It’s Not Laziness: The Science Behind Why You’re Not Following Through

If you already know what to do for your health but aren’t doing it consistently, this episode breaks down the real reason.

It’s not discipline.
It’s the nervous system regulation.

In this episode, we explore:

• How stress weakens executive function
• Why sleep deprivation reduces impulse control
• How chronic stress shifts behavior into habit mode
• Why environment beats motivation
• A practical 4-step re-regulation framework

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💭 Thanks for listening to The Lifestyle of Fitness Podcast with Coach Mike Caulo - NBC-HWC health coach, retired pro Muay Thai fighter, father of 4, and founder of the LOF 100-Day Comback System, 

Transcript

So if you know exactly what to do for your health, but you're still not doing it, this is going to be for you. I'm going to break down not only the science behind why this is happening, but also go over actionable steps on how you can actually overcome the gap between information and action. And then ultimately some Q and a at the end and some additional resources, tools, and insight that you can immediately not only take action on, but ultimately to just increase your success rate throughout the process. So first I mentioned the science. If you guys want to see any of the citations for what I'm referencing, this will always be up in the blog post that I put out after our lives. So if you're actually watching this live, there will be a blog post that comes out afterwards each week. You can check that as well. I also put it in the show notes. You can join our newsletter, all of that good stuff. But ultimately, again, you could probably relate to this, right? You know what to do. You've gone on either a information kind of hunt or you've gotten the book, you've taken the course, you've done the thing, but ultimately there's a gap between the knowledge and the action. And there's a couple of different reasons why that can take place, but I'm willing to bet based on a variety of things going on now, I'm going to say that it's related to some dysregulation. And what I mean by that, the fancy kind of dynamic to that is with our nervous system being dysregulated, it's going to make it extremely challenging to actually implement and take action on any knowledge that we have. For example, why do smart people sabotage themselves? Or why does discipline disappear under stress? It's not just about knowledge by itself. It's also not just purely relying on discipline and willpower, which is a great thing, but it's a multifaceted multivariable approach that we're going to dive into. And I'm going to look at some of the science related to this. That's going to give you some insight. And again, feel free to ask questions. Not only if you're watching this live, but if you're watching the replay of this, ask questions, I will circle back. I will even address it in the Q and a for this, but I will also circle back to our replay and in the comments and add some value. So number one, Stress impairs executive function. And I will explain both of those things here. And this is coming from a study done in from Nature Reviews Neuroscience. And basically what it states is acute stress suppresses prefrontal cortex function. So what does that mean? That's a lot of words I just kind of threw at you. So when we think about prefrontal cortex, this part of our brain that is connected to executive function, to logic, to analytics, to making, again, decisions not influenced by impulse. That's where impulse control can come into play. A lot of this honestly mimics ADHD. orientation. Now it doesn't mean you have ADHD. If this is you, this is just for everybody, but a lot of people with ADHD can relate to a lot of these challenges and struggles. Now, when we increase stress acutely, it will plummet executive function. It will plummet prefrontal cortex function and activation. So if you're already someone with ADHD and and having some prefrontal cortex activation issues, or you're someone that has a, let's say, neurotypical brain, but you are feeling stress, this is going to lower it. That's one aspect. Again, I'm going to get to what you can do with this information after we go through these five kind of data checkpoints. But I first wanted to give you how we are arriving here and what might be influencing this. Number two, sleep loss reduces impulse control. So stress is going to have a factor that's related to impulse control and executive function of prefrontal cortex, but also sleep loss, getting less than seven to nine hours of sleep on a nightly basis will reduce our overall impulse control. This was from a study back in two thousand and ten. Even one poor night of sleep reduces our cognitive control and impulse control. Again, relating to our prefrontal cortex firing, and it can also exacerbate maybe some areas of our brain related to the limbic system and emotional state, being able to play with some impulsivity as well. So we have stress, we have sleep. Now let's look at another aspect of stress as well. Stress pushes you towards habit loops. For better or worse, it's going to push you towards habit loops that you have already created. So under stress, this is from a study done in behavior patterns so you can have a new goal this is like for example new year's resolutions especially it's february right so at least the time i'm doing this live if you're watching replay doesn't matter what time of year i'm curious to see if anyone wants to share in the comments in the chat and hey maybe you're a person that actually set a new year's resolution you're still crushing it but statistically likely you are not And the point of saying that is also, I appreciate the questions here in the chat. I see you, I'll get to you. And simple answer is no, but I got you. And being able to realize that you want to set up habits and it's kind of this expression I pull from sports or martial arts is you don't fall to, or you don't reach or attain the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your training or your behaviors or your habits. This is again, referencing a study from two thousand and nine. So under stress again, behavior