your office. When your sleep routine is at risk, due to travel or any other reason, plan your schedule to get the right amount of sleep. This will help to keep your natural defenses high when you are at an increased risk of getting sick.
It is easy to spend eight hours in bed and still feel lousy in the morning. You can spend nine hours in bed yet get just five hours of good sleep. The problem is, time spent rolling around awake in bed doesn’t count. Nor is it healthy if you are regularly getting up in the middle of the night and struggling to fall back to sleep.
As part of the experiment in the previous section in which people were quarantined and injected with a rhinovirus, participants were also graded on the quality or efficiency of their sleep. To determine the “sleep efficiency” scores for each participant, researchers asked what time they went to sleep, what time they got up, how much time they spent in bed before falling asleep, how many times they awoke, and how long they were up throughout the night. The sleep efficiency score was then calculated based on the percentage of time participants slept out of the total time they were in bed.
The researchers discovered that sleep efficiency is more influential than the total duration of sleep, at least when it comes to warding off the common cold. Participants who had lower sleep efficiency scores over the 14-day period before exposure to the rhinovirus were 5.5 times as likely to develop a cold. Quality of sleep beat quantity by a wide margin.
Set yourself up for quality sleep first. Consider your diet, activity, and environment. Then focus on extending how long you sleep.
Bad genes are no excuse for an unhealthy lifestyle. As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, I have a rare condition that is the equivalent of losing the genetic lottery. Yet the worst thing I could do is blame my genes and use them as an excuse to make poor choices.
As scientists are now uncovering, your lifestyle choices can create rapid and dramatic changes at the genetic level. Even with a family history of obesity or heart disease, you will benefit from a better diet, more activity, and quality sleep. Lifestyle choices can be even more influential than your genetic background. Simply being active is associated with a 40 percent reduction in the genetic predisposition for obesity, according to a study of more than 20,000 adults. While your genes can make it easier to become obese, they do not prevent you from being healthy.
Another experiment showed how participants who underwent just three months of major lifestyle adjustments, from diet to exercise, created changes in the activity of about 500 genes. There was more activity in disease-preventing genes and less activity in disease-promoting genes. One of the strongest genetic mutations for heart disease can even be altered. High fruit and vegetable intake almost negates the effect of this mutation that predisposes people to cardiovascular disease.
While you will not be able to change your genes altogether, you clearly can alter the expression of your genes and the subsequent impact they have on your health over time. You obviously can’t change your family history. However, you can change your family future by making better choices today.
One little secret of medicine and social sciences is how measurement itself creates improvement. When researchers study the effect of a given intervention, simply asking people to track a specific outcome makes it more likely to improve. While this is a limitation for scientific experiments, you can use this to your advantage.
If you want to increase your activity, measure how much you move. When people are assigned to wear a pedometer as part of randomized controlled trials, they walk at least one extra mile per day on average. Overall activity levels go up by 27 percent. Body Mass Index (BMI) decreases, and blood pressure goes down.
In addition to basic pedometers, which cost as little as $5, more sophisticated tools are available today. There are now hundreds of devices that can measure your activity all day long. They come in the form of wristbands, necklaces, GPS watches, and other clip-on or in-pocket devices.
Some of these tools even monitor the duration and quality of your sleep. Others track your heart rate and alert you if you are inactive for a prolonged period. You can also achieve much of this using the accelerometer or GPS in a smartphone. This book’s Welbe companion app will allow you to merge measurement and tracking data across many platforms and devices. It will also show you and your peers how your metrics compare, even if you use different tracking devices.
Whether you prefer high tech, low tech, or no tech, find some way to track or log your activity. This will prompt you to set specific goals — yet another key to adding movement. What could be even more beneficial is comparing your activity levels to your peers’ activity levels. At a minimum, tracking your activity keeps it top of mind.
Once you find a way to measure your movement, set a goal for your daily activity. The most common standard is the raw number of steps you take in a day. Almost any pedometer or device tracks and displays your total steps.
When I first started counting, my typical day was just 5,000 steps. Until I received this daily feedback, I had no idea how sedentary my lifestyle had become. After tracking continuously for a year, I was hitting 8,000 steps per day on average, and I now routinely walk more than 10,000 steps a day. Every night, the last thing I look at before bed is my step count for the day. This number is a decent proxy for whether my body had a good day or a rough one.
Based on the latest research, 10,000 steps per day is a good target for overall activity. This equates to roughly five miles, which is nowhere near as daunting as it sounds once you start adding up all of your
