Health and Wellness of Successful Leaders

Taking care of yourself is a key part of being a successful leader. Building in time for yourself is necessary to ensure you’re putting your best self forward every day. “Health and wellness” will mean different things to different people. To some, it may mean eating cleaner, cutting out processed foods, and making smarter choices with natural, whole foods.

Some others, it means finally establishing a regular exercise routine every morning before hitting the office. It may mean taking 15 minutes to meditate, do yoga, or even start parking far from the building to get a walk-in twice daily. Perhaps to you, it means taking steps to reduce the anxiety and stress that are infiltrating your life. Whatever the case may be, health and wellness should be a priority for every leader.

Prioritizing Health for Success

As a leader, you’re more vulnerable to stress than others. As a result of putting others first and your growing business, you may have been neglecting your health, happiness, and well-being. It may work for a while, but no one can keep it up for long. The sad result is often failure and burnout. With burnout comes a loss of productivity, which is never good for anyone’s bottom line — or health, for that matter. The recipe for long-term success begins and ends with you.

At its core, leadership is about the ability to set a vision and persist over the long run as you lead yourself and others to take on the challenges of running a successful business. Taking care of yourself now will impact your energy levels and stamina over the long haul. Yet so many leaders ignore this simple fact and just keep running on empty.

As your tasks grow bigger and the work piles up daily, it’s understandable that self-care will be relegated to the back burner to make way for more critical priorities. But while it’s understandable, it’s also not OK. Those who don’t prioritize their health can become fatigued, stressed, dehydrated, sick, and, yes, unbearable to work with. This pattern of behavior is more common than you might think.

One thing is for sure: managing your health is a vital part of being a successful leader and an effective human being.

Stress: It’s a Killer

You didn’t get where you are today by shying away from challenges and the stress that comes with it. But just because you’ve made it this long doesn’t mean you’re immune. Someday, it will affect your ability to be a successful leader, and that’s science talking. You may blame your nagging headaches, frequent insomnia, and decreased productivity on illness.

However, stress may be at the root of it all. Stress symptoms can affect your whole body, as well as your well-being, thoughts, feelings, and behavior. It can lead to high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and obesity, and can increase your risk for a heart attack, says the Mayo Clinic.  Common effects of stress on your body include:

• Headache
• Muscle tension and pain
• Fatigue
• Chest pain
• Change in sex drive
• Upset stomach
• Difficulty sleeping

In addition to stress’s physical health side effects, there’s also a mood to contend with. It can lead to anxiety, depression, restlessness, lack of motivation and focus, and irritability. Dealing with stress is vital, whether that’s through doing a crossword or anything else.

Start smaller than feels worthwhile. A leader who commits to an hour at the gym five mornings a week usually lasts about nine days. One who blocks twenty minutes and treats it like a client meeting tends to still be doing it in six months. Put it on the calendar where other people can see it, since a recurring block that stays visible is much harder to overwrite than a private intention. Then pick the one thing that fails first when work gets heavy, whether that is sleep, meals eaten sitting down, or a walk that is not also a phone call, and protect that before adding anything else. If stress symptoms are already showing up in your sleep, your blood pressure, or your temper, treat that as a reason to see a doctor rather than a problem to out-discipline.

The people you lead read your capacity before they read your strategy. A founder running on four hours of sleep makes slower decisions, hears feedback as an attack, and sets a pace the team quietly copies. None of that appears in a board deck, but it shows up in retention and in the quality of the calls you make under pressure. Time spent on your health is not time taken from the business. It is the part of the job that decides how much of you is left to give it.