Brazil never did it

I go home to Brazil for two months at a time. And for years, almost every time, I got sick.

I blamed the trip. Opposite seasons — I leave the heat here and land in the cold. Different food, food I love, food my body had stopped knowing. Fourteen hours in the air. Of course, I thought. Anyone would.

It was the wrong explanation.

What was making me sick was the week before I left.

That was the week I stopped sleeping, and not from worry — from excitement. I was going home. Awake at eleven, then midnight. And underneath the excitement sat the list, because two months is a long time to be away. Everything closed, handed over, left so that nothing would fall while I was gone. I compressed a month into seven days and called it being organised.

Then I landed, met the cold, ate my mother’s food, and said: ah, Brasil.

Brazil never did it.

Especially after forty

Sleep is not the reward we collect once the work is finished. It is when the work of the body gets done.

In deep sleep the brain clears waste it cannot clear while you are awake. Tissue repairs. The immune system builds what it learned that day into defence. None of that is paused while you are busy — it is simply not done.

And after forty this becomes harder, not easier. Deep sleep thins with age, and for women it thins further through perimenopause, when nights fragment and the hours stop counting the way they once did. The same six hours that cost you nothing at thirty-two are no longer the same six hours.

So when we do not protect sleep, we are not just tired. We are weakening the defence and blocking the restoring.

There is one study I think about every time I pack: when researchers measured people’s sleep for a week and then put a cold virus into every nose, those sleeping under six hours were about four times more likely to actually fall ill.

I had been losing exactly that week. Every single time.

What changed

Now I protect it. I start the handover earlier so the list does not compress. I sleep more than usual in the seven days before I fly, not less. I eat warm and simple while I am packing.

I still travel the same distance, into the same opposite season, to the same food I have missed all year.

I arrive well. I come home well. No cold, no week of feeling drained on either side.

Try this one

Find the week before your next hard stop — the trip, the launch, the board meeting, the holiday. Put it in your calendar now, while it still looks like an ordinary week.

In that week, two things.

Sleep one hour more than usual. Not your normal. One hour past it. This is the only one that is genuinely protective rather than comforting, and it is the one you will be most tempted to skip.

Eat something warm and brothy most days. Soup, bone broth, canja. I will not oversell it: hot liquid clears congestion better than cold, and real homemade soup slowed the very immune cells that flood your airway during a cold — though that was in a laboratory dish, not in a person. What I can tell you without hedging is that it is warm, it is water, it is protein, and it asks nothing of you at the point in the week when you have nothing left to give.

One hour. One bowl. One week.

Reply and tell me what you are heading into, and when. I read every one myself.

Next Sunday: beauty, and why your face is the first thing to report what your calendar is doing.

Cheers to a bella vita, sempre.
Maria Antonietta
Sempre Bella · The Executive Aesthetic™