Are You Compromising Your Own Professional Development?

When you’re tired, remember to rest. It Sounds so simple as to be almost imbecilic, however it’s flippin easy to forget, ignore or believe we are immune to this fundamental truth.
Many demands are made of us in a day. Work, home, play. Many distractions pull our attentions off and away into our heads, diverted away from meeting what our bodies need.
With backlit screens suppressing the melatonin that tells us when we are sleepy, to digital games that leave us adrenaline-fuelled but with no physical race with which to purge our system, we lose touch with our fundamental physical cycles and needs.
Did you know that 3am is the body’s optimum time for detoxing? If we are not in REM sleep we miss this opportunity. If we miss this opportunity often enough then our bodies, which are self healing mechanisms, cannot do what they need. This leaves us vulnerable to infection and disease. If you are a night owl like me, then many will have been the night you have worked long into the dark hours, when the rest of the world sensibly slumbers. Whilst this lures us into feelings of opportunity to focus free from the distractions of others, this in itself distracts us from our own essential rest.
We do not honour the vehicle that does us such good service. We even provide our cars with annual attention, but we wait until our bodies manifest real levels of dis-ease before we take heed. When we have to take ourselves to the doctors, then we have taken it too far!
And we truly believe this is sustainable for our lives and continuing professional development. The guidance is all out there. “Rest and you will perform better”. “Take a break for linch and you will get twice as much done in the afternoon”, “go for a walk & your problems will solve themselves” and they really do!
Yet we remain static, eat at our desks, faff about on social media sites until the wee hours, and we wonder why we feel fatigued, resentful and unsatisfied. We have every reason to feel just that, and, we are doing it to ourselves!

Rest a little and see how you can really perform.

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