How Self-Care Effects Organization

Since I have started organizing I have been surprised at how many clients need to learn to plan or prioritize their self-care.  I have had to educate myself and my clients on the role positive self-care (or lack thereof) have on organizing, planning, prioritizing or time management. I educate them on the importance of sleep and healthy eating. These are the most basic self-care skills that I am discussing here but there are certainly others that I discuss with individual clients. I don’t advise people on what to eat or how to eat but I do encourage them to talk to their doctor or suggest going to a nutritionist (I have a specific one that I refer clients to).  I tell my clients all the time that there are loads of hacks to being more efficient but those are no hacks for fueling and restoring your body.

Sleep – Lack of sleep can cause some serious health issues.

• Leaves you feeling grumpy –  which may not seem serious but think about how being grumpy constantly affects people you live with, work with or in relationships with. No one likes to be around someone unpleasant all the time.
• Leaves you feeling foggy – this can almost cause a problem in relationships because you truly never completely present where you are or with whomever,  you are with. There are other issues from feeling foggy that I will list separately because of their seriousness.
• May lead you to have accidents –  You are more likely to make mistakes and cause accidents. Driving in this condition is as serious as driving drunk.  According to the National Traffic Safety Administration conservatively estimates that 100,000 police-reported crashes are the direct result of driver fatigue each year. This results in an estimated 1,550 deaths, 71,000 injuries, and $12.5 billion in monetary losses.
• Make learning difficult – Without enough sleep your frontal lobe where all learning happens you can’t pay attentions, concentrate, reason or problem solve so even if you aren’t learning for a class we are all learning all the time in our jobs or just for fun.
• Leaves you with a poor memory – In addition to the above, at night during your sleep cycle, your brain is busy putting the information you learned into “storage” if you aren’t getting to that part of the cycle, you can’t remember what you learned.
• May lead to a lack of sex drive –  need I say more
• May cause depression –  A study done in 2007 claims that people with insomnia are five times more likely to develop depression as those without a sleep disorder. In fact, insomnia is often one of the first symptoms of depression. Lack of sleep and depression symptoms create a vicious cycle.
• Impaired judgment – Due to lack of sleep our perception of events is impaired, therefore we don’t make good decisions because we can’t take in all the information to make a well-informed decision. Ironically, we especially make bad decisions about sleep.   
• May lead to other health issues – Lack of sleep has been connected to loads of serious health issues. Including heart attacks, heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and diabetes.

Diet –  What you choose to put in your body affects how you function. There are the more obvious health issue that can arise from a poor diet; these issues are more related to organizing, prioritizing and time management:  

• Leaves you with cravings – Sugar has a high content of fructose which makes is more fattening than other foods but it also hits that part of your brain that makes you crave more of it. Also
• Causes memory and learning issues – Some studies have linked between body weight and the size of the hippocampus, which is responsible for learning and memory. Australian researchers studied this link in adults by measuring the size of the hippocampus and then comparing it to that person’s BMI. Everyone’s hippocampus shrinks with age but those of people who were obese shrink more.
• May make you more likely to binge eating – A study at John Hopkins University School of Medicine recently concluded that children with ADHD may be most likely to also LOC-ES, a form of binge eating. It makes sense really if you understand ADHD well.
• Leaves you feeling foggy – Poor eating can also cause brain fog causing you to have problems paying attention, making decisions, or collecting relevant data to make a decision, and unable to prioritize causing you to feel overwhelmed.

There are lots of other issues that I have not listed here. When I work with my clients talking about these self-care issues are coaching topics that I bring up. Organizing can be a stressful addition to your life. I want to make sure that my clients are taking care of themselves.