You have to take care of your biological needs first. This includes a good diet plus basic vitamins and supplements. It also includes good sleep, ideally 7-8 hours of quality sleep every night and blood pressure in the normal range. Hormones like thyroid, estrogen, testosterone, and blood sugar, cholesterol, triglycerides, iron, and B12 are important. To be ideally healthy you have to be physically fit. “First be a good animal.”
According to Ken Cooper (aerobics) this requires a minimum of 30 minutes of vigorous physical activity three times per week for cardiovascular health. To help with depression or to control weight you need to exercise 6-7 days per week. The effort level required is equal to a brisk walk (2 miles in 30 minutes).
A lot of my patients say, “I hate to exercise.” That’s okay. Don’t call it exercise. Call it work. Vigorously vacuum, mop and clean house, or wash the car – an effort that gets your heart rate up to at least 120 to 144. Or you can call it play. Go dancing, play basketball.
But whatever you do make sure to get off your butt and get fit. It’s a lot easier when you find something that you enjoy doing and for many people it’s easier to do with a friend or loved one. One of the easiest ways to stay fit is to have a treadmill, elliptical trainer, or stationery bike in front of a TV where you can exercise while watching the news, sports, or a favorite show. Don’t put it off – you have to do it!
One thing I do is keep a log of my workouts in my day timer. I convert all exercise to miles and I keep a weekly total and an ongoing total. By running competitively at least once or twice a year I keep myself motivated to work out even on days that I don’t feel like it. To feel good and to be optimally productive you have to be fit! You have to take care of your body, and the most important part of your body is your brain!
Being physically healthy obviously means not smoking – that includes second hand smoke. It means not drinking excessively or abusing drugs or medication. It means being smart and wearing your seat belt.
Although not as essential as physical fitness, a good sex life enhances quality of life. Since stress inhibits sex drive and can interfere with sexual functioning and since we live in a high stress world, a lot of people have a sex life that they are not completely happy with. Thankfully we now have many effective treatments for sexual problems and you need to be able to discuss this openly with your doctor. I will discuss all the specifics of sexual dysfunction in men and women and all the current treatments in a future article.
In addition to your physical well being you have to address your spiritual, emotional, and intellectual needs.
What’s next? Your basic biological needs are being met and you are not in any acute danger. Should we focus more on love (relationships) or work (productivity)?
Actually you can go either way. By focusing on education, training, and work you become independent and self sufficient. That enables you to be in relationships interdependently. You are not needy and you are not manipulative. There is give and take. You can focus on relationships first, especially if you had a healthy family and had “good enough” nurturing. This means you feel good about yourself and your uniqueness. Having a lot of emotional/social support can make it easier to build your career and become self sufficient. Most people alternate between these two major needs.
Stephen Covey describes these levels in Maslow’s hierarchy as “to live, to love, and to learn.” The highest level then is “to leave a legacy,” or what he now refers to as the 8th habit – “find your voice and help others to find theirs.” Your deepest most personal, most passionate driving force or motivation is somewhere inside of you. You may or may not know what it is – you may need help in being able to understand what it is or how you can fulfill it. For me, writing this is expressing my voice and if I can help one person to find theirs my life will have meaning. Find your voice!
2 thoughts on “Habit 3: First Things First”
I love this book and your take on it. I wish you would have done a series with all 7 Habits though! This is great!
Unlike most people, I love to exercise and had done so my entire life because it was fun — bicycling, roller skating, ice skating, skateboarding, hiking, taking nature walks, then aerobics, weight lifting, going to the gym, trying different machines and different types of exercises like pilates or working with the fitness ball. For most of my life, I managed to squeeze in exercise even though I always seemed to have a job working for a supervisor/employer with unrealistic expectations of what any human was and is capable of doing and always insisted on making my life hell because I could not meet unrealistic deadlines (“I want these 52 projects done within 72 hours, and done perfectly!”) or comply with unreasonable demands (“You have to work every Saturday and Sunday in addition to the regular five days a week until you complete each of the projects that piled up between the time John left and you started along with completing all the new projects I’ve given you that you haven’t finished and all the projects I and everyone else in the department is going to give you.” John was the employee who had the job nearly a year before me and who was so stressed that he developed a terminal illness.
I thought I was doing well for a period of several years in which I was unfortunate enough to go from working for one bullying boss with unrealistic demands and expectations to another and so on, because to make more time for work and still exercise, I would begin sacrificing other things like eating regular meals, sleeping as many hours as my body needed (my internal “body clock” has always insisted on 9 hours, but I am OK on 8; for years, however, I tried to get by on 3 or 4) and so on. Finally, though, terrified of losing my job, I had to give up exercise. After that, I became ill with some bizarre aches and pains, shortness of breath, chest tightness, dizziness, coughing, and a slew of other strange symptoms, diagnosed as severe tachycardia associated with a previously undiagnosed cardiac arrhythmia a physician I had seen for years didn’t think was a “problem” requiring me to see a specialist.
The arrhythmia was likely related to my fibromyalgia, which I thought I had under control but got so bad I was debilitated, experiencing episodes of temporary paralysis on my left side now and again. Even while hospitalized, I was afraid of losing my job especially because no one in Human Resources or otherwise assigned to help those with disabilities working for my employer, a large government entity, would accommodate me under the A.D.A. or even acknowledge that I had rights under the A.D.A., despite the fact that I filled out a form saying I had a condition covered under the A.D.A. when I applied for a job with the employer. In any case, not only did my fibromyalgia get worse, but so did my chronic fatigue and immune deficiency syndrome, and even though I or my mother called my employer each day to let her know I would not be in, I was terminated. I filed a complaint with the EEOC, but as with every governmental agency, despite evidence, the EEOC said I had no case. Apparently, the EEOC is fine with ill employees being fired not because “you have too many medical appointments”, as my supervisor told me, but because my supervisor didn’t “trust” me to work in a quiet office or from home via telecommuting, which I had been doing for several months before already.
Since then, I have been so debilitated, I can barely (and many times have not been able to) carry or hold onto a glass or bottle of water, so exercise is out. Even walking down my driveway can cause such excruciating pain and dizziness that I must stop. I have also simply fallen on my driveway before, as I have in my home, hitting my head a few times on a hard ceramic floor, a door, a countertop, a table. I also have fallen on my hip and pelvis, but despite the pain didn’t break a hip, although I had a huge bruise.
If only I hadn’t pushed myself to try to work, because my doctors advised me against it, but I felt that I was strong enough to do so and I also felt that I must be a productive member of society, contribute something. I also felt that, beforehand, even the worst work day would never be as bad as the disability paperwork can be and the disability system.
The entire system is designed so that, really, all disabled people (as I am now) should be living on the street. Government agencies designed to help one work contradict their purpose and other agencies while employers don’t comply with laws and governmental entities designed to enforce laws do nothing to ensure compliance. Doctors who advise a person not to work are up against doctors who insist that a person can work. Even employers who say that an employee should not be working are ignored. The system truly is an unorganized mess, just providing more stress to those whose illnesses are already worsened by stress.
I wish I could exercise again.