Читать книгу A Great Day at the Office: 10 Simple Strategies for Maximizing Your Energy and Getting the Best Out of Yourself and Your Day - Dr. Briffa John - Страница 15
ОглавлениеHere’s a summary of the ten chapters that stand to transform your work and life for the better:
Chapter 1: Energy to Burn
Food provides us with fuel, and what we choose to eat can determine whether we are highly energized and raring to go, or feeling as though we’re wading through treacle. The first part of the opening chapter explores the science of the conversion of food into energy, and how to eat to ensure sustained levels of vitality throughout the day.
Most of us have an eye on the long term too, so the second section of this chapter conducts an evidence-based examination of how to eat in a way that aids our personal sustainability. Here, you will learn which foods are best for staving off health issues such as weight gain, heart disease and diabetes. The final part of the chapter provides practical guidance on how to put all this theory into practice.
If you’re imagining that this chapter is all about bran-based breakfast cereals, skinless chicken breasts and low-fat spreads, then you’re in for a treat. As the research reveals, most conventional nutritional ‘wisdom’ is fundamentally flawed. Using up-to-date science (and a healthy dose of common sense), the chapter clears up dietary confusion and puts a slew of nutritional myths to bed. Read this chapter to learn why ‘healthy eating’ may actually be holding you back, and how to release yourself to a state of optimal energy and wellbeing, with ease.
Chapter 2: Fluid Thinking
Ensuring peak performance is not just about what we eat, but also what we drink. In this chapter, we explore the critical importance of hydration, and reveal the single best guide to whether your needs are being met here or not.
This chapter examines the health aspects of not just water, but also soft drinks, fruit juice, smoothies, coconut water, coffee and tea. The chapter ends with an assessment of alcohol’s influence on wellbeing. Here, you will also discover three deceptively simple strategies that often lead to dramatic reductions in alcohol intake, but without the need for conscious restriction or feelings of deprivation.
Chapter 3: Movable Feast
As with advice regarding what to eat, recommendations regarding when and how often we should eat are prone to mixed messages. Traditionally, three square meals a day has been advocated, though in recent times there has been a vogue for ‘intermittent fasting’ – the practice of consuming very little on certain days, or going for extended periods of time without eating. In contrast, others recommend eating frequent, small meals as the best way to maintain energy and effectiveness.
This chapter examines the benefits and pitfalls of different eating patterns and provides guidance on how to ensure the optimal feeding strategy for you.
Chapter 4: Dream Ticket
For some, sleep can seem like ‘unproductive time’, and they will often relegate it in favour of work and other endeavours. Research shows, however, that not only does sleep prepare the body physiologically and psychologically for the next day, it promotes better health and even assists weight control.
This chapter explores how scrimping on sleep can cause our energy levels, performance and general health to suffer. It also offers a range of simple but highly effective strategies for ensuring the sort of deep, restful sleep that leaves us feeling properly revived and ready for action each morning.
Chapter 5: Light Relief
Most of us don’t usually think of light as a lifestyle factor but, as this chapter reveals, it can play a vitally important role in how we feel and function. The chapter starts with an exploration of light’s impact on mood and mental functioning, and the practical steps we can take to make full use of this natural commodity, particularly in the winter.
This chapter also reviews the value of sunlight regarding physical health and wellbeing, specifically through its ability to stimulate the production of vitamin D in the skin. We will see how this nutrient is linked with protection from a wide range of health issues and conditions including heart disease and several different forms of cancer. The chapter ends with advice about how to use ‘safe tanning’ and perhaps supplementation with vitamin D to optimize health and wellness in the long term.
Chapter 6: Fit for Business
We’ve all heard that exercise is good for us, but some can nonetheless struggle to find the time to ‘fit it in’. This chapter looks at how we can meet our needs for physical activity in as practical and time-efficient a way as possible.
The chapter starts by exploring the benefits to be had from incorporating walking into our lives, and provides everyday guidance here. The importance of resistance exercise is also highlighted, and the chapter outlines a brief but effective routine that requires venturing no further than your home or hotel room.
For those who are already active and looking for something more advanced, this chapter also discusses ‘high-intensity intermittent exercise’ – a form of physical training that offers significant benefits for health and fitness, but with relatively small time investment.
Chapter 7: Sound Effects
Many people will know what it’s like to have a favourite song boost their mood and put a spring in their step. This chapter explores the scientific basis for this phenomenon, as well as how something as simple and enjoyable as listening to music may improve our wellbeing and performance, both in and outside work.
This section also introduces a technology known as ‘binaural beats’ – the playing of specific frequencies of sound into the ears to induce desired states such as mental focus or relaxation.
