You’re missing the distinction between local and global blood glucose. A local low is when one particular area of the brain has used up its supply and has to wait for blood to circulate to replenish it. To prevent that from happening, you’d have to either increase the rate of circulation (ie, exercise in a way that increases heart rate), or increase the global blood glucose concentration to a level that’s too high for the idle portions of the brain. A global low is something most people never experience, since the body stores and releases sugar to keep it from happening.
(I am a type 1 diabetic with various fancy equipment for tracking my blood sugar. I have personal experience as to what various blood sugar concentrations feel like, but they may not be representative of more typical biochemistries.)
If only there was some sort of fluid circulating in the body and providing nutrition to every cells which needs it… oh wait...
If you look at the experiments, like the one with the dogs linked above, a plain sugar drink at the right time improves willpower. These tests were all done on people and animals without diabetes, I can easily believe it won’t work for you.
I didn’t mean to imply that you can’t increase willpower by managing blood sugar, but rather that the effect I described sets a limit on the total amount of benefit you can achieve this way. That is to say, while increasing your blood glucose from 80 to 100mg/dL is benefical for willpower, increasing it from 100 to 200mg/dL is disastrous. And most peoples’ metabolism already maintains it at about the right point.
You’re missing the distinction between local and global blood glucose. A local low is when one particular area of the brain has used up its supply and has to wait for blood to circulate to replenish it. To prevent that from happening, you’d have to either increase the rate of circulation (ie, exercise in a way that increases heart rate), or increase the global blood glucose concentration to a level that’s too high for the idle portions of the brain. A global low is something most people never experience, since the body stores and releases sugar to keep it from happening.
(I am a type 1 diabetic with various fancy equipment for tracking my blood sugar. I have personal experience as to what various blood sugar concentrations feel like, but they may not be representative of more typical biochemistries.)
If only there was some sort of fluid circulating in the body and providing nutrition to every cells which needs it… oh wait...
If you look at the experiments, like the one with the dogs linked above, a plain sugar drink at the right time improves willpower. These tests were all done on people and animals without diabetes, I can easily believe it won’t work for you.
I didn’t mean to imply that you can’t increase willpower by managing blood sugar, but rather that the effect I described sets a limit on the total amount of benefit you can achieve this way. That is to say, while increasing your blood glucose from 80 to 100mg/dL is benefical for willpower, increasing it from 100 to 200mg/dL is disastrous. And most peoples’ metabolism already maintains it at about the right point.
I haven’t seen anything in research suggesting that above-normal sugar level is beneficial, just that below-normal sugar level harms willpower a lot.
If we could be near our best performance all the time, that would be enough.