Monthly Archives: July 2019

Gonna make you sweat!

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So, what’s your relationship like with exercise!? On and off? Non existent? Gym bunny!? What exercise did you do last week? What are you planning this week? And why does it matter?

Exercise is the second element in the self care trinity (more here). We’ve already talked about the importance of sleep so let’s grapple with this component and figure out why it’s good for us… because it is…. honest!

There are obvious physical benefits to exercise like improving bone density, promoting muscle growth, keeping you supple, promoting healthy skin …and the list goes. But I’d like to concentrate here on the impact on our psychological and emotional well being. Is exercise a stress buster!?

You are sat at your desk and you have a million things to do, so many things you don’t know what to do next, and your boss pitches up and asks if you can fit in doing something else! How do you feel! Overwhelmed, angry, tearful? People feel a range of things in these situations and sometimes these emotions are not helpful. Some of these emotions activate our ‘fight or flight’ response. When we feel threatened in some way our body prepares us for action by flushing us full of cortisol and adrenaline so that we are ready to respond. This useful reaction harks back to our days as hunter gatherers where we would need to run away from big scary things like tigers! These chemicals prepare us for flight – a physical response…. or indeed ‘fight’ ….but maybe not in the tiger scenario!

But the modern world is not like that. For a lot of us we are sat at our desks when we feel threatened. Here we are threatened by the demands of the job, not an animal with hostile intent (unless that’s how you think about your boss! ;0)). But our bodies don’t know that. So, they sense the threat and prepare the response and you then…. continue to sit there. But your body is ready! Fully armed to fight or flee. In his book “When the Body Says No, The Cost of Hidden Stress”, Gabor Mate tells us that “stress affects and involves virtually every tissue in the body” (pg. 33) and acts on tissues in the immune system. When stress is chronic, that is long term, it leads to an overactive immune system that produces toxic chemicals in the body. He goes on to explain that for many who are in constant state of stress they normalise what stress feels like so are not conscious of feeling stressed despite their body still initiating the internal chemical stress response. He gives many examples in the book of current research that is making strong links between chronic stress and diseases like Alzheimers and MS.

So, what does this have to do with exercise? Well, exercise reduces, burns off if you like, cortisol and adrenaline. As I say, the fight or flight response has produced these chemicals to prepare you for physical action, so, physical action is required to use it up. Given the reality that stress is unavoidable in life, and in many ways short periods of stress can be useful as it give impetus and motivation, exercise needs to be an essential component of self care to mitigate against a bodily chemical response that, for most office based stressors, is not required in the way it once was.

Not only does exercise use up cortisol and adrenaline it produces dopamine. Dopamine is released during pleasurable activities like enjoying food and sex as well as physical exertion through exercise. Deficiency in dopamine has been linked to depression. You may well have heard the term ‘runners high’ which is that euphoric feeling you feel after a run. That’s where it comes from! Exercise also produces noradrenaline, which regulates mood, learning and memory, and produces serotonin, a lack of which has been linked to a range of health conditions.

Rest easy though… we are not talking about turning you into a marathon runner! One single session of exercise has been shown to improve mental performance, give faster mental processing, clear your head, make you more effective at planning, improve memory, and improve self control!

A study by Bristol University showed that exercise boosted mood and motivation by 41% and increased the ability to deal with stress by 20% …..and we’re only talking about a walk that leaves you a little out of breath – the perfect thing to do on your lunch break (have a look here to read about the importance of a lunch break)!

Researcher Pulg-Riberia and colleagues analysed a Sit Less Move More worked based programme and found that by simply engaging in some gentle exercise during the working day there was an improvement in staff retention, sickness levels, and a reduction in stress which led to more mindful work practice. What a huge benefit to employer and employee!

So, how are you going to go about this? Are you going to ‘go about’ it? I hope this little insight into some of the evidence suggest to you that you should….

Firstly, if you’ve not exercised in a while, or ever, get yourself checked out at you GP surgery and then make a plan! I love a plan! And here’s some tips!
– Walk before you run! Literally and metaphorically! Start small.
– Do what you love. If you try running and don’t like it – don’t do it! There are so many options… walking, yoga, resistance training, exercise classes, gardening, washing the car – they all count! Just do them at a pace that leaves you a little breathless
– Write it in your calendar. There is so much evidence that shows if you write it down you are more likely to do it.
– Prepare. Make sure you have what need. Make it easy for yourself. Put your kit out the night before, our your trainers by the door.
– Exercise with someone. This is probably the best advice for people starting out. If you commit to do something with someone else you won’t want to let them down. So get yourself a walking buddy and get going!

