How Long Can We Live?, The Knight's Templar Longevity Diet, How To Have Bigger Babies, How *Not* To Exercise, The Best Morning Meditation & Journaling Practice & Much More!

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast, it turns out that there is a distinct link between exercise and a sense of purpose. This is probably why exercise is also associated with a reduced rate of depression, just overall higher profile of mood state scores overall. By programming your subconscious to just dwell upon that person, it's as though you're helping them out subconsciously throughout the day. And then finally, at what point in the day was that character me most connected to my life's purpose, help, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more? My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Welcome to a very special episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show. Why is this episode special? Because it's just me talking to you. And in this case, I call such an episode a solo sode. Because this is my chance to sit down solo, or rather stand up at my hand crank, stand up desk solo and talk to you about some of the things I haven't really been able to talk to you about because I've been too busy talking to other people. I often spend my mornings, as most interesting or boring people do, sipping my cup of morning coffee or tea or lion's mane or whatever I happen to be drinking, reviewing research articles, scientific studies, interesting and compelling research, and posts from around the world and taking notes on those. I often put them out on places like Twitter or Facebook, but I also sometimes like to dive into them in some of these episodes. And so that's what we're going to do today. We're going to explore longevity, such as how long you can actually live, some of the new effects of caffeine on fatty acid oxidation, omega 3 fatty acids, some of the newer research on exercise, a high intensity exercise and beyond. And also I have a very interesting morning practice I have developed of late practice that involves journaling, meditation, visualization, tapping gratitude, et cetera that I also like to share with you towards the end of this episode, something that has really made a difference in my own life in terms of my, shall we call, self optimization in the morning? And I think you'd benefit from that as well. Now I'm going to put all of the show notes for today's show over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com JunesoloSowed that's BenGreenfulFitness.com JunesoloSoowed that being said, I suppose we can just delve right in. I'm often asked by folks how long I think that I'm going to live. Frankly, I really don't care as long as I am impactful and have Good health, span and lifespan with however long I've been genetically programmed and ordained by God to survive on this planet, I'm happy with that. I don't have a number like 120 or 150 or 170 or anything like that. But I do find it interesting to look at long lived people and analyze what we can learn from them. And one of the more famous long lived people who has since deceased is Jean Calment from France. Now, there are some interesting things about Jeanne. First of all, she enjoyed a glass of port, a cigarette and chocolate nearly every day. She was also known for her optimism, her good humor and her wit. As far as I know, she did not do stem cells, peptides, nad or anything of the like. And so of course I'm certain that she had strong genetics. But she also lived a joyful life. She engaged in what we might consider to be vices. Yet these things, including cigarettes, believe it or not, in small doses, alcohol, cigarettes, chocolate, they do seem to impart some type of hormetic effect. I'm not, I'm not endorsing the smoking of cigarettes to live a long time, but I do think it's interesting that she was sucking down toxins every day and yet lived a remarkable lifespan. Now, when we look at the data on comment, she was one of the longest livid persons or so called supercentenarians that we actually have on record. And of course, because of this, many people are trying to figure out, based on her and others, what the actual human lifespan limit could be. There was one provocative study in 2016 in the prestigious research journal Nature that kind of implied authors had found the limit to human lifespan. This was a geneticist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and they analyzed decades worth of mortality data from several countries and they concluded that the highest reported age at death in most of these countries actually increased pretty rapidly between the 20 years from the 70s to the 90s, but failed to rise since the 90s and stagnated at an average of about 115 years, which is actually pretty close to how old Jeanne Calment was when she passed. I believe she was actually exactly 115 years old. And this theoretical limit on the length of human life has vexed scientists and philosophers for thousands of years. And what it seems is that human lifespan may have arrived at its limit. We're not seeing a staggering increase in the amount of time that people live based on this research that has been done and based on what's called the International Database on Longevity. But after that, that journal Nature published That study, two years later, the equally prestigious journal Science published a study that contradicted the one in Nature. Now what they showed that someone alive at about 105 had about a 