will shift from your goal oriented direction to your habits that you've created for yourself. So it's important to realize we want to lean into our habits. What habits are you creating? And then things are going to get stressful at different points. We'll talk about the actions you can do with that information. That's another factor here. number four environment drives behaviors we talked about behaviors and going from let's say goal to habit environment's going to also drive our behavior patterns this is from a study in two thousand seven forty to forty five percent of daily behaviors are automatic habits here's an interesting one too that is just a fun nutritional data point i saw from another study that we're doing on another topic is On average, on a daily basis, the human brain and the human experience will drive over two hundred nutritional decisions just dealing with food and nutrition and things related to that on a daily basis. So let alone all the other decisions and factors and things we're going to have to think about. So environment is going to drive our behavior. If we're in a costly, stressful environment, if we're in our normal environment where things are laid out, a variety of things are going to come. compound on that. So we're going to kind of look at that again as some options for actionable things we can focus on. And last of our data points, number five, exercise improves executive function. Exercise is going to improve prefrontal cortex activation, as well as other areas of our brain, specifically aerobic exercise. And aerobic exercise is also going to increase hippocampal volume and activity, as well as improves overall cognition. But it's also going to increase prefrontal cortex activation and again this is from a study in two thousand eleven that's referencing this so if you notice these are like all studies from the like early to mid-two thousand so far but the data kind of will hold up and we can always circle back and challenge some things if you guys ever want to like challenge this that i'm happy to like hear that out um Also, hello, hello. What's up, everybody on YouTube? I appreciate you saying hey. Again, feel free to drop additional questions. I'll get into them when we have our Q&A. But to recap these five data points related to you know what to do, but you just aren't able to execute. It can be stress related. Stress is going to impair our executive function, which is our analytical, rational portion of our brain that allows us to make decisions. rational decisions, prefrontal cortex activation. Number two, sleep is going to reduce our ability to control our impulses. So we're going to have more impulse control issues when we're getting less than seven to nine hours of sleep. Even one poor night of sleep reduces cognitive control. Number three, stress pushes us towards our habit loops. So if you've already created a habit, let's say when I'm stressed out, I want to eat sugary oriented foods at night to decompress, which is a real thing. When I'm stressed out, I'm going to be more inclined to do that instead of going towards a potential new goal that I'm working on, which is to lower my body fat percentage or whatever the thing is for most of us that we can relate to. We're going to go towards the habit we've already created for ourselves. But I've been able to, again, and we'll go over some of the actionables, redirect some of these habits and how can we stack these? Number four, environment's going to drive our behavior. Forty to forty-five percent of our daily behaviors are automatic habits at this point that are going to be influenced and related to our environment and routines related to that. And number five, exercise improves executive function. Exercise is going to increase activity of our prefrontal cortex. It's going to increase hippocampal volume and improve our overall cognition. It's a fancy way of saying exercise. If it were a pill, it would be outstanding as far as what it can do for your brain and for your body and your health. So that's just a little bit of like what the science is showing us in the foundation of what we're talking about here. So now, again, we have this information, right? This is the ironic part. You have all the information. Now let's talk about what we're going to do with it. That's going to allow us to take the gaps on. Here's what I want to do to what I'm actually able to implement. And the formula I like to use here is taking awareness. We're aware of where there might be some gaps in what we're doing or where it's not working out for us. We combine that with intention and we combine that intention with action. And ultimately that is going to lead us to results, growth, and transformation. So here's a couple of signs to look for as well that might be going on in life. If you are, you may be unaware that you're even stressed. You're like, oh, this is just my daily life. Especially if you're a parent, you're a business owner, you are dealing with what feels like your typical day to day. Here's some things to indicate you might be dysregulated. Your system might be dysregulated. You may be overly stressed, chronically stressed and overtaxed. number one you scroll at night instead of sleeping i was literally just talking to carrie my fiance about this before i know a lot of us can run into the routine of like oh well i want to decompress so i'm going to scroll on social media or i'm going to watch tv or do those things again i'm saying it's right or wrong but if it's not aligning with the quality of life that you want you're not hitting your goals it's an opportunity to reflect saying there's probably something amiss here there's a dysregulation component going on. So if you scroll at night, let's say you're even in bed, let's say you not only have your Netflix time, all that, then you find yourself in bed and you're scrolling and you can't go to sleep. That's a great example of real time dysregulation going on. Number two, you snack instead of training. For example, we're trying to work out, but instead of doing that, you're like, I'm going to eat instead. or you snack instead of sleeping even, you can substitute those things. You're going for food as an easy