It was completely predictable—at least my health tracking ring predicted it, but I didn’t listen. After months of intense work, my ring health tracker began to show my resilience slipping—going from high “exceptional” to “strong” and then “solid.” That still sounded pretty good, and I needed to make that last push to travel to a book signing for my new book, Well at Work: Creating Wellbeing in Any Workspace. You’d think that the writer of that book would listen to her own advice. But we all fall off the wagon sometimes—and this was my time.
I had planned to rest after all the events had settled down, but my body decided to shut down on its own schedule.
No sooner had I returned from travel than I came down with a viral bronchitis that quickly turned into pneumonia. When I got sick, my resilience plummeted even further. I had no energy or willpower to do anything; my mood was low even after the antibiotics kicked in. The resilience scale on my health tracker had totally predicted my pneumonia. Not so much the level of resilience when I got sick but how rapidly it had declined and stayed low compared to my previous high.
Resilience is the ability to bounce back from any bodily insult that stresses the body, whether physical, emotional, or infectious. It can be calculated in several ways. It includes your stress levels during the day, how quickly your stress levels return to baseline during restorative periods, and how many rest periods you take during the day.
It also includes your stress level while you sleep, which is........