Kind: captions Language: en what's up everybody let's talk about one of the most important things that you can spend your time on brain optimization i am joining you from the gym which is my least favorite part of brain optimization but it's an absolutely critical part there are many things that you can do to get your cognition at the highest level possible and i often hear people thinking that they can grind their way to a better performance and while working long hours is certainly one of the strategies that you can run to get ahead in life i will say you have to be very careful not to spend extra hours in a sub-optimal cognitive state and that's what most people do is they think the first thing to go is sleep the second thing to go is exercise the third thing to go is diet things that we're going to be talking about today and the reality is that the first thing you want to do is optimize your cognition so that all of the hours that you're spending on your chosen pursuit are things that are done at the highest possible level from a cognitive standpoint now nobody wishes more than me that you did not need to pay attention to the body that you could simply live this entirely cerebral life and get everything going that way but the reality is that you cannot separate the organ of the brain from the rest of your body this all works in concert much to my dismay so if you want to be thinking quickly if you want to be thinking clearly if you want to be at your best feeling good operating at a high level the reality is you must focus on cognitively optimizing that's we're going to talk about today one of the most important things that you can do is to get yourself in shape now i am not a fan of working out in fact it is very fair to say that i really don't enjoy working out but when i think about getting my brain in shape one of the most important things you can do is get your blood pumping now i'm also not going to lie there are cognitive benefits psychologically if nothing else to also being strong and looking good none of those are gonna hurt your feelings but the real reason that i spend my time in the gym is that you're sending a very particular signal to your brain when you're working out and so you increase the production of things like bdnf brain derived neurotropic factor if i remember all the letters correctly but basically you're sending miracle grow to your brain to make sure that you're creating the optimal neurochemical soup that you need in order to be performing at a high level it really has big impacts on memory and so getting in the gym getting your blood pumping getting yourself in good shape is going to be a critical part of getting rid of brain fog making sure that you're incredibly sharp and making sure that you're creating the growth factors in your brain that you need to enhance your memory and that's going to be a big part of it so i personally go into the gym roughly five times a week there are definitely times where i might miss a day and there's some weeks where i might add a day but on average it comes out to be about five times a week you can do any kind of different split that you like but i personally find that weights over cardio is one it's far more pleasurable for me and the best workout is the one that you will actually do and so i'm far more likely to stick with a routine that is revolving around weightlifting now i will often do the weights at a cardio pace so i'm moving very quickly in the gym from thing to thing to thing not a lot of rest between periods which has a two-fold effect one i'm going to move quickly through my workout so the amount of time that i need is very low and then the other part of that is that i'm actually getting that cardio workout my heart is pumping it's a very intense workout and that way it allows me to basically combine the two things but some people prefer to do cardio and certainly getting yourself in cardio shape can be very advantageous as well certainly for heart health for your vasculature all of that stuff is incredibly important to maintain well diet exercise and sleep are going to be the magic trifecta of a little bit of meditation thrown in we're going to cover all of that but then finding if you're going to do that split how much can you mix it up now i am particularly bad about mixing up my workouts i'm just going to be really honest but having some sort of split so you're not doing your full body every time is going to be better so the way that i break it up is for me i do a push pull legs abs split so it's a three day cycle that i rotate through so i typically start with my back and biceps so that's going to be your pull and then i go to chest shoulders triceps on the following day that's going to be your push and then i do legs and abs on a separate day and that's the basic split that i use in my gym i work out roughly 45 minutes sometimes an hour sometimes i might be able to get out a bit faster sometimes i have to get out faster if i've got a lot going on for the day but that is the basic cycle put in the work you will definitely get the results all right meditation is one of the most important things in my life it would be very fair to say that it changed my life that is for sure it might it's a little bit of an exaggeration to say that it saved my life but it certainly saved my sanity and i resisted doing it for a long time and