Bridging Mental Health & Fitness | ETP#182

In ETP 182, we explore the deep connection between mental health and fitness, sharing our own experiences with movement and how it’s shaped our well-being. We talk about why exercise is more than just self-care—it’s essential for a strong mind. We break down the science behind movement, and its role in the dopamine reward system, and how some research has shown that exercise can be just as effective as antidepressants.

Timestamps:

00:00 Episode Introduction and Updates

12:26 Personal Experiences with Movement and Mental Health

21:05 The Connection Between Movement and Mental Well-being

27:36 The Efficacy of Movement in Mental Health

30:40 Evolutionary Perspectives on Daily Movement

34:45 Daily Movement as a Lifestyle Requirement

39:48 The Psychological Impact of Exercise

45:00 Dopamine and the Reward System in Exercise

55:18 Cognitive Benefits of Exercise

56:58 Conclusion and Future Discussions

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Transcript

0:28

What is going on guys? Happy Monday or Tuesday, whether you're listening on YouTube or the podcast streaming platforms. Welcome back to Eat, Train, Prosper. This is episode 182. Brian and myself are talking about kind of bridging the gap between like mental health and fitness or movement as medicine in the kind of interdependent relationship between fitness in our lives and then the outlook and overall quality, perhaps I could even say of mental health. So. I think this is going to be a pretty cool episode, a little bit different from what we normally do, but still very much intertwined. But before we get into that, always, Brian, do you have any updates for us? Yeah, mean, extremely related to this topic that we're gonna discuss today on the pod is kind of my other pod that I've been shamelessly promoting on here the last few weeks. So I dropped my new podcast, Life Reflected. The first episode is out and one of the staples or backbones of that podcast that I wanna explore with every single guest that I have on is this idea of... Mindfulness mental health movement exercise and kind of how they all intertwine together and so with my first guest on the pod We did have we started the conversation with 35 or 40 minutes literally talking about this topic and how it impacts us each individually and so I'm really excited to take a lot of that discussion and Apply it here to Straker and kind of pick his brain on the way that he feels about some of these things So I think it's a really great topic. I'm really excited to share it with this audience that we have here at Eat, Train, Prosper, which is, you know, a bit more of this fitness based audience. And I think it's going to be a great conversation. So, last thing on that is that our second episode of the podcast will be coming out in mid March. we're going to be on kind of a monthly cadence here. And, the second episode is going to be with an ultra endurance athlete. this girl runs a hundred and 200 mile races. If you can imagine how long a 200 mile foot race takes to complete, I am intrigued to dig into the psychology around that. that will be upcoming soon. Let's see, on that note, I did my personal longest run ever a week and a half ago, and it pales in comparison to 200 miles because my longest run ever was a 10K, which is... 6.2 miles. Still a long way to go before I'm an ultra endurance athlete. But that felt really long to me and I felt extremely accomplished from that, which again kind of bridges this gap into mental health and movement and exercises, medicine and all of this stuff. So more to discuss on that as we get going. But really cool that I was able to actually run 6.2 miles without stopping. literally never done that before in 42 years. So kind of wild there. last week we, I had the norovirus on Wednesday night was up all night, literally doing what you do when you have norovirus. And it was the most rapid onset and rapid, release of the disease that I've ever experienced. Like I was literally up aggressively, violently doing my thing for six hours. And then I was basically fine. And I was just like tired from the exorcism that that occurred. and it's, was just like, I know other people have norovirus and experienced the same thing, but I just couldn't believe the rapid onset and then the release of that disease in that manner. So rapidly, never experienced anything like it before. So woke up next day, fatigued, whatever felt mostly fine. Went to San Diego. we just spent five days in San Diego. Just got back yesterday. Awesome trip. Really nice to get some warm weather in. But one factor that's been interesting is that my body weight has been plummeting since norovirus. So obviously, you know, I exercised everything, my body released everything I had in me, and I just have had no appetite since then. So even though I feel fine, and I've been continuing to work out as normal, and my performance has been normal, I still have no appetite. And I've lost something like six or seven pounds in the last week and a half since the norovirus. So obviously there was a lot of loss of pounds through that experience, but then it's just continued since then and I can't really eat. Like I keep trying to eat. I'm even having like pizza and cheese steaks and French fries and dessert and trying to just get calories in and I'll have like three bites and be like, nah, I'm full. I don't really want to eat. So I've been at like, you know, a hundred grams of protein for the last week every day, just forcing it down, um, doing the best I can. But you know, it's weird, like for being underfed, I feel amazing. So, um, part of me feels like I've actually been exploring this idea with, with other people that maybe I just let my body weight trend down because I'm going to be doing this cardio thing anyway. And I would be performing better at cardio at 180 pounds than I do at 195. Maybe I just let this happen and and use this as another kind of personal end of one experience like what happens to my training in the gym? What happens to my cardio when when body weight goes down? So, I don't know appetite may come back and things may correct themselves but That is pretty much all I have to say for the moment Very, very interesting. My first update for everyone listening, the notes that I have are, training good, smiley face, eating bad, frowning face. And very similar to Brian, like my appetite has just, it's gone. It's gone. It's bad. I was sick. I don't think it was a novel virus, norovirus. I think it was just like a Bollie related, like bacterial