I rolled over on the concrete floor where I had been sleeping, the thin bedroll doing nothing to lessen the ache in my hips. It sounds like I was being held against my will, but the truth is I was in my office at work — overworked, exhausted, and neglecting myself for a job that would never really care about me.
That was two jobs and a lifetime ago when I let myself be so overworked that I spent 15 to 20 hours a day on the job for more than 15 weeks. I wasn’t saving lives or fighting for a noble cause — I worked for a fluid power distributor. My tasks? Reconcile the company’s entire inventory and implement a new IT infrastructure. By day, I counted inventory and barcoded shelves. By night, I worked alone on data conversion for the new software.
When we finally hired a system administrator, my workload dropped to only 80 hours a week, which felt like a relief.
One night, after working until 2 a.m., I collapsed into my hotel bed for three hours of sleep before starting a 180-mile drive home. Running on two energy drinks, I made it, but by the time I arrived, I was shaking uncontrollably. Shortly after that, I learned that consuming 40 ounces of energy drink poison and sitting still for hours can be lethal.
I was lucky. But not everyone is. Many of us sacrifice our health and well-being everyday — not out of necessity, but because we’ve been conditioned to believe it’s the price of success.
It took me years to learn that when you sacrifice your well-being to meet impossible demands, you’re always the one who loses.
Eve Arnold, whom I quote a lot, recently wrote, “Most people never discover their best work because they are too busy looking at the scoreboard, too focused on numbers, and too attached to the politics of doing well.
“Really it’s neglect. To overlook yourself for others is missing the only opportunity you ever have.”
Come again?
“Really it’s neglect. To overlook yourself for others is missing the only opportunity you ever have.”
There’s a societal norm that almost ennobles self-neglect, but it’s a sacrifice that never really pays off. Now, that doesn’t mean we should shift toward self-centered focus either. It doesn’t mean that we ignore the needs of others in order to accomplish our own goals and objectives. Life has little meaning when serving others isn’t part of it, but we also have to take time to care for ourselves.
That’s not always easy. I’ve referenced time and again the difficult circumstances so many people face in the world today. For some, it’s nearly impossible to devote more than a few minutes to themselves each day.
But there’s value in those few minutes. Too often, we fill our rare moments of downtime with distractions — scrolling endlessly, consuming noise, and missing the chance to rest or invest in ourselves.
Fifteen minutes a day doing something engaging compounds to more than 90 hours over the course of a year. In 90 hours, you can read about 3,000 pages of printed material. In 90 hours, you can learn the basics of a new language or instrument. You can lift hundreds of people. You can put the phone down and embrace the silence.
Fifteen minutes a day might be all you need to stay grounded in this crazy world we live in with talking heads screaming louder than ever. Mike Duncan once wrote, “The winds may howl, but I will not be swept away.”
That’s what fifteen minutes a day might do for you: keep you from being swept away as the winds seem to howl louder and louder with each passing day.
So many of us live like we’re running a race we didn’t intentionally enter, letting the demands of work and life dictate how we spend our time. When we neglect ourselves, we’re the ones who lose. And for what? A pat on the back? A bigger number on a paycheck? The approbation of people who won’t be there to carry us when we collapse?
Demands will always come. Winds will always howl. But we’re not machines. We can’t let ourselves be swept away by expectations that demand our well-being as their price.
Fifteen minutes a day might not seem like much, but it is. It’s a lifeline. I don’t know who said it but I love the thought that a few moments of self-care are “a rebellion against the noise that tells us we don’t have time to breathe, rest, or grow. It’s a declaration that your life is more than a to-do list or adding to someone’s bottom line.”
Take an appropriate amount of time — even if it’s only a few minutes — to care for yourself. Protect that time fiercely.
- Read something that inspires you.
- Learn something that uplifts you.
- Sit in the silence, letting the world spin without you for just a moment.
Deep down, we all know that at the end of it all, the opportunity to care for ourselves isn’t just an indulgence. It’s a responsibility that we owe to ourselves and those we love.
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