The Department of Health (UK) recommend 150 minutes of moderate exercise like walking or swimming per week. That’s two and a half hours, or, half an hour a day over 5 days. So if you go for a half hour walk everyday in your lunch break (….have you got the point about taking a lunch break yet!?) you’ll have done what the government recommend! That’s it! You’re done! Go you!!

If you want to be more vigorous and go for a run they suggest only 75 minutes is required! That’s a couple of half hour plus a bit runs and you’re done! Easy!

You should also include some stretching (have a look here) and strength training. Strength training doesn’t need to be lifting weights but can be simply engaging in some exercises that use your body weight. Have a look here.

There is also a fabulous workout for weight loss program here and lots of other very useful articles – check it out!

…and I’ll leave you with this

And sleep….

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Let’s look at the first and, I’d say, the most important element of the Mordue’s Self Care Triangle!

A good nights sleep sorts out all sorts of things! Sleep can be difficult for all sorts of reasons. This heat at the moment probably isn’t helping a lot of us. Then there’s things preying on your mind that you keep mulling over when you should be asleep. For some, sleep isn’t an easy thing to achieve but it’s absolutely crucial to well-being in ways that go far beyond you being grumpy the following day!

It is estimated that 1 in 2 people are not getting sufficient sleep!Physically our body uses the time to recover and replenish and sleep has an essential role in the consolidation of memories. “Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer. Insufficient sleep is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you develop Alzheimer’s disease. Inadequate sleep – even moderate reduction for just one week – disrupts blood sugar levels so profoundly that you would be classified as pre-diabetic…” and the list goes on [from Matthew Walker’s ‘Why We Sleep’ (Page 3)] So, what advice is out there on getting to sleep!

Keep to a regular bedtime routine
As a parent I’ve said it myself and heard others say it. “Babies, they love a routine! Keeps them right!” Much as we kick against habit as adults we are creatures of routine. Your body is programmed into a chemical routine that does its best to achieve sleep, rest, and waking. And what do we do!? We ignore it. We stop up late and wonder why we are tired the next day. We get up late and wonder why we then can’t get to sleep the next night. Then there’s the impact of alcohol and caffeine. What we end up achieving is the disruption of our programmed chemical clock. And when we don’t attend to it for long enough the situation becomes chronic.

Sleep at regular times
Walker (2017) suggests that we need 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night and that we should be sleeping from about 10 to 10.30 until 6 to 6.30. These timings are in tune with our natural rhythm. So that’s your starting point. You should also maintain this 7 days a week. Lost sleep is lost sleep. In terms of what your body is trying to achieve with sleep you can’t catch it up on a weekend. The opportunity has gone.

Don’t go to bed hyped
While exercise is an important aspect of self care you should avoid it for 2 or 3 hours before bed time. A good way to wind down is to have a warm bath – again…. isn’t that part of the routine we give babies. This clever little trick prepares your body for sleep. It’s not the heat on its own that creates the sleepy mood. It’s the impact of the heat on your core temperature. Do you feel cold when you are tired or when it’s late on a night? Part of your programmed sleep preparation is a drop in core body temperature. The hot bath draws the blood to the surface of your body and therefore reduces your core temperature. Clever body!

Do something that relaxes you
There are a huge range of yoga and relaxation CD’s and Apps out there that might help you. Anything that calms your mind and distracts you from your ‘racing’ thoughts. You could try audio books, or read a book, or maybe listen to the radio. You should try to avoid TV and smart phones as, not only do the stimulate, but the light they emit kids your brain into thinking it’s not dark out there! We need to prepare our bodies for sleep with a darkened environment.

