Typical day cycle of white collar workers
Often we notice people start their morning without taking their breakfast due to a lengthy sleep in the mornings. They don't find time to think about breakfast and by the time they settle it will be noon and time for lunch. Some of them take their breakfast around 11am and go for lunch at around 4pm. Some of them even skip the breakfast many days and go for lunch at around 12:30pm. If we don't take breakfast on time which is normally 2hours after we wake up, we end up gaining weight, developing hyper acidity etc.

Another issue about the late start is the lack of bandwidth for physical workouts in the morning. When a person doesn't get time to take breakfast in the morning it is rarely possible to have physical workouts in the morning schedule. To reach the work location most of us use a vehicle and hardly find any opportunity to walk. Additionally elevators will make us more lethargic and we end up missing that small opportunity also to exert physically. Again from the elevator to workstation only few steps, eventually there is no way we can remain active physically for few minutes in the morning unless we have physical workout in our morning schedule.

During the day someone hardly makes time to walk between workstations because we communicate to the other person by chat or email only. Obviously, till the workday is complete there is no opportunity to walk. Invariably when someone finishes his work, there is no way to do any physical workouts because it will be too late in the evening. In addition to this, there could be a lot of opportunities to take fast food during the day. So the dinner is delayed beyond the normal time. After the late dinner there is no way to do any physical workouts but there might be a session to watch TV. Finally the day ends by going to bed very late, which eventually extends the sleep in the morning and so on....Till Friday.

In aggregate, physical activities are very less during the week days for all desk workers. Hence we need to do make use of Gyms provided by corporate or practice few "Asanas" and customize them which will acquire the benefits of physical activities though we sit in one place.

Weekend syndrome:
The weekend starts by Friday evening itself with a compulsion to have some party in spite of packed work schedule in the Friday evening. This leads to a pressurized working in the same evening and then a sudden relaxation in the late evening. This kind of situation is more than enough to go wild in relaxing in a pub or any restaurant with junk foods. Obviously Saturday is very late start, directly in to lunch and followed by some sort of entertainment. Saturday evening is invariably busy and is yet another long day when the activities are late in the evening. Sunday is also a late start with limited bandwidth to get organized for the next week. This results in a great discomfort starting from Sunday evening and extends till Monday evening. This is typically a weekend syndrome for many professionals. Weekend need to be enjoyable as well as relaxing with limited work to go easy in the next week. But many of us get tired during weekend and start the next week with more fatigue and mental pressure. This kind of situations can be avoided by clearly determining what we need to do during weekend and to make our life easy during the week days.

Ignoring the alerts:
Normally, the body and mind give prior notices before they go out of control which we call as stress or illness. We tend to ignore such alerts and overload without understanding the indications typically suffered indigestive cycles, sleep cycles, stress etc. For example, if the sitting posture is not correct, it starts from a mild strain in the neck followed by few episodes of headaches in the cervical region. At the next stage it will lead to intermittent shoulder and back pain and then severe spondylosis attacks. If we try to suppress them with self medicated pain killers, further it will start affecting the limbs. Finally we end up taking severe treatments when we get numbness in the limbs. This will cause not only a physical suffering but also affects the work life which in turn reduces the performance of a person. If one can understand this in the inception and take corrective and preventive action, the issue will get resolved without much damage.

Fast food impacts:
Right food taken at the right quantity and time works as a medicine. If we can take care of these three parameters our body may not require any other medicine to cure. Our body is capable of repairing itself when the damage happens provided the right input is there to our system which is food, air, water and good thoughts. Today, in the name of fast foods we tend to take more root vegetables than the greens which add up to the body weight if not burnt immediately. Occasionally we can take such food for fun but consuming them regularly is very dangerous for the stressful life we lead. If we can follow our traditional food system and timings, many of the issues might get resolved on its own. For example, right usage of garlic, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, lemon and sesame in our food will definitely make our food with medicinal values in the natural form.

Drugless therapies:
It is a common expectation that people really look for immediate relief for any illness which developed over a period. As the tolerance level goes down, we tend to take lot of medicines which will have its side effects. It goes as a recursive cycle as long as we add chemicals to our body in the form of drugs. Definitely for life saving, trauma care, epidemic issues we may require drugs to prevent as well as to treat. For normal systemic issues, drugless path is better though we need to take some conscious effort for that. In fact, drugless therapies help to prevent many illnesses rather than treating them after we acquire. Always prevention is better than cure. Drugless therapies definitely keep our system clean and allow natural resistance to work in our body when we take the right food. So we can avoid excessive chemical usage if we can prevent any kind of illness.

Travel related issues:
For many of us, maintaining our routine during travel appears to be difficult. In reality it is not so. If we stick on to a few regular habits like sleeping on time, morning walks, timely breakfast and lunch etc, there will not be any difficulty in aligning rest of our activities. When we push the activities beyond its normal schedule the irregularities start. When we don't do a few basic activities on time which sets the reference for other activities, subsequent activities will become chaotic. If we continue to have such a chaotic condition for few days on travel, we tend to forget the habits we follow.

Even after returning home, such kind of irregularities might continue and affect our health professionally unless we make a conscious effort to put back all the activities in to groove. Hence irrespective of any place and country we visit, maintaining few basic habits are always necessary rather than dropping them in the name of adaptability. We can see this pattern evolve when people move to other countries consciously dropping our traditional practices and values in due course.

Hydration:
Many people assume that they don't need to take required quantity of water when they are static in an air conditioned environment, which is a myth. Obviously we don't sweat inside an air conditioned environment but when we sit in one place for long time the stomach gets heated up which does not allow the system to function normally when the abdomen is compressed.
So, drinking water frequently will give a chance to get out of the seat and walk a few steps every one hour while reducing the heat in the stomach. This is very much applicable for all kind of desk workers and we need to take required water, equivalent to the people who work physically under sun.

Conclusion:
Individual productivity and scalability is completely dependent on the kind of life style a person leads. Balancing physical and mental health is becoming a big challenge for most of the desk workers category. As per WHO predictions, lifestyle issues are in the increasing trend. It is the right time to pay attention to the body warnings and take corrective measures to prevent future complications. This is not only a step towards correcting our own lifestyle but also a way we need to show to the younger generation to prevent worst conditions. Many times a person may not even know what to correct and hone to improve the scalability. This paper might give some guidance to take the next step towards improvement.

Suresh Srinivasan - Saligramam, Chennai - 600 093. - www. sureshsri.in

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