Niall Crozier summarises Dr John Briffa’s book on how to boost your performance — in work and general life — by optimising your energy.

 

I don’t have the time to read it — what is the book’s main point?

A Great Day At The Office is based on the premise that however impressive our capability or resilience, flourishing in life and work requires energy. The amount of energy we have available impacts our willpower, physical performance, mental capacity, and mood. The book is about optimising various aspects of lifestyle for energy, in order to improve how its readers feel and function.

 

Who is John Briffa anyway?

A practicing doctor, journalist, and international speaker, Briffa’s consultancy provides wellness training services to organisations, focusing on how dietary and lifestyle factors can treat and prevent health issues that erode professional performance.

This plays out in his pragmatic approach, rooted in the reality of the working world, rather than a series of unobtainable edicts you’d have to dedicate your life to following. He also spends a large chunk of each chapter backing up his points with the various underlying scientific concepts and supporting research for the more cynical among us (i.e. me).

 

What topics are covered?

The book is roughly split into two halves (to use my own vehicle analogy); ‘fuel’ — what and when to eat and drink — and various ‘maintenance’ activities (e.g. sleep).

Chapters 1–3 ‘fuel’

  • Eating
  • Drinking
  • Fasting

Chapters 4–10 ‘maintenance’

  • Sleep
  • Light
  • Exercise
  • Sound
  • Breathing
  • Psychology
  • Habits

It covers the key areas of health and energy at stake, and then recommends some practical courses of action.

 

What are the main takeaway activities?

Eating

Sustained levels of energy require stable levels of sugar in the bloodstream. As a result, a ‘primal’, unprocessed diet is favoured. Foods like meat, fish, eggs, nuts and seeds are needed to stabilise blood sugar and insulin levels, alongside fruit and (particularly non-starchy) veg for nutrients. The aim is to utilise stored fat rather than sugar for energy where possible, prioritising foods that are appetite-sating to stave off hunger, and — where relevant — avoiding foods which your digestive system may be sensitive to (e.g. casein in milk, gluten from grains). Finally, if you’re eating the right things, quantity doesn’t particularly matter.

These principles end up resulting in the following kinds of meals:

  • Breakfasts of full fat Greek yogurt, berries, nuts and seeds, or smoked salmon and eggs
  • Lunches and dinners of omelette / frittata, salad (bulked out with chops/cold meats/fish, egg, avocado, cheese, hummus and other deli items), strews, meaty soups, bread-less scotch eggs (minced pork round boiled egg, chilled then fried), or meat, non-starchy vegetables and a few new potatoes. Even the odd weekend takeaway can be redeemed by laying off sides like rice, chips, noodles, or naan.
  • Snacks ranging from raw veg with hummus or guacamole, nuts, seeds, olives, biltong, cold meat, hard-boiled eggs or a little dark chocolate.

 

Drinking

To avoid dehydration, keep water in sight and drink enough of it to keep urine pale yellow and not odorous. Tea and coffee, as well as containing plenty of water, are rich in polyphenols which are health promoting. However, as per the above, for many people they’re best without milk. Unsurprisingly, sugary drinks are not good news from a blood sugar regulation point of view, nor are smoothies and fruit juice.

Finally; alcohol. Given its potential to damage health, and its disruption of sleep (despite being a depressant) by causing blood sugar to spike then crash in the middle of the night, it makes sense to have a rule about alcohol e.g. no drinking mid-week, no more than X drinks. Sticking to spirits (with their low sugar content) and without sugary mixers, as well as reducing overall intake by having a glass of water between drinks will help limit the damage, as will ensuring that you don’t drink alcohol while hungry or thirsty.

 

Fasting

As well as maintaining energy, when and how often we eat is critical to curbing hunger — which makes us easily annoyed, lowers mood, and saps willpower.

Healthy snacking on the foods recommended above, is good for keeping hunger at bay. These should be easily available but not visible (e.g. in a drawer). Intermittent fasting — either every day (only eating within a constrained window of 12 hours or less), or a couple of days a week (see the 5:2 of previous fame) is suggested for some as a way of limiting the impacts of hunger while controlling intake.

 

Sleep

We all need different amounts of sleep, but if you’re relying on an alarm clock, weakening feeling tired, dependent on caffeine, using a snooze button, having difficulty staying awake all day and/or catching up on sleep on holidays, you’re not getting enough!

A range of solutions are proffered:

  • Thinking — an attitude of valuing sleep rather than viewing it as unproductive time will aid relaxation, as will conducting a ‘brain dump’ to empty your mind.
  • Optimising — getting to bed earlier, taking advantage of the fact that the bulk of growth hormone secretion typically occurs before midnight.
  • Napping for 15–20 minutes during the day restores energy and improves performance, although any longer will result in entering deep sleep from which waking is unpleasant.
  • Fuelling — limit caffeine late in the day if you’re sensitive to it, and stabilise blood sugar with the right foods and limited alcohol to avoid sleep disturbance.
  • Shutting down and out — to avoid disturbances and bright lights, set times to turn devices off (e.g. within 2 hours of bed) or dim their displays, and consider using eye-shades and earplugs. Sleep apps can also be useful (e.g. Pzizz — which uses binaural beats, voice, music, sounds to aid getting to sleep).

