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Health & Fitness

Fit for 50: Ditch the alarm clock and sleep

 One of the benefits of getting older is the opportunity to change the shape of your life.

 

One of the barriers is that you hate change and try to avoid it.

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Welcome to being human.

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Here are some principles for “Fit For 50” that have nothing to do with medicine, usual fitness regimens or deep spiritual awakenings.

 

I like to call it Life Inventory. It’s nuts and bolts.

 

The activities and obligations that have taken up most of your working life might start to subside now. If you have been a schoolteacher for 40 years, the profession may decide to let you go, but how do you let it go? Everyone who has spent a life building a career eventually encounters the moment when that career is far less of your time than it’s ever been. That includes the career of raising children.

 

How do you manage life change proactively instead of just being a victim of them? How can you be healthy if everything you’ve cared about has exited or become less burdensome?

 

There are three ideas that could make a difference.

 

First, get rid of your alarm clock. It’s meant to artificially end your sleep before you are ready to be awake. You’ve gotten used to staying up too late so that you can sleep only six or so hours at the most. Then the alarm clocks jolts you out of the sleep, usually with a sound meant to maximize your irritation. If it doesn’t irritate you awake, you’ll just push then pause button and sleep again until it blasts you with sound again.

 

Do that for years and eventually your body will break.  Fatigue accumulates. It’s also being a slave to unhealthy conditions, even if the conditions change.

 

If you went to sleep at 10 p.m. every night, your body would awake naturally every morning at 8. Do you think you’ll miss something extraordinary if you went to bed at 10?

 

So….Just….Stop.

 

Alarm clocks guarantee that you won’t get enough sleep. While you rationalize alarm clocks because of a high-pressure job and three teens in the house, it’s not necessary when you hit 60 … or even 50. Reclaim your sleep.

 

That leads to the best underutilized advice of all.  Do you know what the important elements of your life are, and which are not so important? I’ll bet you don’t allocate time based on how necessary some tasks are.

 

We’ve already agreed that sleep is the most important, though misused path to good health. But if you identified the five most important things you should do every day – and did them first – how much time would be left for the relatively useless tasks?

 

Do a nuts-and-bolts audit of your time. Just for one day, keep a “timecard” and “charge” every activity down to segments of five minutes. Is spending an hour on Facebook or Twitter every day really that important? Will the earth stop rotating if you don’t clean your house weekly? Is spending an hour watching the news worth it if you can read it in 5 minutes? How important is watching those three sitcoms you love?

 

This requires you decide what’s important to your daily life as opposed to habits you have accumulated through inertia.

 

My third slice of advice really needs to be several blogs.

 

While scientific technology advances, the weight of invention can suggest that only the most invasive medicine really works.

 

But that’s not a definition of sophistication.

 

Sophistication simplifies.

 

The more sophisticated that good medicine is, the more subtle and unobtrusive it is. It might seem an obvious understatement to suggest that less is more when it comes to medicine, but that often is true.

 

Even with science, your health will always be 95 percent you. As an example, a surgeon might give the best knee replacement surgery possible because all exercise or yoga has failed. But if you don’t do any rehab other than the mandatory six post-op sessions, then your knee will never be 100 percent.  It’s your fault, not your surgeon’s.

 

Managing health for 50-plusers is like that. Science will give you more choices, more choices every year. But you’ll be the one making the choice eventually.

 

We’ll talk again. I have more to say. Bet you couldn’t figure out that, right?

 

 

Who am I, and why would a person listen to me? Both fair questions. I’m Christine Hammerlund and I’ve been a nurse for years. I have delivered babies, saved lives, and cared for hundreds of patients through their medical triumphs and tragedies. Now I run Assured Healthcare at http://www.assuredhealthcare.com. We're a multi-million dollar medical staff provider in Illinois. I live in Antioch, Ill. Got health questions for me, whether large or small? I’ll answer. Visit us at http://www.facebook.com/AssuredHealthcareStaffing  and Chrishammerlund@yahoo.com

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