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Learning How to Thrive: Well-being, with Arianna Huffington, Co-founder, The Huffington Post and Author, Thrive
Sleep
We are addicted to a certain way of living. We are addicted, attached to our devices and often addicted to stress and burnout. So for me the first change, the first habit that I changed, the keystone habit as it is known in habit literature, was sleep. I went from four to five hours sleep to seven to eight hours sleep. And that transformed my life, truly.
Now, of course, we have conclusive scientific findings that sleep is really a miracle drug and it improves our health and strengthens our immune system, improves our mental clarity and makes us more joyful. And I recommend that we start simply by adding 30 minutes to how much sleep we are getting. I think everybody can do that and people who say they can’t do that I think need to look at how much time do they spend watching House of Cards or staying up to watch Jon Stewart or anything like that, you know. We have a lot more discretionary time than we think.
Walking
Walking is another step and often what I like to do is, especially as soon as the weather gets better in New York where I live, is to have walking meetings. If I’m going to have a meeting with an editor or someone on the Huffington Post team, I like to do it by putting our walking shoes on and getting out. And we have a park nearby, but even if you don’t have a park, just walking in the streets and take time away from your emails, your devices and being in the office.
Mindfulness and Meditation
The great thing about introducing mindfulness and meditation into our lives is that it does make it easier for us to unplug from our day and actually go to sleep. What meditation teaches us is to not attach ourselves to our thoughts and to find some stillness beyond the thoughts. I recommend starting with five minutes and recognizing the thoughts will keep coming.
I don’t see meditation as one more thing to put on our to-do list. Meditation does us. It’s something that enhances the quality of the rest of our day simply by connecting us to that place in us, that center that every religion and many philosophers and scientists have talked about using different language, which is the place of wisdom, strength and peace in us, the place that Archimedes, the Greek mathematician, referred to when he said “Give me a place to stand and I can move the world.”