50% chance of living to the next year. And the same was true at 106, 107, 108 and 109. Now these authors strongly suggested that longevity is continuing to increase over time and that a limit, if any, had not been reached. So lifespan statistics can only tell us so much. But it's interesting that Jay Olansky, who's an expert on longevity and a professor in the School of Public Health at the University of Illinois in Chicago, he basically says that the risk of death around that point, around 109 to 115, is so high that he says most people aren't going to be living much beyond the limits that we see today. However, Steve Austead, who's a biologist at the University of Alabama, said in Scientific American that the first 150-year-old person is probably alive right now. Now, I don't believe that death is necessarily inevitable and I go into this a great deal in great detail talking about the naked mole rat and the hydro jellyfish and the bowhead whale. In my book Boundless. It seems longevity is largely determined by species, anatomy and lifestyle. But based on all the data that we have date, it would appear that at this point, theoretically the limit on human lifespan is about 110 to 115 years old. And I would be surprised if that significantly increases anytime soon. It will be interesting to see what happens to this increasing prevalence of biohackers who are spending their existence in hyperbaric chambers, cryotherapy chambers, pumping NAD into their veins and getting stem cell infusions. Guilty as charged. However, I really can tell you that based on everything I've seen, 110 to 115 seems to be around the maximum lifespan. And I think that's interesting. I'm going to link to an article about the Jean comment and longevity in general. But if you want to sit back and have a glass of port, a cigarette, some chocolate and have fun with a lot of people, have big family dinners, laugh a lot, make a lot of friends, it may actually be a better way to live than spending your life fasting cold libido, less hanging out in an ice bath, or at least you should strike a balance between the two, in my opinion. Now onto another kind of special diet. And I thought this was quite interesting. They looked into the, the Knights Templars. So these were Templar Knights that were associated with exceptional longevity. So it was an order of knights, I believe it was back in about the 1300s, who had compulsory dietary rules that may have contributed to their long lives and their good health. And I thought it was interesting going through and actually reading what it was that these folks, these knights, actually ate. So it was a balancing act between the type of fasting that, say, monks in those days might do, along with the type of provision that a knight living a more active military life would actually need to engage in, because you can't crusade or joust on a fully empty stomach. 24,7 so the way that these knights were fed was three times a week they were permitted to eat meat. And on Sundays everyone ate meat together with the higher up members permitted both lunch and dinner with some kind of roast animal like beef or ham or bacon. They use salt or seasoning to cure the meat. But Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, they all ate these more spartanesque vegetable filled meals, like two or three meals of vegetables or other dishes eaten often with bread. And sometimes they would include milk and eggs and cheese. They ate a lot of potage P O T A G E which is made with oats or pulses, gruels and fiber rich vegetable stews. In their gardens they grew fruits and vegetables, Mediterranean produce, figs, almonds, pomegranates, olives and corn. Not GMO corn, of course, but just regular old corn, probably the teeny tiny variety back before we genetically modified corn significantly. Once a week on Fridays, they had a Lent fast. No eggs, no milk, no animal products. They relied on dried and salted fish or dairy or egg substitutes made from almond milk. And the weak and the sick amongst the knights were actually encouraged to abstain from these fasts. And they got meat, flesh, birds and all other foods that they would bring them good health to return them to their fighting shape as soon as possible. They all drank wine, but wine was also restricted. Alcohol was not taken in excess, but in moderation, which is interesting because you see this across a lot of the blue zones as well. And even in that Jean Clement lady I was talking about earlier, they would often mix the wine with different cocktails of antiseptics like aloe vera and hemp and palm and all sorts of different herbs and spices. So wine usually had a lot added into it that went beyond just wine. Now, I think this is interesting because a few things stand out to me. First of all, they had like these fast feast fast cycles, meaning they had certain days where they were protein restricted and certain days where they went heavy on protein, those who were sick or injured of course got more of those amino acids, more of those proteins. They had low to moderate amounts of alcohol. They had a wide variety of plants, grains, herbs and spices. And really not necessarily a myopic diet, pure carnivore or pure herbivore, but rather more of a focus on cycling between the amount of calories they would consume and the amount of protein that they would consume. Now of course there's only so much that we can learn from epidemiological data like this versus hardcore human clinical