Time is the #1 Vital Sign: A healthy lifestyle is measured in hours and minutes
Once I completed my medical intern year and transitioned to my MBA program, I made a pact to myself: I want to be successful, but I’m NOT willing to sacrifice my health to get there. Despite the many heroes of mine who openly sacrificed their health to get out on top–including physicians, and entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs–I had learned the hard way this was not the path I was willing to follow.
Instead, I reimagined my day. I took to heart the prescription I had learned through the lifestyle medicine community:
I realized each of the core lifestyle recommendations share a common denominator of time–hours and minutes.
Why are we asking our patients to lower their cholesterol in units of mg/DL, blood pressure in units of mmHg, and blood sugar in mmol/L… when we could be getting to the point–addressing the root cause, and simplifying our approach with hours and minutes? All these interventions boil down to the same fundamental lifestyle equation, and a simplifying metric they already understand and use every day.
Applying this to myself, I realized available calendars and day planners weren’t designed to improve health (imagine inserting 8 hours of sleep into your Google Calendar 🙄…). They had an almost pure productivity lens.
Instead, I started drawing out my day in a whole new way. How do I turn my feelings of time sickness, time scarcity and time stress, into feelings of time healing, time affluence, and time harmony? It wasn’t until I learned about circadian rhythms that this aspiration felt attainable, and my life truly transformed…