Be comfortable and create a ‘clean’ environment
It sounds obvious I guess, but, have the best mattress and pillows you can afford. Try different numbers of pillows and different types. You may find a harder or softer pillow helps. You should keep your bedroom for sleep (and sex…. unlike most other vigorous activity sex makes you sleepy!) Avoid distractions like TV’s and ticking clocks and keep the room tidy. Make your bed when you first get up so when you eventually get to bed after that hard day it looks clean, tidy, and inviting. Your bedroom should be cool (between 18 and 24 centigrade – but go low) and dark. No glowing lights from inside or outside the bedroom.

and my favourite…. Write ‘to do‘ lists for tomorrow
One of the main things that keeps people awake is trying to remember things they need to do tomorrow. Before you go to bed (or ideally at the end of your working day… more on that in an upcoming blog) write down everything you need to do the next day, safely leaving them so you can find them when you need to, without having them going round and round in your head. Keep a note pad by your bed. If you think of something while in bed, write it down. There’s good evidence that externalising memories in this way can help us ‘put them to bed’ to help put us ‘to bed’!

What else…
Inevitably for some making such self care changes isn’t enough. These ideas are effective for many and you need to give them a good month or so to see what the impact is. But if you find that you are consistently trying these things and they are not working then you should seek medical advice. Walker (2017) has concern that this simply leads to the prescription pad and, in his view, drugs don’t work as they don’t achieve the right sort of sleep but are more of a sedative than good quality sleep. So, you feel you have been asleep, but have missed many of the benefits. Your GP should be able to refer you to sleep specialists. It would be useful while trying to make changes that you keep a sleep diary. This should detail what you have done during the day, how you have prepared for sleep, what it is that’s keeping you awake, how often do you wake – make sure you document as much as you can.

Try these things out… what have you got to lose?

Let me introduce you to the triangle!

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Here it is! Your route map to self care. My self care model (lovingly drawn for me by one of our fabulous students Anna Short). It’s simple and straightforward but it’s what you need to get sorted. And over the next few days I’ll tackle each element of the triangle in turn and then we can get on to figuring out how to organise it all!

The three things in the triangle won’t come as any surprise to you. In fact most of what I have to tell you won’t come as a huge surprise. Looking after yourself is one of those things where we all know what to do but we don’t always do it. And we don’t always fully understand the impact on us and our productivity.

So… we’ll talk about sleep, we’ll talk about exercise, and we’ll talk about nutrition. This is not to turn you into tofu eating (although I like tofu), marathon running (although I’ve ran marathons), zen like (although I like some meditation) creatures, but rather to show you how these three things interact and have a massive impact on your productivity in your job and in your home life.

Current research tells us that lack of sleep has a significant impact on the risk of us developing things like cancer or alzheimers, never mind the impact of a poor nights sleep on the next day. Your brain and your gut are connected directly by the vagus nerve and scientists are showing how the quality of what is going on in your gut directly effects your mood. And exercise has been shown to be effective in reducing levels of stress. Also, they are are interlinked….

I’ll tell you more…. stay tuned!

Let’s put a smile on your face…

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Emotions …..a strong and powerful force that sometimes get the better of us!? Agreed? Positive and negative emotions can lead us to lose focus and control and to respond in ways which we wish we hadn’t. In this area our evolutionary history is stacked against us. The oldest part of our brain, the amygdala, which regulates our emotional responses can easily take control. Our emotional response to the stress we are under in the work place can be very personalised. For some it’s anger, grumpiness (that ones me!), fear, or a whole range of others .

Did you know that simply by smiling you can change how you feel? Malcolm Gladwell (author of ‘Blink’ and ‘Tipping Point’ …among others) describes how contagious emotions are. He shows that if someone smiles, we smile back, even if only fleetingly.

He goes on to say that experiments have shown that merely the act of smiling can influence positively how we feel inside. In an experiment that Gladwell describes the researchers took two groups of volunteers and had one group call to mind a stressful experience that caused them sadness, anger or fear and had a second group merely make the facial expressions of these emotions without recalling anything. They discovered that the physiological responses in both groups were the same! Merely making a sad face had the same impact physiologically as actually recalling a sad event! The same is true of recalling a happy event and simply smiling. So when you’re feeling sad, or angry, or frustrated literally ‘put on a happy face’ and the science says you will feel happier!

Emotions work from the outside in – as well as the inside out
Stay in charge, stay in control!

It’s all about life….

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Life is all about transitions…. it’s about starting things and ending things and moving between things. That’s what I love about life. Challenges coming to a conclusion. New challenges to explore. Yesterday saw me watch this years graduates walk across the stage to be given their award. It’s a wonderful day because the journey to a degree is not an easy one. It’s a lot of hard work. But what starting a degree does is set you out a plan. The 3 years of an undergraduate degree, or the 2 of a postgraduate degree, sets out a framework around which all other challenges hang. It absorbs you. For better or worse!

