Why A Healthy Lifestyle Is Essential If You Have A High Stress Job

If you’re in a high stress, high performing job, you may find it difficult to balance your work with everything else you’re responsible for. That includes your responsibility to take care of your physical and mental health. 

Many people in these positions put their health and self-care last. You might feel like everything is basically fine, even if your blood pressure is high and you’re constantly feeling tired. You can just power through, right?

Prioritizing a healthy lifestyle is not just about your long-term health (although that's incredibly important). It’s essential for supporting all the things that matter most to you right now, like your job success, your relationships, and your happiness.

Even if you feel like you couldn’t possibly make time for exercise, healthy eating, sleep, and relaxation, you can and you should. Here are just a few reasons to prioritize your health when you have a demanding job.

Your Health Allows For Your Success

Leading a healthy lifestyle doesn’t guarantee you’ll be more successful, but it can help a lot.

A Healthy Lifestyle Can Boost Your Job Performance

Succeeding in a demanding job depends on your mental effort and energy. When you have deadlines to meet, multiple projects or clients to juggle, cognitively demanding work, or a stressful work environment, your brain needs to be in top shape.

Guess what can help improve your brain function? … exercise! Many studies show that people who exercise regularly do better on tests of memory, focus and attention.

Exercise releases neurotrophic factors, which are chemicals that protect brain cells and help build connections between them. People who exercise have even been found to have more brain volume in certain areas.

I wrote an article about exercise and brain health, with tips for maximizing the effectiveness of exercise on your brain. You can check it out here.

Getting enough sleep, practicing stress management strategies like mindfulness or journaling, and eating healthy foods also support your brain function.

You just don’t think as well as you could when you haven’t slept enough or you’re hungry, or if you’re experiencing brain fog after a not-so-healthy meal.

Too Much Stress Can Rob You Of Your Healthy Years Of Life

When you have so much on your shoulders, it’s essential to take steps to mitigate the negative effects of stress.

It’s well known that mental stress has physical effects. The stress response releases cortisol. That's a good thing in the short term but can become a health risk if cortisol levels stay elevated for too long.

Chronic stress increases the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, and other serious health conditions.

Work stress can quite literally take years off your life. In Japan, there’s even a word for this: “karoshi”, which means “death by overwork”.

Even if you don’t die of overwork, when your physical health takes a hit it can have a huge impact on your quality of life.  

How Can You Prioritize Your Health When You Have A Demanding Job?

I think most people have a general idea of what they should do to support their health. You probably know you should be exercising, eating healthy, getting enough sleep and managing your stress.

But knowing something and actually doing it are two different things. Many people who have good intentions struggle with the execution of their healthy lifestyle goals.

There are many strategies you can use to help you follow through on your plans, including setting effective goals, making action plans, and changing your environment to make it easier to succeed.

For help setting effective goals and creating action plans to help you follow through, download my FREE Goal-Setting Guide. This eBook will walk you, step-by-step through the process of finding your deep motivation, choosing a good goal, and breaking that goal into actionable steps.

The Secret To Success: Do What Most People Won’t

There's something very important to do before those success strategies can be fully effective, though. You need to decide that leading a healthy lifestyle is important enough that you’ll fully commit and do what needs to be done. This is the step that most people skip over.

That means really understanding exactly how exercise other healthy habits can support the things that matter most to you.

Make a list of your current priorities. Next to each one, write down how improving your physical and mental health will help you excel at it.

Next, think about your deep and meaningful values and self-identity. What kind of person do you believe that you are? How can becoming an exerciser or a healthy eater further solidify that self-identity?

If you’re a hard-working person, pushing yourself to exercise is a perfect way to demonstrate your commitment to doing hard things. If you’re a thoughtful and intelligent person, a mindfulness habit can help you be even more insightful. If you’re someone who doesn’t play by the rules, avoiding processed foods means that you’re not being controlled by giant food companies.

Once you have made these strong connections between your self-identity and the things you need to do each day to improve your health, you’ll be much more likely to find ways to overcome obstacles and achieve your goals.

If you need help making the connection between exercise and your values and self-identity, contact me to learn about personal training and health coaching options!