The body machine

Our body is a complex machine. Many important components all working in harmony, allowing us to achieve amazing feats.

Our brain, possibly the most complex part of them all, is where our thinking happens. In our world dominated by knowledge work, it is also our organ that assumes the bulk of responsibility.

It can be easy to forget, however, that our body is a machine. A machine in which all parts play an important role, and affect each other.

Your body is a machine that feeds and supports your brain. Without a healthy and efficiently operating body, your mind will never be able to perform to the best of its ability.

It’s easy to ignore this fact, and many people do. In many cases, we ignore the health of our body in pursuit of achievement. We push ourselves, push our body, in an effort to drive our minds to do more, better, faster.

We use things like caffeine, when we need energy. We stay up, and create irregular sleeping patterns, when we want to get more done. We eat food that’s quick and accessible, to save time. We skip exercise, because it takes time and it’s hard.

All in the name of spending time elsewhere, on important things that we need to get done.

The ironic thing about this is that we’re naively achieving the exact opposite.

Using caffeine, we enjoy a short-term energy burst at the expense of enduring energy throughout the day.

Creating irregular sleeping patterns, we impact our ability to sleep efficiently, increasing the amount of time we actually need to spend in bed to become rested.

Eating bad food that is easily accessible deprives our body of nutrients it needs to operate efficiently, increasing the amount you need to consume to be healthy, or in the most common case, simply creating a deficiency.

Skipping exercise decreases the efficiency of your cardiovascular system. The system that provides oxygen to your brain.

Neglecting to drink water, because, isn’t there water in coffee anyway?

We want more from our brain, but we so commonly deprive it of the things it needs to perform for us.

This is a pretty obvious win. In order to optimize yourself, and your brain, you need to pay some attention to how you treat your body.

So, what does your body need, then? Nothing surprising, really:

There’s no tricks, no hacks, no surprises. Just the basic things that your body really needs to be healthy.

Originally published at sneub.com