New Year's Resolutions: 7 Habits of Healthy People

Its time to look back and look ahead as we finish out 2023 and head into 2024. This episode breaks down some of the habits that we have seen consistently in the healthiest and highest performing clients and patients we have worked with. We hope these habits will help you enter 2024 with a new perspective and ready to tackle whatever life throws at you.

Transcript

0:01

Welcome to the backseat driver podcast, where we attempt to look differently at the world of performance, psychology, and sport. My name is Chris DeMarco and by trade, I am a middle performance consultant. My co host Matthew is a doctor, avid runner, and someone who's not afraid to stir the pot, who also happens to be my brother.

Chris 0:28

Ho, ho, ho. Merry Christmas, everyone. This is, we were recording this the week before Christmas, only five or six days away, I can't count six days away. Um, welcome into this week's edition. Excited to get

Matt 0:42

into this. What are you asking for Christmas?

Chris 0:46

So, I'm finally to the point in my life where I kind of just bought most of the stuff that I wanted. Uh, I asked for like a pair of shoes or something from

Matt 0:58

family members. I was thinking how much I really enjoy Christmas though and how much one of my love languages is gifts, receiving and giving. And so I really, I've actually found that I don't really like as people get older and buy themselves things. Cause I still like buying people gifts, you know. So I'm trying to navigate that still as an adult.

Chris 1:18

No, I can appreciate that. It, for me, it was kind of fun to just. Be like, I want this stuff and instead of like, I can't ask for all of it. I'm like, I'm just gonna, it's on sale. I'll just order some of it. So

Matt 1:32

that was kind of nice. Yeah, I guess that's what a real job lets you do. You can buy stuff for yourself now instead of waiting. But I feel like you still wait the whole year anyway just to get it for

Chris 1:42

Christmas. I do. I shop about once a year.

Matt 1:46

Is that going to be on our, our podcast today? So kind of jumping right into the topic for today. We're going to do habits of healthy people. So basically what, what the idea for this podcast came from is Chris and I were talking the other day and I was telling him that I've started to notice throughout my last, uh, three and a half, four years of being in medicine. And really just in general before that being an exercise, science, strength and conditioning, personal training, all those arenas that the healthiest people are the people that seem to have the best health behaviors all seem to follow kind of certain patterns of behavior and certain patterns of healthy living. And there seemed to be some threads that connected a majority of them. And so I was just telling him it might be good as we head into the new year, especially in people are making all their resolutions. If you're into that kind of thing, um, to do a podcast where we kind of talk about some of those things, cause I think that's. You know, with, with the caveat of, of we're, we're moving into dangerous territory here. One of my friends, when I told him the idea for this podcast said, are you guys just becoming the new health and wellness podcast? So we're moving into dangerous territory by, by embarking on this, this discussion. I think,

Chris 3:08

yeah, I think there will be a crossover and there's always a crossover between performance and health. Yeah. And so this is look what I think is cool about this two things. One, like you said, the timing of it. We'll be dropping this sometime around Christmas, new years. Um, when a lot of people are looking to make habit and behavior change, including myself, I think you do as well a little bit. And, you know, the second piece is this is truly where your expertise lies. If you guys listen to last week's episode, we went into confidence, which is a little bit more in my realm, but your perspective, you know, with, uh, as an athlete and things are obviously very valuable, but. To me, I feel like the roles are flipping where I actually want to learn about this stuff from you of what, what do you see in healthy people? Like, what are the differences in some of the things that they do that maybe I can apply to my life that people listening to this can apply, or at least get some ideas if you are trying to make, um, health improvements going forward or performance improvements. Cause I think, like I said, there will be some overlap there.

Matt 4:14

Yeah, no, I, I. I do think, you know, most of our audience at this time is probably not professional or elite athletes. So I think this discussion is very applicable to probably everyone that listens to this. I think there is, like you said, a strong crossover between thinking about high performers, both in just, you know, everyday life and high performers and kind of the more elite realm. And a lot of these things kind of are crossovers between both, but this will definitely have more of a. Um, health behavior applicable to everybody kind of flair to it for this episode. So, and one thing I want

Chris 4:50

to jump in right before you get started is this. The concept of really health does drive performance. It's kind of foundational to performance and high performance in general. And so really what we're looking at is the underlying baseline that needs to be achieved in order to get to the next stage. If you think like Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? You need. Certain things, uh, foundationally in order to get to the next step in the next step. So,

5:17

yeah,

Matt 5:17

I always draw, I always draw this pyramid for people when I'm discussing, discussing how they can get their VO two max up during our physicals each year. And the pyramid really starts with just moving as the bottom and then built on top of that are things like structured cardio, you know, zone two, and then built on top, top of that are the higher intensity intervals. And I think this is very similar. You're probably not going to be a high performer, both whether you're just an amateur athlete or someone trying to maximize performance in the athletic realm or just your health realm, unless you're doing the foundational behaviors, which I'd say, based on my experience, our experiences, these are things that seem to be a common thread throughout and without these foundational behaviors, you know, if you're interested in the moving into that higher echelon of performance, it's going to be really hard without doing these things. So first one that I have. Mhm. Um, and we'll see how many we make it through. I think we have eight written down to start. So that's, that's our goal. So let's get started. So ownership was the first one I wrote down. So can you describe

Chris 6:19

that?