research. I guess I place some importance on the idea that we can learn from our ancestors, from cultures such as the Blue Zones. And I'll link to the full article on the Knights Tower Templars. But I think probably my biggest takeaway from this and something I personally focus on is I will have some days, especially my heavier training days, my Templar knight sword swinging days so to speak, where I actually will have more rib eye steaks and liver and heavier meat, pork loin and pork ribs and pork belly, the beef, pork, wild game type of approach. And then on my lighter days I actually do a lot more vegetables, herbs, spices, fish, eggs, etc I have a little glass of organic wine or a mix of co cocktails and bitters at the end of each day. And then I'll typically have one day where I eat very light often. I'll do a 24 hour dinner time to dinnertime fast a couple of times a month. I definitely have periods of time where I train in a calorie restricted state over a 12 to 16 hour intermittent fast. And I just think that these are interesting things that we can learn from these type of populations. So I'll link to that article. But I think you would find it interesting how the Knight Templars actually ate. All right, we're going to shift a little bit now and talk about one research study that I thought was interesting. Caffeine's effect on fatty acid oxidation, aerobic capacity when you had caffeine in the morning versus the afternoon. So this was a study that appeared in the Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition. And what they did was they tested when the body responds best to caffeine, particularly related to fat oxidation to whole body fat oxidation during exercise. Now it turned out that saving your caffeine for later in the day, such as a microdose and when I say microdose, somewhere around the range of 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine, not a 500 milligram, pop your eyeballs out and Send smoke out your ears. Pre workout drink like a little bit of caffeine in the afternoon seems to enhance fat burning more than when you have your caffeine in the morning. And I think this is notable because one thing I've pondered about a little bit is why we drink coffee in the morning, aside from its magical effect on the ease of a morning bowel movement. When in the morning, as sunlight hits our eyes and as we wake and as our circadian rhythm begins, we have this natural cortisol response that dictates that our metabolism gets a jump start even without coffee early in the morning. And theoretically, if you're trying to keep yourself from getting tolerant to coffee or keep yourself from engaging in excess coffee intake, it would seem that you could theoretically, perhaps have decaffeinated coffee or tea or some type of adaptogenic mushroom or something like that in the morning and then save your caffeine intake for the afternoon or the evening, particularly if your goals are fat loss and you would see an actual increase in fat oxidation by using this type of approach. Now, furthermore, as I reported in a podcast recently, it appears that for pre workout, drinking your caffeine is actually not as advantageous as chewing on some type of caffeinated gum or like a caffeinated lozenge or something along those lines. Now, one thing that you might find interesting that I've personally been experimenting with is, you may recall Dr. Craig Conover. He's a guy I've had on my podcast before. He's a guy who makes these fast vitamin IVs that he sends out. He's a guy who has sent me nad IVs before. He's one of the cool physicians who I have in my back pocket, who I think is a real brilliant guy. He actually recently developed a gum and the gum is super interesting. So the ingredients are nad, right, which boosts ATP in your nervous system, allows for a higher concentration of mitochondria, increases ATP levels in the mitochondria, about 25 milligrams of NAD in this gum, and then it's got about 25 milligrams of caffeine, that microdose of caffeine that I alluded to, which is enough to improve things like concentration, focus, alertness, arousal, fat oxidation, and your workout performance. But it's a low enough amount to where it's not going to block these adenosine receptors that would lead to increased wakefulness late into the day. And then he puts about 10 milligrams, like a microdose of CBD in there, which is a little bit of a nootropic in and of itself, helps to protect brain cells, a little bit of an anti inflammatory. And so I've actually been popping a piece of this gum in the afternoon to experiment with this saving caffeine for late in the day. And then I'll have some kion decaf coffee or some mushroom tea or something like that in the morning. I also like this, this CAC tea made by a company called My Cacao and it actually seems to work pretty effectively in terms of like an afternoon or early evening workout boost. And it seems to work better when I don't have much caffeine earlier in the day. And this latest study on the increase of caffeine and maximal fat oxidation when the caffeine is consumed in the afternoon seems to back that up a little bit. So I thought that was interesting. You can check. I'll link to that gum in the show notes. I'll hunt it down and link to it if you go To Ben Greenfield Fitness.com June Solo Soed Cool study about the timing of your caffeine. There was also an interesting study about omega 3 fatty acids and this one's going to be interesting for those of you