Chapter 8: Breath of Life
Breathing is one of those bodily processes we tend to take for granted. This chapter reveals, though, that many of us can breathe quite inefficiently from time to time, and how this can impair our energy and mental functioning.
The chapter also provides practical guidance on breathing techniques that can calm the mind, optimize our physical and mental state, and promote general good health over time.
Chapter 9: Mind Control
Our success depends not just on balancing and optimizing our physiology, but also our psychology. Unfortunately, we can sometimes get caught in negative thought patterns that may block our mental processes, creativity and inspiration.
In this chapter, we explore some simple and effective tools for changing our thinking in ways that can very quickly boost our mood, brain functioning and productivity. Specifically, this chapter explores the research that shows that the key to mastering our mind can often be to focus on another organ entirely – the heart.
Chapter 10: Habit Forming
This book offers a range of highly effective strategies for boosting energy, productivity and sustainability. But many of us can sometimes resist things that we know are good for us, and may persist with things that we know are holding us back.
This final chapter show how motivation is the key to changing behaviour, and reveals a way of thinking that makes good habits stick (and bad habits easy to break) – for good.
The Appliance of Science
Throughout this book I refer to scientific research, and it makes sense to get clear on what we can (and can’t) learn from different types of evidence from the start. Research relevant to human health comes in two main forms: so-called ‘epidemiological’ research and ‘intervention’ studies:
Epidemiological Studies
Epidemiological studies look at relationships between things, such as the drinking of red wine and the risk of heart disease. Such studies can tell us that two things are associated with each other, but not that one is necessarily causing the other. So, those studies you’ve perhaps heard about linking red wine drinking with a reduced risk of heart disease cannot be used to conclude that red wine is good for the heart (sorry about that!). It might be, for instance, that red wine drinkers eat more healthily or smoke less than imbibers of other forms of alcohol. It could be these or other factors, not the red wine per se, that account for the apparently superior heart health of red wine drinkers.
Factors that may queer the pitch in this way are referred to as ‘confounding factors’ or simply ‘confounders’. In some studies, researchers attempt to take account of these factors when data is analysed. The problem is, though, this is a very inexact science, and in the end we still end up with results that cannot prove causality.
If epidemiological studies cannot be used to provide a definitive answer, why do them at all? Well, apart from keeping a lot of researchers in jobs, this sort of evidence is good for generating ideas (also known as ‘hypotheses’) that can be tested more definitively using what are termed ‘intervention studies’.
Intervention Studies
Intervention studies involve exposing individuals to a specific intervention and comparing their outcomes to a ‘control’ group not exposed to this intervention. Examples include the testing of the effects of low-fat diets on weight loss and the impact of exercise on fitness.
Intervention studies are far less plentiful than epidemiological studies, mainly because they are much more labour-intensive and costly. However, the fact remains that they are generally much more illuminating than any number of epidemiological studies, and this is why I focus on them quite a lot throughout the book.
Single intervention studies can be insightful, but sometimes it helps to take a wider view by grouping several similar studies together in the form of what are known as ‘meta-analyses’. For example, the results of studies that have tested the effects of exercise on weight loss can be pooled together to get a good overview of the effectiveness of this approach.
Meta-analyses are not perfect, but they are generally more useful than, say, selecting single studies in isolation, particularly if these are taken out of the context of wider evidence that is contradictory in nature.
Science: What is it Good For?
One thing I think science is undoubtedly good for is to discern whether a ‘fact’ is genuinely ‘evidence-based’ or not. Quite often, as you’ll discover as you read this book, many pieces of health advice we are given by doctors, dieticians, health bodies and government agencies (and we perhaps take for granted) simply do not stand up to scientific scrutiny. For example, you’ll see how research reveals low-fat diets are ineffective for both weight loss and for staving off heart disease.
A Great Day at the Office does not primarily exist to expose what does not work, but reveal what does. Published scientific evidence can inform us here too, of course, but sometimes we need to look beyond this. The reality is many potentially useful strategies have not been subjected to systematic study. I’ve seen countless people, for instance, benefit hugely from choosing something other than a sandwich at lunch, or from going to bed a bit earlier than they habitually do. These approaches have not been the focus of properly conducted trials, but they have been tried and tested with countless individuals and been found to produce consistent and reliable results.
So, the information and advice in this book is based on the available evidence, but it’s also informed by thousands of hours of consulting with real individuals in the real world. There is nothing quite like this wealth of experience, I think, for giving us perspective on what really works to help us be the best we can be, both in and out of the workplace.
