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I'm Deborah, survivor of everything from multiple cancer battles to major business setbacks. Join my search for ways to move the mountains, big & small, that block your path to success.
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Practicing torture techniques?

Airline Stewardess

In March, when Virgin Atlantic Flight 404 departed Los Angeles for New York at 10:10 a.m. EST, passengers never imagined they were jetting toward a hostage crisis. High winds forced 404 to divert from JFK to Stewart International 90 miles away. The plane landed at 5:15 … and the nightmare began.

Most people don’t realize the Land of the Free ceases to exist at the door of a commercial airliner. The plane may be free to move about the country, but no matter how long it’s been sitting on the tarmac, ain’t nobody free to leave the plane. For about seven hours the flight crew forced passengers to stay on that aircraft. No exercise. Little water. A few rationed potato chips and cookies. Can’t sleep in cramped seats.

Can you imagine letting someone get away with treating you like that?

Uh … yeah. Do it to myself all the time. Bet I’m not the only one.

Seriously. How often do you spend most of your day sitting in your car, at your desk, and in front of your TV without getting five minutes of exercise? How often do you get sooo busy you skip breakfast or don’t have anything for lunch but a few chips or cookies? How often are you so tired you wind up falling asleep in a cramped chair with the TV blaring and wake feeling like you haven’t slept at all?

Great … we’re showing ourselves the same love we’d get from a bunch of overstressed, underpaid flight attendants. And we can’t even go back and tap ourselves for a travel voucher.

Skipping exercise, meals, and sleep only makes mountains tougher to move. So next time you’re tempted to treat yourself like an airline hostage, remember:

• When you skip exercise … you’ll start feeling more fatigued and less able to complete your tasks. Sounds contradictory, doesn’t it? Exercise leaves you sweaty, out of breath, and tired. Why would not exercising make you more fatigued? Because regular exercise helps keep all systems humming. By consistently requiring your heart and lungs to step up, you ensure these organs can take on more work when necessary. That means you won’t gasp for breath walking up stairs or chasing a toddler. Keeping muscles strong and joints flexible makes you less likely to experience falls and other injuries. Exercise will help keep your weight under control, so you won’t feel you’re going through the day wearing a loaded backpack. And by improving circulation and releasing endorphins, exercise keeps your mind sharp and depression at bay.

• When you miss meals … you’ll begin feeling dull and mistake-prone. Food feeds the brain as well as the body. When you decide to skip meals because you’re desperate to finish a project or have to pick up the kids from school, you’re robbing your brain of the glucose it needs to function optimally. So you’ll lose some of the concentration, memory skills, and decision-making abilities you need to do your job well and to fully process traffic information for that ride home with the kids. Tasks that might have taken 15 minutes if you’d stopped to replenish your brain could wind up taking 30—and still be incorrect. Worse, your reaction time could be off just enough to endanger yourself, your children, and other drivers.

• When you’re sleep deprived … the world turns upside down. Interrogators and torturers use sleep deprivation for a reason: It’s effective. Studies have shown that losing just an hour and a half of sleep for one night could reduce your alertness the following day by more than 30 percent. Being sleepy doubles your risk of a workplace or traffic accident. Sleep deprivation increases stress and irritability … which interferes with relationships … which increases stress and irritability. And it’s been demonstrated that over time consistently losing sleep contributes to everything from heart attacks to obesity to strokes to psychiatric problems. Considering the health and safety risks, giving up a good night’s sleep is even goofier than holding people captive on a cramped plane for seven hours … just a short distance from a comfortable airport.




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