Matt 6:20

Yeah. So what this looks like in my office. is the patient that comes in and they know what their health history is. They know what their last set of labs is. They know, you know, the things that they've been diagnosed with before. They either have a binder or they have a note on their Google drive. You know, they have the pertinent information. They have the important information in a place where they can easily access it. Um, they know kind of what. Is important they understand what the numbers mean, like they have, they have an ownership of, of their health versus, you know, I have a lot of patients that come in, they haven't seen a doctor for a couple of years. I ask them, Oh, you know, do you have any health problems? They don't even know. They don't even know what medicines they take, but they have the bottles with them, but they don't even know what the medicines are called. You know, they don't know if they've had a heart attack or stroke before they don't. Know if they're on a blood thinner all these things that are really really really important details. They're Completely unaware of or have never even thought to ask Oh, these are really important questions to ask or these are things that I really need to know to best Make sure you know best care for myself and to best relay my health status to each person I'm seeing or Practitioners I see or you know personal trainers things like that they just They're not even aware of those things about themselves and it's literally their health. Yeah, so

Chris 7:52

what I'm hearing in that, to encapsulate this word of ownership is a level of paying attention. One, like awareness of what is happening, because that seems like the number one problem. Um, and then number two is there's a level of like initiative. Yeah.

Matt 8:12

I would say that that was definitely the example of the thing I see the most. The way I actually define it more to patients in a simpler term is ultimately you're the one that has to make the decisions. You know, I, I kind of consider myself a kind of a giver of information. I give you the, the information needed to make decisions and understand the risks and benefits of each choice, but I can't go home with you today and make the decision. I can't go home with you and do the, Sleep hygiene things we talked about. I can't go home with you and do the thing We'll talk about next which is meal prepping, you know, I I can't do any of that stuff so that's where the ownership piece comes in is you have to say I am going to Do these things because I realize they're important and no one else in Healthcare is gonna be able to make those choices for me Really? The only thing that I can do is educate you Or give you a medication,

Chris 9:09

you know? Yeah. And, and talking about the power of choice is also a really important aspect of behavior change is making them feel like they're in control.'cause I could imagine that is probably something you see a lot of, is almost like I'm, and I'm guessing here, so tell me if I'm wrong, but like more of a victim mentality of all of these things are happening to me and it's like I don't really have much control over it. And. Almost as like a protection mechanism to just kind of play the victim card. Do you see that?

Matt 9:41

And that's, and that's really the, why I use the word ownership is really those are, that's the separation antithesis of that. Exactly. So you have the people who ownership, meaning they feel that internal locus of control, they feel like they are in charge of the decisions they're making. They are in charge of their health. They're in charge of the outcomes versus like you said, the opposite, which is the external locus of control, meaning. They feel like everything is happening to them, but they don't have any control over those things. There's nothing, they feel like there's nothing they can do to change it, and so why spend energy trying to change it, right? Versus the ownership person is saying, all the decisions I make are very important, they lead to tangible outcomes, they lead to tangible differences in my health, and ultimately, my decisions are driving that, not just these random acts of whatever happening out in the universe.

Chris 10:34

This is Really cool that you're getting into this. Cause I actually see this in athletic populations as well with, with athletes in terms of how they're evaluating performance, you know, if they lose a game or a match, do they feel like, man, there's things I can improve upon to, to change that outcome. And there's some power within that, uh, it makes you feel empowered. I guess it's a better way to say it versus like, you know, this happened and this happened and, you know, there's nothing we could have done about that. Which like, I guess at times could be fair, but for the most part, you really want, you obviously want people to feel empowered to make changes, um, to those behaviors, to those results in the future. And so that would be,

Matt 11:21

yeah, I started with this one. Cause I feel like it's almost the foundation of the foundation. You don't feel like you have control. You're not going to expend the energy to try to change. Exactly.

Chris 11:31

Yeah. I love that. So, so awesome. Let's

Matt 11:33

let's, so the next one kind of is a more practical application of ownership. And I actually just listened to a podcast the other day. It was the Nick bear podcast and he, he actually did 30 minutes on his morning routine, which I personally found so interesting because I, as Chris can tell you, I'm very routine oriented. So, but when I see patients that are really healthy, there is a consistent trend towards at the very least routine, but I think specifically morning routine. And I'll tell you why that there's two big factors into why I think morning routines are really important. I'll, I'll talk more specifically about that in a second, but I think one is willpower. So the longer you go in the day, the more of your willpower account you're spending. So each time you're making a decision throughout the day, you're spending some of your willpower. So when you get to the end of your workday, the amount of willpower that you have remaining is significantly lower. So if that workout that you are scheduled to do that day is going to require willpower, or fighting through some discomfort, the likelihood you do it is a lot lower. Because you've used up a lot of your account. So that's one reason. And two, Is, uh, entropy. I think that's the word. Hopefully people are probably going to roast me for that. But, I think that's the scientific word for, you know, just chaos basically. The world tends towards disorder. So, when you wake up at 5am, we're pretending it's, it's almost the beginning of the world each day. It's quiet. Nobody's really woken up yet. But the longer you go throughout the day, the more disorder kind of builds up throughout, throughout your personal life, throughout your work life, throughout your family. So the likelihood that something changes, the schedule changes, someone needs something is going to increase again, proportionally to how long throughout the day you've gone. So those are my two main reasons for really prioritizing morning routines, specifically morning exercise. Yeah, I,

Chris 13:32

this is, I love how you brought this up.

