Day #7 of 21

So, what was day #7 like?

Thanks for asking. I was quite productive but also took a 2 hour nap late in the day. Now, I love naps. I think it’s good for the soul. It allows me to work late at night when distractions are at their lowest…but my naps almost always come in the late afternoon… so I thought I’d do a little research as to why that may be. I mean, I’m not doing anything bad for my body and I’m tired?

It turns out the body has a very efficient garbage removal system. I’ll give you the nutshell version (it’s a really big nutshell).

It’s called detoxification… better known as detox… a la Brittany Spears and Betty Ford. Look at it this way.

Thelma, my blind dog, spills her water bowl a lot.

If your dog spilled his water bowl all over the floor, you would need to find something to sop up the water with. Right? So you find a towel to do the job. But if you only had one little towel, you may have to go back to the spill several times to remove it… and eventually, you’d have to get a dry towel to really finish the job.

But what if your dog did that several times a day? Every single day. For years.

Trust me… this is really going somewhere.

Now imagine your liver. That’s your towel. The spill is all that tequila, beer, wine, THC, cocaine, magic mushrooms and vodka you ingested last night. But the problem is, your liver can only sop up so much bad stuff… called toxins… that it takes a while before it’s all taken care of. Although the liver is the largest organ in our body (contrary to most male thinking), it also has lots of other things to do besides worrying about the 2 bottles of wine you drank last night. And since we only have one liver, when we drink the next day and the next day… you get the idea… the liver works overtime… lots of overtime. With no vacation. To do that takes lots of energy. And since we only have a certain amount of energy… much of that is sucked up by the liver to do its job.

And so we compensate. We drink lots of coffee… supplements… and pharmaceutical drugs because we’re so depressed about being tired and unproductive. And guess what? The liver has to do the heavy lifting. It’s a giant downward spiral… into hell. OK, maybe not hell.

And sometimes our liver can’t catch up. In fact, imagine taking a perfectly good car and driving it non-stop. The engine never cools, and we’re too busy driving somewhere so we never change the oil. The driving pros would never do that. Shouldn’t drinking pros also know better?

The liver, a most interesting and magnificent piece of engineering, is the same way. In both cases, if we don’t give it a rest and get the maintenance done it crashes. This is known as engine seizure or more to the point, cirrhosis of the liver.

Hmmm. I wonder if that could affect productivity?