The Health Habits of the 2020 Presidential Candidates
The campaign trail is notoriously stressful, grueling, and jam-packed — as is being president
How healthy should our president be? The campaign trail is notoriously stressful, grueling, and jam-packed — the kind of working conditions that make self-care challenging for anyone. Of course, the same is true of being the president of the United States.
Arianna Huffington has provocatively argued that exhaustion was likely a factor in Hillary Clinton’s campaign missteps: in particular, her notorious “basket of deplorables” comment. “Would she have served up such a petit cadeau had she not been running on empty?” Huffington asked. “We’ll never know — but we do know what sleep deprivation and burnout do to us.”
The Thrive Global founder and CEO, an evangelist for rest and company naptime, reminds us that losing sleep is correlated with a reduction in empathy and impulse control. In fact, she writes, “after 17 to 19 hours without sleep, which many if not most politicians would consider a normal workday, we start to experience levels of cognitive impairment equal to a blood alcohol level of .05 percent, just under the threshold for being legally drunk.”
How healthy should our president be?
