Why Breakfast May Be The Silent Killer Of Your Productivity

Seems like every parent and health practitioner told me this piece of wisdom growing up. I assumed they meant that having breakfast was important because breakfast jumpstarted our metabolism first thing in the morning. As long as I ate something in the morning, I was ok. Just getting the engine running.

I later learned that breakfast isn’t the most important meal of the day just because it jumpstarts your metabolism. It’s the most important meal because it’s very easy to mess it up and throw off your entire day. What you eat for breakfast matters more than you may think.

Cereal, oatmeal, toast, muffins, and pastries tend to be some of the most highly consumed breakfast foods. It just so happens that these foods tend to be very carbohydrate rich.

Carbohydrates, especially refined carbohydrates like breads, pastas, and snack foods, get broken down in the body into glucose aka sugar, increasing our blood sugar levels. The problem isn’t that these carbohydrates break down into sugar, although too many carbohydrates, especially of the wrong kind, is not great for your health or energy. The problem is the time in which we are getting them and the amount of them.

When we wake up in the morning, our levels of cortisol at their highest. Cortisol is what allows us to wake up first thing in the morning and is also known as our stress hormone. Cortisol also increases our blood sugar levels, so when we wake up in the morning, cortisol is already at work raising our blood sugar.

Now imagine eating that bagel and cream cheese. You are literally throwing gasoline on the fire. Those refined carbohydrates will break down into even more sugar, spiking your blood sugar levels. The higher the spike in blood sugar, the deeper the crash later, which you may experience as brain fog, fatigue, lethargic, headaches, or the “midday slump.”

The crash can often persist for much longer than we desire, forcing us to get more caffeine or try to push through the slump. This is not helpful when trying to be a productive as possible. If you can’t count on your energy to be there when you need it, don’t count on being as productive as you could be.

Breakfast is an important meal of the day and you can leverage it to boost your brain performance and energy consistently throughout the day.

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