infection thing where you're just peeing out of your butt for a couple of days. And I mean, my appetite just never came back after it. Unfortunately, my body, I was able to get my body weight back up. I mean, we've even this week had to last week was probably one of my worst weeks of eating. I don't think there was a single day last week where I got all my meals in. It's not like I was like out, you know, eating bullshitter off plan because I just could not get all of my food in in the day. I was so grossly full. And. So this week, we have actually resorted to doing is like we've chopped a lot of my food volume and just put an orange juice. Like we're at that point. I'm drinking 1500 milliliters. So I mean, that's 1.5 liters of per day. Yeah. I'm like buying out the grocery stores. I'm like going in and just buying all the orange juice that they have. But I'm getting like the not from concentrate like 100 % you know fresh squeezed orange juice and you forget how damn good that actually is. It's orange juice is one of my favorite, favorite liquids or beverages out there. Yeah. Yeah, after like the first day I was like, I forgot how good like real freshly fresh squeezed juices. This is amazing. So I've been enjoying that. That's like the highlight of my day. Like I get to have my orange juice again. But yeah, like in full transparency, I'm sitting here heartburn. I've got like heartburn feeling and it just I'm just I don't know what it is. It's very strange. Fortunately, like I said, my body weight still like the very low two thirties. But like I'm pretty lean. to be starting prep in a month. But it's just like my body's just fighting it and it just does not want to put more weight on, I think at least. Do you think that that heartburn is a result of this crazy change in the amount of sugar that you're consuming? No, because it's been there for a while, for a couple months. It'll kind of come and go, but the weeks are really full. It's been there for easily two, three months. Alright, well then my next question is have you noticed any effects at all, positive or negative, I guess probably negative, but from going from eating literally zero sugar to going to consuming 1.5 liters of orange juice every day. No, it's been maybe like seven or eight days. So it's pretty recent. I just got some recent blood work done about a week ago, right? It was last Friday and things are pretty much the same. Like there's these little things that are starting to show like my fasting blood glucose was a 101, which isn't really different for me. I had my highest A1C ever. I think it was a 5.7. So it's normally like a five five. Again, I run a little bit high there. but that was slightly higher. Lipids looked great though. like that was, but I'm eating 700 grams of carbs per day and I've been pushing food for a year, literally over like a year now. So I would expect things to start to like bend a little, but then prep starts in a month and all those things are gone in two weeks. Yeah, all the H1C and HGA1C and the glucose stuff should all correct as you go into a deficit. Yeah. But it's just been like frustrating. Like I've I really want to get to like the two thirty five ish before prep starts, but I just I just don't know. Like my body really wants to talk about like the two thirty one to thirty two. And again, I feel like I'm too lean to start a prep really, but I'm not going to like just eat pizza in garbage to get my body weight up, especially because it will just wreck my digestion. So it is what it is. Better update, my posing is getting to a not so embarrassing quality, which is pretty cool. It might even make it to Instagram sooner or later. I've been taking like a weekly class here with one of the pros who's here, Irfan. He's from Singapore, lives here and it's progressing now. I feel better. He thinks it's pretty good, but of course I'm a pretty hard critic on myself. so I feel proficient and it doesn't feel like so, so strange anymore, even though a lot of it is like very strange. How do you, are you, are you like enjoying the challenge of trying to get better at it or is it kind of just a chore that you feel like you have to do? Today was the first day where I'm like, this doesn't look like dog shit. like, was like, kind of, I'm like, I can see, like, you know, it's like in the beginning, you're standing at this hill that's just seems like impossibly steep. And now I feel like I'm, I've climbed to a point where the steepness is like leveling out. So I feel like I can get into them proficiently. I still need to like, you know, modify some of the things that I'm doing wrong, but I can at least identify them now. And I feel pretty. decent so far. Yeah. Yeah. So it's been better, definitely better than before. And think that's it really. mean, of course there's all sorts of gym stuff going on, but I would rather just wait until we're open and then just say like, yeah, things are great. Jim's open to come visit. But but that's a for a future episode. Seeing you the videos and stuff, they look amazing. Like the equipment looks great. The whole ambiance just screams, you know, invite me here. I want to come train. Yeah, yeah, it's it's pretty cool. It's going to be cool once, you know, things are really polished and we have some people coming in and stuff. I'm very much as cool as it is to have like this big private gym that no one knows where it is. And we're just like training in there. I do really look forward to being like, I hope everyone else thinks it's as cool as I hope they think it will. So that's like my big thing personally. Yep, yep, no, it's gonna be dope. It's gonna be great. Cool. So like I said earlier, we were going to kind of talk about the intersection between mental health and fitness. And I think for me, this is really interesting because I kind of have never really had to think about it too much because it's always been like for it's always been a part of my life, you know, and when we were younger, I wouldn't necessarily call it fitness. It was like playing a sport, right. And there was those aspects of it. But even throughout like my early adulthood, I played intramural sports at university. I was in the gym and then immediately after university, I found myself in CrossFit, playing a new sport sort of thing. it hasn't been until I've kind of like gotten older and had some, I guess more life experience. It's really, I've been able to reflect on it a little bit more and I feel very fortunate that I kind of like figured out an aspect of life. that I didn't even really figure out. was kind of just