Training Your Spirit, Resisting Sexual Temptation, What Makes Ben Smile & More

My name is Ben Greenfield, and on this episode of the Ben Greenfield Life.

Podcast, I have created a greater why, and this is important. For example, we worked with a foundation called the Legado Family foundation. And what that family foundation does is it brands your family. We have a giant book that is our entire Greenfield family playbook. It's our family mission statement. Imagine a business branding book. But that for a family we have woven in over the past three, four years or so, a deep sense of legacy in terms of a desire to make the Greenfield name great, or at least specifically create generational wealth and meaning and impact for my sons, my son's sons, my great grandchildren and beyond.

Faith, family fitness, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and a whole lot more. Welcome to the show. I have been a fan for quite some time of low glycemic index, carbohydrates, if I am going to have any carbohydrates early in the day. And when it comes to carbs, I always go for nutrient density. Many of you are probably familiar with the idea that blueberries, particularly like small organic wild blueberries, are amazing when it comes to food for your mitochondria and for your brain. Well, it turns out that not only berries, but in addition pomegranate actually, when metabolize result in the production of something called urolithin A in your gut, along with all the other antioxidant benefits that they provide. They also are chock full of sirtuins, which pair up with NAD to help with cellular longevity. Well, I ran out of my blueber the other day that I've been putting a small handful of into my morning smoothie. Those are probably about the only carbs I have all day. However, I have a little tiny packet that is the equivalent of several cups of urolithin producing blueberry extract. It's like a powder. And this stuff's called Timeline Nutrition. Timeline Nutrition. So what Timeline has done is they've created this product called Mitopure. They put it in a delicious vanilla protein powder, they put it in a berry powder, and they also have it available in this starter pack that gives you all of their different forms of what's called Mitopure. I just use little stick packets. So what I'm doing is I'm putting my smoothie and it's basically giving me everything I was looking for from the blueberries, but with none of the carbs and none of the calories. So just a little better living through science. They also have soft gels for travel, which is really Nice and convenient. And urolithin a, it's amazing for longevity, for mitochondrial benefit. This is kind of like the new darling of the anti aging community. And timeline is going to give us all 10% off of Mito pure. Mito pure it's called. So you go to timelinenutrition.com Ben and use code BEN to get 10% off of your order. That's timelinenutrition.com BEN and use code BEN to get 10 percent off of any order. I want to give a shout out to keto brick. Keto brick's pretty crazy. It's a thousand calorie bar. Sometimes I'll take a week to go through one of these bars. I'll keep it in the fridge in like a ziploc bag. But oh my gosh, for hiking, for camping, for hunting, for snowboarding, for anything where you just want one bar to last you all day. This is a shelf stable meal replacement bar. That's keto. So not a bunch of sugar and crap. And it tastes amazing. They've got like mocha cream, they've got chocolate peanut butter cup. They have have this nootropic icing flavor. They're designed to optimize nutrition, but also to give you as many calories as you actually need. I mean one of these in my bag can last me for an entire day of travel. And a couple literally I can hunt for like 12 hours and just have two keto bricks. They also actually taste like addictively good. They taste like cheesecake but they don't have any nasty, unnatural ingredients in them. So keto brick, they're going to give you a free keto brick with any of your first purchase of any bricks. You got to try the chocolate peanut butter cup flavor. By the way, it's so bomb. Ketobrick.com, K-E-T O B R-I C K ketobrick.com and use code BEN and that will get you that free keto brick with your first order. You're going to be addicted to these.

Things, I'll warn you.