i'm very glad that i finally met mark devine who told me to stop being ridiculous and to start meditating and it really was a game changer so managing your neurochemistry is one of the single most important things you can do and understanding how to shift back and forth between the sympathetic nervous system and the parasympathetic nervous system so sympathetic is the fight or flight response so many of us that are hard charging you're going to spend so much of your time there and it really does have some sort of cumulative effect so that after a while you just feel on edge all the time the sense of you know something is wrong you just feel antsy unsettled and that can get really unbearable in your life and meditation is a magical way that nature has given us where you can reset that to absolute zero to where you feel completely calm and creative and anchored it is truly a phenomenal gift of evolution that simply staying in a comfortable position which i'm literally sitting exactly how i sit when i meditate i breathe from my diaphragm down at your belly and that by bringing your thoughts back only to the breath back to your breath nice and simply back to the breath it's going to wander your mind is going to wander you're not doing anything wrong when your mind wanders that is the nature of the human mind so don't worry that you have what they call the monkey mind that your mind is constantly bouncing around to all these thoughts many of them negative just when you realize that your mind has wandered come back to the breath now i use headphones when i meditate and i play the sounds of nature typically my favorite is a thunderstorm there's something about hearing the rain and the occasional crack of thunder that just keeps bringing me back to the present moment right there with the sound of that rain the sound of that thunder the rhythm of my breath and then i find when i maximize the pleasure of each part of the breath cycle so there are four parts to the breath cycle there's the inhale the inhale hold at the top the exhale and the exhale hold at the bottom and then you just repeat that cycle over and over and i'll do a couple cycles here so you can see now oftentimes people will talk about making each part of the breast cycle four equal parts i have found that optimizing for the pleasure of each part of the breast cycle is a far more useful way for me everybody needs to try for themselves but a far more useful way for me to get what i call that background radiation that anxiety that stress all of that down to zero and so this is what it looks like for me i sit cross-legged just because i find it comfortable you don't need to whatever's comfortable for you i put my hands in my lap i have found there's something weird about touching my hands together ever so lightly that i don't know if it creates like a circle of energy i don't know it sounds cheesy but that's how it feels and then i close my eyes and again i would normally have my headphones over my ears listening to the sound of a thunderstorm and then i just start my breath i breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth but whatever feels right for you so this is what it looks like for me so all right can't help but be relaxed uh doing that even just right now here on camera and the key thing is you'll notice that for me i hold at the top of the inhale for a very brief period of time but then i hold the exhale for a much longer period of time and the only reason that i do that is that it feels better and so finding that rhythm for you is going to be the key and then i meditate for the exact amount of time that it takes me to get completely calm and creative so that i have no background radiation no sense of stress no sense of anxiety sometimes it takes two minutes sometimes it takes 45 minutes now it's never taken me longer than 45 minutes even at the most stressed out and anxious i've ever been in my life which is extraordinarily stressed uh it's never taken me more than 45 minutes to get to cleat equanimity and that is worth its weight in gold now my wife does not enjoy meditating but she does enjoy drawing where she gets into a very meditative state now i think that if she let herself off the hook and stop thinking that there's ever going to be a time where her mind doesn't wander off onto things and just realize that's part of it and you just come back to the breath and you're going to get better at it over time that she would get additional benefit from traditional meditation but having something anything in your life that's meditative maybe it's the gym maybe it's drawing maybe it's cooking whatever your thing is finding something that makes you feel absolutely calm and creative find that thing at a biological level it's going to help you and few things will help you optimize your cognition better the meditation so develop that practice i promise you'll reap the rewards everyone this episode is brought to you by our sponsor betterhelp an online counseling company with the mission to make professional counseling accessible affordable and convenient i hope you enjoy what's up everybody tom bill you here a question for you how many times have you sat down in your life to write out a list of goals and said yourself for real this time i'm gonna make every single one of these happen and i will not quit if you're like most people you set a lot