someone pushed it on me at some point and I had just kind of never stopped and had interests in it. And it's like carried me through now into the middle of my life. What do you think about yours there? Yeah, I, similarly, I think it was an extremely timely and important addition to my life at the time that it came into it when I was 15 or so. I guess it actually started when I, like before there was always sports and stuff, but as far as taking of my own volition and making myself do training, so to speak, it really started the year before high school. The summer after eighth grade, I began swimming. I joined the swim team and I committed to swim one mile every single day throughout the entire summer. And I maybe missed, you know, a day here and there, like a day that we traveled or something. I was like, I can't fit in my mile swim. But literally other than one or two days here and there for that entire three month summer, I swim a mile or more every single day. And so that was that first sense of me. feeling as if movement was more than just a means to an end, but potentially something more vital and important in the grand kind of scheme of who I am. And then that morphed the following, let's say nine months later, so the end of freshman year of high school is when I found the weight room and that took on a kind of life of its own. And it's interesting in reflecting back on that because initially I was lifting for the girls and to get better at basketball so that I could be more formidable on the basketball court. And I was trying to optimize it for those purposes without really reflecting at all on the way that it helped me in my mental health or my mindset. Because I was a 15-year-old kid, I couldn't even really conceptualize of how important it was. But some of those habits and routine that were formed from a young age through playing sports and then through swimming and eventually through lifting have all been kind of building blocks that have formed a large piece of who I am and where I am today with my relationship with myself and the way that that's intertwined with movement and exercise. I really, really like the, cause you kind of said something that is exactly where I wanted to take the conversation. And you said it's formed something with your relationship with yourself. I think everyone has kind of, obviously everyone has a different relationship with self, but when do you think for yourself that being like someone who's in shape or someone that prioritizes their health, like had, form like a close like a value. When did it when do you think it became a value for yourself? Yeah, I think it was probably around 11th grade because I was playing varsity basketball. I was one of the starters on the team and I Basketball had always been the most important thing to me throughout my entire youth. was, you know, my goal in life was to play in the NBA and no one ever told me that I couldn't. Like my parents always were like, you can be anything you want to be. And I still, I still don't know that that was good advice. Like in retrospect, I honestly wish someone would have been like, dude, you're going to be 5'10 and you're like this white kid that's not that fast. Like you are not going to play in the NBA, you know? I do wish someone had kind of told me that and been more realistic with me in my younger years, but I think around 11th grade is when I became so obsessed with this impact that lifting had on my life, primarily in the aesthetic, but way beyond that in retrospect, obviously. And I actually ended up quitting basketball. In the beginning of the season, we had a few practices. And I was like, this basketball thing, two hour practices, six days a week, this is eating into the energy and the focus that I have in the weight room. It's going to take away from the results that I'm going to get in the weight room. And I just decided that I was going to take the year off of basketball and really focus on this new thing that I was obsessed with. And then I did that. And that was when I really got like incredible results. It was that year in 11th grade where people really started to notice that things were changing and that I was kind of being identified by. this other pursuit that I was doing, which was so outside of what anyone else in my age group was doing at the time. Like in the 90s, nobody was committing their time to the weight room like they are these days with our youth, with the TikTok generation and everything. so for me, I think that that was super formative. It really began to define me as the in-shape guy who trains and takes care of his health and all that stuff. And then I was able to actually... take all of those gains that I made that year. And when I came back senior year, I was not just a starter, but I was pretty much the best player on the team. And I don't know, maybe it would have happened if I would have continued with basketball in 11th grade as well. I don't know. I don't have a sliding doors experiment, but I think being able to put on a bunch of muscle and really come into myself by taking the year off had a huge impact on my success in the senior year. Yeah, that's really interesting. As you were speaking, I was really kind of looping back through my years and like I said numerous times on the podcast, my introduction was all through playing American football, so I'm not going to really get into it. But one thing that I remember, one of my summers, I had an internship, this is at a university down in Maryland, outside of Baltimore. So I was in like I just driving down there on like Monday mornings. Like I didn't know anyone. Like I was staying with like a Craigslist, you know, house I found and that was like the time I stopped lifting. I would go on like two runs per week. Like, cause like you have to do something, you know? And it was at the end of that summer. also, that was a summer I got my chest tattooed and I think I was like taking a picture of it to send it to my mom. And I'm like looking at the photo and like, don't I fucking look like, and then I look at myself in the mirror and I can just like see the cumulative effects of like, being a normal person, you know, I'm using air quotes here and like not training and like my diet wasn't like dog shit, but I was just like, and I was like, I was kind of like let down and like what I looked like and I was like, Oh my God, Aaron, and I'm 21. I think at the time, like you need to take care of yourself, you know, and like that was the only time in my life where I had like an extended period of like a way. And it