We need challenges. We need to set ourselves targets. There’s evidence that if you have a plan that you record in some way you are more likely to achieve it. That’s remarkable. Just by writing it down it’s more likely to happen.

When I turned 50 (just short of 2 years ago) I set myself a ten year plan and I wrote it down (yes! For those who know me… in my spreadsheet!) My plan was simple. That by the time I was 60 I wanted to be making all my income from writing and other freelance work. I wanted to have the luxury of not having to work for an organisation. A kind of retirement of sorts. A ‘retirement’ to me setting the agenda for the part of my life I get paid for. This was a big task because 10 years, in reality, is not a long time. So, I had to make a plan. I had to start building up my writing. I had to think about the financial impact of such a move. I had to think about the skills I had and the skills I needed to develop. I needed to take a big idea and break it down into smaller ideas, smaller steps.

This relies on a nice little metaphor that I love to use which is – How do you eat a whole elephant? One bite at a time, of course. You couldn’t possibly eat a whole elephant at once! You need to work on things incrementally and what you’ll find is that when you tick a step off your list you will get a psychological buzz and that will generate forward momentum with whatever it is you are wanting to achieve.

I find myself with a day at home today. I had a meeting cancelled this morning so now I have a whole day to myself. I’m feeling a bit anxious about some things I need to achieve over the next 6 months because at the minute I don’t have a plan. Firstly, I need to write a book! I’ve signed a contract so it has to be delivered by the end of the year! And at the minute all it is is a list of chapters with a brief outline…. and I’ve never written a book before! I need to map out how this is going to happen. So while a 10 year plan is important so are shorter term plans. Because of the way my job works it’s useful to have a 6 month plan. So today I’m going to figure out my 6 month plan. What am I going to do between now and the end of the year and how does writing a book fit into that?

I’m running the Kielder Marathon in October and I can apply the same principle. So working backwards from the date of the run I’ll figure out what mileage targets I need to hit week by week. That way, I know what I need to achieve and I’ll diary time out to do it.

And finally, for today at least, I need to figure out how to fit the work I need to do at University into my working week. So I’ll plan where the lectures are, when I’m going to prep them, who I might need to talk to and when I’ll do that, when I’m going to work on placements, and so on and so on….. right up until the end of the year.

And I guarantee by the end of the day I will feel a huge sense of relief because I’ll have a plan. As David Allen (author of Getting Things Done) says, “if you don’t control ‘it’, ‘it’ will control you.” There is concrete evidence that having a plan reduces stress both at work and at home.

So get planning, get organised, let’s nail this!!

Goal setting

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How do you set your goals? We all want to achieve. We all want to get better at things. We all want to move ourselves towards goals. But maybe the way we set ourselves targets just isn’t helpful. There is a tendency to want to put figures on things because we all know how figures work. “I want to lose 10 kilos”, “I want to run 5k in 25 minutes”, “I want to run a marathon”. These are all fitness goals but there will be others. Maybe, “I want to save £1000 by the end of year”.

These statements are problematic though because one of the things we are good at as people is not hitting the target. Think back to all of those new years resolutions that go unmet. Think of all of those weight loss strategies that didn’t get you to your ‘goal weight’. Think of all those fitness regimes that didn’t get you ripped and slim.

As soon as you set yourself a fixed goal then you run the risk of missing it. But even if you hit it you’ve still got a problem! Once you’ve hit your goal weight what do you do? Go back to eating like you did? What do you do when you hit that 25 minute 5k? Do you stop running? Well, sometimes we do! Sometimes it’s like ‘right that’s it – I’ve done it so I don’t have to worry about it anymore!’ And the weight goes back on or the fitness slides and you have to start again with another goal.

