Schaff: Productivity consistent with exercise

They typically sit in front of you in class, barrage your professor with questions and do 80 percent of your group projects. They typically sit in front of you in class, barrage your professor with questions and do 80 percent of your group projects. They all suffer from my disease. That is, I’m another college student afflicted by the scourge known as “productivity obsession,” and I might have stumbled upon a way to assuage an important symptom.

You might know us (disparagingly, perhaps) as the breed that compulsively evaluates everything we do based on marginal benefit — the ones who can’t help but max out our academic credits each term, carry around ever-morphing to-do lists and feel uncomfortable during holidays at the idea of sitting around and doing nothing (I’m sorry, but listening to Uncle Charlie’s failed-but-he-doesn’t-know-it Christmas dinner jokes doesn’t exactly make for adequate summer fellowship application preparation). Oh, and we also tend to have high life expectations and grade-point averages.

At first glance, the productivity-obsessed might seem invincible. The popularity of such a false belief might serve my interest, but since universities supposedly pride themselves on truth-telling (except when it’s about their budget), I might as well dish some out. The fact is, allowing for the variability that characterizes human behavior, productivity obsession often carries a significant negative side effect — our kryptonite if you will: We consentingly let our bodies fall into disrepair.

With our eyes fixated on the frontiers of our individual production possibilities, we ignore the need to properly maintain the major factor of production — our health. Or we recognize the harm we’re doing and rationalize it. Or we simply don’t care. If pressed about humans’ ability to live forever, we would of course laugh in your face, citing the life expectancy rate and discrediting cryogenics, but nevertheless we act as if we believe in unlimited lifespan, at least for ourselves. Pursuing productivity day after day, we fill our blood with stress hormones and leave our muscles atrophying, building ourselves greater chances to quickly develop major health problems. Convincing us to do otherwise is beyond difficult — but absolutely necessary.

Implementing a healthy regimen of diet, sleep and exercise requires the input of energy, thought and time. The productivity-obsessed are, indeed, capable of utilizing such resources; it’s just that we ascribe to them a sky-high premium — the marginal productiveness of an extra activity has to overwhelmingly convince us before we choose to displace other activities in our packed schedule.

For college students like me, healthy living is a hard sell from the marginal productiveness lens. With the specters of exams and post-graduation employment over our heads, the productivity-obsessed hesitate to subtract from Earth’s mandatory 24-hour time budget so as to partake in activities that don’t seem to directly relate to traditional measures of success. Unless you’re vying to become a personal trainer, companies and graduate schools won’t accept you on the basis of a workout resumé; they tend to smile at good grades and relevant work experience. Likewise, for the large idealistic contingent of us hyper-productive folks, no one ever halted epidemics or overthrew dictators by regulating his personal food intake.

Facing the daily onslaught of collegiate responsibilities, healthy habits often occupy a back-burner against more success-related uses of time, like studying for that next exam or gathering participants for that upcoming club function. Consequently, our non-health commitments direct our health behavior. Given the definitively irregular nature of these non-health commitments, we eat irregularly, sleep irregularly and exercise irregularly (if at all).

And society only makes it worse. The widely circulated American hero motif is particularly culpable: People by and large hold to high esteem someone who perseveres toward some greater good through adversity. It makes imposing adversity on our bodies, in the hopes of enhancing productivity, all the more justified, and therefore harder to reverse.

Yet, through all of this, I’ve recently found myself living healthily (per se). I agree — it’s a truly puzzling phenomenon. Despite internal and external productivity pressures that had me more or less ignore my body for countless years, the evidence is undeniable — for weeks now, I’ve been preparing my own meals, eating them three times a day at regular intervals and getting between seven and eight hours of sleep a night, and to my further surprise, I went jogging last weekend (with the predictable out-of-shape huffing and puffing, no doubt). There’s no saying how long this healthy spell will last, but at least in the meantime I can comfortably say I’ve defied the norm for the productivity-obsessed, and I hope more of my kind can do the same.

So here’s the prospective symptom “assuager” you’ve been waiting for. Surely, potential explanations for my change of habits abound (such as not having a meal plan and living farther from campus). But I’d like to think there’s something more substantial in the mix. That is, I’ve recently been overcome by a new revelation courtesy of the neuroscience field, and the work of Pitt faculty is partially responsible. A growing body of research is strongly suggesting that healthy living — particularly exercise — not only significantly benefits the functions of the body (like heart, lungs, liver, etc.), but also of the brain. On the one hand, exercise can stimulate production of new brain cells that aid in memory, and on the other it can slow the normal degeneration of brain volume over time. But most cogently, the evidence asks us to throw out the popular notion — to which I had long subscribed — that there’s some distinction between body health and brain health. In fact, now we know that it’s unreasonable to expect an atrophying body to somehow spare the executive.

And as the productivity-obsessed intimately understand, you cannot optimally balance energy, thought and time without an on-the-ball brain. As a consequence many of us treat our mental endowments as among our most prized possessions. It’s just that we must gain the perspective that, if not carefully managed with healthy habits, our yearning for productivity may be self-compromising.

Write Matt Schaff at matthew.schaff@gmail.com.