was like maybe two and a half months, but that's when I realized like that I valued to myself because like I had a girlfriend and like the same relationship and all of these things. But that's when I have, placed a value on that as like who the, my self image of myself. Um, and I think that was something, like I said, I had forgotten about that, but that you reminded me as you, as you were talking through it and I'm like, that's when I placed that value. When I realized that I had let it kind of slide. And there's been other times like when I had injuries and was recovering from surgeries, but I would still be doing like something. And I knew it at that point. Now, kind of transitioning a little bit to a little bit closer to the conversation. Back then, did you know anything about the kind of connection with like the mental health side of it and really just feeling good about yourself? And I guess let me back up a little bit. How I kind of like to frame it, because everyone has a little bit of different definitions and stuff is I personally like the kind of like yin and yang relationship between like the body and the mind and kind of, like defining, I think the easiest way to define mental health for me, again, I'm obviously no expert in this. is just generally feeling good, right? When you feel good, you have a positive outlook on things. You're pretty happy. You typically have like a good enough or sufficient level of like, you know, quality of mental health. But when you notice it, like you feel bad kind of day in and day out. And it's like the sun, like the warmth of the sun, you don't really care about the colors don't really look as like green and stuff. Like that's when I start to notice it, it like slipping a little bit. And that's how I can kind of like, that's how I personally identify with it. Yeah, I'm going to try not to jump ahead too far into our conversation here, but... There's an interesting intersection between... doing the movement or the exercise or whatever the thing is that's on your agenda for the day and feeling the sense of accomplishment that you get from doing the thing that's kind of hanging over your head. And this has been something that has just progressed over the course of the 27 plus years that I've been doing this training thing where my mental state in any given day is impacted by when and if I get the movement that I intend to get that day. And I think that that started at a young age, but I wasn't so aware of that. I was more just living in the moment and going through the motions. the thing that was the most gratifying for me was doing the thing that was hanging over my head that was going to challenge me that I knew was going to be hard and then kind of thriving in the after effect of doing that thing. And so that started, you know, at quite a young age. I can even remember, man, I remember around that time, maybe 11th, 12th grade where I was getting serious about it. and getting my wisdom teeth removed and being told, you know, that you have six days where you really can't do any sort of exercise because, you know, the sockets in the mouth are going to bleed and you're on these like steroid drugs and you just need to sit down and watch TV and do nothing. And I think it was on day two where I was like, no, I can't do this. I have things, I have goals, I have objectives. I have to accomplish these things. And so I lifted. and it was okay, my mouth bled a little bit, but I was like, eh, whatever, a little blood, I accomplished my goal. The next day I was like, I gotta play basketball, so I went out and played basketball and my whole mouth started just oozing blood out of it and I was like, yeah, day three was probably a little bit too early to go play basketball, but I've always had this sort of obsession or even, I use the word addiction to movement, and now that I'm older, I'm able to. reflect on that and acknowledge that it might be an addiction or even a compensatory mechanism for some sort of other mental health issue that I may or may not be dealing with undiagnosed. But movement has been kind of that rock that has always allowed me to feel good in myself, even from a young age. Yeah, and I think kind of what I wanted to get at, so thank you for kind of taking it where I thought. What is, I truly do think that there is a connection to being a human. There is something tied with like health, right? And I'm using mental health in that and some form of movement, right? And don't get me wrong, I love training. I love, you know, the sliver or niche of the movement world that, we fit into, but I don't think everyone needs. to be lifting weights, especially if you want nothing to do with it. But I do think in order to live like... the best life for anyone, I do think there is a movement component attached to that. And even if it's just like going for a walk or doing something like you, your body and your mind just feels better when you are doing something, something in a meaningful capacity that you have a value attached to or some meaningful connection to. I do really, really believe that. I think I was... or am fortunate where I haven't like some people are unfortunately experienced like these negative mental health things like pretty young, you know, and I do granite think things are a lot worse now with like exposure to social media at younger ages in those sorts of things. And we were fortunate to really not have to deal with any of that just by due to our age. But I noticed at times where I wasn't doing things, whether I was like really stressed with like, you know, the work stuff or like When COVID happened, we were like stuck inside. Those are when things really started to, I started to notice it for the first time. And it was because of that like restriction of my like movement of my training, the things that I would inherently do that I didn't realize were these like anchoring points to my mental health. And I find that in my experience, right, and I'm probably stepping far outside my bounds here. with friends and siblings and things that I've experienced more. at larger aspects of negative mental health, they don't have that, they don't have a meaningful movement capacity in their lives that they're also attached to. And I've noticed that time and time again, but I bite my tongue about it because it's not my place. But I do firmly believe that there is a fundamental core component of being a human that is attached to some form of movement. Yeah, so I'm in the process of working on another project that's not the other podcast, something I'm keeping