Time is life’s most valuable commodity, yet it isn’t something you can buy. It is something that everyone you speak to wishes they could have more of and is the often cited reason for not doing some of the things we want or need to do in our lives.
When starting out in our careers, it is often the desire to try and increase salaries, seeking out new opportunities and ways to climb the career ladder that takes up our time. As we grow more tired and stressed with our relentless work ethic, our productivity decreases so we have to work longer hours and become more stressed — it is a vicious cycle! However research has shown that people who exercise or do some form of physical activity on work days, are more productive, happier and suffer less stress than on days that they don’t exercise.
As we progress through our careers and children come along, it is a combination of work and family that is the time thief. As the end of our working days approaches, the desire to save for a fun retirement where we can do all the things we haven’t yet got around to, drives us to work harder, save more money and hence still have little time for ourselves.
Finally our retirement comes and many people here in India and across the world realise that throughout their working lives, they have prioritised making and saving money above their health, and that the activities and travelling they wanted to do are no longer achievable. Research shows that, of people near retirement but still working, 75 per cent believed that their quality of life after retirement would improve, but only 40 per cent of retirees found that it actually did.
Prioritising our health and leisure time is therefore important throughout our lives. Whilst many of us will always say we will start a new routine next week, next month, after Diwali or some other milestone, it is not the starting that is important but the ability to make any leisure and healthy activity part of our everyday lives. Whilst money is of course important and helps us to lead the lives we want to, if we don’t find the time to enjoy it and ensure that we are healthy to enjoy our lives, then money won’t be able to fix that.
But how do we find time to be healthy and take leisure activities when we are so busy with our day to day lives? An hour is just 4 per cent of our day but the logistics of finding somewhere to be active, fitting this in with our family commitments or even just finding the motivation is often a challenge.
For those who find it hard to be motivated to exercise, group classes such as Zumba, body balance or group cycling are really social activities and lots of fun. Scheduling physical activity into your diary has been shown to raise levels of adherence to regular activity and hence booking into a weekly group exercise class is a fantastic way to ensure you can keep healthy whilst having fun at the same time. For others, playing a sport is a fun and interesting way to spend your leisure time, a workout for the brain as much as the body! What many people don’t realise is that a game of tennis can burn as many calories as an hour on the treadmill but for most people would be significantly more enjoyable.We are all a little guilty of prioritising working and making money over looking after ourselves. We could do more to ensure we fit leisure and exercise into our lives for both our mental and physical health.
(Hazel Geary, COO of David Lloyd Clubs Talwalkars)