who, who especially have babies or are expecting or know someone who's expecting. It was a systematic literature review on the intake of EPA and dha like fish oil when it comes to birth weight and healthier babies. Now basically in a nutshell, or I guess I should say in a fish oil shell, what they found was that DHA and EPA supplementation in women who were expecting resulted in higher offspring, birth weight and weight in childhood. Now I've always with any of the women who I work with, who I'm helping out with their, with their meal plans, with their nutrition, even with their postpartum eating, helping to support more breast milk production, healthier babies, et cetera. I've always recommended to them what's called the Weston A. Price diet, which is a diet rich in fatty acid, ghee and coconut oil, and different forms of fish, fermented foods, lots of organ meats and almost the type of diet that one would want to eat for really good hormonal support and arguably even either weight gain or weight maintenance or muscle mass or hormone balance or all the things that this diet is indicated for. Very clean, very cool diet. It's not necessarily like a fasting or weight loss diet, but man oh man for healthy babies and healthy mothers. And this literature review definitely shows that if you are a mom and you're Expecting even more. So if you're like vegan or vegetarian, you should really go out of your way to get a lot of EPA and DHA in your diet. One thing that I actually get in pouches and I even eat this myself. I don't just recommend it to women who are expecting, but also I enjoy it as like a sauce that I'll put on on steaks or put on salad. There's this company called Serenity Baby Foods. I found them a couple years ago and what they do is they make baby food, but they have these flavors like wild caught salmon with squash. And all their baby foods have is really good amounts of olive oil. Wild caught salmon, organic beet, organic butternut squash, grass fed grass, finished meat, vegan or vegetarian varieties too, like their organic roots. One is sweet potato, carrot, beet and olive oil. But these things are amazing for the essential fatty acids that encourage nutrient absorption and aid in brain development. They taste really good. I recommend them to pretty much all women now who are expecting or who have babies. And I got somebody recently passed on to me like an investment deck for a baby food company. And it was like this vegetable based baby food company. I looked at the labels and it was like soy, almond, a high amount of these polyunsaturated fatty acids. No meat, no dha, no epa, no saturated fats, none of the things that we know that babies and mothers actually need. And of course I passed on the deck, but I actually emailed the guy who I know, Joe Carr, who's the founder of Serenity Kids. And I said, this is sad that this company is probably going to get a bunch of money take off and women are going to be eating or feeding their babies this type of baby food that's not giving their babies anything like the babies actually need. These type of studies just show us what young humans should actually be consuming. And I thought it was interesting. So that company I mentioned is Serenity Baby Foods. And I'll link to this article which appeared in the Journal of Frontiers in Nutrition. It was a systematic literature review on the type of fatty acids that really support good birth weight. But I would look into the Weston A. Price Foundation's diet if you're expecting or if you're breastfeeding or if you have a baby. And I would also look into this Serenity Baby Foods company as well. Cool information on nutrition. I want to shift focus now and talk a little bit about exercise. So when I interviewed Stephen Hussey recently, which I caught a lot of flack about, because Dr. Stephen Hussey who I did a two part interview on cardiovascular health which I thought was amazing. You can find it on my website. I'll link to it in the show Notes. Just a wonderful treatise on what really causes cardiovascular disease and how to really manage heart health. I caught a lot of flack on that because people basically said he's a chiropractor, what can he know about the heart? The dude knows a lot about the heart. I don't think you have to be a cardiovascular surgeon to understand how the heart works or to even have an alternative approach to caring for the heart that goes beyond things like say statins and aspirin. But so interesting because I recently went to a doctor, for example, because I had a gut issue and he took a look at my charts and everything and took a look at, at some of my anatomy and said basically in a nutshell, he wanted to cut out my colon and put me on an antidepressant. I cut out my colon and put me on an antidepressant. No talk about diet, no talk about the pelvic floor musculature training, no talk about defecation positions. I know this might be a little bit of a TMI or whatever, but I was having a gut issue. Just a shocking approach. He gave me about 10, 15 minutes and then walked out. Treated me like dirt. I think that there are, there are many good allopathically trained physicians out there, wonderful allopathically trained physicians. But I also think that we shouldn't discount what a lot of these alternative physicians, chiropractors, naturopathic physicians and the like know and practice when it comes to caring for the body in a more all inclusive and natural way. Anyways, though I digress. One of the