You can sense it coming, that creeping feeling someone is standing right behind you, breathing on your neck about to sink their teeth in. No, it’s not the office vampire – well, maybe that, too – but rathe
r it’s the routine post-lunch 3 p.m. coma coming to put you down like a chloroform-soaked rag over your crumb-ridden mouth. But I’m here to tell you – those who actually work in public and cannot avoid being seen asleep at the desk – there is a way to break the spell and put that dreaded coma into its own coma and carry on with a good energetic pace through the end of the workday.
There are a few simple things you can avoid, foods and beverages that make you drowsy, as well as smart routines to practice that promote energy. Follow along and learn a thing or two about staying productive near the end of the workday and not having to slap yourself around to stay awake.
Avoid Breads & Dairy
Certain foods, although part of the age-old food pyramid paradigm, are ones that bring you down. Carbs are great, as they give you energy if you’re exercising, but if you’re chowing down on pizza, breads and bagels while you sit at your desk, the snooze monster (a real thing) will be waiting to pull your chair out from underneath you.
Instead of getting a sandwich at lunch, one that is 70 percent bread, eat a salad. If you’re not feeling the salad, Mexican food is usually light on the bread, heavy on the protein – beans, meat, greens – that will give you bursts of energy when you’re back at the desk. Just don’t complain when you have terrible bursts of office gas, the kind that clears out the conference room. You could have had the salad instead, chump.
Eat Clean Green
Aside from salads, there’s a myriad of clean greens you can shovel in your mouth that give you the vitamins and energy you need. Kale, spinach and mixed greens are easy to come by and if you can, grab a green smoothie from the store or have one made fresh. You can make your own smoothies at the office, and it’ll save you a ton of money, too. And they also make salads with chicken nowadays!
Avocados have a long list of health benefits, most of which promote a consistently healthy, coma-free afternoon. You can even exfoliate, if your cubicle walls are high enough. Now there’s a good way to move up the professional ladder!
Walk It Off
The only reason we would recommend eating out for lunch during the workweek is if there were a brisk walk involved. Hopping in the car to go from point A to B, which has a drive-thru line, then back to point A is only going to cramp your style, not to mention your gut and your legs. If you want to get lunch offsite, try to go someplace that is in walking distance. It’ll help you work off the carbs you just ate so you don’t face-plant those pearly whites onto your keyboard when you get back to work.
Even if you do eat at work, don’t spend the entire lunch break sitting, eating and gossiping like a high school princess; finish your food in an appropriate time frame, then save the last bit decompressing from the first half of the day and working off your lunch by going for a short walk. Even if it’s around the building to shoot up drugs, that’s better than going straight back to work without any exercise. OK, don’t shoot up drugs; that’ll actu
ally put you in a worse coma and make your teeth fall out. Just walk. And whistle; it’ll put you in a better mood. Whistle while you walk.
At the Very Least, Stretch
If your break is too short or you’re a slow eater like me, at least do a little stretching to get the blood flowing and muscles loosened. You can’t work productively at your desk if your body is one giant knot, so stretch out the arms and legs, maybe do a push-up or two to avoid crashing into your seat for a power nap like it’s Sunday afternoon and you’re suddenly not wearing pants either.
People in your office might look at you strange and judge you for stretching in the workplace, but trust us, they were already looking at you strange and thinking you were a total wacko long before you started doing jumping jacks in the break room.
Drink Tea & Water, Not Coffee
Coffee is great when you need it. When you don’t and already have plenty of energy, it just wires you up real tight and then drops you like a stone later in the day. So you assume the best way to pick yourself up before you crash again is to drink more coffee? That’s what cocaine addicts do, silly. You need to switch to water and hydrate your body.
Tea will help detox your body, maybe make you poop, and give you a slight awakening to keep you moving calmly through the end of your day. Depending on what kind of tea you drink, certain ones can promote a better efficiency than others. Green is usually the way to go, jasmine especially. Tossing back more cappuccinos and espresso is only going to jack you up long enough for you to crash into the water cooler on the way back to your desk.
Avoid Friday Lunch Drinks
Save it for the end of the race. No marathon runner ever grabbed a margarita at mile marker thirteen and still finished strong. Having drinks at lunch on a Friday, however well deserved, is a recipe for woozy droopy eyes
once you plant your ass back at your desk. Save yourself for happy hour, then get totally demolished in front of your coworkers, grope the secretary and sexually harass the waitress in front of the entire staff. Just let everyone know ahead of time you can’t hold your liquor worth a damn so you will be excused for your actions.
Change Your Desk Setup
If your general response to all these suggestions is that I can go f**k myself because you’re going to eat what you want when you want, that’s just fine and dandy. But, if you’re going to be stubborn with your food and exercise habits, you can at least swap out your desk setup for an inflatable exercise ball or a new age standing desk to keep the body in motion. That way if you start to zonk out, the only place you’re going to end up is the floor, as exercise balls require a bit of balance and remove lazy posture entirely from your work desk.
Finally, if you’re still falling in a coma at work after 3 p.m., it might be time you quit jerking off in the bathroom. It sounds extreme, but extreme times call for extreme measures. Good luck to you.