of goals but you don't achieve all of them in fact you may not have achieved any of them the great news is i don't care if you are the highest achiever in the world or if 2021 has beaten you down hard what i know for a fact is that humans are wired to adapt and no matter how difficult the previous year or years have been you can find your path to fulfillment and achieving your goals look my friend trust me learning how to stick to your goals and achieve them again and again is a skill and you can't learn it you can master it and when you do it will serve you for life great news is it's a process like anything else 2021 has been hard for a lot of people so i'm going to be going live later this month to host a workshop on exactly how to run that process called how to make any goal stick now you can go to this link or click the button on your screen and get free access to this live training and when you register i'll send you a bonus class from impact theory university to get you started all right see you soon over at the live workshop and until then my friend be legendary take care all right welcome to where the battle is won or lost now all of the things that we're talking about today are important for cognitively optimizing but very few will have the deleterious effect of failing to get your diet right as somebody who went through a brief period where i could not understand what was going on i had brain fog i was tired it literally felt like i had lost my will to fight it was crazy it was the weirdest period of my life as it relates to diet that is for sure and the culprit ended up being pecans i still can't believe that that is true but i know that if you're not feeling good in life uh at a physiological level the first thing you should do is ask what am i eating a lot of and then cut that out it is shocking how much your diet impacts your cognition so now what i'm showing you is basically everything that i eat now full disclosure if i make any error in my life it is that i don't eat a wide enough variety of foods but i'm going to be honest with you about what i eat so this is my monday through friday diet in its entirety with the exception of jicama i don't have any jicama but i do eat a fair amount of that all right so the vast majority of my calories um so i eat a lot of meat and the vast majority of my calories this is a sponsor but they're a sponsor because it's real so lisa and i um in trying to fix her gut needed a good source of grass fed and grass finished meats so we get our meats almost exclusively from butcher box again they're a sponsor but that is not why i eat them i eat a lot of eggs so intake calories a fair amount from eggs and then between the different meat sources that we get i have found that consuming a lot of vegetable matter does not sit well with me i'm perfectly willing to accept that if i were to transition my microbiome slowly over time that it may work but i have not found that advantageous but i do eat a fair amount of green leafy vegetables three of my favorites right here you've got bok choy you've got kale and collard greens are ones that i particularly enjoy i also eat a lot of carrots and then for a snack i'll have berries so it's something very sweet almost always either blueberries raspberries sometimes blackberries but those are the ones that i eat olive oil extra virgin olive oil is the the only oil that i use so be very very thoughtful about getting vegetable oil so vegetable oils a they rancify even just sitting on the shelf and then they have a very low flash point or smoke point so you can damage the fats in cooking i use olive oil largely because it has a high smoke point so it doesn't tend to get damaged in a normal cooking process of course if you cook it too high or too long it can and i probably get about i don't know 60 to 65 percent of my calories um from meats and if you throw in the eggs maybe it goes closer to 70 75 of my calories um and that's all that i eat monday through friday now on the weekends i eat differently so on the weekends i have a fair amount of sushi but it's mostly what i'll call clean sushi so it's things like baked crab hand rolls so it's basically crab rice and avocado and that helps me mix things up i'll also get some of the things you see here or maybe like a beef burger i don't eat the bun or anything like that it's literally just the patty which i tend to mix with eggs or bacon um and yeah that's my diet now in terms of what i drink i'm not sponsored by these guys uh just so happens that i mix cold brewed coffee because i don't like hot liquids and again no sponsorship or anything but i drink perrier water and i mix them together and that's very weird for people but i don't like the idea of being addicted to caffeine so i like to keep my caffeine intake very very low um so what i do is i take one of these and i normally have an empty one and i'll pour some from the full one into the empty one so that i get about a third of the coffee that i mix with the water and i continue every drink that i take i add more water until it reaches a point where i can sort of just barely taste the coffee and the only reason i do that is that when you don't drink anything other than water it gets a little bit tedious so one i like the sparkling water and two i like to mix it with the coffee just to get a little bit of a different flavor and the