753. Is It Their Attitude…or Their Blood Sugar?

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. Now, before we dive into today's episode, I have a quick disclosure. What I'm about to share is something that, that I'm experiencing, that my family is experiencing in our personal world, in, in my own home. So I am not a doctor and I am not giving medical advice. I am just sharing observations and some lessons we've learned and a performance lens that may or may not apply to you. So please take what's useful for from what I share today and talk to professionals, professionals if needed. This is simply a health conversation and a leadership conversation through my lens, through my filter, and the lens of what I'm gonna call physiology. So let me first start by asking you a question. Have you ever watched your child go from totally normal to completely irrational in a matter of like 5 minutes. Snappy, emotional, even dramatic. And then maybe 10-15 minutes after eating, they're, they're amazing again. They're fine, as if nothing even happened. Here's the interesting question. What if it's not their attitude? What if it's just biology? And here's an even more interesting question. What if it's actually happening to you? See, my, my daughter Katie, who's 13, who I've talked about quite a bit here at No Days Off, she's even done a couple episodes with me over the years. That is exactly her. Where she's totally fine and all of a sudden she crashes and kind of goes sideways for a bit. And then we feed her and 15 minutes later, she's different. This has been going on since she was very, very, very little, like since she was a baby and into her toddler phase. And it's, and it's existed ever since. And, and we've always kind of made a joke about it, but I didn't get more serious around kind of figuring out what's going on until just recently, because I had this, this reality that we all tend to call hangryness. I just said Katie was hangry. We all joke probably about being hangry. But physiologically, it's actually real. See, glucose is the brain's primary fuel source. So when blood sugar drops, what happens is adrenaline tends to rise, cortisol tends to rise, and the body interprets the drop as stress. And stress shows up as irritability and impatience. It shows up as emotional volatility and shorter-term thinking. In kids, it looks like mood swings, and in some kids, it's more pronounced. And in adults, it looks like losing patience with your team, making reactive decisions, snapping at your significant other, immediately grabbing for some sugar or caffeine. It's funny, but sometimes we call it personality. Sometimes we call it fuel. But there's more to it than all of this. Some people are just more sensitive to it. Of course, not everyone responds the same way. Some people are metabolically flexible. They can go longer without, without eating, and they stay relatively steady. But others are more sensitive, and their blood sugar drops faster, or maybe more dramatically. For kids, You add the things they go through at the ages of, you know, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, the hormones and changing insulin sensitivity, and the swings can really feel amplified. So that attitude problem may not be character, it actually may be chemistry. And I think here's where this becomes powerful. Once you understand it, and once your child understands it, it can become leverage. Stick with me. I think there's a superpower angle here. If you discover that you or your child are more sensitive to blood sugar swings, that's not weakness, that's information. And information, when you use it correctly, becomes a competitive advantage. So imagine a 13-year-old who understands, "Hey, if I don't eat protein before I go to—" practice, I'm more likely to get frustrated. Or how about an entrepreneur who knows, if I go into this negotiation on caffeine and no food, there's a good chance I overreact. That awareness is real maturity, life maturity, business maturity. It's self-leadership. Most adults, in my experience, never connect physiology to performance. Sure, we read about it and we talk about it, we think we get it, but we're in the moment, we don't think about our physiology and how it's impacting our performance. We just assume that, that mood equals personality sometimes. But when you understand your fuel curve, then you're going to gain more consistent energy and more emotional stability. You'll have clearer thinking, specifically under pressure, and you'll make fewer reactive decisions. And that's not small. That's actually a superpower when you get it. Because in business and in life, emotional regulation wins. It's a really big deal. So here's what I'm thinking about. Here's maybe the even leadership lesson. As parents and as leaders, we are quick to correct behavior. But if the rule became Hey, before we address attitude, we stabilize fuel. What if that— what if that became the rule? Before we address attitude, we stabilize fuel. You wouldn't discipline dehydration. You wouldn't criticize someone for limping on a sprained ankle. Yet we regularly react to blood sugar-driven behavior as if it's a complete failure. And in my house now, we're learning after many years to pause and ask, hey, when did you last eat? When did you last eat? Because that question alone can actually change the trajectory of a moment. Now there's an adult version of this and we're going to talk about it. Let's, let's talk about you. How often do you skip breakfast? How often are you running on coffee? How frequently are you eating a high-carb lunch? How often are you crashing mid-afternoon? Do you find yourself getting edgy before dinner? See, we default to thinking it's about stress, or we think it's about our workload, but sometimes it's just this spike and crash cycle that I'm describing. A big glucose spike leads to sharp insulin response, and that can cause a pretty solid dip later. And that dip feels like brain fog and fatigue and even anxiety or irritability. If you're leading an organization, if you're leading a team, if you're raising kids, if you're making financial decisions, that dip actually really matters. And performance starts with your physiology. You can't outthink or outmind your biology. We are always talking about discipline here at No Days Off, but discipline doesn't necessarily just show up, you know, when you're waking up early or you're working hard. It's also about being disciplined around how you manage your energy. And the best of the best are managing their sleep and their hydration and they manage their fuel timing and they manage their macronutrient balance, they don't just send themselves into these high-stakes moments on an empty tank. And if you or, or your kid are more sensitive than average, that's not something to hide. It's, it's actually something to engineer around. And I think it will make you so much better in business and in life. So, here's the experiment I want you to run. For the next, call it 7 days, and again, remember, I'm not the health professional here, I'm just somebody with some experience both personally and with my family. For the next 7 days, I want you to eat a solid breakfast, one that has, call it, 25 to 40 grams of protein, not too long after you wake up. I also, for the next 7 days, want to challenge you to eat every 3 to 4 hours. I'm not talking about full meals. Get something in your stomach every few hours. Make sure it's well-balanced. Make sure you're pairing carbs with protein or fat. And then, here's the key part of this next 7 days, track your mood and energy at various times throughout the day. So let's say, now that we're having this good breakfast and we're eating every 3 to 4 hours, let's track mood and energy at 11:00 AM and 3:00 PM and 7:00 PM. If you have kids, I want you to observe patterns. When do the mood shifts happen? What preceded them? Like, what was going on right before that mood shift? How long has it been since their last meal? I'm not saying to completely obsess about this or even completely overhaul. I just want to create more awareness around this because it's so easily overlooked. And again, we chalk it up to attitude, but it really just may be physiology, may just be biology. Sometimes what looks like a character issue is just a chemistry issue. And once you understand the chemistry, you can unlock greater consistency. And I do believe that consistency in mood and energy and performance is a real superpower. So, just something to test out. Maybe you think this isn't you, but you're observing somebody. We all know somebody. And by the way, you may not think it's you, but if you take a step back and look in the mirror, I guarantee you there are some days where you are, you know, acting as though it's not your chemistry, but you probably know it is. So let's see what we can do about it. That's all I have for you today, the No Days Off Podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.