The Virtuous Circle
Last weekend, for a variety of reasons, my son had a day where he didn’t get to go outside very much - and, for a nearly three year old, this has some implications. He was starting to get tetchy by lunchtime and didn’t seem to want any food. He then got hungry in the middle of the afternoon and demolished a massive mountain of snacks (at least one of which was chocolate based) which subsequently had him bouncing off the walls. When we got to dinner time, he, unsurprisingly, wasn’t hungry again, and was so wired that he was a massive pain in the ass. Reading stories at bedtime was an exercise in futility, and when he finally ‘went to bed’ (read: loudly protested in the dark) I had to go back in twenty minutes after he’d tipped the contents of his water bottle all over the bedsheets. The limits of my maternal affection were, as you might imagine, somewhat strained.
The next morning, I knew what I needed to do - namely, take the child to a large green area with a playground and let him run around until, very much like an overexcited puppy, he’d worn himself out. Two hours later, this was firmly achieved - he then ate a ton of lunch, survived a fairly lengthy journey in the afternoon with, if not grace, tolerance, then was out like a light in the evening.
This, I think, is a good example of what we might call a virtuous circle. Those two key elements that were absent the previous day - fresh air and movement - triggered a load of other positive impacts: hunger at sensible times, ability to tolerate non-ideal circumstances, feeling tired at the end of the day. One must take these conclusions with a pinch of salt when toddlers are involved, as cause and effect with them is a slippery concept - some days they just wake up with an urge to destroy everything in sight and there’s really very little you can do about it. However, I’ve seen the same thing happen to grown adults time and time again, so I don’t think it’s entirely speculative.
To take myself as a case study: there’s a notable difference in how my days play out depending on the amount of sleep I get. When I was young and stupid, I thought sleep was an annoying necessity that took up time that you could be spending on something more interesting. Life, however, has a way of making you face up to the error of your ways so, after experiencing some fairly negative consequences of sleep deprivation in my early thirties, I realised I needed to sort myself out. I now have a target number for hours of sleep per night (seven) and a non-negotiable threshold that I won’t drop below (six). The difference between these two numbers - just one little hour! - seems negligible when written down, but the experience of multiple nights at one or the other is entirely different.
A string of days done on six hours of sleep starts with waking up tired, not enjoying my morning run as much (or, if I’m trying to do a training session where I hit particular paces, not being able to hit those paces), being a less patient parent, finding it harder to focus at work and be more likely to make some unhelpful choices come the evening about how late to stay up. Compare to a string of days on seven hours of sleep, where I’ll sometimes wake up before my alarm, leaving me with a lovely smug well-rested feeling that ripples out through the day and makes my running, work and parenting better. The naturally early wake up time results in me feeling knackered fairly early in the evening, thus driving me to bed at a decent time, thus resulting in another smooth seven hours. Repeat.
Like most of us, I slalom between these two approaches, and it always amazes me quite how different a version of myself I feel between one and the other. Whilst sleep is a pretty important factor for many people, you may have something slightly different as your own secret weapon - maybe it’s making time for a swim in the evening, or ensuring you eat breakfast rather than skip it, or taking a walk in your lunchbreak. It’s worth your while identifying those one or two habits that have an outsize influence on how your day goes.
We can often be bombarded with a lot of different messages about how to maintain a healthy physical, mental and emotional life - go to bed early! meditate! batch cook! exercise! - and it’s really easy for this suddenly to be yet another area where we’re not making the grade. But, as with so many things, the trick is not to try to do everything, but instead identify exactly what will work best for you, and then put all of your energy into implementing and protecting this habit.
It is very easy, when you’re in a leadership position, to consistently deprioritise yourself. The weight of responsibility - the knowledge that the buck stops with you - can lead you to consistently put the organisation’s needs ahead of your own. But the reality is that you will be much more able to carry that responsibility if you are in a better headspace yourself - I certainly notice that a well-rested version of me has better ideas, is a better listener and, often, just gets stuff done quicker. Taking a lunch break on a particularly hectic day can sometimes feel like an indulgence - but, in reality, it might be the smart choice that allows you to really wring every drop of productivity out of the afternoon. If you’re doing a job that’s hard (and leading, whilst brilliant, is hard) you want to be showing up as the best version of yourself as much of the time as possible - so take the time to think about which non-negotiable habit or practice will set you up to take on any challenge that might be chucked at you.
PS - my wonderful friend and ex-colleague Susie Italiano (aka The Finance Fairygodmother) has started a brilliant YouTube channel that makes finance and econonics actually accessible (and even fun). Last week’s video was on Chalamet-gate, so if you’d like some well informed reflections on whether ballet and opera are indeed dead art forms, go check it out here.