When I heard that professionally boring Steven Bartlett had “ruined” his life after an evening drinking wine, I was momentarily rapt. Could “Mr Perfect” have a redeeming dark side – and if so, what happened!? Did he ring a friend’s partner and confess his undying love? Crash a car? Post something career-endingly offensive online?
Well, buckle up, because the entrepreneur spilled all the gory details of his excess (three whole glasses, on a par with your nana on Boxing Day) on his inexplicably popular podcast, Diary of a CEO.
“I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up,” Bartlett explained.
Bugger. Any hope of delinquency was fading fast – perhaps the next bit was where it got juicy? “I podcasted worse. I didn’t go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse.” Ah, I see. He had a… hangover.
Guess my definition of life-ruining is somewhat different to Bartlett’s. And while I’m not alone in this – the internet obligingly jumped in with plenty of sniggers about his low threshold – his position on what constitutes a good life is far from an outlier in our wellness-obsessed world.
