T I M E M A N A G E M E N T
hour day and the five-day work cycle. Here are a few ways we can
acknowledge, honor, and accommodate our natural rhythms.
How to Find Your Rhythm
Your body has an inherent natural rhythm. To the extent that you
can, you must rediscover your rhythms and live by them. Relearn
how to listen to your body and recognize when you’re tired or
hungry or angry or restless, rather than override these feelings
because they’re “improper” or simply inconvenient.
We’ve all picked up opinions about diet and sleep, based on
experience and inclination, study, folklore, and social pressure.
Sometimes these four sources agree: you love apples, science says
apples are good for you, and folklore teaches, “An apple a day
keeps the doctor away.” And aside from the scare over the pes-
ticides, society seems to approve of apple eating. The only real
drawback seems to be that Adam and Eve business, but even there,
it’s the serpent, not the apple, that does the damage.
Often, though, the four influences are in conflict. “Eat your
spinach,” your Mama and Popeye the Sailor told you. Scientists
agree that spinach is wonderful stuff. But society has singled out
spinach as the very symbol of something that’s good for you but is
really yucky, and, truth be told, you really don’t like spinach.
Chocolate has gotten a bad rap (perhaps largely unjustly) for
years, but lots of folks love to eat it, and it has come back into favor
as providing at least some health benefits.
Smoking provides a more complex and troubling example.
Most smokers start young, and peer pressure often plays a big part
in getting started. Most beginning smokers react violently and
negatively to their first few smoking experiences. From coughing
to throwing up, the body does its best to repel the invasion of a
foreign substance into the system.
If we persevere, though, the body learns to handle, then to
enjoy, and finally to crave the smoke as we develop an addic-