a little more private, but it's kind of based around this idea of daily movement and the evolutionary base of it and its impact on a lot of the stuff we're talking about today, among other things. But in doing some of the research for this project, I've come across just endless numbers of studies that seemingly all show that movement and exercise are as effective or in many cases more effective than taking antidepressant anti anxiety drugs. So the things that people suffer from the most like, SSRIs, you know, this is like an RFK thing and in Maha right now in the US, right, we have RFK coming in and saying that everyone's on too many SSRIs, everyone needs to get off of them. Maybe, I I think that from my read of the literature, there is obviously certain cases of depression that are high enough to warrant medication, obviously. But it does seem like the literature as a whole points to this notion that just getting up and moving, as simple as 30 minutes, four times a week of walking or low intensity aerobic exercise can literally move the needle and change your mental state. from being on the depressive spectrum to being on the other side of that spectrum. mean, still, it's always a spectrum, right? So it's just to be less of it. But it was really eye-opening for me to see that because I've heard that throughout the social media space over the last couple of years, but to actually sit down, look at all the preponderance of studies, I mean, there must be thousands of studies that have analyzed and assessed this exact thing. And... And also related to that is, you know, in my research into the movement, the evolutionary basis of movement in our ancestors, like it was ubiquitous. It was literally the way that you would get food on a daily basis. So maybe once in a blue moon, you had caught something really big and you are feasting for a few days and you don't need to necessarily go out and grab more food, okay, that's fine. But for the most part, most days, were spent waking up with the sun, a sect of the group going out and looking for larger game food or some sort of animal protein, while another sect of the tribe is going out and picking for nuts and seeds and berries and things like that, tubers, digging for tubers, whatever, all of them out moving around in the daylight, socializing with their peers and moving their bodies. And all of that is based now in the evolutionary process of how we came to be who we are from thousands of years ago. Yeah. One thing I will add really quickly, because I don't want to kind of derail us, it's something that I was, I did not come up with this analogy. I wish I was this cool, but our society has really moved so quickly, right? But from a, from a genetic standpoint, from a, from a biological standpoint, our bodies, our biologies are still, they're slow to change. society has paced rapidly. but we're still on like old hardware, quote unquote. So like things that happen in modern day life, our bodies do not respond to in a way that we would think they would because our responses are engineered towards like fighting for our life. You know what I mean? Like fleeing from things like a much more primitive and rudimentary society. And that's not the society that we live in. Yeah, mean, sedentaryism, sedentaryism, is that the right word, has really only been prevalent in our society for 100 or 200 years. Since the Industrial Revolution in the late 1800s or whatever, we're literally looking at 150 years that people have been able to be sedentary and not have to move as part of their daily life. so, yeah, we are just not, we are not savvy individuals enough to be able to have adapted. quickly enough to a sedentary lifestyle. Yeah. So we've covered pretty much about like the movement is medicine part that I really, really like. and I think you agree with that as well. our own kind of personal mindsets around it, so much so that I know one thing that I do want to kind of talk about too is we've talked about this, but definitely on the podcast before, like we know for our lifestyles, like what makes us feel really good. So we, Repeat those regardless of the situation where you just went on this San Diego trip with your family. Did you just sit at the beach and go from hotel room to beach and just drink coconut waters and whatever bullshit drinks? No, you probably went on walks, did activities with the kids. You probably still train to some capacity and you keep this core component of your life that you know makes you feel good in these different home situations. Probably when you see family or things like that and on like a vacation or holiday type trip. Yeah, Kim and I, my wife, we make sure to prioritize each other's movement time every morning. So even on trips where we don't have the kids in school and we don't have childcare, know, every morning we wake up, you know, breakfast, coffee, whatever, and then she gets an hour and then I get an hour. And in that hour we can do whatever we want. And luckily in San Diego, you know, it's warm. It's very accessible to be outside. And so every single day I got between 15,000 and 20,000 steps. I ran twice, I lifted once and I walked pretty much every day wherever we went. that's just like, couldn't imagine, imagine going on a vacation where that wasn't just a basic part of how my day was started. And so I don't know. if you have somewhere specifically you wanna take this conversation, but one of the things that I am really interested in discussing is this idea of daily movement. Because for me, and I'm curious your perspective, for me, daily movement has become something that is basically a requirement. And it doesn't have to be daily exercise per se in the sense that I'm huffing and puffing and going to failure in the gym or anything like that. most days it is one of those two things. It's either some sort of cardio or it's some sort of weights, but it could just be, you know, going out for a long walk outside. could be doing some sort of, yoga class. could be throwing the football for an hour with Bryson on the beach. Like, I mean, any, any number of ways to move my body, but, but it's very important to me to have that. And my mental health doesn't feel the same. on days where I don't have that, especially on days where I think I'm gonna have that and then I don't have that. And so I think that that's the very interesting piece of that is how people deal with the unexpected change to what their intended plan is. And where do you sit on that? In full transparency with everyone, like my activity right now is solely restricted to