The entrepreneurial lifestyle is tailor-made for late nights, quick meals, and a crunch for time. There’s a constant stream of ideas, planning, meetings, and projects taking up the mind of the self-made businessman. You have to be a bit crazy to undergo this taxing, draining endeavor, and that craziness is part of what makes the pursuit worthwhile. While this is admirable as hell, you can easily fall into the trap of putting the burgeoning ideas ahead of a healthy body.
You burn a lot of midnight oil. You exert your brain with brainstorming and problem solving. You find that you have a dozen thoughts crossing your mind at once. All of this takes a toll and consumes most of your energy.
Restoring this burned energy will work wonders for your physical and mental states, and ultimately, for your goals.
To truly be on top of your game, you should be paying attention to two basic human functions that have been ignored and abused for years: sleep and nutrition.
We’ll start with sleep.
Sleep developed for many reasons, one of which was restorative: you heal, grow, consolidate memory, and fix bodily issues all while sleeping. Old adages about getting enough sleep after injuries and after studying are not old wives’ tales. Those people were not lying to you.
As an entrepreneur, you need your memory to stay sharp. How can you change your world when you can’t remember when you have business calls? When your projects all go on the backburner because you simply forgot what you were planning?
That’s not true, you say. You say you have planners and secretaries and alarms and memos to remind you of what you have to do.
Guess what? That’s a lot of unnecessary additional worries that you could avoid being troubled with, provided your memory is sharp as a tack.
Quality sleep is hard to get. REM sleep, the time during which you’re in deepest rest, is so important to restoration that getting low amounts of sleep will lead to REM rebound, in which you enter REM quicker than you otherwise would.
To ensure that you’re sleeping properly – which is something many of you will scoff at – you need to respect your sleep hygiene and environment.
No, that doesn’t mean make sure your bed sheets are well washed and your pillowcases cleaned up (please do that anyway). It means freeing yourself from the myriad distractions that arise seemingly hourly.
To do this, start by treating your bed as a sacred entity, to be used for two activities: sleeping and sex. Do not lay in bed working on your laptop; do that in your office space. Do not lounge and play music; play in the louder, more active part of your house. Do not hold important calls as you stretch beneath the blankets. Pace elsewhere. The more you ritualize your bed as a rest area, the better your sleep will turn out.
I had many restless nights before investing in blackout curtains. In the aftermath of the purchase, my sleep quality skyrocketed, and my work improved as well – I had a clearer head with which to help clients and a more rested body to accomplish my daily goals.
With your entrepreneurial lifestyle and all its frenetic moments, you have to train yourself to relax before going to bed. What you choose to do to relax is very important and varies from person to person, but the key is to do nothing too strenuous or thought-provoking, or you will wind up staying up later than intended. You can completely focus on nothing in particular. Write down your goals for the next day; small things you wish to accomplish, nothing too spectacular. Jot down three or four things that made you grateful that day. For the people who might be too bored, a light walk, Tai Chi or yoga can ease your body into a relaxed state and bring the mind with it. Remember, stress and lack of sleep go in tandem with one another, and by eliminating stress before going to bed, you can greatly influence its reduction in your waking hours.
Entrepreneurs: stay ahead of that curve.
As important as sleep is, nutrition is equally so.
When you’re running around all day organizing meetings and networking, the most efficient choice to nourish yourself is usually a quick fast food meal; or, if you’re home at, you opt for something microwavable and fast.
Think of nutrition as fuel and your body as the vehicle. You put watered down, bad quality gas in your vehicle, and it will run poorly.
Understand?
Quality and quantity are both huge parts of proper nutrition. Don’t only worry about one while ignoring the other. Unfortunately, the highest quality food is also worth the prettiest penny, and not all blossoming entrepreneurs can justify buying pricey food – not to themselves nor their wallets. You can get around these in various ways – for instance, I used to complain about food pricing until I decided to start going to farmer’s markets. All that food comes from the farmer’s two hands.
And it supports small businesses, which we entrepreneurs are very familiar with.
Your body will thank you if you do the best you can with what you have, and if you take steps to avoid potential problems.
Habitual eating should be treated just like sleep. The routine of it will be beneficial for your mind as well as your body. You should focus on eating while eating, not answering a dozen phone calls. They can wait. It’s half an hour of eating and digestion. You can do that much. You owe it to your body.
If you’re not eating enough during the day, not only are you probably pushing your body into a sluggish, sickly state, but you’re depriving it of vital nutrients. At the very least, you should invest in vitamins to make sure you aren’t becoming deficient on a nutrient level. If you’re unsure of what you’re lacking, you can research vitamins such as Alpha-GPC and Acetyl-L Carnitine, which stimulate brain activity; DHA Fish Oil, which increases your focus and improves your mood; and Phosphatidyl Serine, which reduces the perception of stress. And as you undoubtedly know, stress management is key.
Stress is something you know well as an entrepreneur, and it’s something that is alleviated by healthy eating habits. You don’t overcome stress by refusing to eat or by gorging on junk food – in fact, that just worsens it, and you know that. How many woe-is-me movie scenes have we seen where depressed and stressed people fall into seemingly bottomless pits?
Prevent yourself from having to climb out of a hole and break a debilitating habit by not being in the hole in the first place.
Like anyone else who has attempted to run a business, I’ve had my fair share of stress. But I’ve taken steps to reduce it, and there is no secret or trick. It’s as simple as treating your body and mind right.
Avoid greasy, low quality, fast food. Avoid anything that has been contaminated or polluted in the wide market. Embrace vegetables, free range meats, and something people tend to forget: water. Lots of water.
Water is life.
It’s where everything reacts in your body, and fittingly, seeing as humans are primarily made out of water.
Dehydration is more than just thirst. It affects the whole body and mind. Often, it is overlooked how quickly performance decreases when we’re dehydrated. Not to mention we sweat and urinate to flush out toxins. And just as quality food and quality sleep is important, so is quality water. Invest in a filter and stop drinking unfiltered tap water.
I’ve moved from a town in the South that had acceptable, unpolluted tap water to LA.
Yeah. I bought a filter immediately.
What all of this does for you, the entrepreneur, is allow you to reap the rewards of what you’re building.
You talk about investments and planting seeds that will take time to blossom. You set up deals that have a bigger payoff when they’re seen all the way through. Entrepreneurship is a long-term commitment.
Let your health be as well.
You cannot fully enjoy the future and all its possibilities if you’re riddled with digestive issues, constantly stressed, or plagued by sickliness due to insufficient rest. You cannot even operate to your fullest potential on a weekly or daily basis.
The end result will be one that is a betrayal of what you’ve worked toward. Sure, you may achieve your goals and all your ventures will pan out, but you’ll be going to the doctor a lot, spending time resting, and dealing with the side effects of choosing time over health.
Before you go to your next meeting and make the next chess move, do you and your future self a favor and clean up your sleep and your nutrition. You can’t conquer anything without a sharp mind and responsive body.
