How many hours a day do YOU work?

The Internet meets me with people that are probably not even remotely interested in movement and nutritious eating but what brings us together is the interest in health and quality of life. I was recently contacted by someone named Allison, who mentioned she read my blog post on managing diet in times of stress. Then she invited me to take a look at an infographic she has been working on, regarding the length of the work week in the US and inviting me to share it, which I will do in a couple of paragraphs.

Stress is an ugly monster, my dear friends, and we have the key to lock it in it's dungeon or let it loose and allow it to change the plot of the fairy tale that is our life. 

Do I think work can cause stress? Well, to begin with, stress is not something that happens TO you, as in '' this guy really stresses me out''. It's something that happens inside of you because you cannot appropriately react to a stimulus. There are countless of stimuli in your day, and it's individual what brings you to your tipping point.

For the sake of simplicity, let's look at work as your only stimulus. If you had only a limited number of work hours that you could appropriately process that allowed you to be creative, happy, fulfilled, but alas you were in a circumstance where you needed to work ''more'' than those hours, that could cause you to react with stress. Not necessarily because you don't enjoy your job, like some people have shared, but just because of the sheer number of hours, appointments, conversations, problems to be solved. I won't even get into the topic of work-life balance, because then we will have to look at relationships, health, sleep, finances, career, education and everything else that seems to take 1% instead of 90% of your day.

During my homecoming week at the Restorative Exercise Institute in Ventura, one of the business training topics we discussed was how to balance our health and personal priorities with the desire to work with others and help them on the road to physical health! We were all in agreement that more than 3 hours of work a day with clients/patients was all that was productive, and the rest of the day, like Katy Bowman advised us, would be dedicated to making sure people can find us and making sure we are the living example of the health people want to regain. Given that this means not more than 25 hours a week will be spent working, that would significantly reduce stress, and simplify your life, should you choose to go that way.

Is the 40 hour infographic a good start? I think it's a great wake up call for those who haven't thought about it, so please read on :) The infographic is way cooler than anything I am able to create and I am very glad that Allison shared it with me.



How many hours a week, do YOU work? And how many of those hours are dedicated to getting 80% of your work done?