Americans are in pretty bad shape. It seems you can’t open a paper these days without reading about how the incidences of cancer, depression, and heart disease seem to rise yearly, while obesity and diabetes have become full-blown epidemics. The primary reasons cited for these trends are high calorie, high fat diets (especially over-consumption of fast food) and general inactivity. These factors are certainly a big part of the problem, but we're not going to focus on them here. Instead, we’re going to highlight some other major factors contributing to the health crisis that aren't as widely recognized, and attempt to offer solutions.

Factor One: The “Work Hard, Play Hard” Mentality

There’s nothing inherently wrong with working hard and playing hard, but if all you think about is working hard and playing hard, you’re leaving something very important out. What about rest and recover hard? When it comes to prioritizing rest in the face of work and play, a lot of people feel like sleep is for the weak. Sure you have to sleep sometime, but you should get it over and done with as quickly as possible and get back to living life.

This mind-set is a little bit crazy. Pretty much every sleep study ever done indicates that at least 99% of people need 7 to 9 hours of sleep to function at their best. All of us are less focused and less efficient when we don’t get proper rest. In our rush to be as productive as possible, we undermine any chance of being at our best when we short change sleep. A lot of people who do regularly sleep less than seven hours per night think that they don't need more sleep than they're getting. But one of the most striking findings from sllep studies is that as we grow more tired, our ability to do just about everything (think creatively, memorize, recall, organize) seriously deteriorates, but our ability to perceive this deterioration falls off just as fast. When participants in sleep deprivation studies are asked to rate their ability to do various mental tasks, they tend to rate them just as high, or nearly as high, as they do when they are well rested. But across the board, their actual performance is far worse. We should all learn a lesson from this. Missing out on sleep isn’t a reasonable strategy for getting more done.

In addition, missing out on sleep is disastrous for your health. Our bodies repair themselves during sleep. When we fail to get enough sleep, processes of cellular renewal that help stave off disease and slow down the aging process aren't fully completed. Sleeping less than 7 hours per night ends up translating into increased risk for cancer, heart disease, depression, and a number of other serious diseases, as well as premature aging. Sleep is also the time when your body processes fat and builds muscle, so if you’re training hard at the gym and short-changing sleep at night, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

The time you invest in sleep pays off. When you get adequate rest, you end up feeling better, looking better, and getting more done. In addition to trying to sleep more, it’s important to take little rest brakes through the day. Take a 5 minute walk or stretch break every 90-120 minutes at work. Set aside some time in the evening to turn off the TV, get away from work, and walk in the woods, listen to music, or take a bath. Take at least one full day off  from all kinds of work every week, and take a real vacation every six months to a year. Our minds need periods of recovery just as much as our bodies do. Work Hard, Play Hard, Rest Hard – there’s a formula to live by.