“I don’t have time.”
That’s a common remark for people in high-pressure jobs, particularly business owners and senior members of the organization.
But as the common saying goes, if you can’t find time to be healthy, you’ll have to find time to be ill.
You wouldn’t be the first person to make the mistake of sacrificing health for your business, and it’s easy to decide that we’re too busy to workout, or that we need to grab a quick snack on the go. But this is wrong.
Personal health aside, ignoring your health can have a significant negative impact on the business you’re working so hard to grow.
How significant?
The CDC claims that sick days cost American businesses over $200 billion a year.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
How high-pressure jobs cause stress
Responsibility brings additional stress. Specifics naturally vary from one role to another but common ones are:
- Long hours
- Travel
- Lack of sleep
- Frequently eating at restaurants or fast food
- Skipping meals and consuming a lot of energy drinks or caffeine
- Deadlines
- Competition
- Pressure to meet targets
- Anxiety
- Lack of exercise
- Working too hard
When you’re invested in a business, putting it first feels like the important thing to do. The irony is that in order to truly give your best at work, you need to prioritize your own health.
Yet people often put it down their list of priorities. “I’ll worry about that later,” they say.
But “later” rarely comes. When one business objective is met, another takes its place. Before you know it, years have passed and your health gets worse and worse.
For many people, it takes a serious health scare to prompt them into action.
The reality of workplace stress
The impact that stress has on the heart has been known for a long time, in both the short term and the longer term.
A study conducted in 2021 found that chronic stress could be linked to an increased risk of:
- Cardiovascular disease
- Coronary heart disease
- Stroke
- Death
Realistically, stress can’t be fully avoided. And that’s okay – it doesn’t need to be eliminated, it just needs to be managed.
If you struggle with taking care of yourself because it feels like using time that you should be working, focus on reframing that. First, getting healthy doesn’t have to take a lot of time, and a lot of it just requires making different decisions. For example, instead of buying a readymade lunch, prepare something at home. Instead of using the elevator all the time, take the stairs. Have walking meetings when possible, instead of sitting down all the time. Invest in a standing desk to help get your body using its own muscles again.
Second, remind yourself that these actions will positively impact your business.
Stress manifests itself with physical symptoms, like a lack of energy, feeling unwell, and insomnia. Any of these will stop you bringing your A game to work, which will hamper its growth.
In fact, stress is estimated to cost the US industry more than $300 billion in losses. Do you want to contribute to this statistic?
How to protect yourself against workplace stress
Given that you can’t eliminate or avoid stress entirely, and it’s likely that you enjoy the high-pressure role, your best approach is to improve your overall health.
This includes stress management, where you learn strategies to reduce the impact external factors have on your stress levels and wellbeing.
It also includes adding exercise to your daily routines and adopting a truly healthy diet (which means ignoring most of the advice we see).
One approach is to learn which steps to take yourself – this is possible, but requires significant time and trial and error.
Alternatively, you could save significant time and reap immediate benefits by working with a metabolic health coach. With this, you and your team will learn how to make decisions that not only start to help you straight away, but have long-lasting benefits too. Best of all, the information will help you to make better decisions at work as well as at home, leading to true health.
Today can be the day you change your entire future and supercharge your business.
If you’re ready, click here to find out more about metabolic health coaching.