We’re all familiar with the many benefits of exercise – even the mental health aspect has seen much coverage lately. Yet one benefit that’s often overlooked is the life lessons you can learn. Things like building grit, setting and achieving goals, and embracing failures all seem natural in the context of fitness. These same things come to us less readily in other areas. In fact, fitness is one of the only areas in our life in which we expect to fail regularly.
Pushing your limits in fitness means experiencing one failure after the next. But we learn early on in life not to accept these failures as final. Just because you don’t get the mile time you’re aiming for today doesn’t mean that if you stick with it, you never will.
You can apply these same lessons to any area of your life, and reap the benefits as a consequence.
5 Ways Fitness is a Training Ground for Life | 12 Minute Athlete
Brain Drain
As a shift worker, it’s safe to assume feelings of exhaustion are the result of disrupted circadian rhythms and a lack of sleep. That’s certainly the first place to look. But another factor could also be at play; mental exhaustion.
Chess grandmasters burn up to 6,000 calories a day during tournaments, just by sitting there and thinking.
Just like our muscles need energy to run a marathon or lift heavy things, our brains require energy to complete cognitive tasks.
What to Do When Your Brain Is Too Tired to Think Straight | doist
Clean-Up Time
Sleep scientist Matthew Walker and other experts often talk about how sleep acts like a “clean-up crew” for your brain. They refer to the work of the glymphatic system, where cerebrospinal fluid is pumped through the brain, washing away toxic proteins and other waste.
A new study conducted in mice shows that this waste removal process is not solely based on sleep or wakefulness, but by our circadian rhythms. When the animals were anesthetized all day long, their glymphatic system still only functioned during their typical rest period.
“…these findings suggest that people who rely on cat naps during the day to catch up on sleep or work the night shift may be at risk for developing neurological disorders.”
Key takeaway: Maintain those circadian rhythms.
Circadian Rhythms Help Guide Waste From Brain | Neuroscience News
Snacklisted
A study released last year showed that snacking is a better way to get through the night shift than eating a big meal. But if your snack time typically starts with a trip to the vending machine, you may need some guidance to avoid the post-snack crash.
21 Energy-Boosting Snacks You Can Take Anywhere | Greatist
Proactive Productivity
There will always be too much to do – and this realisation is liberating. Today more than ever, there’s just no reason to assume any fit between the demands on your time – all the things you would like to do, or feel you ought to do – and the amount of time available. Thanks to capitalism, technology and human ambition, these demands keep increasing, while your capacities remain largely fixed. It follows that the attempt to “get on top of everything” is doomed. (Indeed, it’s worse than that – the more tasks you get done, the more you’ll generate.)
The upside is that you needn’t berate yourself for failing to do it all, since doing it all is structurally impossible. The only viable solution is to make a shift: from a life spent trying not to neglect anything, to one spent proactively and consciously choosing what to neglect, in favour of what matters most.
Oliver Burkeman’s last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life | The Guardian
Stay healthy-
Jason Glenn