After a hard day at the office, where you were focused intently on a challenging project, you may consider a choice on the way home: impulsively splurge on a fancy dinner as a reward for that cerebral slog or save that bit of cash as planned—perhaps putting it toward a relaxing vacation next month. Despite any frugal inclinations, your weary noggin may not be able to rally your normal level of willpower, according to a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the study involving 52 healthy adults, researchers found that six hours of challenging cognitive tasks fatigued a part of participants' brains involved in higher thinking and willpower—the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC)—and increased their impulsiveness. The finding suggests that real-life scenarios, such as having a mentally taxing day at work, may have critical but unappreciated impacts on people’s economic decisions. It also may point to the need for more brain-resting periods throughout a workday.
“The number and duration of work breaks could be adapted to avoid any dramatic LPFC dysfunction,” the authors of the paper conclude. And, they note, if employees have control over their own work breaks, they might instinctively avoid this brain drain, as researchers saw in a control group.
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