Matt 13:35

So, especially with a kid, I like, I can not even tell you with a kid, how much more true this is, right?

Chris 13:44

So this is, this is a fun one for me because I've actually played around with this a little bit recently and, and I really completely agree. Um, and Chris

Matt 13:53

is not a morning person.

Chris 13:54

I am, I am, well, I'm not as routine oriented as you. I like a little bit more variety. In my life and historically don't love waking up at the crack of dawn. So, but I will say there's some validity to this and I don't, obviously, depending on your schedule and things like that. I don't know if you necessarily have to get up at 5am or 6am, but the validity to your statement that I have found from getting up more recently, this is kind of a change I've made. Of getting up at 6 AM is the workout in the kind of creative time is what I call it, where I'm writing or creating something it happens. It actually happens. Whereas when I didn't have that space, I would have it planned or built in. But then something like you said, almost every time something comes up. Or it, I'm like, Oh, my free time's at 4 p. m. this afternoon. And I am so unproductive at that time because of what you said, I'm worn out. I've had been in conversations with people all day. Like I just want to nap. And so the last thing I want to do is go do a really hard workout. And so I completely agree with that. I think the word is like decision fatigue, like you said, the willpower and those are both great points. I think entropy is also the correct word. I could Yeah, I think so.

Matt 15:17

Well, I, you could roast me too. I mean, we'll look it up afterwards. It's like, it's kind of when you, I always did this in med school. I'd leave a test and I'd have five questions in my head that I'm like, oh, I need to look up the answer to see if I actually got that one right and be like, oh, dang, I got that one wrong. Or oh yes, I chose the right. All right. That's how I feel right now at the end of this podcast, going to go look on Google and it's going to be like, Oh, no, that was totally the wrong word. You get trolled

Chris 15:39

on

Matt 15:39

social media. Um, so specifically within the morning routine, I think there's a couple of things to think about. So one. Is trying to prioritize your workout time or your exercise time during that, especially the structured exercise time. And it doesn't have to be a lot. I, a lot of people think that means it has to be an hour or more, 45 minutes or more, even five to 10 minutes of some kind of structured is enough to get the blood flowing, kind of wake you up, help you feel better. And if you want to use more of that time, like you said, for creative time writing. Photography, editing, whatever it is, journaling, then that works just as well based on whatever your health goals are, how healthy you are, how much of that structured time you want right then based on your goals. But I think putting whatever is most important to you in that morning time can be really helpful because it's going to happen a lot more consistently. Um, and I, and especially as you move through the life stages, right, when. When you're single, you can generally work out after work if you want to, if that's really what you prefer. But once you get married, once you have kids, it's, it becomes really hard because if you come home after being at work all day and then. You, you know, your kids want to see you, but then you're like, Oh, I got to go work out for an hour. You don't get home till 6. 30, 7 from the workout, and then it's time for them to go to bed. And that's, that doesn't, for me personally, that doesn't really seem fair. That makes sense, and that's something that,

Chris 17:14

um, so, you know, I haven't had to consider, but that makes a ton of sense.

Matt 17:17

So, um, so those are just some, some thoughts. I think it also gets you really primed for the day as well, mentally. I use that time to listen to a lot of like sermons or podcasts, just kind of get my mind flowing, creative thoughts going. And that's a lot of where my journaling comes from is things I listened to on my, my morning run. So my morning routine, just to go through it real quick so people have an idea, I wake up depending on the day sometime between five, five 30, depending on how far I want to run. Usually, um, drink a little bit of water, put my shoes on, stretch for five minutes and then I'm out the door. And then usually run right now, cause I'm training a lot, about 10 miles, which is 80 minutes approximately. So about 80 minutes. And then I come home and, uh, shower, grab my breakfast and then drive to work. So there's not a time, a lot of time for reflecting and not necessarily except on the run. So what I do is I listened to a podcast or two and then kind of reflect on one or two big ideas, the rest of the run after I listened to it. And then listen to like 15 minutes of music to kind of finish it off. And I think that's a really, really nice time. And then I take those one or two big ideas and during my lunch break or end of day, once Luca's asleep, kind of just write them down in my journal and, and extrapolate them out for another five or 10 minutes. And that's been a really good, really good routine for me. Um, and I think I'm more creative at night. So it's really helpful to do this more structured time listening to these podcasts, get these ideas in the morning. And then once I've been able to kind of do my day and then sit down at night and just have a few minutes of creative time to let, let the, all the different, um, variations of that idea kind of take shape in my journal. Here's

Chris 19:08

one of mine that is exactly what you're talking about. And I'm thinking about in terms of probably healthy people. And again, getting into the high performance realm is learning about yourself. And where you're, how you operate best. And when I'm listening to that, I'm sure you didn't know that at 16 years old, but

Matt 19:31

more like 12 for me. Cause I was, I was working out at 5 AM when I was like 13. But I'm saying, I'm