dopamine fix and a system regulation tool, as opposed to going to your training or whatever habit is that you're focusing on. Number three, you react emotionally. You're more emotionally oriented and you have a harder time regulating those emotions. And in general field, what we would call emotional dysregulation. Number four, you delay workouts. You push them off or you delay other actionable oriented habits and things that you said you would do. I'll start it next week or I'll start it tomorrow. I'll do it on Monday. And this is number five. You say, I'll start Monday. You say, I'll start tomorrow. You say, I'll do it later. Again, to recap these things, this isn't laziness inherently by itself. This is a nervous system overloaded with chronic stress. Now, that doesn't mean, hey, we don't want to look at this. It doesn't mean there's not going to be a component of discipline, of willpower. But what it's indicating is obviously the way you've structured your life or the way I've structured my life or the way we in general structured our lives, it is creating dysregulation. And we get to reevaluate this. You can for sure push through and use discipline. And I've coached people on doing that. but being able to go back to reevaluating the systems, reevaluating what got you here in the first place. So I'm going to pause. I'm going to just check the chat and see what kind of comments we got here. Sure. Yeah. Nothing might be worth the risk. That can be a valid statement. I'm not sure of the context, but appreciate you. Thanks, Rome. And we'll see if we got anything else coming in there. It doesn't look like it, so we're going to keep on going on to the next component of this, which is looking at the re-regulation or the regulation component, the four pillars related to this. This is, again, the actionable parts. This is, all right, you know what to do. This is what you get to take action on. So number one, we talked about sleep and stress. Protect seven to nine hours of sleep. But in general, this is the deeper component to it. No one just has a simple on and off switch where you're like, cool, I'm going to get seven to nine hours of sleep. That's not how that works. Okay. If you have that, cool. I'd love to talk to you. We can study that. We can evaluate your behavior. But most of us are going to be like, all right, I'm going to sleep seven to nine hours tonight. And that's how it works. What we really get to protect is our two to three hours before sleep or that evening time chunk. And then also protect our morning time as well. So we want to have consistency with our waking and sleeping windows. For example, the one thing you can do tonight is something I want you to take on right now is turn your devices off an hour earlier. Whatever time you normally would do, whatever it looks like. Let's say you bring your phone into bed. You watch TV in bed. First off, don't do that. Create a separate space. Your bedroom is your bedroom. You don't watch TV in your bedroom before bed. You don't use your phone in your bedroom. You don't use your computers or any devices in your bedroom. Your bedroom for the two, three hours before sleep is a pure sleep zone only. Ideally in general throughout the day, but at least for the three hours before bed. So being able to piggyback on that, you don't eat an hour. I'm sorry. You don't do whatever devices you're doing an hour before your sleep time. You move it up an hour. Then there's the three to one method. It's something I've talked about in the past, whether it's your stressful activities, work related items, things like that, eating, and also, um, digital kind of devices. You can use any variations of that. So let's say three hours before bed, I'm not going to eat anything. Two hours before bed, I'm not going to have any more work or stressful related kind of activities. And then one hour before bed, I'm not going to do any kind of devices whatsoever. And you can adapt this into a varying degrees. This is just one thing that we can take action on. That's number one. Number two, in the morning, if you are not fasting, like I like to play with intermittent fasting, so I will like kind of do a variation of it. Well, I'll do protein shakes and coffee in the morning. That's all I do in my mornings. And I usually break my fast between twelve and two p.m. after my workout. But let's say you're eating breakfast. You're going to have thirty to forty grams of protein, maybe more, maybe less, depending on your size. I'm a two hundred ish, two hundred ten pound person. male about six foot so i will tend to have about three to five meals a day they're gonna be roughly about thirty to fifty grams of protein each you can adjust that again we don't have to go pure into the numbers and math and all that fun stuff but shoot to have protein at your breakfast what this is gonna do it's gonna stabilize your appetite your blood sugar and we're not gonna get that huge blood sugar spike first thing in the morning The reason we even care about that is being able to create consistency and sustainability. When we're not spiking our blood sugar first thing in the morning or in general, you're going to set yourselves up for some regulation and circadian rhythm. You're going to set yourself up for success with your appetite and a variety of other components, even related to like gut health and things like that. We can play with fiber and some other things, but to keep it simple, have protein at your breakfast. And if you're not eating breakfast, make up for that protein. So let's say you do intermittent fasting. You do a sixteen eight style where you do sixteen hours of fasting, eight hours of eating and you don't eat until two o'clock at that two o'clock window. You have to make up and throughout the rest of that eight hours, you have to make up for that protein you did eat at breakfast. Otherwise, you are going to risk lowering your overall protein intake and overall lowering your body's ability to recover from a muscle repair and an overall muscle mass body composition. Why that becomes important in a system regulation, it's going to be harder to maintain your workouts if you don't have adequate muscle growth. You're not going to feel as