body health for productivity
Created: 2026-09-07 Mon 22:57
Me as many other professionals experienced multiple health issues which in some cases where really hard to heal. The most frustrating moment is when you understand you are not functioning and you start seeking for professional help and get involved in many conjectures.
Physicians are less and less involved in using their intuition to guide you to the resolution of problems and they recommend you to some specialized experts. You wait for weeks for your appointment, you have around 5-10min visit and you wait for your exam results. In most of the case they say “I see nothing critical/decisive” and you jump to the next expert waiting for some clarity. In some cases it took me up to 13y to find an expert to perform a decisive exam for my eyes.
Ancient Romans were advising that a grown up adult should know how to not need doctors because they know how to interpret the body signs and know how to react.
This is why I thought to write down everything I learned in these years, pain after pain, and how I got independent from external help.
I want to avoid saying trivial things or common sense. I will just list the habits that really worked for me and stress when the solution was pretty different from what I was always told and it took a lot of experimentation to understand progresses.
Let’s start with the body where most of the issues comes from.
When we have bad habits or we don’t pay attention to body signals we often have a series of consequences which severely impact our productivity.
I’m definitely not an example of healthy lifestyle because I can’t renounce to nightlife. After days spent at the computer I need to go out and meet friends and go to concerts. This is nothing it would make sense to cut. Nightlife means alcohol, cigarettes and bad food. This is not the best start but neither something that prevented me to live healthy because the usual hang-over guilt let me compensate with other activities. If you can have the social interactions you need in a healthy way better for you but this is not the most necessary step.
In IT we all experience back pain. I wish I knew how bad was the chair I was using during the long days in the office during the PhD which harmed my spine for good. The cures I tried to fix the problem where even worse and I can’t count the days where I could barely stand.
Headaches heavily impacted my productivity.
What we eat and drink modifies our intestinal flora making a unique signature of our symbiotic life with bacteria and yeasts. It can take years to try to select the flora by feeding it with different meals and let some bacteria prevail on others.
Bad lighting is an important cause of eye tiredness.
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Sedentary life increases the chance to gain weight and reduce concentration and resistance.