Chris 19:36

saying even like the, I'm most creative at night, figuring that out the, you know, I am always going to be more productive with a workout in the morning. Like these are little kind of nuances to you. And how you operate that take time to figure out a little bit of trial and error. But if you pay attention and you experiment, and I know you experiment with different things I do as well, you, you start to learn. And it's like, um, I heard this somewhere. I can't remember exactly where in the moment, but basically like being a scientist on yourself is so important. Over time, you start to optimize all of these things. And so that's really cool to hear that I will say for me, the biggest thing that I didn't expect from waking up a little bit earlier, working out, having a little bit of time to, you know, whatever I call it, the creative time is I actually feel so much better during the day where I, where I thought I would be more tired because I'm like waking up early and I'm doing more, I'm actually more energized. And so. So that's just kind of a change I didn't

Matt 20:39

expect necessarily. I think anyone that, I try to tell my patients this to bring it back to the, the discussion. But I think once patients start exercising in the morning, most of them never go back because of that. But to overcome that initial inertia to wake up earlier and not feel better for the first few weeks, especially. I think it's really hard. And so I try to set that expectation that it's going to take a few weeks for the dopamine, the serotonin, all those feel good hormones to kind of shift their pathway. And for this to be something fun for you, because it, for a lot of people, it's not very fun at first. And that goes back to the scientist thing to finding. Things that you enjoy and realizing what does energize you for the rest of the day versus what's really draining and not very enjoyable, especially in the morning. Yeah. I don't

Chris 21:32

know if you had a principle, one of your, one of yours was kind of consistency over what was it? Yeah.

Matt 21:39

So the saying that I. And on it I should know I think this goes along. I think I can't remember who said this I feel really bad because I stole this verbatim from someone but it's basically being consistently good over occasionally great and so this is really a For me has come from the world of running but I think is something that I use in every area of life So this idea, so I'll give you the running idea and then I'll apply it to, you know, my patients. So in running, when you show up to do a workout, a couple of times a week you run easy and a couple of times a week you do harder runs, whether they're intervals or longer tempo runs. And when I used to be younger, I thought whenever I had those hard workouts, I needed to get the most out of myself every single time. But what I realized was two very important facts, which is one, if you're always pushing to the limit, you get burnout really quick. And two, is there's just going to be some days where you're, you're not feeling it and where things just don't, it just feels hard, no matter what pace you're going at. And so on those days, still doing the workout, but doing it to the appropriate effort, instead of trying to hit specific times, feeling like you need to run, you know, just as fast as you did last week when everything was lined up a little bit better and all, I'll even give you two examples from within the last week of this being true. So last. Thursday, we stayed out late on Wednesday, and I usually wake up really early on Thursdays. Cause I meet some guys for coffee at like 6 30 AM. So I usually run before that. And this is, this is the last thing I wanted to say for the morning routine, which is the number one excuse I get for morning routine is that people have to wake up early for work. And I do think that is fair, but I will tell you having had to wake up very, very early in residency for work. I still prioritize working out before Because the principles were exact exactly the same if I wake up early. I was working really late I was working over 12 hours every single day. There was no way in the world. I was running after work most days, right? So yeah, I shortened it. I was had a little bit more leniency Maybe worked out a little bit less often, but I still did something most days before work and And that was it, that was before 4 a. m. That was like 3. 50 a. m. most days. In Salt Lake City, so you can imagine the winter. Yeah, I had to be at work by 5 a. m. So, I got really creative. I did shorter things, some days I ran to work. And yeah, I was in the winter, it was in November in Salt Lake City. It was horrible. I love the imagery of this. This was on my OBGYN rotation and residency. Two years in a row, I got put in November, which is right when the seasons change and when the light changes. So legitimately do not see the sun for a whole month because you go in at five and you leave around six 30 or seven. It's, it's rough. It's really rough. So anyway, so if you're thinking that I cannot relate to whatever you're about to say, it's just, I can relate. So anyway, um, so that's, that's one little caveat, but yeah, I think the. The consistently good piece. So last week I, on Thursday had done the very thing I was told you not to do, which is I skipped my morning workout. I, what I actually did was slept through my alarm somehow, but I don't know how. Anyway, so I had to go to coffee. And then I had to run after work and I will tell you, I felt so terrible that I basically just said, okay, I'm going to do something. So I went and ran, I was supposed to do five mile repeats. I think I did two. I was like, this feels terrible. I've done two, I ran five miles, you know, I'm just going to call it a day. I'm not just going to destroy myself, burn myself out mentally. So I just had a little bit of grace on myself said, okay, I did something today. That's good. Move on. Next day, rest of the weekend was great. And I wasn't burnt out mentally and just kind of key. And that's being consistently good. I was just being, I was showing up consistently. It was good enough. You know, that day was a B minus at best. And the guy that uses this quote also says B plus workouts are really what we're aiming for, because once you get into the age, you're usually pushing yourself so hard that you're just trying to prove something to yourself rather than actually trying to get this stimulus that we're designing. So that's my track and field slash running analogy. I think what this looks like practically is, is all of these behaviors. I use the 80, 20 rule. So that's how I practically talk to my patients about this. So the 80, 20 rule is 80 percent of the time you. So I use it more in the diet realm, like eating. So 80 percent of the time I want you to try to eat the most nutritious foods, the things that will bring you the most energy, the things that you meal prep, you know, focus on that 80 percent of your meals. The other 20 percent of your meals though, I don't even want you to think about what you're eating. I want you to go do it for the social aspect or the enjoyment aspect of trying a new restaurant or being with friends, or, you know, just something that brings you a lot of happiness, right? I don't even want you to think about, because especially in the South, I've noticed this, there is such an attachment of good and bad. They talk about this in therapy a lot with emotions, but this is true for food. People attach good and bad labels to each food. And I cannot tell you that is one of my soapboxes, you know, we went to the soapbox and like one of the earlier episodes, this is another one of my soapboxes, even when I'm giving presentations on things that have nothing to do with this, people always ask about it, they ask about diet, and then they'll say something like, I try to eat good foods most of the time, I'm like, no, no, no, it's not good and bad foods that all food brings nutrition and nutrition is what allows us to do the things we want to do to be healthy. Enjoy our lives pursue things we're passionate about all food does that now if you eat certain foods a majority of the time Yes, it's gonna lead to unhealthy outcomes, but that doesn't make it a bad food That just means it's the wrong proportion of that food. Like I can have a donut It doesn't make it bad when I eat a donut once every three days or once a week or once every two weeks It's fine. It's fine. It's not a bad food in that situation. So I really I really liked that 80, 20 rule and that applies to exercise too. You know, 80 percent of the time you might have to do something that's programmed, but 20 percent of the time, if you're feeling burnout, just go do something fun. You know, so I, that's the rule I

