A flywheel is a heavy revolving wheel that increases a machine’s momentum, thereby providing greater stability or reserves when power falters. Sleep, diet, and exercise are your body’s flywheel. By neglecting any of the three, you deprive yourself and others — primarily those closest to you — of your fullest being.
Like any flywheel, it can be difficult to get things moving. You’ll fight yourself constantly. You will conjure spectacular excuses. You’ll fall off track, restart, stumble, begin again. This is normal. The magic isn’t in doing it perfectly, but in sensing when it’s wobbling and paying in relentlessly.
- Sleep: Get eight hours nightly. Wake up at the same time every day. Sleep is a sanctum. Sleep debt compounds worse than credit card debt.
- Diet: Eat clean and not too much. Avoid stuff that has been prechewed, predigested (sapped of nutrients), or otherwise processed, especially to improve palatability, shelf life, or appearance. Eat excessively or recklessly only if it will help you savor a moment in life — that hole-in-the-wall pizzeria in Naples, your friend’s admirable first attempt at frying chicken, your child’s birthday cake.
- Exercise: The closest thing we have to a panacea — nothing else offers such a spectrum of physical and mental goodness in such a concentrated package. Regular exercise can improve your health, energy, appearance, emotional stability, resilience, discipline, self-esteem, and more. Push yourself near physical failure a few times a week, and your everyday stressors and hardships will seem more manageable. It is daily proof that hard things are possible.
Prioritizing these three aspects of life will teach you that self-accountability is essential for self-respect. It’s a tangible way to pay love and trust forward to yourself.
