by Tom Rath
One experiment on this topic found that people who consumed more trans-fatty acids were more aggressive and irritable as a result. These findings were so pronounced, one of the researchers suggested that places like schools and prisons should reconsider serving unhealthy foods because they might be dangerous for others in these environments. Even “comfort foods” like baked goods actually have the opposite effect of comfort and are likely to make people more depressed.
Making better dietary choices, on the other hand, can improve your daily health and well-being. Studies suggest that on days when you eat more fruits and vegetables, you feel calmer and happier and have more energy than normal. Every time you decide what to eat, you shape your days and your interactions with others.
Learn to Walk Before You Run
Being active throughout the day is the key to staying energized. Even 30–60 minutes of exercise a day will not cut it if you spend the rest of your day sitting around. Moving around and getting more activity every hour is what will keep you fully charged.
People now spend more time sitting down (9.3 hours) than sleeping in a day. But the human body is not built for a sedentary lifestyle, which creates a host of problems. Even watching your diet and exercising every day is not enough to offset several hours of sitting. A 2014 study estimates that every two hours of sitting cancels out the benefits of 20 minutes of exercise.
When researchers from the National Institutes of Health followed more than 200,000 people for a decade, they found that even seven hours of moderate to vigorous physical activity a week was not enough to protect against the hazards of excessive sitting. Even the most active group they studied — people who exercised more than seven hours every week — had a 50 percent greater risk of death and doubled their odds of dying from heart disease if they were also in the group that sat the most throughout the day.
Keep Sitting From Sapping Your Energy
Sitting may be the most underrated health threat of this generation. It subtly erodes people’s health over time. On a global level, inactivity now kills more people than cigarettes do. A recent study from the Mayo Clinic found that the average American spends more than 15 hours per day sleeping and sitting. Obese men and women spend less than one minute per day engaged in vigorous activity.
Consider how the time you spend sitting down accumulates over the span of a single day. Maybe you sit down for a while to watch the morning news and eat breakfast. Then you have a commute that adds another hour of sitting. After arriving at work, you spend 8 or 10 hours in an office chair. After your commute back home, you have a nice sit-down dinner with family and then watch an hour or two of television before going to bed.
While this is a normal day for some people, I’m hoping you have a bit more activity in your daily routine. When you look at a typical day, you can most likely identify long periods of time when you are seated. What’s not as easy to see is the way this “sitting disease” takes a physical toll.
When you sit down, the electrical activity in your leg muscles shuts off quickly. Your rate of burning calories drops to just one per minute. The enzymes that help break down fat fall by 90 percent. After sitting for two hours, your good cholesterol drops by 20 percent.
However, sitting for several hours a day is almost unavoidable for many people, so the challenge is to build as much movement into your day as possible. Little things like stretching and standing a couple of times every hour make a difference.
Walking increases energy levels by about 150 percent. Taking the stairs burns twice as many calories as walking. Instead of viewing a slightly longer walk as something you don’t have time for, view it as an opportunity to add a little activity to your day.
Study your surroundings to determine how you can reduce completely sedentary time. The way life has become built around convenience means that many of the things you need are now within arm’s reach. So you can sit for long periods without having to move around and interact with others. Try to turn this around by organizing your home and office to encourage movement more than convenience.
Small bursts of activity will do as much for your mind as they will for your physical energy. Regular breaks from mental tasks have been shown to increase both creativity and productivity. You simply think better when you move more. A deluge of research published over the last few years has shown how even brief periods of activity improve learning and attention and help your brain function more effectively.
Measure to Move More
One of the best ways to increase your activity levels is to measure how much you move every day. While this is a golden era for wearable health-tracking devices, you can also accomplish this goal with an inexpensive pedometer. As part of one experiment, when people were assigned to wear a pedometer, they walked an extra mile per day, compared with a control group. What’s more, participants in this group saw their overall activity levels go up by 27 percent as a byproduct of measuring their movement.
When I first started tracking my daily activity in 2009 using a small clip-on device called a Fitbit, my typical day consisted of just 5,000 steps. Even though I considered myself fairly active at the time, I had no idea how sedentary my lifestyle had become. A year after I started tracking my movement, I was averaging 8,000 steps per day. Today, I have a rule for myself that I need to hit 10,000 steps before I go to sleep, even on days filled with travel in cars or on planes.
On my best days, when I’m using a homemade workstation I built atop an old treadmill, I get about 30,000 steps a day. While this may sound like a lot of activity to squeeze into a day, I usually get far more work done on these days because all that walking boosts my energy levels. Each night before I go to bed, the last thing I look at is my total step and distance count for the day. This number has become my single best gauge for whether I had a good day or a sluggish and stressful day.