How about simply framing what you want to do differently? I want to get better at being a healthier eater? I want to get better at being a runner? I want get better at being a saver? These things have no end point. They have nothing to ‘fall off’ or ‘fail at’. You want to become a healthier eater so you start nailing the salads and the baked potatoes and then you have a take away. Well, what you are trying to achieve is still there. You’ve not done anything wrong because just because you had a take away doesn’t mean you can’t continue to try to be a healthier eater. When you choose a measurable goal like weight loss and you don’t lose any weight because of that take away the scales shout at you, make you feel bad, and make you think ‘well hey – I’m never going to hit my target weight – so why bother!’ But you can still follow your dream of being a healthier eater because that’s still an on going proposition – it never ends so it’s always available to you to help you frame what your doing. ‘Hey, I had a pizza, but I’m still trying to be a healthier eater’

The difference is maybe a subtle one but the psychology of it apparently really works. It’s like when you have a big task to achieve like, say, write a 3,000 word report. If your goal is to write the report then every time you sit down to do it and you don’t complete it your mind sees that as a failure – ‘I didn’t finish the report’. But if you break it down to manageable chunks. ‘I need to read this article’, ‘I need to think about the structure of the report’, ‘I need to map out what I want to write’ etc etc then you achieve a result whenever you do these individual things giving you a psychological boost. This is called ‘The Power of Small Wins”. This is the ‘how do you eat an elephant – one bite at a time’ strategy!

There’s a similar thing at play with the psychology of setting goals. If your goal is to run a marathon then every time you don’t run a marathon you haven’t achieved it. If your goal is to work on being a better runner then every time you run you are working on that. If your goal is to be a healthier eater then every time you eat you are working on that. Personally, I find that taking this approach helps me make better choices. What I eat isn’t governed by the scales or a target weight but by simply wanting to try and achieve ‘eating healthier’. Yes, I do hope that what that means is weight loss but if it doesn’t it doesn’t and I will continue to try and eat healthier because the positive impact on my life is broader than what the scales say.

Let’s do it!

Emails… the modern tool or the modern scourge?

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Emails are great…. and they are not great! Emails allow you to ask the same thing to a number of people at the same time and get answers back quickly – that’s great! …and it can be a nightmare! How many of you get cc’d into things and wonder… “why has someone included me in this!?” For such emails there is the ‘delete’ button! Emails let you send things to people wherever you are and whatever time it is! That’s great…. and that’s not great!

Like them or loathe them they are here to stay I’d imagine though. They appear to have caught on! There are various estimates but it appears the average person at work sends and receives about 130 emails per day. In ‘Organised Mind’ Daniel Levitin tells us that even outside of work we process around 100,000 words every day! That’s remarkable. How do we manage this information overload.

Well, as David Allen, author of ‘Getting Things Done’ says…. if you don’t control it, it will control you. And, as a manager I had was fond of saying, ‘you need to get ahead of it’. Steer it from the front rather than chase it.

How many are in there!?

So, how do we manage this onslaught of information, and particularly for this article, how do we manage emails. David Allen says that your Inbox is a capture tool not a storage tool. Your job on a daily basis should be to ‘get in to empty’. How many emails are in your Inbox at work? I bet for some of you it’s hundreds and once they disappear off the bottom of the screen they disappear out of your mind. ‘I emailed you about it’, ‘Don’t think I’ve seen it’, ‘It was a week or so ago’, scroll scroll scroll…. ‘oh there it is’. If your Inbox is empty, or at least down to a handful of emails, there can be nothing in there that’s more than a few hours old, or a day at most.

If your Inbox is overflowing set yourself some time aside and systematically work through it. You’ll feel great! I bet anything that’s older than a week or so can be deleted or saved somewhere. And then once you are down to a manageable amount you’ll find it easy to keep on top of them.

There’s a process you can go through to get in to empty – and it comes to us courtesy of the wonderful David Allen again! When working through your emails, take them each in turn and either ‘Do it, Delegate it, Defer it, or Delete it’.

Let’s have a look at each of them in turn. There will be some things in your Inbox that you can just ‘Do’. Here’s your chance to apply the 2 minute rule. If it’s going to take you less than two minutes to do just do it. Don’t procrastinate, don’t leave it till later… just do it. There’s a thing called the planning fallacy that leads us to overestimate how long small tasks will take and underestimate how long big tasks will take (more on that last one in a different article later). There are loads of emails you can do in two minutes. And when you have dealt with the email either save it off to a folder or delete it. You’re done with it.

The next one is ‘Delegate It’. Delegation is not a ‘down the command chain’ activity. It is merely passing something on to someone because they need to do, or you need information from them so you can do it. So you can delegate up, across, or down depending on what you need. So if you can pass it over or ask for information then do that and then file or delete the email.

