It’s a
Monday. You’re tired, stressed,
working on autopilot with fantasies of your warm bed filling your head. There’s a pile of tasks at work and a pile
of chores at home. You know you
should get started on them but you’re just so tired. That exhaustion
(not to mention abandoned work) carries on to Tuesday, carries on to Wednesday,
carries on to Thursday, and even carries on to the ever-fabulous and promising
Friday. You live in a constant
haze of energy drinks, coffee, energy bars, and energy shots and suffer the caffeine crashes that follow.
Not anymore.
Renew your
energy, health, and life with The Fatigue
Prescription. Linda Hawes
Clever, MD, Clinical Professor of Medicine at UCSF and founder of RENEW,
provides a straight-forward guide to taking care of your whole self. Filled with
easy self-assessments, informational charts, and sound advice from a physician
who healed herself, this book will help you avoid illness, reset priorities,
and most importantly, regain your health and happiness.
Convinced? Not yet? Well, here’s an excerpt for your sleepy eyes:
No wonder you’re tired! You have wants and
needs. You want to get a lot done and you want to do it well. Your family and
friends need and expect your attention. So does your checkbook. You also have
plenty of shoulds and ought tos. You should be an informed
voter. You ought to get some exercise. And for goodness sake, you want
to see a good movie sometime soon! In your rare quiet times, you realize that
you want to be better than busy. You want some time to think and plan. You want
some peace and quiet without feeling guilty and selfish.
This book puts your closest buddy—you—into
the driver’s seat, moving out of the rat race and into fatigue-free good
health.
How?
In medicine, we try to determine the cause of
the symptoms— the diagnosis—and then we can design the appropriate treatment: the
remedy. That is what I hope this book does for you.
In this chapter, you and I will sort out the
whys and wherefores—some of the reasons you have accumulated so many demands
and commitments, what these relentless responsibilities are, and what they may
be doing to you. You’ll give your energy bucket the onceover and come up with a
couple of favors you can do for yourself. After discussing two important
qualities—courage and pride—the chapter wraps up with a preview of the Fatigue
Prescription and its four steps.
Later in Part One, since this is the
diagnosis section, you’ll do your own checkup and see the Prescription’s
benefits. Soon you’ll be well positioned to launch into the remedy. Part Two,
The Renewing Remedy, uses the Prescription’s four steps to help you reconnect
with your values and discover what you really want and how to get it. You’ll
see how others have renewed their bodies, spirits, and energy. You will get
some quick tips and ideas for long-term maintenance.
Why all this emphasis on you? Because
you are important! And it is not selfish to take care of yourself. It is
self-preservation so you can do what you want to do or must do. You are
the one who can best take care of yourself. No one else can do it as well, and
no one else cares about you as much.
By way of example, and to help you start
understanding the challenges you may face and the way you may approach them—and
why—let me tell you about a young musician. She was trying to make a living by
patching together jobs as a church choir director, a high-school rehearsal
accompanist, a greeting card designer, and a piano teacher—all while she was
thinking about a new career, hunting for a full-time job, dealing with family
demands, and dating an interesting guy. One day she came home to find her low-rent
apartment flooded with sewage. The manager said he would fix the drainage
system, but when the apartment flooded for a second time, her spirits hit
bottom. She was angry, and she felt betrayed. She caught a cold, snapped at her
friends and students, and cried. Anybody would! She was stuck, however, with no
money, a tight schedule, and lots of distractions. She was determined to fix the
problem but didn’t want to add a disruptive move to her situation. So she
enlisted her father’s help. He checked the plumbing and made firm
recommendations to the manager. She persuaded the manager to pay for the
cleanup so she wouldn’t have to call the health department. When the dust and
goo settled, she had an after-the-flood-get-together. Her grit and network got
her through.
Where do you get your grit, and how do you
develop your network? What about your drive, even your tastes and preferences? How
did you get so much on your plate that you got exhausted and, perhaps worse,
stale? Nature, nurture, combinations, circumstances? All of these, most likely.
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