Prioritize health
2024-02-03
This one is another of the unplanned, but brought-up-through-life articles, so it might not be for everyone. I usually talk quite a lot about hustle, goals and becoming successful, but don't spend a lot of time thinking about health, since I'm physically fit, almost never ill and fortunate enough to not have had a major accident or something along these lines. However over the last few weeks, I had to deal with an insistent infection and am only now making my way to recovery. So, let's talk about health for a bit...
Before we get right into the topic, I just want to make clear that I'm not a physician or any other kind of health expert and also not a native English speaker, so don't take what I say for medical advice and please excuse me if I use the wrong or not quite correct terms - my goal is to get a general message across and that's what matters. Alright, to make what I want to say later one more specific let's start with my recent story.
As already stated, I'm usually never ill and if I have only catched a small cold in the last few years, which I could get over through the help of my immunsystem within a few days. This time around the symptoms of runny nose, cough and overall weakness started 11th January and pretty much stagnated for two weeks, even though I stopped exercising. However, I also tried to fulfil my regular schedule, proceeded with utility biking and went to a few parties during this time, which was probably the reason for the symptoms becoming drastically worse after the 25th. I just didn't give my body the peace and rest it needed to deal with the infection on its own and thus it failed after some time. Until the following monday (29th), it got so bad that I had to visit the doctor, since not only my cough intensified drastically and my nose was running like there's no tomorrow, but I also got rather high fever, pressure headache and my lungs started to make a rattling sound - not good. Luckily enough, my doctor had quite some people with these symptoms over the last while, knew what medication to prescribe and I can now confidently tell you that I helped beautifully so far.
I'm still nowhere near my normal ability to take stress and work, but it's getting better and I'm planning to keep away from social activities and sports for quite some more time to come in order to make sure that I really get across the hill. Health is one of the things you only learn to truly appreciate once it is gone and we should remind ourselves more often about this. Would I have heard to my body earlier on or even just visited the doctor one week prior, much of the unpleasant time I went through could have been mitigated. It is always advantageous to prioritize health (and happiness for that matter) over work, success and fulfilling deadlines and not just from a personal perspective. If you can stop a major flu early on through taking one or two days off and properly resting, you are likely to save at least 8 to 14 days of inability to work that could have been caused by not hearing to your body and persisting on working. It really is an economically viable concept, especially if you are in the fortunate position to be able to work from home, since you can on the one hand control your workload much easier there and on the other hand also avoid unnecessary exposure to infections through human contact in times of fragile health.
With that said, I really want you to make prioritizing health one of your personal guidelines, share it everywhere you can and possibly even manifest it for yourself with a tattoo - even though the last one should be read with a bit of a smiley face. Have a lovely day and I'll focus on getting fit for now...