Then you may need to do some work in order to respond to an email or, the email may have given you a task to work on. So you ‘Defer It’ for these ones into what Allen calls a Trusted System. We’ll talk more in another article about ‘trusted systems’ but essentially if there is something to do, put it somewhere where you will be reminded to do it. For me, if things are time and date specific they go in my calendar in a time and date slot. If something is actionable but not time and date specific it goes into my calendar as an ‘all day’ event on a day where I might be able to get to it. If something needs some thought and planning and isn’t time and date specific it goes into my master spreadsheet. Once it’s in one of those places I save or delete the email.

Finally, in this process, if something isn’t for you or of interest to you ‘Delete It’! Go on you’ll feel good!

I pick up and work through my emails twice a day. First thing on a morning and last thing on an afternoon. I sometimes have a look in the middle of the day if I have the time and I follow the methodology above. It goes like this. I work through the emails and delete the ones that I can. I then make another pass and use the 2 minute rule to do things or delegate things. This leaves me with the meaty emails that I need to defer into my trusted system. I then work through those and put what I need into my calendar or spreadsheet. And then, by that point, I will have got in to empty, safe in the knowledge that when I next look there can be nothing in there I don’t know about that’s more than few hours old. And if, for some reason, I don’t get to check them again that day, I know the next day that there is nothing in there that is more than 24 hours old. No one has been waiting on me for very long. It make you feel so good and so in control and frees up loads of psychological capital to do other things.

Note though – when I’m not actively dealing with emails my email client is shut down with notifications switched off. When I’m not doing emails, I’m not doing emails, because I’m working on other equally important things! Research by Microsoft showed that if you are working on a task and get distracted by an email it takes you up to 15 minutes to get back up to the speed on that task you were working at prior to going to check the email. That’s a huge productivity loss. So either be emailing or be not emailing. The idea of multi-tasking is a myth. Trying to write a report and answer emails as they come in will slow down your productivity in relation to both and research has shown that you will be more prone to mistakes.

Emails! They are necessary but you can manage them. Having them under control will reduce stress and allow you to focus on other tasks without worrying about what’s in there!

  • Start by emptying your Inbox… you’ll feel great!
  • Use ‘Do it, Delegate it, Defer it, Delete it’ every time you work on emails to get in to empty
  • Set specific times in your day to do emails
  • Outside of those times don’t check your emails

Take that break….

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Image result for lunch break
Take that lunch break!

Hello everyone! Monday! First day of the working week for a lot of us and a lot to do I’d imagine? But I want you to make sure you do something for me today… and then every day. I want you to take a lunch break. I want you to take at last 20 minutes even if you don’t think you have the time. I want you to go for a walk and eat something.

A study at the University of Bristol showed that exercise can boost mood and motivation by 41%. Now that’s got to help you get through your afternoon work! They also found that exercise improved the ability to deal with stress by 20%. I suspect you need that to help you out. Yet research by BUPA showed that up to two thirds of workers feel they can’t take 20 minutes away from their desk at lunch (Davison 2015)

In 2017 Pulg-Ribera and some fellow researches looked at a ‘sit less, move

Image result for lunch break

more’ programme in the work place and discovered that simply by getting up and moving about people reduced their stress levels. Imagine that! Exercise, even gentle in nature, ‘burns off’ the cortisol and adrenaline produced by our stress response. When you are at your desk and you are feeling overwhelmed your stress response kicks in ….only the problem is it’s designed to prepare us for fight of flight… and when no fight or flight is required we don’t use these chemicals for what they were intended. That gives us the problem of those chemicals hanging around. Some gentle exercise will help mitigate that response.

Afternoon performance is bad enough as it is even if you don’t miss out on your break. Daniel Pink tells us that judges hand down harsher sentences for the same crime on an afternoon, and a study in North Carolina showed that the chances of something going medically wrong in one of their medical centres was four times higher at 4 p.m. than any other time (Pink, 2018, ‘When’)

In his wonderful book ‘The Joy of Work’, Bruce Daisley (creator of the fabulous podcast Eat Sleep Work Repeat) recounts the story of Laura, a manager at the Museum of London who, during a heavy period of work, went without lunch, and reported as a consequence that her mood, energy, diet and attitude to her job all crashed.

It’s such a small thing to do but it’s so important. Take your lunch break and have that brisk walk before having something good to eat. …and by ‘good’ I mean healthy 😉 You will improve your mental performance, clear your head and enhance your performance in the afternoon. You absolutely need some distance from your work half way through the day to energise yourself!

Go on… you know you want to. You’ll thank me for it…. as will your clients and colleagues.