encouraged. You're going to feel more tired. It's going to create a ripple effect in a chain. So that's why we want to have protein at breakfast and or make up for the protein you're missing at breakfast throughout your day if you're doing intermittent fasting. Number three, get sunlight and movement. Ten minutes of sunlight and movement within the first thirty minutes of waking in a perfect world. But realistically, I told me in the first hour, that's money. And it doesn't necessarily even have to be outside if you're in dead winter. Like ideally, yes, it's outside. But if you can have a sunroom in your house or room with a lot of windows, be able to get in front of that, get some sunlight, open up the blinds and then just walk around. Like it's February right now. It's actually like fifty something, maybe sixty degrees around that. But let's say it was cold. It was like five degrees a couple of weeks ago. i would say okay i'm not going outside except to shovel not getting a bunch of sunlight per se i'm going to have the windows open i'm going to walk in front of the windows i'm just going to walk for ten minutes in front of the windows do a little bit of calisthenics or some movement some shadow boxing whatever that looks like but getting ten minutes of sunlight and movement within the first thirty to sixty minutes of waking up this is going to improve your dopamine to start the day, which is our motivation signal. It's our reward neurotransmitter and our motivation neurotransmitter. It's also going to help impact your circadian rhythm, your serotonin levels, your vitamin D. It's going to impact your testosterone. It has a huge chain reaction that's going to be really impactful. Number four, breath work. Five minutes of breathing before reacting is absolutely money. But five minutes before breathing can feel so overwhelmingly out of the picture, we start with what's possible. And I invite people to start with thirty seconds. And being able to do that will down-regulate our sympathetic nervous system, which is our fight or flight state. So if you're worked up, if you're emotional, you're gonna get into your sympathetic state more than likely, which is not the place we're gonna be for making rational decisions. In that sympathetic state, you're going to be more potentially illogical, emotional, and impulsive. So being able to slow our breathing down for thirty seconds, ideally for five minutes is where it's going to have a massive impact, and be able to transition into our parasympathetic state, our rest and digest state, where we're going to be a little bit more clear-headed, we're going to be a little bit more impactful. and be able to be a little bit calmer what's going on kraken hey hey it's going good we're getting into the deets here you know how you doing again feel free to ask questions guys as we're going through this don't mind as i randomly will like tag into the chat and say hey to everybody so to recap those things these are the actionable pieces you could do right now today to have an impact to bridge the gap from your knowledge if your health and what you want to get done to actually implementing and creating new regulation oriented habits. One, protect your sleep like it is your job. It is the most important thing you can do. Prioritize your sleep. That's been something that I get to continuously refocus on, especially having kids between traveling. We just got back from our retreat. It's impacting that being able to manage having a ten month old, being able to manage having a having kids, they gotta get school, all these co-parenting. We have half of the kids in the house, half of the week. And then we have the other half of the week where we just have hope. So being able to regulate our routine. So having some consistency, I'll be honest, I'll give you guys a perfect example. When I have my two older daughters or three older daughters combined with my stepdaughter as well, I wake up usually around five forty five in the morning to bring them to school. So half the time, half the week I'm waking up at five forty five on Thursday, Friday and Monday morning to bring them to school. If I have them that weekend, if not, it's Thursday and Friday mornings. And then the rest of the week, I'm usually waking up around seven to eight o'clock, which is a bit of a gap. Right. And that's. Cause I'm really grateful, Carrie. And this is an opportunity. I'll be honest. The reason I do that is I will change my windows because when I don't have the kids, I stay up a little bit later. I get a little bit more productivity done. I push right now. If I had the kids, I wouldn't be doing this last year. I even have a coaching call after this. I wouldn't be doing these things. The point of saying this is I do even have a rhythm. I have similar sleep and wake times pending on what stage of the week it's at. Now it's not going to be every single day, but it's a weekly routine that looks consistent. And maybe it's a monthly routine that looks consistent. It's going to vary. Maybe it's a seasonal routine that looks consistent for you, but it's finding consistency in that. The next piece is being able to have protein at breakfast. For me, I drink coffee first thing in the morning. I have a little coffee station right over here over my shoulder. I have my protein shakes pre-made or we'll have powders. Shout out to PES Science. That's not even a sponsored plug. They did sponsor our retreat. I'm just giving them some love for taking care of us, but I'm fortunate. I have a bunch of companies that'll send me out Protein, PES is one of them that has in the past. And whether I have, I'll pay for my protein shakes, like pure protein is what I literally pay for right now, the pre-made shakes. PES actually sent us some, we drank them all on the retreat. So I'm gonna have to get some more from them. The point is I will have protein with my coffee. That's how I get my protein in the morning. And then I break my fast after my workout, usually around twelve to two o'clock, depending on how the day is going and what's going on from there. So for you, if you don't want to do intermittent fasting, get protein in the morning. Thirty from thirty to forty grams of protein can