DON’T KILL YOURSELF, MR EXECUTIVE

A senior Indian executive and CEO of a big MNC died after a massive cardiac arrest in Mumbai recently. He was only 42 and a regular gym buff. In fact, he died after a gym workout. What killed this young and healthy executive is a question that begs an answer. The executive was active in sports, a fitness freak and a long-distance runner also. It so happened that after his workout, he collapsed and was taken to the hospital where he was declared brought dead. The cause of the sudden death was a massive heart attack.

This incident once again is a grim reminder to the corporate India to mend its ways or rather mind its ways. Of late, a new fashion is catching up with Indian executives — overdoing. Overdoing almost everything. Overdoing work. Overdoing workouts. Overdoing parties. Overdoing entertainment. Just everything except one. And that one thing is vital — sleep. But the point is that if you overdo so many things, how can you sleep?

Exactly and this is what is happening. The results are disastrous. But people don’t realise this. Rather, they do not get time to realise because by the time you realise, you are dead. These days people very proudly proclaim to be workaholics, which means they are obsessed with work. Rather, inebriated with work. This condition is given a name ‘Karoshi’ in Japanese management literature, that means death due to over work.

Interestingly, these days Karoshi is also the name of a series of puzzle platformer games in which the goal is to die. The term ‘Karoshi’ was coined in the late Seventies to refer to a large number of Japanese people who got strokes and heart attacks due to overwork. It is time the menace is recognised in India because the social costs of family disruption that these young deaths may carry are far more than the economic gains that accumulate to the corporations and individuals.

What to do? Going back to the case of the young executive mentioned above; it is important to note that all his activities forced him to cut short on sleep. Sleep is crucial and has significant impact on human physiology. Sleeping for less than the required seven to eight hours has serious health implications. It increases the risk for high blood pressure. Not getting proper sleep increases flow of toxic secretions in the body, damaging many vital organs.

The greatest advantage of sleep is that it keeps stress away for all those hours you sleep, providing resilience to the body to cope with future stress that is inevitable. Senior cardiologists advise sleep for a variety of reasons; the most vital one being giving your heart a time to have peace. Not just the heart, sleep gives peace to the mind also.

Without doubt, then, sleep strengthens the two most vital organs of human beings — the heart and the mind. It is important for the executive to understand this and take a call. Sleep well. Sleep is precious and even the best of the salaries cannot buy it.

Perhaps it is precisely for this reason that conventional wisdom suggests that a good sleep is a very dear thing and those who get it are fortunate. Wake up, Mr Executive, and start sleeping well before it is too late.