things that Steven talked about was this idea that excessive endurance training and excessive high intensity interval training causes the heart to shift into a state of glucose utilization and, and causes basically an acidic, like a lactic acid buildup that may be disturbing to heart tissue. This latest study in the Journal of Cellular Metabolism titled excessive exercise Training causes mitochondrial functional impairment and decreases glucose Tolerance, investigated what happened when people were engaged in this high intensity interval training. High intensity interval training, meaning you'd like do two minutes hard, a little bit off. Two minutes hard, a little bit off. But doing a lot of that type of training and they found a striking reduction in mitochondrial function, a disturbance in glucose tolerance, a disturbance in insulin secretion. And this was in like world class endurance athletes. And it just goes to show you that exercising harder is not what makes you healthy and arguably if that's your own personal Mount Everest that you want to climb, you want to go do a Spartan race or an ironman triathlon or whatever, and you use that form of training, that's fine. But don't fool yourself into thinking that's going to make you healthy versus say long walks outdoors, preferably in the sunshine, or what's called high intensity repeat training, which is different than high intensity interval training. High intensity repeat training might be go on a walk and every time you go by a telephone pole, you sprint for five seconds. Right? Super short sprints, long recovery periods, mostly low level aerobic exercise with a little bit of sprinting throw thrown in. If you do that occasionally you lift heavy weights. Every once in a while you play a sport, you do some mobility. I have a whole training program like this laid out in my book Boundless, that's going to be far more healthy for not just heart health, but lifespan and glucose tolerance and insulin management and mitochondrial function compared to fooling yourself that beating yourself up and crawling out of the gym and being hella sore the next day is actually the recipe for health. Okay? And you might look good to a certain extent for a certain period of time, but studies like this just keep coming out showing that when we beat ourselves up and spit ourselves out using the old school marathon training approach of the 80s or the bodybuilding approach of the 90s, it's just not the way to train. Just a word of warning for anybody who is, who is exercising the wrong way. I'm not saying hiit is bad, most people overdo it. I might do a HIIT training session where I'm actually going longer than about 10 to 30 seconds in terms of the length of the hard duration that I do one to two times a week max. And that HIIT training session lasts about 15 to 20 minutes. Okay? These are not like 60 minute long HIIT training workouts. So just a word of warning for those of you who are engaged in excessive hiit. So be careful you masochists. Related to that, there was another interesting study on exercise published in the Journal of Genome of Medicine. Now I've talked a lot about how important it is to have a purpose statement in your life, how important it is to have a single succinct distinct purpose statement that you identify with. You can go to my website and search for how to find your purpose in life to discover how to weave in things like what you enjoyed doing a kid, what makes time go by quickly for you now, what puts you in the flow or what kind of Things when you assess yourself at the end of the day, which I'll get into later, make you feel as though you're most connected to your life's purpose. But ultimately, what this study found was that those with a sense of overall purpose are generally more likely to exercise and that regular exercise can actually increase one's sense of purpose in life. So what they did was they studied like almost, I think it was over 14,000 patients. And they asked them questions about their sense of purpose and their physical activity. And what they found was that active people have an exercise program that gives structure and meaning to their life. It provides them them with goals, it provides them with a dopamine inducing way to achieve and check those goals off. It engages them in forward motion, which according to an article that I recently published on my website and research done by wonderful folks like Dr. Andrew Huberman at Stanford University, these studies show that forward motion can actually decrease your stress. Just this act of taking one step forward. And sometimes taking one step forward can be a long walk or a swim or just doing an exercise session. That one step forward could literally be like pushing a weight overhead. But it turns out that there is a distinct link between exercise and a sense of purpose in life. This is probably why exercise is also associated with a reduced rate of depression and just overall higher profile of mood state scores overall. So it was just a great insight into how much exercise can give structure and meaning to one's life. Of course, pair that with the warning that I just gave you. This is not hardcore exercise. Riding your bike and walking and swimming, maybe a little bit of sauna, lifting, a few heavy things, playing a sport. If you have a purpose statement in life and you're also exercising in a sane and smart and wise and healthy way, it really is a good way to live your life. Especially