Chris 28:24

use. Yeah. So there's, there's really what you're talking about is the difference between rigidity and being flexible. And one of the tenants of kind of the theory I work from, from a psychological standpoint is what's called psychological flexibility. The ability to not be rigid with beliefs and. Like you said, stuff comes up in life. You have a breakfast in the morning or you're scheduled changes for your rotation and you have to be flexible with that and it's not always going to be perfect. And that's okay. And actually in this, for my life, the way that this has impacted it has been huge. Where, cause there are days when I wake up, I'm like, I am feeling like crap. I'm not going to get it. I'm not going to push myself in a workout today, but I get in there and I'm like, let me just do something. Let's just start with a set, just a simple set. Even take some of the weight off, like just feel it out. And usually for the most part, I'm like, I can do a second set. And it doesn't end up being the hardest workout, but it's like, like you said, the, the showing up aspect of it, I know I'm getting something done with it. And for me, it takes the pressure off of feeling the need to be at that A plus state all the time, because some days that happens kind of naturally and you feel great, right. And that's awesome. But then other days it's most of the time you're in the middle and you kind of get what you need to get done. And then there are those days where again, you just be flexible with it. And.

Matt 29:56

Yeah, this goes, this goes in, this is perfect. Cause this goes right into the next one, which is attitude follows action. Everyone thinks it's the opposite way where you feel something and then you go do it. I think Rich Roll coined this one. I'm trying to remember all these people that I've stole these things from, but I Well, this is a, this

Chris 30:15

is a bigger principle. I think we could almost spend a whole episode on, on this one with motivation.

Matt 30:19

Right. And we probably, we'll come back to it for sure. But I think the principle is the people that are healthiest and exhibit the, you know, most healthy lifestyles and the highest performance. They don't wait to feel like, Oh, I'm ready to go now. You know, I was reading someone kind of reflecting on their year and how many times they would have worked out if they felt like we're basically what you just said, how many times they would have worked out if they felt like it verse after five minutes and he was like, if I. Would have only worked out in days. I felt like it. I would have worked out 10 times this year But the number of times I would have worked out after how I felt after 10 minutes of working out was 300 times You know and so the action you have to have enough of these other things we talked about ownership showing up consistently Being consistently good being willing to step out action first and believing the attitude and the feeling is gonna follow To, to make significant change.

Chris 31:23

This is a fundamental cognitive error that people make, in my opinion. Which is, they switch the order of that. It is a massive difference to understand that actions create the feelings, not the other way around. And, like you said, um, There was a, I'm just thinking of a story. The first time I heard this, um, one of my first weeks of grad school, there was a sports psychologist with the Olympic committee that came in and the first thing he says to us opens up his talk with, uh, so what I tell every athlete I work with is I don't care what you think and I don't care what you feel. And I'm like, at the time I was like, isn't that your job to care about those two things? And, but the more I learned about what he was talking about, the more it made sense. It is exactly what he was talking about. You're not always going to feel motivated. You're not always going to feel good. You're not going to always feel confident going back in the last week's episode. So there's all these different feelings. And he's like, I don't care about those in relation to what are the actions that you are taking, um, toward kind of the values that you have in your life. And that, that has always stuck out to me, uh, obviously just the, the dramatic way he opened up his talk, but I love it at the same time. And so, so just kind of a piece I wanted to