Based on the research I’ve studied, 10,000 steps per day is a good target for overall activity. This equates to about five miles, which is not as intimidating as it sounds once you start to add up all your daily movement. At the other end of the spectrum, people who walk fewer than 5,500 steps a day are considered sedentary. Fortunately, going from the low end of this continuum to the recommended 10,000 steps can lead to significant health benefits in the short term as well as the long run.
Get a 12-Hour Charge in 20 Minutes
You may have noticed how being active can boost your daily well-being. An experiment on this topic suggests that the improvement in mood may be even more durable over time than I would have guessed. When researchers assigned one group of participants in a study to do 20 minutes of a moderate-intensity workout, they found that the participants had a much better mood immediately following the exercise than a control group who did not exercise. What surprised researchers was how long this increase in mood lasted. Those who exercised continued to feel better throughout the day. Even two, four, eight, and twelve hours later, they were in a better mood than the control group.
Working out in the evening is better than no activity at all, but if you work out late in the day, you essentially sleep through and miss the boost in mood that exercise produces. The more activity you get the morning, the less likely that 12-hour mood boost will go to waste. Activity early in the day could also help you burn more calories throughout the day.
Instead of thinking about exercise in the morning as something that will drain your energy, as it sometimes does over the first few days of a new routine, keep in mind that it will eventually give you more energy throughout the day. Even brief activity can produce major gains in creativity and productivity.
You simply think better when you are active. “Research shows that when we exercise, blood pressure and blood flow increase everywhere in the body, including the brain. More blood means more energy and oxygen, which makes our brain perform better,” explained the University of Illinois’s Justin Rhodes. What’s more, activating these pathways in the brain and body does not require extraordinary effort.
Moving more throughout the day starts with simple changes. Walk and stand in meetings to keep focused and energized. Use a headset so you can move around while you’re on the phone. If possible, finding a way to work on your computer while standing or walking is even better. The key is to start engineering a little activity into your routine today.
Sleep Longer to Achieve More
While growing up in a hardworking city in the Midwest, I learned that needing sleep was a sign of weakness. The adults I looked up to constantly boasted about running on limited sleep. I now understand that this stemmed from a good-natured work ethic, but it caused me to view sleep as the very first expense I should cut out of my day.
Over the last decade, however, I have learned that one less hour of sleep is not equal to an extra hour of achievement or enjoyment. Instead, the exact opposite occurs. When you miss an hour of sleep, it decreases your well-being, productivity, health, and ability to think. Yet sleep continues to be the first thing people sacrifice. I fell into this trap for many years, until I realized my assumptions about sacrificing sleep were in direct conflict with a great deal of research.
When I read K. Anders Ericsson’s landmark studies of elite performance, I noticed that many people overlooked a factor that significantly influenced performance. While many concentrated on his findings relevant to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, the other factor that differentiated top performance was sleep. The best performers in these studies slept for 8 hours and 36 minutes per night on average. The average American, in contrast, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes of sleep on weeknights.
Ericsson’s studies of elite performers — which included musicians, athletes, actors, and chess players — also suggest that resting more frequently boosts achievement. Much like the most effective workers I discussed earlier, elite performers in these professions also work in bursts. Ericsson found that they take frequent breaks to avoid exhaustion and to ensure that they fully recharge. This allows them to keep improving and perfecting their craft.
When you work on a task for too long, it degrades your performance. To avoid diminishing returns, work in bursts, take regular breaks, and make sure that you get enough sleep. The next time you need an extra hour of energy, try adding an hour of sleep.
Don’t Show Up for Work After a Six-Pack
The less you sleep, the less you can achieve. A study from Harvard Medical School found that lack of sleep is costing the American economy $63 billion a year in lost productivity alone. One of the study’s authors noted, “Americans are not missing work because of insomnia. They are still going to their jobs but they’re accomplishing less because they’re tired. In an information-based economy, it’s difficult to find a condition that has a greater effect on productivity.”
When you’re working without sufficient sleep, you are a different person — and it shows. One study suggests that losing 90 minutes of sleep can reduce daytime alertness by nearly one-third. Amid all the things you need to do in a day, losing this much of your normal alertness creates a serious deficit.
To put this in perspective, think about it from someone else’s standpoint. The person I want to fly my airplane, teach my children, or lead the company I work for tomorrow is the one who sleeps soundly tonight. Yet people in these essential roles are often the ones who think they need the least sleep. A full one-third of workers may be getting fewer than six hours of sleep on a typical night. In some cases, the consequences go far beyond lost productivity.
Sleepless driving can be just as dangerous as driving drunk. One scientist who studied this extensively claims that four hours of sleep loss produces as much impairment as a six-pack of beer. An entire night of sleep loss is equivalent to a blood alcohol level of 0.19 percent, which is double most legal limits for intoxication. There is a good reason why doctors and pilots now have mandated periods of rest before working. If you look at major transportation incidents involving cars, trains, and planes, sleeplessness is a common cause of accidental deaths.