But they're pretty amazing and it's pretty worth it. So ketobrick.com all right, so whole body wellness is obviously a big part of my life. I'm always looking for new ways to make my body feel great, make my brain feel great. One non negotiable for me is a daily dose of red light. I can use it to simulate sunlight. I can use it to simulate sunrise, sunset right in my office. Bringing the sun into my own office. The infrared Light spectrum is fantastic for boosting cellular energy for healing damaged cells that are under oxidative stress. There's a ton of clinically proven benefits to it. Better skin, higher testosterone, better blood flow to the whole body pre workout or post workout for recovery. Use them in your office at night when you don't want to flip on all the bright lights, but you want that giant dose of soothing red light therapy. And what I go to is Joovv for my red light. They source from the highest quality materials. They got medical grade components. They went through third party testing. They have safety marks from nationally recognized testing laboratories. They give you the safest, most reliable product. It's unmatched. There's a lot of red light companies out there, but Joovv is unmatched. They have a whole body treatment device. I can treat my whole body in 10 to 20 minutes. I do it once a day. They even have a little handheld device called the Joovv Go I can throw in my suitcase and take with me on the go. Barely weighs anything. And so I can do my red light when I'm in my hotel room anywhere in the world. This stuff just works. It travels through GSA too, also just fine. So Joovv.com Ben J-O-O-V-V.com Ben apply my code Ben to your qualifying order and you can feel what infrared's actually like in terms of a big upgrade in your health. J-O-O-V-V.com Ben and you're going to get an exclusive discount on your first order when you use my code Ben on your qualifying order.

Howdy.

Howdy ho, folks. So today I recorded a podcast interview with the author of a great book called the Personal Socrates. It's kind of like Tribe of Mentors or Tools of Titans or one of those books where there's a whole bunch of different authors, but it's on philosophy.

It's fantastic.

I really enjoyed the books by Mark Champagne. Mark reached out wanting to interview me for his podcast. We decided that I should fill you guys in on the show and put.

It out right here as well. His podcast is called behind the Human.

His book is called Personal Socrates. And we discuss everything from religion to family to legacy to habits and happiness and a whole lot more on today's show. So the show notes will be@BenGreenfieldLife.com MarkPodcast that's Marc podcast. Enjoy the show.

Welcome to another episode of behind the Human. My name is Marc Champagne. It's my job to unpack the mental fitness practices and stories of people living at the top of their game personally and professionally. And do we ever have one of those people? Today we've got Ben Greenfield on the show who is a health consultant, speaker and New York Times best selling author. A wide variety of books, including the widely popular titles Beyond Training, Boundless Fit Soul, Spiritual Disciplines Journal, the Boundless Cookbook and his latest, Endure, which I'm pumped to talk about. There's so much around in that book around spirituality, belief systems. I'd say just at its core we which we haven't spent that much time on this show talking about. So I'm pumped. Ben, welcome.

What? You haven't spent time talking about the most important thing in the world.

I know that's why you're here.

I know you talk about important stuff. Totally, totally.

It's there. But I would say just knowing that the content of obviously of your book and I covered this off in mine a little bit more so from stoic philosophies and like Marcus Aurelius and having some sort of higher belief system. But we haven't gone that deep specifically in what you cover often Endures. So that's why I'm quite excited to link up the topic along with just what this show covers often mental fitness.

That's fine as long as we establish the second most important thing in the world. I think you alluded to it when you mentioned Cookbook is steaks. And this is fresh in my mind just because before our interview I even think I showed up a few minutes late because I was prepping dinner for tonight and putting steaks in a sous vide bag for dinner with some yuzu sauce and some shisho leaves which are like this minty kind of like Japanese herbaceous leaf and doing like a water bath on the steaks. So I've got food on my mind right now.

Amazing.

Yeah, I'll sous vide them and then I'll take them out of the sous vide and I'll let them sit in butter for about an hour and then finish them off with a nice smoke and feed the family tonight before I head out to Mexico tomorrow morning for the this is probably more along the lines of what you cover on this show. I'm going to be going down there for the Day of the Dead, the Dia de la Muerte celebration. And I'll be attending a conference where I'll be speaking on death and meaning and legacy and memento more and purpose and life. And so of course all of that needs to be fueled by a good stake though. So now that we've gotten the important stuff out of the way, we can.