if you're eating like a knight's Templar, as we've already learned. I told you. Also related to life's purpose that I wanted to share with you my own morning journaling practice, what it looks like now, how I combine breath work, visualization, tapping, prayer, gratitude, service, self examination and purpose in my own life. I'll walk you through how I do this. So what I have on my phone is I have what's called an Insight Timer app. I believe the app is free or the cost is pretty much negligible. And what I've done is I've set this app up to have a preset where you can preset your own timed meditations or whatever you'd like to do. So I have it set up for a seven minute morning meditation. I use this background music. They have all like 20 different tracks you can use for background music. The one that I like, if you want to use the one that I use, is called Angel Choir. Don't laugh. I like it really puts me in the mood. And then I set the timer. Okay. So the timer will chime with this little bell. You like my bell Dong. That's better. I set the timer to chime at the beginning of the meditation and then at the two minute mark, the second two minute mark, and the third two minute mark. Okay, so it's a seven minute long timer that I do. Now I do this with my whole family. We typically go out to the back porch, or in the winter, we'll sit in the living room and do this. And we use this thing that I actually developed called the Spiritual Disciplines journal. It's@spiritualdisciplinesjournal.com we open up to the page that we're all on in the Spiritual Disciplines Journal. We read the inspiring verse at the top of the journal and then, ding, set the timer. Now, for the first two minutes, all we do is breathe with a six count in and a six count out. Long, slow, deep breathing, preferably through the nose. And that is our time to connect with our bodies, to connect with God, to meditate upon that verse that was at the top of the page, to find a dark, empty space in the back of our eyes, to rest our tongue at the bottom of our mouths and just get into that meditative mood, so to speak, sit there and sit there in silence for those first two minutes. And then the next ding goes off at the two minute mark. And at that point we begin our gratitude practice. So for two minutes, what we do is we think about something that we are grateful for, typically something we experience the night before or that morning. And it's interesting because by reliving that gratitude moment, by visualizing it in your mind, it actually induces the same physiological and psychological response that you had when that moment occurred to you. And I'll just throw this out there. Let's say you had a wonderful lovemaking session with your spouse the night before, and that's what you're grateful for that morning. And you relive that. You actually experience those same sensations, that little relief release of oxytocin, that little release of pleasure that you got from the night before by reliving that moment, by visualizing it. And we also make it a focus. And this is based on research by an Institute called the Heartmath Institute to breathe that gratitude into our heart like a deep breath in. And just imagine that whole experience traveling down to your heart center. And they've actually shown that this just almost instantly increases your heart rate variability and plummets your stress score, decreases your sympathetic nervous system activity, and increases your parasympathetic nervous system activity. Now, as we're sitting there for two minutes dwelling upon that moment of gratitude, at some point, we open our eyes and write about what it is that we are grateful for in our journal. It's the first question prompt in the journal is what am I grateful for? Okay, so it's two minutes dwelling upon gratefulness and finally writing it down. And by about that time, the next two minute chime sounds. Now, when the next two minute chime sounds, that's when we begin into what's called service. So you think of one person whose name you can jot down in your journal, who you can pray for or help or serve that day. Now, it's very interesting because what I've found is that by writing that person's name down, and sometimes I'll sit and think about that person because I have a full two minutes, and I'll dwell upon who God brings to mind for me to actually go out of my way to either help or pray for or serve or send positive emotions towards that day. It's interesting because you almost subconsciously manifest and program your mind to dwell upon that person throughout the day. This recently happened to me, actually, this was just yesterday. The person's name who I wrote down, not only did I have two interactions with them later that day, once on the phone and once in person, and was able to go out of my way to give them helpful advice, to smile at them to make their day better. But it's interesting because by programming your subconscious to just dwell upon that person, it's as though you're helping them out subconsciously throughout the day. If you listen to my podcast with Don woods, for example, or Brian Scott, two podcasts that I released this year, we talk a lot about programming your subconscious to spin in the background throughout your day. It's related to the old school, the book the Secret or Think or grow Rich, or I really like Joseph Murphy's the power of your subconscious mind. I think that's. That's the best treatise on, on how this works. But basically