Matt 32:52

add, that reminds me of one of my, my favorite Christian theologians, Martin Lloyd Jones. He was a doctor in England. And, uh, one of my favorite quotes of all time, any person I've ever read, he basically says. And he's talking about the Christian life, but I think this applies to everything. He goes, the biggest problem I see is that people listen to themselves instead of talk to themselves. Basically this idea of like, they listen to all these things that are feeling in their head, but they don't actually talk to themselves and reframe it. With things that are true or, you know, the, the reality of the situation, they just kind of let all the things you just talked about drive all their decisions, all their feelings. And I'll tell you practically where this shows up the most prominent for me. Concentration. So ADHD, chronic pain and sleep, the, the amount of attitude driving action in this, those three conditions is. I would say 99%. I mean, once, especially once you're on the medications that people use to treat those. Because to make a significant difference in how those things turn out requires so much action before there's any change in feeling so much, like so much, I can't emphasize the word so much enough with this and most of the people that really, really suffer from those things to the point where they not ADHD as much. Cause that is a little bit different, but I think if you're trying to come off the medication, this is true. It requires so much work, but it can be done, but it requires so much work. And like, you're not going to feel better if you come off a sleeping medicine you've been on for a year. You think you're going to sleep well for a month? No. I tell people that I say the best thing for you to do would be to come off the sleep medicine, but you're not going to sleep for a month and your actions have to continue for that whole month. The attitude or the sleep will come as you make those action changes, but it's going to be a lot of work and you're going to sleep horrible for a month. Ask me how many people have taken me up on that offer. Let's say zero. I, I think I'm still at zero. Same thing for chronic pain. I may be at one for chronic pain, you know, one or two, but that kind of highlights, this is just like. And there's a lot more nuance to that. Sure. But I think it, it highlights this idea that to make the, the change, the depth of work it requires and the depth of action it requires before there's any change in feeling or attitude or internal dialogue is significant. I want to, if you're not ready for that battle, you're going to lose every time.

Chris 35:35

I want to spend one second on why this happens. Cause I think, I think it's relevant. Which is our, our brain hates change. And you think about why is that? Like, why, why is behavior change so difficult is because it fears it. Our brain always fears change. Why? Because it's unknown and our brain fears unknown things. Why? Because they could potentially be dangerous. So we don't know the consequences of them. Even if we do, like, even if we read about them, our brain doesn't know that. And so that's kind of more of a, um, I guess evolutionary trait that has come up with. In our, in our development, um, and so basically anything new, there's always going to be resistance to, from the psychological standpoint, and that's where I love how you're laying out the framework for him of like, this is going to suck. I mean, habit change largely, mostly

Matt 36:30

sucks short term, short term, short term,

Chris 36:33

but then long term. It, and for me, where I go with this, with people who struggle with. Actually make, getting to the place where they want to make that decision is what do you value more and like really getting to like, okay, you can say you value your health, but if you're not willing to do these things, then you don't actually about your health. And I want to be very clear with you that that is not your value. Right. And like, I think telling people, having people hear that, they'll be like, wow, I don't, you know, and instead of being like, Oh no, you value your health and you want, no, no, no, you don't because your values are dictated by your actions. And so I, you know, I can say I value all these things all I want, but if I don't do the things, then it doesn't matter. Yeah. Um,

Matt 37:21

so that's good. That's really good. I think it's really hard because usually the patients that are struggling with those things have the most, uh, emotional history, most trauma history, most accident, you know, all these different things. They feel so out of control kind of getting back to that first one, right? Exactly. And it's just, I, I haven't quite figured out what it looks like to really put someone back in the driver's seat. Once they're that far removed from feeling ownership, it, I think it is probably something that requires a lot of, again, action in therapy and stuff like that, whereas I only have. 15 minutes and all I can do is almost like plant the seed, you know, and kind of water the seed a little bit each time they come in. So,

Chris 38:16

so I have a question. Have you tried, and you may have done this, but where my mind goes with that is, have you tried just giving them one very simple step and like just by the next time you see me do this?

Matt 38:29

Yeah, I, I usually do, especially for diet and exercise. Or sleep. I do. Um, you know, as you say that, I'm thinking, what could I do for, for some of these other things? And I think for pain, it would maybe be, can you take one less pill, you know, a week or one less pill every three days, you know, something like that. So that, I think that is a good.

Chris 38:53

Cause I, cause I think people, at least in my experience, when you start to talk about these big changes, you

Matt 38:59

get overwhelmed, right? I definitely am in the atomic habits, micro habit. I definitely try to do that as much as possible. And people are resistant to change. Um, it just, I hate to say it seems like there's like this threshold where people just get so. Far removed from feeling like they have any control where everything just happens to them and It's hard to even like have a conversation because it's just like oh this happened to me. My life sucks. I'm so depressed I'm in so much pain. So you can't even have like a normal conversation with them So it becomes really it can become really hard sometimes to even get to that place in the conversation. We're like, okay, let's Make one small action step

Chris 39:46

and that's a fair point. I mean, we definitely have different populations that we're working with. So, um, you know,