 

Light

Our mental functioning, mood, sleep, physical health and body composition are impacted by light. This has two strands — our levels of Serotonin, and our levels of Vitamin D, both of which can be improved in the UK with even 20 minutes outside at lunchtime in the brighter months.

Outside the March — September window, while eggs, oily fish and supplements are an option for increasing Vitamin D, large quantities are required to have any real impact. Alternatives include ‘light therapy devices’ which act as sunlight substitutes to promote serotonin and vitamin D levels.

 

Exercise

Knowing the benefits of cardio and resistance training is the easy bit, accruing them within a busy lifestyle is somewhat more difficult. Briffa recommends four strategies for this:

  1. Walking more on the basis that it’s pretty much as good as running the same distance in terms of the fitness, brain function (particularly ‘executive control’ tasks like planning, multi-tasking), back pain reduction benefits it provides.
  2. Planning exercise ahead to avoid it getting pushed out, even using simple strategies like getting off public transport a stop early to force yourself to walk/jog the last section
  3. Having a very short, daily ‘no excuses’ workout ensuring that even the busiest days with no gym access have a base level of exercise. 12 minutes and an elastic exercise band are all that’s required for his suggested example. The first half is split into a minute each of press-ups, one-armed rows, shoulder presses, bicep curls, tricep dips, and situps. The second half is split into three minutes each of jogging on the spot and squats. No excuses.
  4. Use High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) where appropriate, given its ability to improve insulin sensitivity, cardio fitness, and metabolism of fat in a highly time efficient manner. This is contrasted with most regular cardio which is unlikely to help with fat loss (due to increased appetite, increased likelihood of being sedentary at other times, the slowing of metabolism, and often not burning that many calories).

 

Other maintenance:

Sound can be used in a range of ways to optimise how we feel and function. Some of this is intuitive (using upbeat music to get in a resourceful state prior to a task or exercise) and well-publicised (using classical music to improve intellectual performance, as it improves our ability to hold multiple pieces of information simultaneously in short term memory). However, the use of ‘designer music’ such as ‘binaural beats’ whereby playing one frequency of sound in one ear, and a different frequency in the other allows wavelengths of the brain to be coaxed either higher to increase engagement, or lower to reduce anxiety, was new to me.

Breathing slowly, into the diaphragm (rather than chest) can promote feeling calm, focused, energised and productive in the short term, as well as improving various disease markers in the longer term. Briffa recommends practicing a routine such as inhaling for two seconds, exhaling for four, and pausing for a further four.

Psychology as well as physiology has a role to play in optimising our emotional and physical health and energy, particularly in promoting what is referred to as ‘coherence’, the extent to which our hearts and brains are in sync. High levels of coherence are associated with ‘flow’, a resourceful, absorbed mental state where high quality work can be completed quickly, with ease, without being conscious of time passing.

Coherence can be improved with various physical habits already referred to (e.g. diaphragmatic breathing), but also by consciously evoking any positive emotion. A number of daily practices are suggested eliciting positive emotions — carrying out random acts of kindness to evoke feelings of generosity, using positive self-talk to reflect on what’s gone well at the start and end of each day in order to evoke a more resourceful state, and practicing thankfulness at the start of the day to reflecting on what we are grateful for to evoke a feeling of gratitude).

Habits being sustained, not started, is the challenge. Emphasis is placed on avoiding reliance on will-power by making lifestyle changes which mean that self-control is not required. Focusing on the reason for creating/breaking a habit is crucial — thinking about what can be gained from the desired change, and pain that can be avoided, gives the necessary motivation.

In addition, sustaining that change can be made more likely by

  • Getting support — from family, friends, or an other half, who can provide encouragement and accountability
  • Avoiding hunger, which saps willpower,
  • Writing things down — putting appointments of commitments into your schedule, and keeping a log of progress (with the motivation of filling it up and avoiding blank spaces) which can be reviewed on a regular basis,
  • Being realistic — focusing on embedding no more than a couple of habits at once (which will build the belief you can change) and not looking too far ahead (e.g. 1–2 months of sustaining the habit).

Worth a read?

To describe Briffa as ‘not a shrinking violet’ would sell him short. Provided you’re prepared (as I am) to hear him out on his various amusing rants — suncream, ‘health food’, the alleged dangers of red meat — this is a thoroughly enjoyable, useful and actionable book.

On reflection, the one area of energy management it doesn’t address is that of interaction with others. A chapter spent on the neuro-biology of introversion and extroversion — why some people appear to be drained by engaging in certain ways with people, while others become energised — and some practical ways in which to optimise this, could have been very helpful.

 

A Great Day at the Office (2014) by Dr John Briffa is published by Harper Collins.