Absolutely. I am going to back us up though, because before we get into any topics, I always start with the same question with this show. And it's been almost about 300 guests now have asked this one too. So I'm excited to hear your response. And it's just, you know, like, if we put all the stuff I mentioned in the bio and the titles and all of that stuff aside, who are you? Who's the person right now that just for everyone listening, Ben is walking at a nice slow pace on a treadmill, in case you hear that in his voice, even though I'm sure he's doing a lot of Zone 2 training, so you probably won't notice it. But who are you, Ben?

I am a man walking on a treadmill right now. I do many of my calls while walking on my office treadmill because it kind of increases the blood flow to your brain and allows you to get a little bit of a low level physical activity in throughout the day, which is nice. I try to avoid walking so fast that I get out of breath and can't speak with folks like you, Mark. But who am I? I'm at my core, I'm a teacher. I'm a teacher. Ever since I was a kid, I loved to learn new things, but I didn't like to just learn for the sake of learning, which is fine if that's the way you're wired up. I think that's a really magical way to live, to be intensely curious about this world and to go out and discover all of God's great creation and to be fueled by really the dopaminergic response that that can give you. And I think that what many people discover along the way of learning new things, though, is that at the end of the day, it can become as many things do, an unfulfilling process. You learn a new language and you read a thousand books and you learn tennis and pickleball and golf and how to repair a jet ski and how to build a home in Thailand and how to build a tiny house in Kansas. You can learn things all your life. But I think that at the end of the day, if some semblance of your life is not engaged with the process of loving other people in some respect, if some element of your ikigai taking your unique purpose and skill set in life and what you were genetically encoded to do and what brings you passion and you're not actually delivering something meaningful and impactful, to the world in some respect with that icky guy, then you kind of have a hole in your soul at the end of the day. And so while I certainly have always been wired up to learn new things and I love it, I'm always leaping all over the place, sometimes annoying my friends and my family with me jumping from whatever. Let's use the case of physical activity. I was bodybuilding and then tennis and then water polo and then Ironman triathlon and then Spartan racing and then back to tennis and then now pickleball. It can be almost confusing to some people who hang out with someone who's intensely curious about things. And this is why I have a blog and a podcast and I like to write books and I give talks. I'm a teacher, so I like to learn things, always have. But then I like to take them and package them up and teach them to other people so other people can discover those same things that bring joy to me. And if I can wake up in the morning and rinse, wash and repeat the process of learning new things and teaching them to people, I feel really self actualized and that's who I am.

I love it. I love it. I mean, you could tell though, like, I understand what you're saying in terms of, you know, people from the, from the outside or who may not know you well or who even do know you well and see, it might seem like you're jumping around, but I don't know, I just, I see just from even your body of work and having read many of your books, they're all connected, but they're big like fundamental life chapters almost in a way. Right. Like boundless obviously. And like you said earlier about steaks and nutrition and so forth. And then now, I mean, you've written about spirituality in the past, but like all of these things are like, seem like the big buckets to your life and you're just going deep, really deep on them and packaging them away to then teach them.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes I tell people I'm a Christian hedonist, I am a man of faith, I am a Christian. And I think that the nature of that particular religion and many religions, they do sometimes almost have an excessively stoic and a bit of a lack of the Epicurean approach in which someone's just savoring and enjoying life in general. And I love to just savor and enjoy each and every aspect of God's great creation. And I do so with temperance and sobriety and caring for my temple, as the apostle Paul might say in The New Testament. But I certainly love to just basically live life through this lens that God made all of creation good. And one of the things that brings a smile to my Creator's face is to see me running around and playing in it and enjoying it and bringing my friends along for the ride. And so, you know, that's. That's kind of the way that I look at myself from a. From a religious standpoint is as a. As a Christian hedonist, philosophically speaking.

