Falling behind with work? Stop working and exercise and sleep more!
It happens without fail. With the turn of the weather from pleasant Autumn to freezing Winter, comes the dreaded sickness that will engulf my body into a bedridden mess. I felt the unrelenting plague touch upon me this May — it is truly a moment of helplessness as you can only watch on as you begin to fall sick. And yet, this time around I felt that I would fight it (I’m not sure why) by doing a few counter-intuitive things that ultimately worked.
Coincidentally, I always seemed to have stressful periods of work fall right when temperatures change. What would follow is that I would start to fall behind and begin to increasingly prioritise the work over other aspects of my life — namely exercise and sleep. I mean falling behind on work? No problem, skip gym and gain back an hour. Need even more time? No worries, I can stay up later or wake up earlier to gain back even more time!
This would continue on, all the while the pile of work never really decreasing. This I would be totally aware of, causing me more stress which led to giving up exercise completely and even less sleep. By this time, my body would be extremely vulnerable, and this would signal when I would get struck down by an illness. I called this the feedback loop of death.
The thing with working on a startup now is that the workload and stress is perpetually high so it was alarm bells when winter came. This May, I felt the tell-tale signs — stress and fatigue that sap my energy to the point where I STRUGGLED to get out of bed every morning. My productivity was diminishing and I felt that I was beginning to enter the feedback loop of death — I had already begun to cancel some of my workouts and sleep less.
However, without actually really knowing why this time was different, I decided to try something new. This time around, I tried to listen to my body and work less. Yes, this tactic could have added more stress seeing that the less I worked, the less that I could get done. However, I felt that any additional time spent working was for diminishing returns. How? By remembering what happened last year, and the year before, and so forth.
It didn’t stop there. Struggling to get out of bed? Fine. I’ll just stay in bed and sleep what I needed until I could get out of bed. This meant that I would get about 1–2 extra hours of sleep that I normally wouldn’t. I also double-downed on my exercise, which normally would be the first thing I sacrifice.
It was actually really stressful to commit to the gym while I felt like I was falling behind on work. I would drag myself there, already behind my normal schedule because I had ‘slept in’. It was difficult to focus on my exercises as the moment I was at the gym was the moment I wanted to get out. Tick tock, tick tock, went my mind as the anxiety built as I felt like every second there was time not in the office.
And yet, I persisted. I slept in, and diligently headed to the gym before arriving ‘late’ to the office to begin my day. After actually just a few days, I began to realise that I was feeling better. Much better. The extra sleep allowed me to properly recover whilst the exercise kept me in-shape. And I never actually got sick!
Don’t get me wrong, this routine didn’t allow me to operate at 100%, but 60% of me was better than 0% if I had become bedridden. As a founder, I simply couldn’t be completely out of the action for too long. I felt about 60% for around a week and a half before seemingly experiencing a strong rebound back up to 100%.
So what actually happened? What happened in my body and mind during this counter-intuitive response to falling behind in work? Here are my guesses:
Progress is motivating
In previous years, that feedback loop of death would make everything seem to work against me — sacrificing exercise would mean that I would lose strength, conditioning, aesthetics, which would place greater pressure on me to deliver my work. Of course, the work never ceased so I would only feel more stressed and more sick.
By not ‘losing gains’ in this period, I was able to feel that I was still progressing in my training. This increased my confidence and self-esteem, particularly in this work ‘down-cycle’ — the progress and improvement I experienced in the gym gradually became something very motivating.
In a 2011 Dutch study of more than 7000 adults, found that exercise reduced the risk of developing a mood or anxiety disorder over the following three years, even when considering socioeconomic factors and physical illnesses.
I told myself that if I slip on work, I could not slip on other aspects of my life. At the very least, if I had to look at this period, I could hold my head high on my exercise. I protected this and it worked out (pardon the pun).
Reversing the feedback loop of death
That loop always ended with my succumbing to illness. But this time around, I used the loop to my advantage (albeit unintentionally at the time). By sleeping more, I had more energy to train, and in turn, the training allowed me to get better quality sleep, and so on.
The benefits of sleep and exercise are well documented, but it’s worth exploring again. Sleep is associated with improved cognitive function such as memory and decision-making, and for improved mood and reducing risk of depression. Sleep is when your body heals and repairs itself, regulates hormones, and allows your immune system to function properly.
Without getting into the athletic benefits of exercise, sleep gets the blood flowing, improves your mood by releasing neurochemicals such as endorphins, dopamine, and serotonin. Endorphins are fired in response to pain and stress, and is also released when you laugh. Dopamine motivates us to achieve goals and gives us a surge of pleasure when we achieve these goals. Serotonin flows when you feel important or significant. So as you can see, I was getting myself into a chemical cocktail of awesomeness (the good variety).
Combine exercise with sleep, rinse and repeat and you have a recipe of continual physical and mental benefits. I exercise first thing in the morning, and combining it with a cold shower straight afterwards gives me a mighty high to start a new day.
Motivation to get stronger
An interesting consequence of this change is that it seemingly triggered a greater desire for me to focus on health. I’d considered my interest in health as above average — I ate reasonably healthy, exercised regularly, etc. but never had a great desire to go any further. This began to change rapidly, which surprised even myself.
I have since upped my training from 3 days a week to 6–7 days a week, and experimented with nutrition — first adapting to a ketogenic diet, and now combining keto with intermittent fasting — some days going up to 20 hours of fasting. I am performing everything at personal bests, functioning with a sharpness not achieved prior, and have even lost a couple of allergies along the way!
I must admit that I still struggle to prioritise sleep, but feel that I have a much better read of my body so will sleep (even nap) when I need to. I’ll explore the training (heavier focus on calisthenics) and nutrition in future articles, but I can proudly say that I feel incredible at the moment — leading to longer, better quality work too.
So the next time you feel like you need to drop your sleep and exercise to do more work? Do the opposite for short and long-term benefits.
P.S. Please do your own research on health and nutrition — I have done my own and this is currently working for me although I am always experimenting!
P.P.S. This article is exactly the type of bad-karma/super jinx/wrong feng shui thing to do to get me sick…so let’s hope nothing bad comes from it!
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