How to Stay Sane and Healthy on Business Trips
Safe and Heatlhy work trips are a science. If you are a frequent business traveler, these tips might save your stay.
For most, work-related travels evoke a promise of company-paid escapades and all-expenses-paid foreign discoveries.
For others — those who actually experience it — it’s a nightmare of logistics, sleep depravation, without the time or opportunity to do anything else besides the allocated mission.
While the question of having fun while traveling for work is a worthy one, it deserves its own article. Today, I want to focus on the question of healthy travel, namely how to sleep well, eat well, and stay well on a mission abroad.
I wrote this guide chiefly for myself, because I needed it — I usually sleep and eat very badly while traveling. But I thought this also might be useful to you, so here it is.
Prioritise sleep quality and quantity
It’s a bit of a paradox: the #1 cause for productive waking hours is good sleep.
Therefore, I try to prioritise sleep quality and quantity, that is, for me, at least eight hours of sleep in a comfortable room.
Allow for sufficient buffer of time to sleep. If the venue is 30 minutes away from the hotel, don’t wait for your usual sleeping time to get on your way to your room. Leave time for a shower, wind down, and prepare for the next day.
If I can’t sleep, I find the best thing to do is to read or write.
I always pack a pair of earplugs and a sleeping mask. They can save the night, and therefore the next day.
Don’t indulge in rich food
That is my number one issue with traveling.
Since I don’t have easy access to healthy food on travel (no homemade spinach soup or leek sauté), I tend to resort to lower quality food, sometimes of the worst kind.
On top of that, hotel breakfasts are too sugary, and restaurant meals too fat. That’s the recipe for an unhappy belly. And if the belly’s unhappy, then I regret it for days.
Therefore, as a rule of thumb, I try to:
Always pack a fruit with me. Mostly apples because they keep well and need no peeling.
Pick the menu with chicken. That’s always the healthiest alternative in restaurants, since it is accompanied by a salad, instead of fries. Plus, poultry is less rich than red meat.
Start breakfast with a fruit, and stay away from pastries. Fruits have higher chances to fill me up, so I don’t indulge in sugary food afterward. As for pastries, their butter content is just impossible. I console myself by reminding me they taste like cardboard outside French cafés.
No more than one coffee per day. Cafeine, on top of having a negative effect on sleep quality (I’m very sensitive to that), is irritant and addictive1.
Keep time for yourself
The nice thing with seminars is that you are constantly surrounded by peers and friendly colleagues.
Networking’s nice, but there comes a time when it becomes too much. Therefore, I try to keep some time for myself throughout my stay.
Breakfast is one of these moments. I religiously keep to myself at this moment of the day ; first because I am waking up and you don’t want to talk to me then, and second because I use it to breathe before plunging into the giant networking pool.
Evenings are also an important moment for me while I'm away. I won’t be the last to go home, and I will use this time alone to call home, relax, read, unwind.
Additional tips
These are random items that I help me make the best of work-related travels. Use it to your advantage:
Sushy on the train! Just try, you’ll thank me later.
If you can, do not book the hotel suggested by the organiser, but one next to it. This way, you will be able to keep some privacy, while the other guests will go to the suggested one.
Always pack an additional pair of socks. Useful after rain, if you step in water outside the shower, or any other floor-related accident (it happens more than you’d expect).
Drinks: never on weekdays, except for Fridays and the celebrational sparkling wine. Keep to one drink.
If possible, add an extra day to your mission. It will serve as a buffer for emergency situations, and allows you to meet partners in the visiting city or region. It might also give you a more relaxed evening for a cultural visit of the area.
A note on the Beubble
As you might have seen in the last weeks, I have not been able to keep a consistent posting schedule. This is due to many factors, but mostly because of work and health reasons.
And as I want to prioritise these two aspects of my life, the pace of new articles will probably slow down. Instead of posting an article per week, I will, until the end of the year, post when I feel like it.
I will also remove the option for paid articles, because I don’t feel like answering what would be a legitimate request for regular content from paid subscribers.
The Beubble is not over. It only evolves, as it adapts to the always changing context of my personal life.
Thank you for being supportive readers, and see you in the next article.
It’s also the most consumed drink in the world — that’s to say about its power.