reason that i chose coffee is i didn't want to drink anything that humans haven't been drinking for thousands of years that was the idea and that actually made a big difference in my anxiety levels once i cut out all of my artificially sweetened beverages so i was drinking a lot of zero calorie monster and a lot of diet coke and i miss them and they're amazing and to anybody that drinks them i get it but i had begun to notice a tie between having that and feeling anxious and so i decided to cut it out and just see if it would help and it helped massively i'll say it probably reduced my anxiety by about 70 which is massive so um that's been a big win so this is it now on the weekends on a saturday i may have a full-blown cheat meal i don't do it every weekend but i absolutely do it when i'm in the mood it tends to be something like cold stone ice cream which i absolutely love so i'm very thoughtful about how often i do that very thoughtful about monitoring my blood glucose levels in fact literally just off camera is a new blood glucose monitor that i'm excited to try out a continuous glucose monitor and i think it's really important to understand what your average glucose level is like where are you spending the most of your time and then another big part of my strategy is intermittent fasting and so i will intermittent fast seven days a week there literally isn't a day even during the christmas season where i am totally off the chain in terms of my normal diet even then i'll do intermittent fasting and i do that one for cognition it is hugely valuable to staying sharp to have these long periods of time without eating and then usually one to two times a year i'll do an extended fast and some of them might only be 24 hours other times it might be up to 72 hours i've done a full five day fast before that was miserable though and i don't plan to be repeating that uh unless some new evidence comes out that really shows that there's a huge difference between a 72-hour fast and a five-day fast i just found that it was like having the flu i couldn't pay attention it was just horrible and i'm somebody who's keto adapted so for me to really struggle at the five days like it it negatively impacted my business which is something that i don't like to do and certainly had a negative impact on my cognition i find a 24-hour fast is pretty amazing longer than that and i do find that it has negative impact on my performance so i do limit that but every day literally every day my average is probably about 17.5 hours so that means there are some days that i'm doing call it 19 hours and then other days on the weekend where i'll do typically 16-ish hours but in the wash it comes out to about 17.5 when you factor it over the course of a year but that intermittent fasting is something that i do all the time every day it's just a natural part of my life and the way that i do that is i have my last meal around 1 15 2 p.m at the latest and then i don't eat again until the following morning and i'll usually eat somewhere between eight and nine sometimes a little earlier sometimes a little bit later depending on what i'm doing that day but making sure that i get that average of 17.5 hours has been incredibly beneficial so there's all kinds of health benefits but in terms of its impact on body composition and cognition it really can't be beat especially when your diet consists of whole food and that's the thing other than the olive oil everything that you see here on this table is the thing that you would see out and about so the bacon looks like the flesh of a pig as it is and the eggs obviously are just whole eggs the carrots carrots the berries berries the vegetable vegetables and so not eating processed food eating whole food where during the week i'm going to guess 95 of my calories even including a week where i cheat 92 to 95 percent of my calories are gonna come from whole food uh and that's that's been a huge win in terms of um how i feel how i sleep um cognition all of it is vastly improved by whole food so that's my easy advice to people is to eat whole food whenever possible and that's my diet hey everybody it's time to talk about all of our favorite subjects mental health is there something holding you back or preventing you from achieving your goals or even just interfering with your happiness do any of you suffer from depression or anxiety as a lot of you guys know i've suffered from anxiety for years and trying to tackle something like that on your own is not always the optimal strategy but a lot of people are super nervous to try out therapy or they don't really know where to start or they're just plain embarrassed but now there's a service called better help that makes therapy more accessible and affordable better help is professional counseling done securely online using your computer tablet or mobile phone through video calls phone calls or text messaging with licensed therapists who are certified by their state's board to provide therapy and counseling it is not self-help and it's not a crisis line it's an online service available worldwide and it has a massive network of counselors who have a broad and diverse range of specialties so you can get a counselor with the sort of expertise that might not even be available in your local area betterhelp assesses your needs and matches you with a licensed professional therapist