I found at times I had to adapt and cope at work rather than focus on performance.
Most large organisations now promote wellness as they recognise the detrimental impact work has on their employees health. But the general work environment and schedules don’t leave time and energy for employees to consistently look after themselves.
I remember sitting in wellness training sessions and feeling a deep contempt for the wellness disciples that would happily explain their elaborate daily rituals when they didn’t really have a busy day job.
And now I’m writing this post and you are probably already thinking what I was thinking! Keep reading as I promise there is only practical advice in this post.
The top causes of short-term absence were: Minor illnesses (94%), musculoskeletal injuries (45%) and mental ill health (39%).
Causes of long-term absence were: Mental ill health (63%), acute medical conditions, such as stroke or cancer (51%) and musculoskeletal injuries (51%).
You can see that musculoskeletal injuries i.e. painful back, shoulders, neck, hands, knees and hips plus mental health feature heavily in the absence reasons.
Absence is only the tip of the iceberg as many more people will be affected by these conditions, but still attending work. These conditions affect a person’s ability to be consistently focused and perform at work, but also affect all aspects of life.
I’m not surprised by these survey results, as work for office based employees has fundamentally changed as a reaction to the COVID pandemic.
Home and hybrid working combined with always on digital technology, plus managing a very volatile business world results in long intense working hours.
People are sitting more, moving less (especially on the working at home days), neglecting nutrition and mentally over stimulated by tech and the complexity of roles, that disrupts sleep.
The Monday to Friday working week was from a time when work was compartmentalised to the workplace, but now with digital technology and hybrid working there is little recovery time from work as work and home life have merged. This merging creates unstructured time management, making it harder to allocate specific time for family, friends, nutrition and exercise.
Yet although work has many of the stresses of a high performance sport most people that work in intense roles don’t behave like a professional athlete who practice the structure and habits to perform under stress.
If you said to a professional athlete:
You will train at least 8 hours a day, at least 5 days a week at high intensity
You will train even though your body and mind are fatigued
Nutrition around and during training will be what ever you can find at the sandwich shop or in the fridge
You will hydrate with tea and coffee
You will train in different ways each day to meet the programmes set by multiple coaches
When you finish training rather than rest you will go out to socialise or travel
You will sleep less than 6 hours a night as you have to get up early to commute to training
They would quickly tell you behaving like this will not result in high performance and probably result in injury.
Yet that is what a lot of people’s working routine can look like, but they want and are expected to be consistently high performing.
Time restricted
Not in complete control of their work schedule
Need to invest spare time on social and family life
Are mentally fatigued
Do not like working out or going to the gym
Are less confident about their body and what it can do as they age
Which mean wellness solutions that could boost performance are well meaning but aren’t practical.
The simple but hard to actually do practical answer is to adapt what you have to do every day e.g. eat, hydrate, sleep, move, into a set of performance boosting habits.
I have listened to and tested a lot of wellness advice and recommend there are 7 habits that are practical for most working people to adopt.
If followed 80% of the time these 7 habits will help you perform, feel and look better.
They will over time build a foundation that can motivate you to invest additional time improving your health and longevity.
Often during the working day you don’t get chance to eat much. A sandwich at lunch time may only provide 5-600 calories and that may be all you eat between 7am and 7pm when you finish work and get home or go out for dinner. That is only about 25% of the calories required for the day for a male.
The brain does rely on glucose, which is a type of carbohydrate, as a primary source of energy. Glucose is a simple sugar that is readily used by the brain for energy production. While the brain can use other sources of energy, such as ketone bodies during periods of low carbohydrate intake (such as during fasting or ketogenic diets), glucose is the brain's preferred and most efficient fuel source.
The body typically processes and uses carbohydrate in the form of glucose on a 4 hour cycle. Which means in this work eating scenario, suboptimal processes are supplying energy to the brain which can reduce performance.
Electrolytes also contribute to brain performance as they replace and boost salt in the nervous system which your brain needs to perform optimally.
So neglecting to consume carbohydrate and electrolytes will cause you to feel unfocused and tired while trying to use your brain intensely during work times. Caffeine is used to mask this affect, rather than consume the right nutrition and hydration.
Walking after eating has two benefits. As a habit you have already stopped working to eat, so an additional 10 minutes break for walking is not disruptive. You have to eat so it is a good trigger to remind you to walk.
Walking then both increases your daily activity to help maintain muscle and burn calories to control weight. Plus it stimulates the digestive system to regulate insulin so you don’t feel tired after eating. Which means you don’t get an energy dip after lunch.
As we age beyond around 35 years old the process of sarcopenia kicks in which cause muscle loss. Muscles are critical stabiliser and movers of the body. If protein intake is neglected then stabiliser muscles deteriorate even faster, resulting in back and joint issues.
To maintain mobility stretching for just 5 minutes each day will maintain joint health that can reduce pain. Working requires both sitting and typing on phones and keyboards that puts joints in stress positions over prolonged periods of time. So a small but focused stretching routine will offset that impact so muscle tightness doesn’t accumulate over time causing shoulder, neck, back, hip and knee pain. Which is very distracting during work.
Sleep is critical to daily recovery, so using sunlight and relaxation help the brain trigger good sleep patterns which can be heavily disrupted by brain over stimulation due to the complexity, intensity and stress of work.
Most people cannot go without sleep for more than a few days before experiencing significant cognitive and physical impairments. Severe sleep deprivation is associated with a range of health risks, including an increased risk of mental health issues, cardiovascular problems, and a weakened immune system.
Learning to offset the sleep disruption affects of intense working is critical for short and long term health, performance and longevity.
However in high performance sport, training cycles are organised into blocks that are typically 1 week to 4 weeks long. The reason they do this to manage intensity and the fact that a human body needs time to recover physically and mentally from the stress of training. This is done by creating waves of intensity in each block with a high point followed by a deload period where intensity is reduced to enable recovery.
This has two affects on the athlete it avoids burnout but also incentivises the athlete to perform at maximum effort as they know they get a recovery period. If they could just see constant intensity into the future they would hold back to conserve energy as a survival response.
Work is the same if you know you have 10 weeks of grind before a holiday break then you will naturally hold back to conserve energy and avoid burn out. If you know that every 4th week the intensity will be reduced you can go as hard as you can knowing you don’t need to conserve yourself and you can look forward to doing something you enjoy during that deload time.
In the graph below their daily steps started around 3,000 ,now they average 10,000 which combined with nutrition targets, has resulted in over a 5kgs weight loss, cholesterol returned to normal levels and stress levels reduced to a lower level.
This is without going to the gym or doing more intense exercise (despite my best efforts persuading them to do that).
If you want to start I recommend you start with the two easiest ones. Habits 2 and 3, Hydration and sunlight in the morning to help Sleep.
Then go for habits 4 and 5, Mobility and Walking.
After that it gets harder as your routines learned over many years have to be changed. Habit 1 Nutrition should be next, which will have a big benefit but is a constant battle to stay on track.
Habit 6, Relaxation is very hard as you have to put your phone down!
Habit 7 on Intensity is not completely in your control. If you are a line manager think how you could implement this for your team to give them the permission and space to deload.
If you want to try it yourself, just plan in your diary every 4th week some non meeting time or a half day holiday or a social engagement that you really look forward to.
Try these habits and see how you feel, you may be surprised how big an impact they have. They are a foundation and your first steps to improve your longevity so you can perform, feel and look better as you age.