Matt 39:52

that's, that's good context. Yeah, I think, uh, one other one we'll let's go to one or two more. Yeah, we have a couple more, so I'll just say meal prep is one I see consistently. So prepping your, you know, again, probably 80 percent of your meals on one day of the week, usually Saturday or Sunday so that your meals during the week are already made. And a lot of times package and stuff like that, because what is one of the main things that causes people to eat unhealthy? It's getting to lunchtime, not having their food ready, getting home again, going back to the willpower thing or the decision fatigue, getting home, not having food made, you're tired, your willpower spent, what are you gonna do? Spend 30 minutes cooking? No, you're not. You're going to go order door dash, especially now with door dash Uber eats. We're just pick something up. Yeah. It picks them on the way home. And the majority of those options are not going to be healthy. Right. Right. So chris is gonna i'm gonna give we're gonna give another fake sponsor. Well, it's not a fake

Chris 40:50

this is I'm gonna reach out to this company because it has legitimately like changed my life is

Matt 40:57

probably too when I saw when I just Wish we I may post a bit. Well Post on our story

Chris 41:03

this week, so there's a company called Tovala. You've probably seen maybe their ads on TV or something. That's kind of how I learned about it, but it is a food service that has a oven that goes with it and you, so you order the food just like a normal food service, but it comes with a QR code. So all you do is like basically do one minute of prep and stick it in the oven, scan the QR code and it cooks it perfectly every time. And it is like for someone, I cannot tell you how much I despise cooking. It is my least favorite thing in the world. I get no joy from it. It's tiring. It's time consuming in what I have, when I've obviously like had to cook in my life, I always do a bad job of it. I'm not good at it. I don't like to taste it. There's, there's so many things that go into it. So ultimately ending up doing what you were just talking about, like, I just, I'm going to pick something up because I don't want something that tastes good. I don't want to spend 45 minutes on my feet doing this, cleaning up everything about it. So I found this, tried it out and it has saved me so much time and energy. And I will say like, you know, not everyone, it's, it's a food service. So it has a price to it. Um, it's not ridiculous, at least in my opinion, but it's, it's more pricey than, you know, if you're meal prepping by a

Matt 42:30

large amount. So probably not. I mean, you told me the price it's definitely cheaper than eating out every day.

Chris 42:36

Yes, it's cheaper than eating out every day. So, and that's kind of how I would justify it, I guess. And also it's something, again, for like what I value in my life. Right. That time and energy is worth that price for me. And, and from a nutritional value, I don't cook very well or, or, you know, I don't spend the time and effort to make like healthy meals. Cause that, it takes time. And so I'm getting more nutrition than I would as well, in terms of like the health of the meals. I'm being able to mix it up. And so, so anyway, shout out Tavala, love it, uh, highly endorse it. And, you know, but, but that's something that has, you know, really had an impact on my life, if I'm being honest. Yeah.

Matt 43:22

I think it depends where you're at, like you were saying, but if you prior, if you value, you know, meal prepping, if you value this and you have the financial ability, it's a great option. And if you don't have the financial ability, then buying some chickpeas and air frying them and getting some salad stuff and some pep, I mean, my lunch is so simple. It takes no prep. I do not, it takes, that's a lie. I have to cut, I have to cut the peppers. It takes three minutes on a Sunday for me to cut six peppers. All I do is lettuce and I bring this all to work because I have a refrigerator. I bring lettuce, peppers, cucumbers, air fried chickpeas. And salad dressing and feta cheese. That's what I eat for lunch. 90 percent of the days it requires no cooking except air frying the chickpeas for 10 minutes on Sunday night. You know, it's, it's so simple. My breakfast is usually Greek yogurt with fruit and some kind of granola or a protein powder, water, and some fruit. You know, it's, it's so two of my meals require absolutely no cooking and that's intentional. Yeah. And then dinner, usually meal prep, a large instant pot or slow cooker meal of some kind. So all three of our meals in total for the whole week, take an hour of prep, maybe.

Chris 44:46

No, it's cool. And again, kind of learning about yourself, optimizing things, doing, um, and I I'm similar. I mean, my breakfast and lunch costs me about 10 a week. I mean, it is, and that's kind of where I make up for, like, I'm willing to spend a little bit more on a dinner plan. Because I eat Cheerios in the morning, you know, like that's 1 a week, you know, um, you know, things like that. So, and like you said, there's no prep time in making a turkey sandwich.

Matt 45:15

So, um, we're, I'm not necessarily endorsing the Cheerios and turkey sandwich as part of the healthiest eating plan, but. There's room for improvement,

Chris 45:24

but it works for me in the place that I'm in right

Matt 45:28

now. All right. Last one that we'll finish up with is curiosity. So this was one that Chris kind of tossed in and I do think it's a, it wasn't necessarily one that came to my mind because it's not as tangible of, of a health habit that I see physically in my patients, but I just thought it was one that was worth talking about because it. Is a little bit different maybe than what a lot of people attach to these health behaviors. Yeah,

Chris 45:55

so think about, um, a patient that would come in, kind of what you were talking about, what's so frustrating, which is like, this is happening to me and I feel this and it sucks versus someone who comes in with questions of like, this is happening to me. How can I improve this? You know, what can I do about this? And, and that's fundamentally what curiosity is, which is basically asking questions. And we, we kind of touched on it as well with the learning about yourself and kind of viewing ourselves as many science experiments to run different research on, um, by trying different things, trying different times to wake up in the morning and morning routines, and obviously giving it a big enough sample size to figure out if it's something that works for you or not, but being able to do that trial and error over. Months and years you really do start to and I think that's kind of what I'm looking at some of the things you talked About today. There's a lot of things that have been optimized through some of this process of viewing it as like, how can I? Do my meal meal prep most effectively and efficiently get the nutritional back, you know all the things that you care about and then and so the curiosity aspect is kind of like how Can I? Improve these things. I mean, it really kind of gets into maybe a little bit of growth mindset. I hate that term. It's kind of just over popularized right now, but questioning, is there a way I can do this better? Is there a way I can do this more efficiently? Um, or even like, is this, does this need to be in my life? Is this, uh, you know, do I need to watch Monday night football? Every single, you know, whatever is first thing came to my mind. Um, you know, can I drop that for something else that I actually care about more and just kind of looking at. Your week and schedule in asking questions about it and being open to making little tweaks here and there.