within 24 hours you can log into your account anytime to message your counselor and betterhelp also has group in our sessions every week where members can learn in groups directly from licensed counselors on multiple topics like relationships and ways to overcome anxiety especially if the thought of seeking help makes you nervous or embarrassed be sure to check out the over 60 000 positive reviews posted on the betterhelp site and that's betterhelp h-e-l-p betterhelp is committed to making it easy for you to access the therapeutic help you need even if you have never gone to counseling before it's free to switch therapists it's more affordable than local therapy and they even have financial aid available if you need it betterhelp wants you to start living a happier life today visit betterhelp.com impact and again that's spelled better h h-e-l-p and join over 500 000 people taking charge of their mental health with the help of an experienced professional betterhelp costs just 65 dollars per week and financial aid is available for those who qualify during the sign up process as an impact theory viewer you can get 10 off your first month so visit betterhelp.com impact and get the help you need today all right guys if you need this one please give it a shot take care and be legendary let me ask you a question do you know the difference between someone who crushes big goals in their life year in and year out and someone who can't seem to get ahead [Music] what is up my friends tom bill you here in my opinion there are seven strategies that you must use in order to achieve any goal the more of them that you can take action on the greater the chance that you'll achieve your goal i say that the difference between someone who is an overachiever and someone who fails to hit their goals is that the overachiever does everything they can possibly do to be successful i said a second ago that there are seven strategies you must use to hit any goal i'll be teaching them later this month on a live workshop called how to make any goal stick great news is it's a process it can be taught and you can deploy it in your own life and you can register for this workshop by going to this link i'll tell you though right now quickly what they are first extreme clarity and focus the average person fails to achieve their goals not because they didn't put an effort but because they don't actually know what it is they're trying to accomplish they're not focused on exactly what they want second massive excitement and motivation there are two things that motivate us pleasure and pain most people don't properly leverage pain and negative emotions which means that they're only half as motivated as they could be or at least only using half of the tools of somebody else that finds their way to success third is desire fourth is massive pressure and this goes back to that idea of negative emotions if you use it the right way fear of failure can actually be a very useful thing fifth coming up with the right strategy sixth avoiding the trap of overthinking rather than taking fast aggressive action and finally evaluating your progress building grit and adjusting your course that loop is critical in fact that last part is what i call the physics of progress if you fail to do that you will never make progress all right these are the seven steps that i'm going to walk through in much greater detail on my live workshop how to make any goal stick so go to the link on your screen or click the button below to register alright my friend i will see you soon take care and be legendary [Music] all right let's talk about the big daddy of all things related to cognitive optimization and that is sleep if i were going to say the two most important things that you can do to optimize your cognition is sleep and eat right those are the big ones but sleep is the one that will impact you the fastest you could mess up your diet for a day two days maybe even a week before it really starts to hammer you but man you miss one night's sleep and there is a catastrophic cascade of biological problems that will present themselves rapidly so somebody that gets i think less than six hours of sleep a night shows the same kind of blood glucose response as somebody who's pre-diabetic so that gives you an idea of missing only part of one night's sleep can have that kind of massive cellular impact so being incredibly thoughtful about getting your sleep is super important now as somebody who loves hustle porn and being hardcore and working an amazing amount i do all of that with precious little negative impact to my sleep i won't say that it never happens especially not since i've gotten into nfts it is there has been some wobble in my perfect sleep record but it's really minor and the reason that i do that is to me being tired is a unique ring of hell i do not understand people who are prepared to go their entire lives fatigued it makes everything worse your ability to enjoy your life goes down your likelihood of being depressed goes way up your likelihood of having metabolic disturbances goes way up there there's just so many things go wrong and then of course the most traumatically impacted is your ability to think clearly and think quickly if you've ever gone even one night with bad sleep let alone two or three nights you can feel yourself declining rapidly in performance in fact if