Okay, so how many all-nighters did you pull in college? And I mean the studying kind of all-nighters. How many?
For me, it was about zero. I could never do it. Even the one time that I swore I would do it, I had so many papers to finish and tests to study for, and I swore I would pull an all-nighter. Yeah, I made it until about midnight. Exhausted, went to bed, woke up at 3:00 a.m. to finish later.
Now if you’re like me and you know, you’re just a couple of years out of college (LOL!), there is no way at this age I could possibly fathom pulling an all-nighter – literally staying up through the night to work on a project, stay focused on a task at hand. That is ludicrous! I could not do it!
Yet, we seem to do that during the day. We are firing on all cylinders for hours upon hours, because I know you don’t just have a job that you do; you don’t just have a career or a business that you run. You have other responsibilities outside of your professional area of life. And so, it’s as if you’re bookending your days from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to bed. That your brain has to be fully-functioning – you’ve got to be on it. Alert, responsible, responsive. Hours upon hours. Yet the next day, when you wake up, you wonder why you’re sluggish, why you’re tired, why it’s hard to focus.
If you’ve been experiencing insomnia, if you have been fluctuating in what you’re eating, what your weight is, how you’re feeling, your mood levels, you are most likely suffering from some level of stress. And as your stress levels increase, your productivity decreases; there is a direct correlation.
You have got to find moments through your day to take care of yourself!
Taking a step away from those screens, taking a few minutes to take a deep breath, get some fresh air. Sit quietly and just be with yourself.
And I know you want to fight it, you want to say that that’s not real. That you’ve got to grind and grind in order to drive the results, that you’ve got to push those long hours in order to be successful.
It is B.S., that is not true!
You have to take care of yourself.
If you want to be successful, if you want to be productive, you want to be in this for the long term, you have got to find just moments, minutes in your day to take care of yourself. Once you do that, you will start seeing not only your professional productivity increase, but you’ll start feeling so much better and have greater connections in everything else in your life.
Right now, in the comments below, I want you to share one thing that you are going to do to take care of yourself today.