Hi, friends, and welcome back to Change Wired, the podcast for people who love evolving. One habit, one insight, one bold action at a time. Today I want to start, as Chad GPD suggested, with a confession. I haven't taken a proper day off for more than 100 days and I feel freaking fantastic. No burnouts, sundays, scaries, no counting down to the weekend. But here's the thing I'm not some superhuman being able to do that and I'm not on any superhuman supplement regimen or doing a lot of caffeine. It's simply because I stopped waiting to get exhausted or to work myself to the ground and I stopped also working on things I don't like. But the main shift was me learning how to take a break, and we're going to talk about on this podcast scientifically-based practice, how to be able to go to run this life or business marathon, feeling great, doing great, absolutely loving every single day, without having to take weekends and days off and feeling exhausted often.
Today we are talking about how energy also not motivation, not discipline is a real driver of your personal professional business transformation. We'll take a peek into Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and creator of ChatGPT. We'll talk about his playbook for productivity and how a huge part of it, and we're going to talk details is taking care of his physical self, his body, his health, and we'll also talk about why, how to adjust your energy, and why it's important to make strategic decisions that change, that transform your life, your business, your relationships. So let's just dive into Sam Altman's playbook for health, which he wrote about in his blog on productivity. So, guys, that's the thing we often think like what do I need to do? Like what system would have to be more productive, or to be more motivated, or to be more disciplined, or to do more things or to have more ideas. Actually, what I noticed and what science confirms very solid evidence that you are your most energetic, productive and creative when you take care of your physical health and your cells become very efficient at producing energy. And also, if you don't waste that energy on some drama or some scattered attention or being all over the place and being very mindless with your time usage. That will drain your energy. But in order to first drain it or use it effectively, you need to create it, and that's where taking care of our physical selves come.
I have this Venn diagram on my desk with me all the time, and it's in three circles intersecting in the middle. One is health, the second one is mindset, the third one is productivity, or work, and the intersection is where you can unlock your full potential, where you have a lot of health, where you build systems and habits, where your mindset supports you and your systems for work allow you to deliver. When you build all of these resources in mindset and health and I shorten it to three words charge, drive, deliver. So charge is where you take care of your physical health. Drive is when you align your mindset with what you want to achieve in this life, and deliver is when you create systems to deliver your work into the world, because even when you have a lot of energy and the greatest mindset, but you have back-end systems that just don't work and take all of your energy and resources and productivity and motivation away, then, no matter how much energy you have, it's not going to sum up to anything. So physical health, though, is where you charge the whole thing. Without energy energy is literally a currency of life You're not going to have motivation, you're not going to have discipline, you're not going to have creativity, you're not going to have anything. To be honest, when you have energy, you have nothing, and the more you're in that energy-depleted state, the more you're going to miss out on your own life. So let's see what Sam Altman has to say about his routine for productivity, his health routine. We're going to sum it up you can Google Sam Altman's blog, productivity and it's going to come up. So he starts talking about his sleep and how he gets his eight hours and how he took some time to figure out what works best for him.
Speaker 1He used the tracker. These days, he makes sure that he sleeps in a dark, cold and quiet room, as all the sleep scientists recommend. He makes sure that his body temperature supports deep sleep. He uses ChiliPad, basically a cover that changes temperature and allows your body to cool down, which has been proven to affect the quality of the depths of your sleep. He uses eye mask and earplugs probably also a very sensitive person like I am as well, but that also has been shown that sleeping in a darker room and sometimes you don't have darker room, that's where a sleep mask comes in or using earplugs eliminating all the possible noise, it doesn't necessarily wake you up, but it takes you out of this deep sleep. I use eye mask and ear plugs and you just got to find good ones and get used a little bit to them. He doesn't eat late at night and tries not to drink alcohol very often at night because that affects sleep and again, that is based on research. He makes sure to get some full spectrum light whether that's well. He writes about a special lamp, circadian lamp you can Google them on Amazon, there are plenty.