Well, just for people that may not know a bit of your backstory and so forth, just there's a section early on in the book that I was really intrigued about, and it's a pretty long paragraph, so I'm not going to, you know, read the whole thing. But essentially it was all about this idea that, you know, back in your triathlon days and all the bodybuilding and so forth, and I just call it endurance days, there was all these routines, right? And you still have routines. But it seemed like it got to the point where it was like if you didn't do the routine, like, you'd almost be mentally punishing yourself in a way. And I think a lot, A lot of people can resonate with that. Especially I see that in the mental fitness space where you hear things like, I didn't get my meditation in today and. Or I didn't get my journaling in today. And it's like, well, that's kind of almost counterintuitive to the practice. If it's feeling like that for you in this line, I want to. I want to read that I think connects. It got to this. This realization around spirituality and your faith and so forth. That was kind of like the missing piece to go really all in. And this is the line that I really liked. To be a true father, leader, and legacy builder for my family, I needed to apply just as much forethought, seriousness, and training to my spiritual stamina and endurance as I had been applying to my physical and mental health training. When and why did that spark for you, Ben?

Yeah, you're right, first of all, that we can become creatures of our schedules and our habits to the extent to where it really doesn't serve us and others very well, which is often a little bit of an art and a science to be able to decode in one's life. Because, let's face it, there's very few impactful people who aren't somewhat creatures who adhere to a relatively strict schedule, wake up and you have your sauna and your cold pool and your fitness routine. And your breath work and your meditation. Then you've got your zoom call scheduled from 10 to 1 or whatever. And then a walking lunch and afternoon meditation session. And then you have your work and your reactive time and your emails through the afternoon. And then here's your dinner schedule. And this is when you put your blue light blocking glasses on, and this is when you turn on your little cooling system underneath your sheets. And maybe some of these things are a little bit more specific to the biohacking health crowd, but we tend to get very, very involved with and married to and attached to that schedule to the point where you take a lot of impactful people these days and you tell them, we're going to go camping out in the forest, and it's like they need 80 pounds of shit in their backpack to be able to be happy out there, because they have to just take their schedule everywhere with them. And I think that there is a certain balance that needs to be found between creativity and flow and rigidity. Because often rigidity and adherence to rules are what can hold us back from flow, what can hold us back from a creative process, and what can even hold us back from discovering new adventures with friends and with family. And that can be something as simple as something that happened to me last week. I love my morning sauna and ice routine, and I got invited to go play pickleball instead. You know, at 7:00am when I normally want to be in the sauna listening to my audiobook, doing my sweat and my down dog and then getting in the cold pool, and I went and played pickleball instead, and I embraced the flow and it got me out of my routine and I had a fantastic time.

How did that feel, though, Ben, was your initial reaction like, hell no.