Matt 47:55

I'll tell you two things that immediately came to my mind. So one was I, I think this comes up the most for me and people that are having GI issues, so abdominal pain or issues with bloating, you know, diet related things. The patients that are the most curious usually do the best long term because they're willing to experiment. They're willing to say, Oh, when I eat this food, it seems like I feel a little bit worse when I eat this food. It seems like I feel a little bit better when I eat more bland foods. I do a little bit better when I eat really whatever, you know, all these different things. And they start to notice patterns, put them together, cut some of that stuff out. They do a lot better verse. I think a lot of times what I see is the patient who. Is fake curious. So they come in, they ask the questions you just asked, but they don't really want the answer. And I think that is, that's kind of hard to deal with, right? So if you're curious, that means you're open to the answer, especially if you think the person you're asking has valuable information. So I would say if you're a patient, you don't know what's going on. You're going to see a doctor. That in my mind would be like, Oh, I'm asking this person because I think they might have valuable information. I think there are certain times though, where people come in, they ask those questions, give them your thoughts, and then they completely disregard everything you say and tell, tell you like what they think they should be doing. But then I always leave that. And I'm like, well, it doesn't seem like you were actually very interested or curious to use the word we're using here. And what I had to say, it seems like you already had these preconceived notions. But those things aren't really working for you. So I don't know i'm always confused by the interaction like what yeah What were you trying to get out or were you just hoping i'd reinforce your your preconceived notions by saying and when I didn't It kind of challenged it and now you don't know how to navigate that like I i'm always very Confused by that conversation. You

Chris 50:03

asked an amazing question in there. I don't even know if you caught it of how was that working for you? Cause that, that foundationally is the question for whatever behavior you're talking about. How is the morning routine working for you? Do you like it? Is it, is it giving you what you want? Are you getting what you want out of it? You know, I don't think it really matters what it looks like. If the, there are, there are certain things or routines that I've seen from athletes that I'm like, I don't fundamentally agree with, but like, how is it working? And if they're like, yeah, this is great. It helps me feel okay. I have no research to back up what you're doing, but you've. You feel like it's working and the results back that up by all means do it. Um, But if the answer to that question is no, that's where you would love to see we're talking about habits of healthy People maybe higher performing people That's some that's a place that those that type of crowd would go right which is hey, this isn't working How what you know, what's your advice on this or how can I do this better? And that's another piece of it too on, on this topic is looking for, uh, not just within yourself, because I think that is important, but also looking at how other people do things and experimenting with that, because you might see something that might not look like, I would have never thought that getting up at 6 AM was something I wanted to do, but I tried it because a lot of people have, I've heard a lot of people over the years say, man, getting up in the morning, like it's changed my life and this and that, and. So I'm like, all right, you know what, I'm just going to try it. And sure enough, like I've seen a lot of good to answer the question. How's it working for me? I'd say

Matt 51:54

very well. So, yeah, so I'll wrap this up by closing with, this isn't necessarily a principle, I guess, in a way it is, but something that someone said to me that I think encapsulates all of these into, to one, which is all of these things we talked about, he goes, then you go and surround yourself with people who do those things. So he basically was like, you want to do those things. He's like, find people that do those things because we naturally take on the behavior. Of the people around us, you know, the power of social influence. So he made the point that, okay, all these things, especially if you're having trouble with one, it's like, go find a group of people or a, you know, a set of people that value that thing, or a group of people that work out at that time, or he's like, surround yourself with those people. And I promise you, you're more likely to take on at least a few of their, their health habits. So I thought that was a great point to kind of. Um, well, I think this is, um, I think this

Chris 52:51

is a good time to wrap up. Yeah. And there's studies, there's studies that show that you just place a student near other good, good students and they will improve just by the placement of them. And then vice versa. Yeah. No one

Matt 53:02

got to experience that with me in high school. Cause I was so far removed from the rest of the classroom that no one got to experience my, uh, high performing boost. Um, well, I think this is. A really cool way to end the year. We have really enjoyed the last three months of kind of launching this podcast, getting it off the ground, hearing some feedback from you guys and just hearing, you know, ways that we've been helpful ways that we've been not helpful. And I hope some of these. Ideas will be things you can incorporate into the new year, whether that's setting goals, whether that's setting, um, different resolution. I couldn't even think of the word cause I don't do it, but New Year's resolutions, things like that, um, as you move into 2024. So hope this has been helpful for you. Hope you guys have a good new year and we'll, we'll see you on the flip side.