be nice with anywhere from twenty to forty grams. Again, if you're not sure how much to eat, talk to me, someone on our team, reach out to L.O.F. You can get on a free call and go to our website. We'll take care of you. And now more than ever, you're even able to leverage insurance where it may not even cost you anything. You can leverage your insurance or HSA or FSA. We have a variety of really cool options. Point is, get your protein in. If you're not certain, talk to someone. If you are not doing breakfast, make up for that protein throughout your day. Whenever you break your fast, if you're not going to do a protein shake with your coffee or something like that, make up for the protein you're not getting in that meal if you're skipping it. It's going to help stabilize your blood sugar. It's going to help repair and continuously grow the muscle that you want, the lean body mass. It's going to help with a variety of things. Number three, within the first thirty to sixty minutes of waking up, have ten minutes of sunlight and movement. If it's dead winter and you don't have access to outdoor sunlight, use windows. Like what I have behind me, get out in front of that. If let's say you live in Alaska or somewhere where you're like, you know what? I've got like four hours of sunlight throughout the day. You can get artificial light. It's not the best thing. There's things even on Amazon. I realized now in hindsight, I should have probably added that to my carousel because I actually have some light therapies and things like sad seasonal effective depression disorder lights and things you can get like circadian rhythm lights you can get as well. I'll have to add that when we do the blog post. If you're listening to the podcast, if you're listening to this like repurposed, not live, I'll add that into the mix. But you can even, again, go on Amazon if you guys are watching this live on Amazon. I don't have that, but you can even go to like some of our supplements, like vitamin D is a great one, magnesium. They'll help with those components, but you can get like, again, a light therapy oriented thing. And lastly, breath work. Ideally five minutes before reacting. I have this, again, access point. I say at least start with thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. Breathe. It's the pause, breathe, and then reassess technique. And it's something I invite for all my ADHD clients, but also for all the clients my team and I work with as well. We leverage this approach, whether you have ADHD or not, to pause before you emotionally respond. Take a breath or multiple. And a pro tip I will just tell you, because ironically I'm seeing Carrie walk out of the bedroom, and Carrie will tell me when I'm emotionally dysregulated, I need you to breathe right now. Here's a pro tip. Don't tell someone to breathe. You as the individual need to like get that for yourself. Otherwise it's not gonna necessarily work. It's gonna be more emotionally triggering from my experience. So have visual cues to breathe, be able to have a system or what I've worked with people. I have my watch. My watch is actually helpful prompt to get steps in to also breathe. But make sure you're breathing, even if it's for thirty seconds, ideally five minutes to regulate from a fight or flight state to a rest and digest state. It'll help regulate your nervous system so you're not as emotionally worked up, not as impulsive to make irrational decisions like eating an entire bag of Reese's or eating whatever or not going to the gym or saying something unkind to someone you're going to regret later. These are the things that showcase in a dysregulated system that ultimately impact why when we ask the question, why do I know what to do? I just ultimately don't. your emotionally dysregulated system, and your overly stressed. So this is another actionable. So to recap all four of those things, first, protect your sleep like it's your job. Like you are getting paid a million dollars a year to sleep seven to nine hours a night. So that means, again, you don't have control of how many hours you sleep, but protect, hey, what is my intake of whether it's social media. Like I personally don't bring my phone into the bedroom. I just don't let my phone in my bedroom. I'll still watch TV. I'll still read. I'll do certain things. But if I have a hard time sleeping, I'll find journaling, reading becomes helpful. Not using the TV, maybe using the foot massager that I can hear that Carrie's putting on right now from Montrex. They're actually a great brand. We really enjoy them. Carrie's probably going to put out some videos on them because it's literally, I don't want to put words in your mouth, Carrie, but you're saying it's literally been like a massively impactful thing for you, right? Exactly. so it's changed her life so being able to that's how i know i got a good christmas gift was shout out to me uh the point is having these checkpoints to protect so protect sleep like it's your job you're getting paid a million dollars an hour to sleep seven to nine hours per night you would figure it out i believe in you so treat yourself to that and you'll have an impact on your nervous system number two Protein at breakfast, thirty to forty grams of protein at breakfast, maybe more, maybe less, depending on how big or small you are. If you don't eat breakfast, you can go with a protein shake with your coffee like I do. You can skip breakfast altogether, but make up for the protein throughout your day. It'll help in a variety of ways. Get sunlight and movement for at least ten minutes within the first thirty to sixty minutes of being awake, whether it's outside, whether it's in front of the windows, whether it's doing yoga, walking, holding your baby, playing, dance party, whatever. But get some sunlight, ideally real sunlight. If not, do artificial with like a light, a lamp, something like that, circadian rhythm-oriented light. And then lastly, focus on your breath. When you're emotionally dysregulated, breathe. I find it helpful to close my eyes. I look up. I put my tongue also on the base of my mouth. That helps stimulate the vagus nerve and the vagal nervous system or the vagus nerve pathway to help