Get a Vaccine for the Common Cold
Sleeping well may have even more practical value when it comes to preventing the common cold. As part of one study, participants agreed to be quarantined and given nasal drops containing rhinovirus (the common cold). Researchers had tracked these participants’ sleep quality for fourteen nights prior to administering the rhinovirus. The subjects were then monitored for the next five days to see if they developed a cold.
The results showed that participants who averaged fewer than seven hours of sleep a night before being exposed to the rhinovirus were nearly three times as likely to catch a cold following exposure. This experiment also revealed that total time in bed was not the most important metric. As you have probably experienced, you can spend eight hours tossing and turning in bed and get just six hours of good sleep.
For that reason, the researchers also graded participants’ sleep quality, or “sleep efficiency,” and assigned a score to each person. This calculation factored in what time people went to sleep in relation to when they awoke, how much time they spent in bed before falling asleep, how many times they woke during the night, and how long they were up throughout the night. The sleep efficiency metric was an even more powerful predictor of which participants developed a cold.
Study participants who had lower sleep efficiency over the 14-day period before exposure to the rhinovirus were 5.5 times as likely to develop a cold. This compares with the threefold increase based solely on duration of sleep. As with other areas of health, quality of sleep beats quantity by a wide margin. Even though you cannot see what’s going on inside your body, it’s clear that a sound night of sleep has a direct effect on your near-term physiological health.
Fight Light, Heat, and Noise
While getting seven to eight hours of sound sleep each night is easier said than done, there are adjustments you can make to improve your odds of a good night’s sleep. And what you do in the hours before you go to bed could matter most.
More than 90 percent of Americans use electronic communications in the hour before they go to bed. Allowing such stressors into your pre-sleep time is only going to keep you awake. A 2014 study suggests that late-night smartphone use is bad for your work the following day. This research found that using a smartphone late at night not only leads to poor sleep but also creates fatigue and lower engagement in the workplace.
The light from electronic devices alone can suppress your melatonin levels by as much as 20 percent, which is a direct threat to sleep quality. To avoid that, impose a moratorium on all electronic devices in the hour before your normal bedtime. Be cautious about bright light from any sources in the hours leading up to your bedtime. While natural light in the middle of the day can lead to better sleep and is good for productivity, dimming lights throughout the evening can help you sleep better.
Creating the right environment in your bedroom can give you a head start on a good night’s sleep. It is easier to sleep in a room that is a few degrees cooler than the temperature you are accustomed to throughout the day. The reduced temperature prevents your natural body clock from waking you up in the middle of the night.
The same principle applies to noise. If your sleep is often disrupted by random sounds, use a white-noise app or device to keep noises from waking you throughout the night. Creating a routine in which you eliminate as much variance as possible is critical for a good night of sleep.
Prioritize seven to eight hours of high-quality sleep ahead of all else. You will be more likely to have a good workout, get more done at your job, and treat your loved ones better when you put sleep first. Keep in mind that every hour of sleep does not cost you in terms of efficiency. Instead, it will give you a positive charge for the upcoming day.
Eat, Move, and Sleep to De-Stress
Of all the ways that eating, moving, and sleeping well influence your health, how they can buffer against stress may be the most remarkable. Scientists have known for some time that stressors accumulate and contribute to agin
g at a cellular level. Telomeres, which are protective caps at the ends of your chromosomes that affect how quickly cells age, protect your cells from stressors. As these telomeres shorten and their structural integrity weakens, cells age and die.
Telomeres shorten as you age, and they have also been shown to decrease in length as a result of stress. A team of University of California, San Francisco researchers was surprised by the degree to which the shortening of telomeres can be slowed — even in the face of stressors. As part of a remarkable yearlong study, 239 women provided blood samples for telomere measurement and reported on stressful events that occurred throughout the year. Researchers also tracked their eating, moving, and sleeping patterns during the study.
The researchers found that women who were exposed to more stressors throughout the year saw significant reduction in telomere length. This in itself was notable, as it was the first study to show that stressors can create substantial changes in just one year. However, when researchers looked at the group of women who maintained healthy lifestyles — in how they ate, moved, and slept — the accumulation of life stressors did not lead to significant shortening of telomeres. As lead author Eli Puterman summarized, the results suggest that “keeping active and eating and sleeping well during periods of high stress are particularly important to attenuate the accelerated aging of our immune cells.”
Keep Stress From Snowballing
When wet and heavy snow falls on my sidewalk, I know that I need to start shoveling well before the snowfall ends. If I wait too long, the snow will be too deep and heavy for me to shovel. There is also likely to be a layer of ice at the bottom that is almost impossible to crack through. Stress accumulates in a similar manner.