Oh, yeah. It felt very uncomfortable. I'm like, why am I in the car, driving 10 minutes from my house right now to go meet these people when all I want to do is be doing my schedule that I know is going to set me up to have a fantastic Monday. And now I don't know what's going to happen. Is this going to ruin the day? Is the breakfast after pickleball going to be disrupted because I can't have my normal morning smoothie? And then that's going to make me not perform well in my morning podcast and then what's that going to do to lunch and when am I going to get my sauna session if I skip it? You get all these things rolling through your head because in a way, even though we're not really tiny Mammals, we respond from a dopaminergic standpoint to all of these tasks that we're checkboxing throughout the day very much like a rodent. And it can make smoke come out of our ears sometimes when we're ripped out of that routine. And at the same time, it can also be incredibly mind expanding from a creativity process to and introduce us to new adventures that really help us to grow as a person when we understand that it's okay sometimes to step out of the rigidity that does serve us very well from a productivity standpoint and embrace the flow. And I think following something very close to what you might consider to be an 8020 rule is kind of a good way to approach these things. It's like, okay, rigidity and scheduling and management and predictability is very, very good for me to be able to accomplish a lot for any given week. But I need to have those times or those days where I actually do have creative flow. I think that's honestly, again coming back to my own history from a Judeo Christian standpoint. The beauty of having a Sabbath right, having one day set aside, that's not rigid, that's not scheduled, that's totally free flowing. That's an embracing of a paradise of rest and relaxation. And for me, Sundays are a very sacred day now. And I won't lie, by the time I get to the end of Sunday, I'm like a freaking rabied dog on a leash when it comes to work. I'm like, why can't I jump into the email inbox already? Why can't I start into Monday's project? What can I tackle right now? And that's kind of like how you want to feel on Monday morning. You want to wake up at like 3:59am on Monday morning and just feel ready to take on the world because you've had this full day of having the Tesla that is your body charged into its battery port all day long on Sunday. And it also means that even if you work really hard and that's the way you're wired up for six days of the week, you have that one day where you're just with friends and family and creative flow and playing a musical instrument or trying a new sport out, or just being with people or spending a little bit of extra time in the kitchen preparing a recipe. And so I think that there's a balance between rigidity and creativity, between flow and adhering to a strict schedule. This in no way is a reply to the original question that you asked me, but it is A little bit of a rabbit hole that I think is interesting to think about for all those driven, hard charging high achievers in life. The question that you actually asked me was how I got to the point where, where I realized that I wasn't feeding and I wasn't training and I wasn't tending to and caring for the garden of my soul in the same way that I was tending to my physical prowess or to my mental acumen, or to my business and my money making abilities or my ability to be able to grow myself professionally. What happened to me was that I began to grow distant, particularly from my wife, who is a real spiritual warrior and who was growing each day in her faith. She would spend lots of time literally on her knees in the bedroom in the morning and then sitting in a meditation chair. And I would walk in and there'd be incense burning and music playing and she'd often have little wax earplugs in so that she wasn't distracted by me and my sons going about and doing our own morning routines. And she was demonstrably tending to her spirit with the same type of ferocity that I might tackle the gym in the morning or that others might spend learning a new language or doing something that's mentally demanding. And I was a little bit spiritually stagnant. This would have been about seven or eight years ago when it came to my own walk with God or my own consumption of spiritually demanding or devotional materials, my own practice of the so called spiritual disciplines. Fasting and meditation and silence and solitude and journaling and prayer and worship. And for me as a Christian, the reading of scripture, I really treated a lot of those things like an afterthought because I was still at that ego fed state in my career and my personal development where I kind of preferred to do things on my own power. Because let's face it, if you wake up in the morning and you're doing heavy Turkish getups with a kettlebell and high intensity intervening full training routine on an Airdyne bike and rowing 500 meters and crushing a mile at the track and doing a bit of heavy lifting on the Nautilus or crushing a CrossFit wad or whatever, it's pretty easy to finish all that and then kind of wipe your hands together and go take a cold shower and jump into the day and feel like you could pretty much crush anything life's going to throw at you and you don't need much help from God, bro, because you're ready to crush it and it's easy to go through life feeling as though you can do a lot of with your own power because discipline equals freedom. Or as our friend Ryan Holiday just wrote about in his new book, that I am only about a quarter of the way through discipline. What is it called? Discipline Equals destiny, I believe is the name of that new book. And we can almost become really reliant on our own discipline and what that can bring to us. To the extent to where we begin to neglect a reliance upon a higher power or devotion to tending to ourselves spiritually, to the extent to where we can divine with that higher power in a much more meaningful and even a much more humble way that acknowledges the fact that we can't do it on our own, that there is a Creator, and that our reliance upon that Creator to be able to get through the hard times in life is something that we actually need. And so what happened to me was, was that I began to