training five days per week and on the like one or twice per week that I'm like carrying and moving shit at the gym. it's, and that's mostly due to like circumstances type things like I'm not heading over to the gym to do cardio and stuff yet. I've, I, I, I, I want to get to a point where I'm doing daily cardio in the morning, like right when I wake up for like 20 minutes just to, because you feel so good afterwards, but I just have too much going on and I don't really want to start that before prep because I don't want my body weight to start going down. So it's kind of like buying time a little bit. And, you know, I've talked about this before, but like here in Bali, like you really can't go for a walk unless you, I get in my scooter, drive to like some remote road where I like can walk. Or walk or drive to the gym and walk on the treadmill, which it's like padded by like 20 minutes on each side. I just don't really want to do it. So that's definitely like a con of living here is like it's walking is effectively impossible. I mean, it's not impossible. Some people do it, but it's not fun. You're on the side of the road. It's really, really not fun. you know, but I do. Yeah, good. me dig into that just a little bit. So you have five days where you lift and you're not doing any structured cardio right now because you're in this gaining phase for another month and then you'll change and you'll be in a period where cardio has benefit. So you have these five days where you train. How does your mental state differ on the days where you train versus the two days that you don't train? Or does it at all differ? Right now it's a little bit different because like for example, today was a rest day. I didn't train, but I like went over to the gym and had to move some things and do like run errands there. I also had to like take some cream of rice over to one of the restaurants that sells it. And like I had errands to do and I had my posing class, right? So I was still like moving in some way. The things that I find If I have like, it's like rain, if it's like a day where it's just raining all day and I'm not training and I don't leave the house and I, and like, I don't have a lot of work to do. And it's like a lazy day. I find myself miserable, miserable. And it, and that's one thing I noticed, I think maybe like two years ago, you know, cause there's everyone feels differently, right? And there's people who love that, like lazy Sunday where you just like hang out and maybe cook and like watch movies. I fucking hate that day. You know, and I'm not saying their day is wrong, but I just I found myself where I was doing it because I thought that I should to have like a down day to like de-stress and stuff. But it wasn't what was happening. I just felt like I was burning a day of my life by not doing anything. And personally, I just don't feel good on those days. Yeah, so I actually love those days after I've moved. So it's like, you know, I do my movement in the morning, I get my mental, my mental fix. And then I'm able to be like, yeah, let's just chill. And like, you know, it's a big day watching football or whatever. But so the where I was going with that question to you initially is like, Like you have two days where you don't train and so you know like those days you wake up and you have a different agenda for yourself. When do you usually train? Is it in the afternoon? Yeah, right now anywhere from like one to like four-ish. Yeah, so you start your days always in the same state, regardless of whether you're training or not training. Your first six or seven hours of the day are pretty much the same regardless. So your mental state likely less affected than in the situation like me or my first guest that I had on Life Reflected where he and I both tend to work out earlier in the day. And as the day wears on and on and on, if we hadn't gotten our workout in or our movement or whatever, we start to feel more and more antsy and edgy and it starts to kind of eat at me. So I don't want to speak for Greg, I'll just speak about myself. Especially on a day where I intend on moving, but it just keeps getting pushed back and pushed back because a work thing or a personal thing or the kids home from school or whatever, whatever. And suddenly it's 1 p.m. and I still haven't gotten my movement in for the day. Those are some of my like least quality mental health days. And so that's where I I alluded to in the beginning, this like addictive quality of exercise. And so it's like, in a sense, it's it's it's tough to say how much of that is the physiological impact of the catecholamines like adrenaline or adrenaline, dopamine on on the body and the mind, physically, I guess it would be more physically on the body versus how much of that is self-induced mental perturbation that I've somehow told myself I have to do this thing or else, you know? So it's likely a mix of the two, but my days are very much impacted by whether I get my movement in the morning or not. And I notice a distinct change in... the amount of contentment and happiness that I have on that day, whether or not I got that in. I would 100 % agree with that. There was a period last year where I was training and I would train around like 12 or one, but then on the rest days, we would be at the gym by like 7.30 or eight in the morning doing our cardio and then like, know, a hot bath or sauna and I'd be home by like 9.30. I felt amazing on those days. It was very of like an elated feeling. I do like the concept of what you're doing. I like to call that like paying yourself first, right? So before you like pay the email or all these other things like you're taking your Brian time and like paying yourself first. That is the concept that I have for when I start prep. The hard thing right now, especially with how my business is structured and where and living over here is I shut my laptop around like 9.15 ish, sometimes 9.30. From 9.30 PM my time to like 8 a.m., all my clients, the majority of my clients are still Americans and in the United States. That's normal times for them. like check-ins come in, questions come in, and it's very hard for me to ignore those messages and like go trade or something like that because I know, I pride myself on response times and that's prime. I can catch my East coast people when it's still like seven, eight PM and I prioritize taking care of that. Whereas like in the future, when I'm back in the States, like I do very much. So looking forward to be able to like go train at nine AM as opposed to like four PM, because I don't have to