In today’s society it has come to my attention that there are rules and regulations for almost everything we do. Whilst recommendations on how much alcohol we should drink, how many calories we can eat and how much sleep we should have are useful, they are sometimes the cause of much stress.
For example, I read an article online recently about sleeping. According to this article if we had too much sleep it was detrimental to our health, just as much as having too little sleep. The recommended amount of sleep for the average adult was between 7 and 9 hours a night. Well this sent me into complete panic, I don’t think I’ve had more than five hours of un-interrupted sleep in nearly twenty years. I actually could lose sleep worrying about how much sleep I do or don’t get. Then theres the recommendation for how much alcohol you should drink per day, for a woman, one glass of wine, and for a man one glass or beer. There goes my plan for drinking a couple of glasses of red to lull me into my nine hours recommended sleep a night.
Then there was the article about how much television we watch and the effects of this on our health. This article proposed that for every hour watching television it diminished the average life expectancy by 22 minutes. I lost sleep trying to work out how much earlier I was going to die because of my Inspector Morse box set marathon over Christmas.
Finally, one we all know, how many recommended calories we should eat in a day. One day I might be really good and eat within this range of 2000 for women (2,500 for men), another day we might go out for dinner and have a diet busting meal at a restaurant, this begged the question “can I carry over the extra calories from last night to tomorrow?” Whilst worrying about this I look down to see I’m stress eating my way through a piece of cake.
Through all this research, I have come to two conclusions. Firstly, the old adage “everything in moderation”is a good thing to go by. Secondly, I’m going to reduce the time I spend reading articles and stick to fiction, it’s much safer.