Dr Ro hope you’re well. This is more of an emotional personal development subject which is one of my biggest passions and I had a great conversation with someone this week.
In the meantime I just finished a podcast recording for the Seekardo and it was on the subject of three things, your dietary habits, your vitality and your sleep and he really drilled quite a few deep questions at me.
These are three things I’ve been talking about for a long time.
In fact, I pulled up a document to show him that the last time I ran a very intensive health event was nearly five years ago, I showed him the subject matter and he was like holy shit. You’ve been talking about sleep all these years let’s pull this out. Extract this and share this with people. The nuts and bolts were he asked me what’s my definition of health.
To me health is vitality.
If you can wake up in the morning and throughout the day maintain a certain level of vitality and that really for me is clarity, purpose, engagement feeling physically, spiritually, and emotionally vital then what that does is creates a flow in your life and it’s different to energy.
We talked about food and he said, you know, a lot of people say that they are eating healthy but the thing is for example the big vegan shifts that have happened in recent years and I’ve been talking about vegetarianism and not eating meat and dairy for a long time.
There’s been a big movement in the last 12 months as we know but you can be a vegan and still be extremely unhealthy. You could eat rice, pasta, drink soda drinks or non-dairy and still be unhealthy, so don’t attach being vegan, being vegetarian or skipping certain things to be healthy. It’s a combination of all these things.
So on that note what we talked about was food and fuel. What’s the difference between nutrition and fuel people eat stuff but is it nutritional or is it purely fuel and I explained about that. We talked about the food pyramid.
There is a specific structure of diet and it’s not like you have to follow a regimented approach, but if you have a general approach to it the bottom of the pyramid for example is lots of leafy greens and stuff like that. It makes a massive difference to how you feel and how your energy feels so we really drilled into that and this is a 90-minute podcast just talking about three areas of health.
Then we switched to sleep, again a big subject.
There’s a whole thing on melatonin and the curve that happens during the middle of the night between like the one and four and the circadian rhythm and how your performance in your business.
If you’re in sales or goes out in front of the public or does anything in business where you have to talk about and promote yourself if you’re not sleeping properly, your business is going to suffer.
I’ve physically witnessed this with people and I’ve seen it myself. I can measure my vitality based on my sleep performance. I’m a big fan of the Oura ring. For example if you’re averaging six hours sleep a night on an average basis you’re actually depleting yourself and you can underperform.
You potentially can reduce your immune system and you’ve got the potential and the science is showing Alzheimer’s and short-term memory issues because you’re not able to upload your short-term memory to your long-term hard drive. Generally this happens during the night there is a certain process that happens and power naps the importance of them. We talked about the five a day. I have these recipes, 52 weeks a year. Great that covers a lot of these aspects and if you go to Seekardo people have access to that.
When it comes to sleep easy thing for us to do we’ve got lights around us is to stick the lights on I’ll work through the night sleep when I’m dead. That’s an 80s and 90s philosophy I grew up with and actually you’re going to die because you don’t sleep so start to look into this and we reference a couple of books.
I think sleep is a major factor.
So my question is, how is the balance of your diet?
Are you generally getting the right fluids?
Are you genuinely getting the right balance of food into your diet?
Are you fast crashing food down to get it done and dusted, or you having a balance? Are you preparing your food, are you living vitally are you feeling engaged?
We have got Covid part two coming. I mentioned this two months ago after a conversation with a friend of mine in Harley Street, she said mark my words, October, November there’s going to be round two. It’s going to be tough and it will be tough.
What’s going to happen to people going into winter if we have another lockdown? Depression rates are up already.
Obesity rates are up, kids are feeling down, people’s emotional state is imbalanced, their financial status is unbalanced.
We’ve got a government situation if we go into lockdown and people can’t work that’s going to have a massive impact on people’s mental health and physical health.
If we don’t start to get the right plans in place now and start to eat and look after ourselves now properly when times are tough, often we revert to a shitty style of eating and looking after ourselves.
So, one diet and fluids. Number two sleep, third one is vitality and I gave an approach to monitoring your vitality, a way of measuring your vitality based on two or three key indicators I like to use.
A couple of things I look for when it comes to vitality, number one, your clarity. The way you think, feel, the way you engage every single moment. If I’m talking to you, you’re feeling that state on a consistent and regular basis.
For me that’s how I am as a human being and I look to try and maximise that not that I’m always vital. I started off today feeling shitty actually and that was because I worked very late last night. I didn’t get a good night’s sleep, meaning I got six hours of sleep. I had 91% efficiency of sleep, which is good, unfortunately two nights in a row with five, six hours sleep and getting up early for the builders here that had a knock-on effect. So my readiness was only 61%, 62%, which means you’re not going to perform as well as you should do.
Everyone’s percentage is different. Harminder was joking saying, Ro’s 60% is most people’s 120% and that may be the case but that’s because I’ve chosen to live at that level of intensity and engagement over the years and look after myself. But trust me, I felt rough this morning and that’s a self-reflection and it’s okay to do that, but there is a way to monitor this and check in on your vitality.
If you do it for two to three weeks there are things you can do now to start to improve and tweak and engage your vitality because it is something you can engage and bring into the fore of what you do.
This is really meaningful for me because I think there are three things that we overlook and if you abuse your diet, sleep, vitality over the next couple of months you’re going to age quicker, your memories are going to be poorer. Your immune systems are going to be lower and we can’t afford to do that going into October, November this year.
I’m convinced we’re going to see another surge in levels and people’s immune systems are typically lower in the winter. It’s going to be worse if you’re really not looking after yourself.
I think if we don’t start to prepare ourselves physically on an immune level and emotionally going to October, November this is going to be a tough winter. One of our toughest in a decade and I’m not trying to scare people. I just want you to be prepared.
Imagine what’s going to happen if restaurants close, schools close again, companies close down, transport closes down.
There’s a rush at the supermarkets, it’s winter and cold. Kids can’t get out, you start eating more food, less live food, relying on processed and sugary drinks and shit like that.
Your immune system drops you don’t sleep enough as you’ve got anxiety, everything is going to go in the opposite direction so we can work on that. We can really do some good stuff but it has to start now and I really hope if you’re plugging into Seekardo or send your friends to it go and get them to listen to this and I have got a couple of video series on this.
If you’re a Seekardo supporter one of the support levels allows you to get videos and I have a whole video series on exactly this.
Take care.
Responses