take advantage of that time difference really. but one thing I want to do with my prep is what I think I'm ultimately going to do and is buy a spin bike for my, for the Villa here. so that I can just wake up, hit electrolytes or water, and immediately do like 20 minutes ride just to get a little bit sweaty, get my heart rate up, get my cardio in, take a shower, get that like, and it's only like 7 a.m., 7.15 a.m., and I already have that like feel good feeling, and then I look at my phone. But I have a very hard time looking at my phone, knowing that there's messages in there, ignoring them to go do my cardio or something like that. Yeah, that makes so much sense. I'm torn to take this in one of two directions. One, the evolutionary situation of not actually having phones in the past and that being a non-issue of just waking up and looking at the sun and being like, another day where I'm doing the exact same thing I did every other day. And the beauty in that, right? No one looked at that and was like, the monotony of every day being the same. This is so boring. It was just like. This is life, like the sun comes up, you go find food, you eat food, you hang out with your friends, like it was very simple. And then the other side of this being just how good you can feel in modern day society by making a small change like that. And in some ways, almost manufacturing a way that it's taking us back to the evolutionary roots, not that... someone would get up in the morning and be like, 20 minutes of cardio, here we go. But it was more naturally ingrained into the pattern of the day and the beauty of that. And so I just, I think in reflecting on it, there's something really important and vital in all of our mental healths in... getting back to that in some way. Like even though it's a modernized version of that, like you're hopping on a bike, but at least you're not looking at your phone. So there's all these kind of inputs occurring together. And it does create that kind of milieu of better mental state throughout the day when you can get that in earlier in the day. Yeah, I mean, I think there's there's definitely a basis for everything we're speaking around of that kind of like, like work, then reward system in that sort of thing. And we know and I'm sure you probably came across this in the reading of the research you were doing. If you if there if we separate enough the work versus reward system, that dopamine pattern gets like I don't know the proper terminology, but I don't think like burns out as the proper term to use, but it just doesn't spin forever. Right. Like if, let's say, I don't know you, you think gambling, right? If you win like a hundred dollars, you know, gambling for like 10 minutes, you're like, man, that was so much fun. Right. If every single day you won that $100 at gambling, like that dopamine response dies out. Yeah. It diminishes in there. And there needs to be some sort of like. It's again ingrained in us through through whatever mechanism like hard work, time input, reward on the back end. And if you remove that hard work, you can't just spin that same dopamine. It like you said, it diminishes. It's the contrast between the two different types of ways that dopamine works, right? So I read this book, Dopamine Nation, a couple years ago. It was the impetus for me to stop consuming weed for a while. And the two ways that dopamine occurs, right, is either you do the thing that gives you the dopamine high, and then you pay the price after. So you could think of illicit drugs, alcohol, eating chocolate or food that you enjoy, something along those lines, sex in a sense. mean, any of those things, extremely high dopamine followed by a dopamine depletion where you pay the price. A lot of people call that coming down or the hangover. Any of those things are the dopamine depletion side, right? Trying to get back to baseline. What I try to implement into my life is the reverse dopamine curve. So trying to do things that require you to do the hard work first. So you pay the price upfront and then the dopamine comes after. So you could think of something like an ice dunk. You you're like, every part of me is telling me I don't want to go into this ice bath, but then you do it and you get that crazy adrenaline dopamine high for many hours afterwards. Working out. something like working out where you know it's gonna be really, really hard and everything in your body is telling you like, no, you're not supposed to do this because like, we're not meant to go to failure on a hack squat or whatever. And then you do it and the dopamine comes after because you've gone through the hard part and you've earned it, so to speak. And so I think there's extreme value in living your life with that idea. And it's actually, through kind of discovering that in my mind a number of months ago, it's completely reframed the way that I think about a lot of things in my life. Do you think, and I think this is probably a pretty decent spot for us to kind of wrap this one up. Do you think that what you just described there has any kind of impact or precedent on like your relationship with self? And let me let me explain a little bit. Maybe I explained it poorly. Like you just use that example at the hack squat, right? And I know we use that example when we were talking before the episode. But for example, like I'll just I'll just explain it for everyone in the in the on the on the all the listeners. I trained like yesterday. I had a bad session. I was just in like kind of a crappy mood, a little bit pissed off about different things. I really didn't want to do my hacks. My top hack squat set. It's just very, very heavy. It's hard, like Brian said, it is unpleasurable to do hard sets of like squatting, anything like that. I really wanted to skip it, but I knew if I skipped that set, I would feel horribly about myself because I didn't do something that I said that I was going to do. And that would have a very negative impact on my perception of self. So I also had this idea that I'm going to film that set because I don't film many of my sets, like maybe 10 % or something like that. so that I know if I film it, I also will not bitch out and stop it like a two RIR or something like that. Not that I'm saying everyone who stops at a two RIR is a bitch, but I know for me, it's a two failure effectively set or a zero RIR set in my program, right? With my volume allocation, et cetera, et cetera. I did it, I didn't wanna do it, I hated it. Immediately when I was done, I felt this rush of pride perhaps because I did something