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Health Habits: Watch The Long Hours

Guest post by: Michael Hume

Article Overview: You need your energy... and you need to avoid working yourself to death. Even if your work hours are unavoidably long, you can still maintain good discipline in the five key daily health habits I call The NEWSS: Nutrition, Exercise, Water, Sleep, and Supplements....

Health Habits: Watch The Long Hours

The Midnight Oil Is Burning YOU Are you working yourself to death... literally?

In my youth, I ran a newspaper business. I was a one-man shop, and it was my job to do every chore associated with publishing a weekly small-town newspaper. I decided on the copy log and dummied the layout of the paper... gathered all the news (quotes, interviews) and wrote all the copy... edited my own stuff... sold and designed every ad, from the classifieds to the full-page supermarket displays... snapped, processed and cropped every photo... set every letter of type, from tiny legal notices to headlines... and pasted-up the final design, every week. It was at least 90 hours of work every week, and 110-or-so was probably average.

Only some nights featured actual sleep.

My friends and clients who've been consultants and entrepreneurs can usually relate to that sort of work schedule. Consultants routinely put in 100-plus hours every week, and pull frequent all-nighters, because if they don't, their clients can find plenty of other consultants who will. When you own a business, you have to do whatever it takes (and work as long as necessary) to make the business work. Even my investor friends sometimes burn the midnight oil, remembering that "money never sleeps" and feeling like they shouldn't, either.

But when you crank out long hours, you're putting your health (let alone your energy and vitality) at risk. In April, the journal "Annals of Internal Medicine" reported that those who average more than 11 hours of work per day have a 67% higher risk of developing heart disease. The researchers suggested doctors should include a patient's work schedule right up there with such other risk factors as smoking, diabetes, and blood pressure when estimating risk to the person's ticker.

You need your energy... and you need to avoid working yourself to death. Even if your work hours are unavoidably long, you can still maintain good discipline in the five key daily health habits I call The NEWSS: Nutrition, Exercise, Water, Sleep, and Supplements.

Your achievement-oriented mind tells you the day is often too short to get done everything you need to do. But consider that your life is too short already to take chances with heart disease. If you can't knock off early, knock off the junk food (among other things). Your friends and family (and your future self) will thank you.

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Article Tags: health habits, health wealth and happiness, personal responsibility, successful entrepreneurs



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Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - Glad you liked it David! I only managed to get partway through the list today because my one year old was looking for some playtime but I did read the Zen Habits one - I love reading Zen Habits while relaxing at a coffee shop!
Re: Top 50 Lists - Hi Evan, How about "Top 50": -Inventor Blogs To Watch -Franchising Blogs To Watch -Business Book Review Blogs -Women Entrepreneur Blogs -Young Entrepreneur Blogs
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Re: What I'm reading this weekend - Sept 10, 2010 - I was also interested in the Zen Habits affiliate programme as it might mix well with my business/japan blog...
Re: Internet Marketing is the best business in the world - Watch out for the video of this post in the next two weeks


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