program your subconscious as you're thinking about that person in the morning, and then that person just winds up being someone who you help every day. And if you think about this. If you're doing this 365 days a year, just imagine all the people that you are able to help and serve throughout the course of an entire year. And I really like this better than those morning self affirmations where you're just like me. I, I Old school, Saturday Night Live, Stuart Smalley, what does he say? I'm good, I'm smart and beautiful and gosh darn it, people like me. Something like that. You're instead focusing on, on others. And I find that to be far more meaningful. And so that's during those two minutes. And at some point during those two minutes, you of course open your eyes and follow the second prompt in this spiritual disciplines journal, which is, who can I pray for help or serve on this day? And you write down that person's name. Now by then the third two minute chime will have sounded and you are at the six minute mark. And for that final six to seven minute mark, here is what we all do as a family or what you can do if you're doing this on your own. We return back to our breath, eyes closed, dark empty space in the back of our eyes, tongue resting on the bottom of our mouth, which is a really good way, especially if you read a book like Dawson Church's Bliss Brain. He gets into this, it's a really good way to almost instantly get into this deep meditative state and this delta brainwave production. So dark, empty space in the back of the eyes, tongue resting on the floor of the mouth. And what you do for that final minute is you reach for your heart or somewhere else where you'd want to set an anchor. And as you're in that state of pure peace and bliss and delta brainwave production, you begin to tap and you tap about 15 to 20 times in that location. I like my heart center. When you're tapping, you're setting an anchor. And the more you do this, as you do it every day, you entrain yourself to be able to enter into that state of peace and meditation and low stress point during the day when you're stressed more quickly. Okay, so the first few times you do this, it doesn't work that well. And as you keep going, let's say later on in the day, you're checking emails, you're stressed, you're in an argument, whatever, you start tapping on that same area and it's really weird, you return like almost straight back into that state of peace that you were in before, especially if you take a deep breath and you do it. So we spend that last minute, just basically tapping, eyes closed, breathing slowly. Now, when we all finish as a family, we like to finish with a prayer. We typically. Typically, we'll just say the Lord's prayer together. Our father, heart in heaven, hallowed be thy name, et cetera, et cetera. So we all say that prayer together, and then that's seven minutes. Okay, so that's the end of seven minutes. And that sounds like a lot to do in seven minutes, but it actually fits just perfectly. I use that Insight timer to guide us through the entire routine. It is probably the best kind of combination of breathwork and visualization and tapping and prayer and gratitude and service that I have discovered to be able to do in the morning. Now, here's the thing. We bookend our day, and our evening meditation is not as long. Our evening meditation is typically two to four minutes long. Okay, I like this better that I did, like a transcendental meditation course two times 20 minutes a day, which is too much for me, but I can handle seven minutes in the morning and two to four minutes in the evening. You don't need the insight timer app for the evening journaling and meditation. You could use it if you want to, but we just lay silently, typically, in my. My son's bedroom. And we do it all in their bedroom is like the final thing before everyone falls asleep at night. So what we do in the evening is, first of all, we still have those same journals, right? Because there's two more questions in the journal that we need to complete for the day. You close your eyes, the same thing. You find that dark, empty space in the back of your eyes, tongue at the bottom of the mouth. But rather than doing the type of breathwork we do in the morning, which is a six count in and a six count out, which is a fantastic form of breath work, but we want to get even more relaxed and the evening. So we do a four count in and an eight count out in the evening. It's even more calming when you exhale for a long period of time. This is all, preferably through the nose. So four count in, eight count out. And as we settle into that breathwork pattern with our eyes closed, what we do is we begin to play our entire day like a movie in our mind, looking at ourselves in the third person. Okay, so you're watching yourself go through your day. How'd you wake up? Up? What'd you do when you first got up? How did you breathe? What did you have for breakfast? What did you do between breakfast and lunch? What'd you Eat for lunch? How'd you spend your afternoon? How'd you spend your evening? What'd you read? Who'd you talk to? And you just go through the whole day playing it. And again, it's only the course of about two to four minutes, but you can easily gather the most meaningful moments of the day. And as you're assessing your day playing yourself third person character movie, in your mind, you're asking yourself three questions. Okay, here are the three questions. Questions. What