Speaker 1I prefer to get out for 10, 15 minutes each morning, which also, again, has been shown to have a great effect on your energy, on your motivation, on your dopamine production. That is your main molecule of motivation, drive and getting things done. Then he talks about exercise, how it's the second most important physical factor and these days he works out. He lifts weights three acts a week and then high intensityintensity interval training occasionally. In addition to productivity gains. This is also an exercise program that makes me feel the best overall. So exercise like this exercise is your brain's super fuel. Don't skip exercise, guys. Your brain on exercise is a completely different beast as your brain. Without exercise we are designed to move to function properly.
Speaker 1The third area is nutrition. He talks about how he makes sure he's a vegetarian, so he makes sure to drink his protein shakes and get his supplements, his essential supplements like omega-3s, b12, iron, vitamin D, and he also says that sometimes I go for weeks when I don't really feel my best, and he says that it might be nutrition, but he hasn't figured that out yet. What else he talks about caffeine, how he has about? Well, he has two expresses a day and that's pretty much it on the health side. But I just want to emphasize, guys, that in his productivity blog, he dedicates a big portion of his blog to his health, and there is a reason for that.
And, guys, it's illogical to think that you can even get close to tapping into your full potential without being efficient on a physiological level with producing enough energy to support your activity. By the way, your brain is the most energy thirsty, hungry organ in the body. It consumes 20 to 25% of your total energy intake, being just 2 to 3% of your body weight. So just think about that. The first organ who's going to suffer is your brain when your energy systems are not optimized. And the worst part, you won't even notice because your brain when your energy systems are not optimized. And the worst part, you won't even notice because your brain doesn't work that well when you have no energy. So take care of your energy. Even the tech people actually tech entrepreneurs were onto that for a long time with all the biohacks and all kinds of crazy health protocols. But to be honest, just like Sam Altman wrote in his blog, basics work the best. You sleep, you exercise, you're essential Nutrition. Until you put those into consistent practice, none of the hacks will really work for you.
Speaker 1Now, from Sam Altman to my routine with breaks and how I'm able to go for 100 days straight and more working and feeling amazing and never really feeling like I need to take a day off or I need to unplug or all this crazy stuff. You don't really need to unplug, like all this concept of weekends and taking sabbaticals. These are all constructs of our society. What is biologically wired is your need for rest. That's why you're driven to sleep and you feel really shitty when you don't sleep. Rest is biological. Weekends are a construction of society to kind of have a routine to make sure that you do function somewhat well. But if you are someone with good routine of rest and you are self-aware enough and you know when you need to push the brake and when you can keep going, if you have that, you don't need to obey those artificially constructed truths and you can take a break when you need one, and you can keep going when you keep going my routine.
Speaker 1There is a book Hyper-Efficient by Dr neuroscientist Mitho Storoni and she talks about different cycles and ways our brain works, how our brain delivers productivity, and in the book she talks about the science of taking breaks more often. Taking breaks, mental breaks, from your work, from devices, just letting your brain unplug, not being focused, not looking again, scrolling, just being not thinking again, doing some work like cleaning or walking, just not having to be focused. How taking these breaks before your brain fatigues. Taking these breaks every 30 minutes or so and your brain works in a cycle, so 90-minute cycle, after which you definitely want to take a break. And there is a reason for that is because when your brain does focused work, your neurons create byproducts of their function, certain radicals and certain molecules that actually harm your brain, and so your brain needs some time to work through this garbage that is created by its work. Kind of think of a car that exhaust fumes and the environment needs to take them up and process them and eliminate that. That's why we need to create sustainable systems or change fuels if we wanted to maintain our Earth health and be able to live here.
Speaker 1But the same thing happens with your brain. When it works, it produces these molecules that harm your own brain, and so there are systems in your brain that eliminate those harmful molecules. But the thing is, that system can only work when your brain is at rest and stops creating those molecules. So breaks help with that. And when your brain creates too many of them because you didn't take rest and you just decided to push through. What Mika Staroni's research has been shown and what she talks about is that you get to a point where you sort of create and accumulate so much of those molecules and what is felt often as fatigue that you need to take longer breaks and you need to take maybe a weekend. And if you've been doing that without breaks for a prolonged period of time, caffeinating yourself and just pushing through this need of your brain to stop, what's going to happen is then you get to a point where your brain is so damaged, fatigued, and the whole system just needs a lot more time to recover. It's kind of like riding a horse and making it run that fast that at some point it just drops dead and never recovers. So the same sort of thing happens to your brain. The only difference is that your brain doesn't go dead and never able to function, but that's how you get to a state of burnout and you need to take a month off to get back to your peak performance or your optimal performance for your brain, taking micro breaks.
