is general in nature and not a substitute for personalised medical advice. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your health routine.