good have I done this day? Meaning when was I proud of that character? When was I rooting for that character? When was that character, like the hero of the movie, doing the things that I feel really good about? What could I have done better this day? Meaning where did that character fail and learn something? Where did that character succumb to temptation? Where did that character not rise to the occasion? When was I not proud of that character? And so you're asking yourself, what could I have done better this day? And then finally, at what point in the day was that character me most connected to my life's purpose? At what point in the day was I doing something extremely purposeful? Usually for me, it's something I've done with my sons, or an article that I'm working on that I find to be super meaningful, or perhaps this solo so that I'm doing with you right now. But you're asking yourself, what good have I done this day? What could I have done better? Better? And what did I do that really lived out my life's purpose? Where did I feel most purposeful? And as you play that movie in your mind for a couple of minutes, two to four minutes at the very end, you open your eyes and you write down those three prompts in your journal which appear, what good have I done this day? What could I have done better this day? And where did I live out my life's purpose today? Jot all that down. And then what we do is we return back to our breath and do one final breath. In through our nose, out through our mouth. We smile, we open our eyes, we finish, we tuck away our journal for the next morning. And that kind of bookend way to start your day and end your day I have found to be incredibly meaningful. So I'd be remiss not to share that with you. And I also will write an article somewhere on my website where I spell this all out. Hopefully soon. I already have a video on YouTube. If you go to YouTube and search for my morning journaling practice or evening journaling practice, you'll find it. But the journal is@spiritualdisciplinesjournal.com the timer that we use at the Insight Timer app, which is free. It's been incredibly meaningful for me. I wanted to share it with you. We're getting towards the end of everything that I wanted to share with you for the day. But I also wanted to let you know that now that things are beginning to open up again, with COVID being a little bit less restrictive on things like travel, I'm starting to speak again, I'm starting to travel to conferences again, and I'm going to start putting all the conferences that I'll be at, all my speaking engagements that are public. If you go to BenGreenfulFitness.com calendar, that's BenGreenfulFitness.com Calendar at this time. At the time this podcast coming out. The next one is the Ancestral Health Summit in la. Ancestral Health Summit in la. And on the calendar you'll see links and everything to that. But it is from August 12th to 14th. If you want to add that to your calendar. You want to attend this wonderful summit with a whole bunch of great talks based around ancestral biology and healthy living and really great expo. Cool conference, Didactic. You learn a lot. For you geeks out there, you'll love this one. I will put that one on the calendar and also put all future events that might occur before then or after then to BenGreenfieldFitness.com calendar so I also wanted to share that one with you. The Shownotes for today. I know a somewhat brief podcast, but I just want to get a few things out to you. The Shownotes I'll put@bengreenfieldfitness.com junesolosode where you can also pipe in with your own feedback. Your comments, your questions. I love to help you guys out and I'd love to dialogue with you. So leave everything over there. And and oh, there's one other thing I want to tell you. I've gotten some feedback from many people of late that I've been interrupting guests. Admittedly, when I go back and listen to some of the podcasts that you all have said that about, I agree, I have interrupted guests. Sometimes it's an issue with connectivity where we're talking over one another. When it's a Skype interview, sometimes it's a case where I want to interject something and I make a mistake and I interject it too soon or I do a poor job letting someone finish their second sentence. Be mercil with me. I'm learning. But I hear you. And I I will do a better job making sure to let guests finish their sentences before I get so excited about something I want to add in that I interrupt them. So I totally hear you. I like for these podcasts to be a discussion, right? Not just me asking so many questions and sitting there on my my hands in my lap while I'm, you know, waiting for them to finish their reply, rather than being like a conversation such as one I would have with my friend. But at the same time time I get what you're saying. I went back and listened to some of the ones where you all said that I interrupted my guests frequently. And the beauty of that, of course, is that I can't interrupt myself on a solo. So like this. So I believe I did perfectly not interrupting myself on today. Excuse me, Ben. I'm just kidding. All right, anyways, I'm gonna end this thing and before you all tell me not to give up my day job. And thanks for listening until time next next time. Have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep, depends, digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes, use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.