There are specific protocols. There is all kinds of mindfulness protocols, from breathing, breath work, paying attention to your breathing. There is also very good one, yoga nidra, or non-sleep deep rest, popularized by andrew huberman, and they did a lot of research showing how it is actually one of the most effective ways to restore your brain's capacity to produce certain molecules, to deliver work. And in basic terms, it's body scan when you just lay down and I do it every day, at least once a day and it restores again a lot of that brain capacity, helps it to recover, to remove the garbage faster probably. But what has been shown and is confirmed if you take regular breaks, it doesn't have to be a lot, just a few minutes every 30-40 minutes and every 90 minutes definitely take 15-20 minutes. Do some yoga? Need to go for a walk? Just allow your brain to just do nothing and repair itself, prepare for the next bout of work. And also, obviously, sleeping well and sleeping between eight to nine hours every night on the same schedule. That has been a tremendous amplifier of my productivity and just best for life.
Speaker 1And so when people tell me like you need to take a break, I'm like why? Just because you need to take a break, because you are so not disciplined about your sleeping routine or taking breaks, and haphazard and all over the place doesn't mean that that is true for everyone. And if you want to keep working on things that matter to you, if you want to show up for your life more powerfully, in a more impactful way, and deliver a lot of value, and not feeling exhausted because of that but can go day after day after day, feeling like you're more and more productive and you deliver more and more, and not getting exhausted but instead being more and more energized, that's where you really need to take care of your health holistically, from sleep and rest to nutrition and exercise and all the stress management and recovery protocols to be take breaks and learn how to take proper breaks. Social media is not the break for your brain, so just just know that and it might sound like a lot that you have to take care of a lot of things and it is a lot.
Speaker 1But also good news, we have more than enough evidence that simple things work. You just need to, one habit at a time, one step at a time, build a system that works for you, just like Sam Altman writes about how he found a system that works for him and it took him a while of experimentation, measuring, tracking certain things but what he writes about in his blog, that's a fundamental health science that has been confirmed and researched. We humans are different, but 99.9% of our genome is exactly the same, and we need to sleep for 7 to 9 hours and we need to eat certain things to run smoother and we need to do certain things to run smoother and we need to take breaks and we need to exercise for this whole machinery to work well. Here's the deal. I have a trial executive coaching session 360 where, as a certified health coach, as a certified nutrition, recovery and sleep coach, I can walk you through the missing pieces that are not in your routine yet, or if habit formation, if sticking with it, is your problem, I can also give you the most effective tools to start building consistent habits. So if you'd like that, then there is a link in the show notes of this podcast to schedule your trial coaching session, absolutely free and available to you.
If you're serious about making impact in this life, about living your best life, then first comes the charge. You need to figure out a system to maintain high vitality, high health, high vitality, high health and learning how to be in high energy state by not wasting your energy or not doing silly things like not taking breaks and pushing gas all the way until the whole system breaks. And then you need to take a weekend off, two weeks off, and you never feel really recovered. You never feel really recovered. So recovery and rest is also science and needs to have consistency and solid research before you build habits. You can just wing it in most of the cases. So book the session with me. Or if you know someone who needs this session, who needs to just understand how health works and why they might be exhausted all of the time, then share with them that link that is again in the show notes. Other than that, guys, check out Sam Altman's post. If you are in tech world and motivated by technology entrepreneurs, check it out Again. Google, sam Altman, blog, productivity what else. Share this episode with at least one other person or someone who you believe might really benefit from it, and then take breaks, treat life as a marathon, because it is, and, before you do anything in the world, make sure that you have a solid charging station that will fuel your pursuit of greatness.
Speaker 1Thank you so much for tuning in. Thank you so much for listening. Stay tuned for future episodes. We are having guests. Finally, on our podcast. I have a lot of interviews, but I needed to work through them and put them online. So stay tuned for that on Saturday from change leaders, ceos and just people who are committed to impact, leadership and growth. So that's that. Have an amazing day, keep growing, take breaks and make sure that you have a solid charging station.