After years of working herself to the bone, Arianna Huffington finally had a wake-up call in 2007.

She was getting little sleep and exhausted from working 18 hour days, seven days a week. It took a nasty fall, which broke her cheekbone and resulted in a serious gash above her eye, to get her attention. Ms Huffington, the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, one of the fastest growing media companies in the world, realised she had to make some healthy changes in her life.

The 64-year-old media mogul will share the importance of meditation and sleep as part of Colonial Medical Insurance’s An Audience with Arianna, an event taking place at the Fairmont Southampton on Saturday at 10.30am.

You had an ‘aha moment’ after falling down and injuring yourself. How did that incident help you to start prioritising your health?

Well basically after that wake-up call it was clear to me that the way I was living my life wasn’t working. It was fuelled by burn-out, sleep deprivation and exhaustion so it was really important to make the changes that I needed to make. I also decided to find out the latest scientific findings around sleep and medications because basically we have all been living out this collective delusion that burn-out is the way to succeed. But the modern science makes it very clear that’s not the case. When we prioritise our own health around renewal, sleep and meditation we are more effective and productive in whatever our job is and also happier and more fulfilled.

How were you able to change your life?

Well for me it started with sleep and that’s why I just completed the course for Oprah.com. It’s a six-week e-course to help people get from where they know they have to make choices to where they can actually make them. We deal with two steps a week and the first step is around sleep and the second is around meditation. Every week we have guests featured and the first guest teacher is [NBA player] Kobe Bryant because interestingly enough Kobe and many other athletes have recognised the importance of sleep and meditation as performance enhancement tools. [The e-series was my way of] helping people break those habits and attract new habits. We have found the way to do that is to create accountability and tracking to create what we call ‘thrive drive’, which is like a support group. My personal thrive drive includes my sister and my two daughters. They have supported me in making those changes in my life.

What advice would you give to other busy professionals who realise their work/life balance is off?

Well the first thing is it starts with sleep and getting eight hours, which makes a huge difference and the science now is incontrovertible. We have 65 pages of scientific findings at the end of my book Thrive, that show the importance of sleep on cognitive performance. Also other steps that you are dealing with in the e-course [are] how do you prioritise the projects we are going to be involved in and how do we drop other projects? Because the truth is often we have projects that we have started in our heads, but never really are going to put energy behind and need to learn to let them go. I call it ‘completing a project by dropping it’. It means we can free up our energy to concentrate on the things that really matter. Over the years I’ve done a regular life audit and dropped things I thought I would do one day, like learning to speak German or cook. Realistically, I wasn’t going to put energy into them. It freed up the energy to do things I was really going to invest my time behind.

You wrote about your life-changing experience in your book, Thrive. Why?

Most importantly I wanted to help people realise that they don’t have to have the wrong wake-up call. They can learn from others. Instead of you having your wake-up call, you can learn from my one. In a way I was very lucky because it could have been much worse. People have heart attacks and blood clots and I feel that by having that wake-up call it averted something worse.

Have you been to the Island before?

I love Bermuda. I have been three times before, but not enough.

What do you hope people take away from the presentation on Saturday?

Well, I hope that people would be left with specific steps that they can take in their lives — to move from surviving to thriving. And also with the data and scientific foundation that makes it clear these are not flaky, new-aged approaches, but based on modern science. And to help them to see how the changes can be very microscopic ones. They don’t have to be big. It can start with getting 30 minutes more sleep or five minutes of meditation or taking the steps instead of the elevator. It doesn’t have to be a big transformation or change.

To register for this free event go to www.cgigroup.com

For more information call 296-3200.