The attack of the 2pm daily crash!

Every day, it doesn't matter how big or small, leafy green or protein-enriched my lunch is, I always have this crash in the early afternoon between 1-3 pm. I have the least amount of energy and can barely focus...almost as if I wanted to just take a nap. What gives?

Has my 9-5:30 weekday office lifestyle led me to fall into this rut? I guess being in a habit of sitting 5 times a week for hours at a time is inhibiting me from having any energy during the middle of the day. If I were to graph a chart of my daily energy levels on a scale of 1 to 10...this is probably what it would look like:

Yeah, assuming the energy from after 11:00pm is probably on weekends where I might get a small spike of energy...i'm pretty sure this is how I feel on most days. If only I can get that sunken level of energy in the middle to even go up a few points slightly, I'd feel much better. 

Hoping that my change of schedule for RISD classes will help...hoping to get a few afternoon workouts in to help boost my mid-day energy levels and trick my body into thinking it needs to be more alert around 2:00pm.

I feel that your body maintains some sort of "energy time clock" where your body memorizes when you tend to use the most energy, then saves up your energy for those points in the day. For example, I always have workouts in the evening after 6:00pm, and have recently been doing a lot of workouts around the 7-8am time period. Also, I'm used to waking up at almost the same time everyday (6:30/7am) and getting ready for work, so my body has adapted to being away at this time.

Thus, my body has prepped itself to be full of energy at these time periods and regardless of whether or not I go to the gym or am just standing around being bored, I feel I have boundless amounts of energy or at least feel very alert. On the flip side, I'm so used to just sitting at a desk on my butt between the hours of 11:00am-5:00pm, so of course my body will adapt to not using any physical energy at these hours. Hence even on weekends where I am not sitting down half the time, I still feel the need to crash. (Yet I don't even though I feel like I should take naps...maybe I should?)

The moral of the story is, if you're feeling crashed at certain points in the day, start finding ways to trick your body into thinking it needs more energy at that point in the day. I'm trying to walk around the office more...at least once classes start my afternoons will be more varied than on my butt at the desk.