get into parasympathetic state and to calm our system down and help with breathing. So that's the actionable pieces that you can take away from this. That's the, if you could take one thing away, the one thing I want to offer you guys, this is the last like action piece is pick one of these things. Pick one of those four to take action on today. Whenever you're watching this, do it right now and implement it. implement it until it feels hardwired until you couldn't not do it. If you tried, you had to intentionally not try and do it. That's the one thing. Cause think about people want to do like, Oh, I'm going to do all these things all at once. I'm going to drink more water. I'm going to eat less sugar. I'm going to get more sleep. I'm going to exercise more. I'm going to stretch more. I'm also going to journal. I'm going to read. That's like a million things to do. You're going to fail at all of them. Statistically, you're going to fail. If you pick one thing and you execute it for the next month, the next two months, and you did that again for the entire year, you would be way more successful. And you probably have three to five really dialed in strong habits at the end of the year that you could have the rest of your potentially life that will set you up for success. So instead of trying to do all of these over the next hundred days, do one of these over the next thirty, sixty, hundred days, and then do that again until you get all of them dialed in. So you get all four of these dialed in. And then it'll have a chain reaction from there. So this is where I'm going to pause for a second. I'm going to check the questions. I'm also going to drop a couple of fun facts in here that I think are just interesting that we'll recap. And then I'll talk about some of the products that I think could be related to this. And then if there's any questions, we'll get into it. And if not, actually might take a couple of extra minutes here, wrap this up early and get prepared for my last coaching call the evening, and maybe even do a little foot massage with Carrie over there. That could be a fun little... I'm thinking about when we have a shed being delivered on Friday, which you guys are going to see a new background. The reason I bring this up is you're going to see a change in content scenery. We're going to bring the coach's corner hopefully back. We'll have a dedicated space where I'll always be creating my content so you guys can see that kind of like scenery again and be able to have a little like recovery station in there. Maybe we'll have a foot massage out there or some other things as well. Let's drop some fun facts here for a hot second. Number one, emotional reactivity can increase up to sixty percent after poor sleep. Let me reword that. Your likelihood of being emotional most likely being negatively emotional. For example, I'll use myself in this situation. I'll use real-time examples. The likelihood of me being more unkind and either raising my voice or saying something unkind to someone I care about is increased by sixty percent if I'm getting less than seven hours of sleep per night on average. So again, if you're getting less than just one poor night of sleep, less than seven hours, you're sixty percent more than likely going to be more emotionally reactive and unkind or being impulsive. Number two, the prefrontal cortex. I was talking about this before. This is the logical part of our brain. This is the rational executive function oriented analytical part of our brain uses more glucose, i.e. sugar than almost any other brain region. So this is what I think is kind of hilarious. When we were watching, what's that anime that we were watching, Carrie, where that like the detectives, the like, it was like L or something. He's like constantly eating sugar. Oh, um, Death Note. So Death Note's a great anime. I highly recommend you guys check it out, but it's actually great. It makes me think of this. In general, also, if you think of like chess, chess is a great example. Jujitsu, martial arts in general, you don't think of that as like a cognitive game, but it's actually very much a cognitive game. Jujitsu especially is considered human chess, but I would argue any martial art is like human chess. And chess in general is obviously the baseline of it. You have to use your prefrontal cortex for that. activity which is a logical analytical rational part of your brain sixty percent of the calories it needs is or i'm sorry more that's it's not really sixty i was kind of mixing that up from the sixty percent uh more reactivity with sleep but more of the body's energetic demand is going to come from sugar for that part of the brain than any other brain region which most of our brain is going to operate on sugar anyway, but there is some fat it's going to use. There's some other components to it. It needs to be hydrated. There's some fuel components, but that rational part of our brain is the most sugar oriented, glucose oriented. Now, if you're asking me, well, Mike, what about those that are ketosis based or doing different things where they're not having a lot of sugar? You can leverage it. You can reorient your brain chemistry, but it's not optimal from my understanding of it. Again, I'm not a neuroscientist, but when I gather about brain chemistry and the science behind it, you'll be adaptations, but it's not the most efficient. Doesn't mean you can't do it, but it needs, it's going to require some sugar. But the point of that doesn't mean you should just be hammering. You don't actually need to take in sugar. Your body will convert things into glucose. You can have your regular normal nutrition from carbohydrates. It will convert it into glucose. It'll let your body take care of it. Don't go, Mike told me to eat M&Ms because I'm playing chess and I need a lot of like prefrontal cortex fuel. That's not a side of the case. But this is a cool fun fact. That rational part of your brain requires a lot of glucose. So you're gonna need more carbohydrates. Under stress, your brain conserves energy by defaulting to habits. So for example, when you're highly stressed out, you're not going to be as logical. Your brain's going to almost reduce activity and