you take somebody that hasn't gotten any sleep and put them in a car they have the same sort of delays that somebody who's intoxicated has so the impacts on cognition cannot be overstated so be very careful if you're trying to be at your best and really perform at an elite level the thing that you must do is get sleep so make sure that you're prioritizing your sleep now how do we do that how do we get sleep done in a high quality way number one is you want to make sure that you're sleeping in a completely dark environment so no night lights hopefully no even like charging lights or things like that now one way i do to make myself absolutely bulletproof not only do i have blackout curtains but i sleep with the blankets completely over my head now admittedly it didn't start for reasons of light pollution but now as i get older i'm actually grateful that my whole life i've had this pattern of sleeping with the blankets up over my head which i know for some people is a just nightmare scenario but for me it's like i mean if i'm honest it's like sleeping in a womb it's just to be completely encased is so wonderful and it makes me feel so relaxed absolutely incredible and then the other thing that i do is i use white noise and so to make sure that there are no little noises that are going to wake me up in the middle of the night i have white noise basically sounds like a fan but from a little machine that plays that consistent sound and that helps me sleep incredibly well and then because my mind is so frequently in problem-solving mode what i found is that about 30 minutes before i go to bed i switch into narrative mode and so i'm going to be reading a book i use audible but i'm going to be listening to a book that shifts my mind out of problem solving mode into narrative mode and then if i wake up in the middle of the night i keep next to me three pairs of ipod pros so that i can put them in i listen to the book it makes sure that i don't go into problem solving mode that i can stay there in narrative mode and i turn the volume down just to the point where a little bit of pressure on my ear is required to hear them perfectly and so i'll put that bit of pressure listen to the story and then as i fall asleep that pressure comes off my ear and now i can barely hear it and i fall right back to sleep now i will give you the advanced tip which is don't pick an audiobook that has a bunch of murder in it because then you wake up to the narrator screaming and yelling and that was waking me up so i had to learn the hard way that there's a certain type of book that's a good engaging story but doesn't have narration where you know there's yelling and screaming at any point in the story and yeah the last thing that i will say about my sleep is that i go to bed at the same time every night which is 9 p.m i treat it like a religion i go to bed every night at that time sometimes a few minutes earlier if i can convince lisa and then the second part of that is that i don't set an alarm so i haven't set an alarm for the last 16 17 years at this point so trust me you can do amazing incredible things in your life without needing to set an alarm i get as much sleep as i need now i don't have kids so that is no doubt a big part of how i'm able to maintain that but the more that if you do have kids you can sleep closer to their sleep rhythms to make sure that you're getting as much sleep as you need and let me tell you if i had kids and i needed to go to bed at 7 00 pm i would go to bed at 7 pm so i'm gonna go to bed at whatever time i need to in order to get all the sleep that i need if you need nine hours get nine hours your brain shrinks in the middle of the night which basically the inflammation is going down so that the glial system can flush everything out get rid of any toxins that might be building up in the system get rid of the amyloid plaques which are very present and people have alzheimer's probably doesn't cause alzheimer's but nonetheless let you know that it's doing something that we don't necessarily want sticking around and i said the glial system i think i mean the glymphatic system somebody will have to fact check me on that because i'm actually not sure which but the brain shrinks nonetheless and allows you to clear out that system um so being very thoughtful to get as much sleep as you need so that you can enjoy your life so that on a biological cellular level that you're able to run all your processes so that you're able to do all the memory consolidation all the things that go along with the ancillary effects to sleeping and then making sure that you're able to think as clearly sharply and quickly as possible and all of those things come down to the quality of your sleep the quality of your diet the quality of your exercise and your ability to manage your psychological life which we can do most easily through meditation so that in a bundle my friends is how you take care of yourself cognitively to make sure that you can deliver an elite level of performance day after day week after week month after month year after year there's no reason that pursuing great things in your life needs to come at a toll but you've got to take care of that machinery that is your body that is your mind so be very thoughtful and i promise the sky is truly the limit all right guys until next time my friends be legendary take care peace