(During my time on keto, I didn't feel any significant energy loss below the baseline; but I wonder if reintroducing carbs after being deprived of them for a while could have created a temporary state of high energy?)
But on a small-scale basis: - Eating a big simple-carb-heavy meal will absolutely ruin my energy focus the rest of the afternoon - However if I've been running a deficit and feel low-energy, a moderate meal of complex carbs (ex: bowl of pasta) will give me enough energy for a few hours of high-energy focused work
I've done keto once or twice at various points when I was more into fitness and there's something nice about the consistent levels of energy.
Have you tried going on keto again? I wonder if there's some magic recipe of cycling on-and-off carbs that can fuel extreme bouts of energy without negative health implications
Agreed on big simple-carbs meals; that's a sure-fire way for me to shut down my brain for a couple of hours.
- In both cases I had a hard deadline and a well-defined set of goals, but there was a big gap between "minimum acceptable outcome" and "best possible outcome", with rewards scaling with the outcome. Something back then made me set my sights on the high end of that spectrum.
- I wasn't really blocking other people - if I didn't meet my deadline, I'd suffer some limited (and mostly non-financial) loss, but nobody else's work would be destroyed by this. I.e. in one case my work was irrelevant to anyone but myself, and in the other it was an optional (though strongly desired) dependency.
- I had people to impress. In one case personally, in the other I wanted to make our group look impressive in the local community.
- Both cases have had a significant "like hell I/we can't do it, just hold my beer and watch this" factor. I.e. the deadline was tight, and relevant people didn't believe it could be done in the time remaining.
These factors are a bit harder to reproduce. Most of situations I encounter these days don't have truly hard deadlines ("there's a release next week" is almost never a hard deadline in practice), and yet at the same time involve potential losses to other people (if the release actually happens and I don't deliver, I might derail it). There's little space to go above-and-beyond, in a way that doesn't feel like setting yourself fake goals for the purpose of self-gamification.
I'll be thinking about ways to test these hypotheses and, if any of them turns out to be a significant factor, to engineer my life to make use of it.