just think, all right, cool. What have we already laid the foundation for? I'll try and give an analogy. If let's say you were a city, you were a city and you were building a new road, but all of a sudden the economy tanks. you're gonna stop building that new road and you're gonna use the roads you've already built. i.e. your habits. These are roads we've already built, pathways we've already built. You're going to shut down any new projects, any new things you're working on, especially under stress, and you're going to go to the tried and true tested pathways you've developed, which is why it's important to think about when we're creating a resolution or oriented a goal, we want to make it habit oriented and not trying to do a million things all at once. For example, if we want to make a habit out of going to sleep at a certain time or not watching our TV or going on social media before bed, focus on purely that for a long period of time to make it a strong habit. Next, twenty minutes of moderate aerobic exercise improves cognitive function, improves hippocampal volume and activity, as well as improves prefrontal cortex activity. Twenty minutes. What does moderate aerobic exercise mean? So if we were to use a zone training, you would be in zone three or above. So that could be, again, roughly sixty five percent to seventy percent of your max heart rate for twenty minutes. You can even start with three to five. You can even start with less than that. But twenty minutes of moderate aerobic exercise, dance, like shadow boxing, walking, hiking, running, biking, you name it, jumping rope, as long as it's staying in like zone three or more, then you are going to get a benefit for your prefrontal cortex and overall cognitive control, basically impulse control. You're going to be less impulsive if you're doing cardio is the simple way to put it, but it's having a certain level of intensity of cardio for at least twenty minutes at a time. And lastly, morning light exposure improves circadian rhythm alignment. So fancy of saying you get exposed to light early in the morning, you're gonna stay on a consistent sleep routine and your body's gonna stay in a particular rhythm. That's why we stress that and why in general people talk about circadian rhythm. You're like, why is circadian rhythm even important? It helps keep us in a predictable pattern, not only for sleep, but for as our body produces other hormones, as it produces different types of habits, rhythms, neurotransmitters, signaling, all of these things are related to our circadian rhythm. And that's pretty much it, y'all. So to, again, recap all of this, to go from the science all the way down to the insight, to the actionables, For the science, number one, stress impairs executive function. Acute stress suppresses prefrontal cortex function and executive function. Number two, sleep loss reduces impulse control. Even one poor night of sleep less than seven hours is gonna reduce our impulse control and overall cognitive control. Number three, stress pushes you towards habit loops. When you're stressed out, your body's trying to conserve and your brain's trying to conserve energy so it's gonna default to habits you've already created So you want to make sure that you're creating strong habits for yourself. Don't be surprised that you try to create a new habit. You have a crazy stressful event. Like let's say you're moving. And then obviously you're like, why am I eating pizza and going to fast food and things like that? It's like, because you're stressed out and your body's going to its default habit. If that's been a habit you've created. Don't necessarily judge yourself for it. Yes, you can use some discipline, but also be mindful of like, all right, how can I try and create a habit ahead of time? If you know you have to move, really be intentional about creating a new habit. If you've already had to deal with the stress, yes, that's where using acute willpower. We could talk about that in next week's potential episode. Okay, great. I have all this insight, but I need some acute discipline and I need some acute willpower. What can I do with that? There's strategies we can get into. If you guys are interested in that, let me know. We'll totally dive into that. The number four, environment drives behavior. So, forty to forty five percent of daily behaviors are automatic habits and are related to our environment. For example, I have a high five on the mirror in the bathroom. I give myself a high five every morning. I say I am devoted. That is an environmental habit. I don't know if you notice this, Kerry. I didn't do that when we were in Joshua Tree. I didn't high five myself in the morning because I didn't have my little high five signal. And I even told myself I was going to pack it, but I just didn't because stress, all these things we literally just talk about because, and also Carrie didn't meditate because we're in a new environment and we're out of our routine. We don't have those cues. The point is, it doesn't mean you can't work around that. What I ended up doing is a, once I got back home, I immediately got back into the routine. I was very intentional with that. But I also still kept journaling and planning and I still did my prayer and I did some baseline things that are built around my morning routine. But environment is a huge cue. So leverage it where you can and also give yourself some grace when the environment changes and try and set yourself up for success by adjusting the environment you're going into. And then number five, lastly, from the science side of it, exercise improves executive function, especially aerobic exercise. Twenty minutes of moderate aerobic exercise or more will increase hippocampal volume activity, prefrontal cortex activity, and improves overall cognition, as well as just any type of exercise. Resistance training, martial arts training, aerobic training, anything you do exercise oriented will have an impact on your prefrontal cortex, on your just brain function in general. Now the questions we ask ourselves, like, how do I know this is me? You scroll instead of sleep. You snack instead of training. You react emotionally more than you would like. You delay