that I said I was going to do even when I didn't want to. And there was no one else in the gym. It was just me. So there was no kind of like that nice peer pressure into it. No eyes on me. It me in an empty gym by myself. that my relationship with myself improved because I held myself to my word in a very easy environment to take the easy way out. Yeah, no, I love that. I think that that adds an actually an extra variable that maybe needs to be discussed, which is the idea of accountability. Because by you filming that and putting it out on the internet, now you've made yourself accountable to people that see you doing that. And so I'm not sure what the psychology is behind that changing the relationship to self where you are intrinsically motivated to do it for your own benefit versus like you're still doing it for your own benefit. but you're doing it with the expectation of some sort of validation that's gonna be achieved by putting it out there, you know, of like, see, I did it, I didn't wanna do it and I did it. And so I relate to that because I've also relied on accountability a lot in my life. Like I think I do that a lot with my training, the way I put it on Instagram and film my sets and stuff. But even a better example of that would have been when I dieted a number of years ago and we... tracked it on the podcast, what I was doing was I was posting my body weight every single day on my story. I would wake up, I'd shoot a shot of the scale. I would have a paragraph about, you what I felt about why my body weight is what it is, where I'm going, what are my goals, blah, blah, blah. And this happened every single day for five straight months as I was dieting. And it was part of that accountability of putting it out there that allowed me to, I have to say, reach my full potential or achieve my goal. And I don't know how much of that may or may not have changed if I had not had the accountability of putting that on Instagram and just been doing it for myself. And so I think that that definitely adds a little bit of an element in there. The, yeah. It does. mean, accountability is huge. And one of the really hard things, right, we know is to be accountable to self. Yeah, yeah. And so I also think that this then also brings in this idea of life framing. And when you do hard things, whether it's the hack squat set on like a very small, know, this takes one minute basis, or like my buddies and I did last May when we went out and did our misogi where we went and hiked for eight and a half hours and did 20 miles and 6,000 feet of vertical and we didn't train for it. It was just, hey, let's go out. see if we can accomplish this thing. And we know it's going to be really, really hard to walk for eight and a half straight hours and 6,000 feet of vertical. But we did it. And in doing so, what these hard experiences do is they frame the rest of life as much more manageable. And so the mental health benefits that come from being able to have that contrast in your life, where it's not just every day is kind of doing the same thing. because then every day could just feel hard. But having these experiences where you do really, really, really hard things so that when semi-hard things occur in life, semi-challenging situations, they feel significantly less challenging. Yeah, I mean, you it's really true. And I never really thought about it in that manner. But as you were saying that I could just think of all these things, it seemed like impossible to be before. And now it's just like, that's just fucking Tuesday. And now these other things that I never would have thought that I was even remotely capable of doing are like my new hard projects. Yep. Always leveling up. And I feel like that's just like a little micro explanation for like life. You know, it's just like this journey of self improvement or leveling up or living a life that in a way that you want to live. At least that's how I think of it. I don't know. Maybe other people live their lives differently, but that's been a very cool thing for me. Cause that's how I look like in the next chapter about like having a family and stuff like that's just the next. level up and like of the way that I want to live and the man I want to be in and that sort of thing. I look very, I look at it as a big project and maybe that's not the way to look at your family, but that's how I have it framed in my mind, at least for now. Yeah, well because of all the hard things that you've done in your life and all of the monumental projects and tasks that you've overcome and physical feats that you've accomplished, not that having a family is gonna be easy, but it will be easier than it would have been if you had not done all those hard things in the prior years. I'm going to try and remember that one. Yeah. All right, anything else on the back end of this one, Brian? I think maybe just to add the incredible body of literature coming out about the importance of exercise and movement on cognitive function as we age, I think that it would be wrong for us not to at least mention that because I think part of, when I talk about this addiction that I have to movement and exercise, I think so much of that is framed or cloaked in this idea that it's so good for me. Like it's not like I'm addicted to exercise strictly for the fact that it makes me feel really good, but it's also the broader idea that it's so good for me. And so that's not just for my physical health and my blood markers and all of that stuff, but it's also for now all this incredible body of research coming out on cognitive function and how, you know, like. Every piece of research now is literally showing that all that crap like Sudoku and Solitaire and like all of those games that people would do to try to develop their mind are not nearly as effective as just exercising. Like literally exercising is better for your brain than all of these mental gymnastics that you can put yourself through, crossword puzzles, all of that crap. And so yeah, I just think that that's super important. And another reason that... the exercise is just so powerful for physical and mental health. Yeah, so I think that's a really good place to wrap up. I'm sure we'll get some questions on the back end of this one. I might ask you to shoot me over some of that research on the Sudoku versus the exercise one. That one I think is pretty interesting. But as always, guys, thank you for listening. Next week, Brian, we may have a Q &A. We may also have another topic. We're TBD on that one. But we'll be back, talk to you guys, and see you next week. Yep.