Taking care of your overall wellbeing is important for anyone interested in optimizing lifespan and health-span, but for people who work in hazardous environments, it can be especially so. How you maintain your health at home will affect how you show up on the job, and when your on-the-job safety depends on you being alert and ready to respond to a crisis, you want to give yourself a solid foundation of wellness.
That’s why at TenCate Protective Fabrics, we include in our monthly safety meetings trainings on a wide variety of health topics, ranging from mental health to heart health and beyond. We understand how crucial it is that all our people have the information and tools they need to make choices that will help safeguard them while carrying out their duties. These are a few of the factors within employee control that we prioritize in supporting worker safety.
Hydrate Against Heat Stress
If you’ve worked outside in the South in the summer, you know how brutal those August afternoons can be. Heat stress is a significant risk factor for employees who work outdoors in summer months, or in non-airconditioned indoor spaces. When the heat index is 107°F and you’re pounding Diet Cokes or Red Bulls, you’re not going to do yourself any favors. Water is the best line of defense to ensure proper hydration.
Sodas and energy drinks can act as diuretics, sending you to the bathroom more frequently and throwing off your electrolytes on top of flushing water out of your body. Gatorade and other sports drinks can help replace electrolytes, and you can dilute them with water to cut down on the sugar content. Whether you’re drinking water or something with extra electrolytes, don’t wait until you’re thirsty: drink 5 to 7 ounces every 20 minutes to get ahead of dehydration. If you don’t start drinking until you feel the need, it’s going to take much longer to get hydrated.
Hydration while you’re off the clock is just as important as when you’re at work. Especially in the summer, if you’ve spent your weekend mowing the lawn, playing with your kids outside, or working in the garden and haven’t had enough water throughout, by Monday you could have lost 5lbs of water weight. Just a 1% to 2% reduction in body mass due to water loss is associated with significant impairment of cognitive abilities, including attention, executive function, and motor coordination. Your brain needs plenty of water all the time in order to be ready to go when Monday morning comes.
Sleep Is the Foundation of Good Health
The importance of sleep to your overall wellbeing cannot be overstated. Like dehydration, a lack of sleep can drastically compromise your cognitive abilities. Third-shift workers are at particular risk of fatigue with workdays that begin at midnight and end at 8:00 am, which can present challenges with flipping sleep schedules on off days. Whether you keep the same schedule every day or not, it’s incredibly important to get as much sleep as possible, ideally at least 7 to 8 hours per night.
Following tips for good sleep hygiene can help ensure those 7 to 8 hours in bed are as restful as possible: avoid screens before bedtime, keep your room cool and dark, and make your bed a sleep-only zone (that means not bingeing Netflix in bed). If you can go to bed and wake up at the same time every day, you’ll have an even easier time getting quality sleep on a regular basis.
Eat Right and Exercise
When you consider how much time you spend at your job and how much your attention and focus is needed in order to feel comfortable and safe while doing it, you could liken your fitness needs to those of an athlete. Like an athlete training for peak performance, you too must condition yourself for the demands of your work. On top of getting enough sleep and water, nutrition and exercise also support your ability to perform.
If eating healthy sounds like hard work, small changes can go a long way toward improving your habits. Pick one goal at a time and see how you can improve on it, such as swapping water for soda, or trying chicken from the air fryer instead of the deep fryer. Stringing together lots of small decisions like these can help you make continuous progress toward living a healthy lifestyle that supports what you need your brain and body to be able to do on a daily basis.
Exercise has a variety of benefits for your overall health, including improved mood, better cardiovascular performance, and increased longevity. If your job requires a lot of physical movement, regular exercise can help you maintain the range of motion and the levels of strength and power you need to keep doing your job for as long as you want to be able to do it. Strength training can also help guard against injury, making you less susceptible to major injuries in incidents such as a fall.
Lifelong Learning for Lifelong Health
Studies about the benefits of hydration, sleep, healthy diet, and exercise abound, and new studies are released all the time giving us even greater insight into how we can build healthy lifestyles using science-based protocols. There is a lot of information to be found on each of these factors, and we encourage safety managers and workers to stay engaged in learning more about supporting on-the-job safety with round-the-clock healthy living.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start, The Huberman Lab podcast has multiple episodes on these topics and more, breaking down the science into digestible and actionable information anyone can understand and implement. Maybe grab a bottle of water and queue up an episode to listen to while you get moving, and take the next step toward your improved health.
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