workouts. You say, I'll start Monday. Again, this is not laziness by itself inherently. This is a nervous system overloaded or dysregulated. that's how i knew like last week i was very intentional when i got back to like decompress for a week because i was feeling myself being more emotionally like dysregulated and i was like i can feel the stress and i can feel all these things even though i was working out i wasn't necessarily stacking stuff training i could just feel the emotionality through it all um and feel like oh you know what i'm gonna like instead of doing these tasks i'm gonna do it monday when i'm like yeah this is a good example of like my system's overloaded i need to regulate my nervous system before i can get anything and now today like i'm I've been super productive, even yesterday, super productive. So I can see from regulating my nervous system, I've been able to get back into that groove. And it's important to notice that. So again, the actionables, number one, protect sleep, protect seven to nine hours of sleep. Like it's your job. Like you're being paid millions of dollars a year to be able to do that. And again, you can't control your sleep, but you can control the routines around your sleep and wake times. Focus on the three to one hours before bed and the one hour after you wake up. Like you're getting paid millions of dollars. Number two, have protein at breakfast. Thirty to forty grams is ideal. You can always adjust it more or less if you're not clear. Again, talk to someone here on the team. You can schedule a free call with us. We'll take care of you and give you some insight. We can even get coaching if you need that. You could just look it up. There's so many formulas. Even on our app, we have a free formula we share with you how you know what protein to take in. And Number three, getting sunlight and movement. We're talking about the first hour of waking up as part of your routine. Getting ten minutes of sunlight and movement within the first thirty to sixty minutes of waking up. It's going to improve your dopamine, your serotonin, all that good stuff. Yeah, Nina, what's up? Nina says hey, by the way. yeah we had it was a great time in joshua tree and then from a breath work perspective number four focus on your breath thirty seconds as a baseline five minutes if you have the bandwidth and the capability to do it it's gonna help regulate your nervous system the technique i will echo here is again pause breathe assess hope is not using that she's freaking out and hope literally just heard me talking to that i'm guessing but again pause Breathe and then assess what you want to do. When you breathe first, you regulate your nervous system. You're more likely to make a less than impulse oriented decision. You're going to be more rational, logical. And then again, lastly, for this, just pick one of these things, pick one of these things to focus on right now, whether it's your sleep, whether it's your protein, whether it's your breath, and just pick one of these things and be able to build a system and a habit around it. That small adjustment will compound over time for a massive transformation. That's pretty much it, y'all. Again, if you want to see the citations for this, where I'm getting the data from, if you want to see more about the products and you're catching the replay, you can not only go onto our blog, we'll have it citated on the Amazon side. I didn't have the circadian rhythm lights. I'll actually add that to it in our blog. You can, again, just go on and search it. on TikTok as well. I'll kind of add it into our shop and our storefront, but I will add that in. I do have some recommendations on my ideas list. If you just go to my storefront homepage, you can just look up light or circadian rhythm or circadian light or anything like that. And it'll have a couple of the products I've used in the past that I do like here. And again, feel free to just ask questions. We're finishing up the live, but if you go on the replay, wherever you're watching this, drop questions. I always love hearing from you guys. Also, thank you to Nina for dropping by saying, Hey, for Kraken, for Romeo, uh, bruh, and, uh, Peter, regardless, whatever you guys are asking or just saying, Hey, I appreciate it. If you're not already, please follow, subscribe, all that good stuff. But I'm going to go charge my laptop, get ready for my last call for the evening, and then actually implement some of these things. This is literally like next hour is going to be my last hour of work stuff before I start to transition. And then I'm going to have my last meal for the evening. And then we'll start to wind things down. So I'm literally going to implement the sleep thing is the biggest thing I focus on. I know when my sleep's dialed in, the rest of my life tends to be really, really aligned and smooth. It's not always perfect, but that's where it's at. So thank you everybody. Hopefully this is valuable for you. And again, if you even have requests on topics, you can go to our website and you can go to lifestyleoffitness.com. We even have an area you can vote on topics. We were giving away a um shout out to our winners we had some winners for the fifty dollar gift card we even had a seventy dollar gift card we gave away when we had seven hundred subscribers on youtube i'll have to do a hundred dollar gift card when we had a thousand subscribers so if you want to help get us there follow us on youtube also lastly really quick we just launched our new instagram account the lifestyle experience on instagram if you guys want to give that a follow we'd really appreciate it it's basically going to be all of our retreats all of our pop-up events for the lifestyle experience It's bringing our coaching and everything together and all our collaborations. It's really exciting what we're working on with that. That is pretty much it, y'all. I will see y'all in the next one. And also just a quick shout out to Funky Junk for hooking me up with this girl's dad hat. I kept it backwards the whole time because the lighting, I think it would be a little bit better. But I don't know. I like the vibe. I like the look. But later, everybody. See y'all in the next one.