grow distant from my wife. And it got to the point where we started to get into a lot of arguments and not physical altercations, but lots of emotional battles, lots of strife, lots of struggle. I wasn't a good husband or a good father. I was beginning to grow distant from my family. I was just a pretty egotistical fit guy who could go out and crush competitions and do a lot physically and even mentally, and from a business standpoint and financial standpoint was doing great. But really things were not well with the family. And it took a near separation with my wife for me to realize that the only way for me to be a strong leader in the home and the only way for me to be able to withstand a lot of the trials and tribulations and struggles that life was throwing at me at the time was to be on my knees in prayer each morning was to be seeking guidance and counsel from God each day was to be praying before breakfast and lunch and dinner and in the morning and in the evening for strength. To be able to bring my family back together and glue together the pieces that had kind of fallen apart as I had put business and health and personal gain over. The two things that I think need to come before that. For any driven, hard charging, high achieving person who has a lot of resistance to these two aspects of life, and that's faith and family. I didn't realize that the foundation of faith and family must come before health and it must come before business. And if you want to throw community and relationships in there, those are also important. But I would throw them in third. Faith, family, community, relationships is third. And Then health and then business. And I think that's a really reasonable order to go when it comes to having what you need, having the foundation that you need for happiness. So I began to back to the rigidity thing because I do really well scheduling and I do really well with intentional calendaring of certain activities. I began to wake each morning about a half hour earlier and put on really, really good music and burn incense and essential oils. And I had a cheesy little organic meditation cushion. And I would sit on that and I would open my Bible and I would have a little devotional. I still do this now. And I'd read from the devotional and I'd read from the Bible and I'd spend about 15 minutes doing that and then start to pray. I would often do breath work beforehand to kind of prime myself, which is a great way to bring yourself into a deepened spiritual experience. I'm always fasted at that point in the morning anyways. And I think that going into any type of spiritual morning experience fasted will really deepen that experience too. And so I began to carve out time each day before the workout and before the phone and before the emails and everything else to do that. With the only exception being the. That I find personally, I think that anybody who's like me, who likes to move, obviously I'm walking on the treadmill right now. So we've established that's a fact. I'll often do a lot of stretching and foam rolling and blood work and jumping up and down on a trampoline. I like to roll out of bed, do all of that, and then I have the coffee on the stovetop or the tea, and that's my carrot on the end of a stick for when I've gotten through that 20 to 30 minute spiritual routine that I get my coffee at the end of it and then I get to head down to the office. So carving out every single morning for the building of the spiritual muscles has been transformative for me in terms of me being able to handle a lot of the stress that was coming at me in my own personal life that I was relying upon my own power to be able to handle. Because I wasn't building up my spiritual stamina in the way that I was building up my physical and my mental stamina. That's why I called that book in which I detail many of these habits and tips and tools and tactics that I'm using for my spiritual enhancement, Endure. Right. Because it allowed me literally to be able to build up the same type of endurance that I'd built up in things like iron man and Spartan and whatnot. But to be able to do so physically and that blossomed. I mean it really did. For example, Mark, even though I would do my own personal routine around 5:30, 5:45 in the morning, I now gather my family, my entire family at 7:30. And at 7:30 in the morning we all sit on the living room floor and I play more music and we meditate for about eight minutes. We use something called the spiritual disciplines journal and we all begin with a bible verse, a very encouraging verse that we read in the first three minutes. All we do is just dwell on that verse like a mantra. And I just use insight timer, I put it on, the whole family can hear it. And after three minutes the little bell goes off and then we spend the next two minutes in gratitude. Who is it that we're grateful for? What is it that we're grateful for? We write that down. Then we move on to service. And for the service question it's who can I pray for or help or serve today? So there's no personal affirmation like a me, me, me I, I, I'm good, I'm great, I'm wonderful. And gosh, aren't people like me. It's instead that others facing way to start the day. So who can I pray for help or serve that day? And that can be going and checking in on the neighbor, it could be calling my mom, it could be encouraging an employee who I know needs help. It could be sending flowers to someone randomly, it could be I now use an app called Text Magic in which I have certain lists of people who I've committed to help. And so I'll send out an encouraging image like, like a word or a quote or whatever to my list on text magic like today what I sent to them, cause usually I'll text them about once a week was encouraging them to break the rules in some aspect of their creative routine on this day on Monday. So to start an article by writing the summary first or to hold a tennis racket with a different grip or to cook a meal in a way they'd never cooked it before. And so I'll just send out little things like that to help to make people's day better. But that's an example of something I'd write down in the service section. And then we finish that morning routine with tapping which is based on neuro linguistic programming. So for me it's right over my heart. I'll tap 15 to 20 times and that sets an anchor so that later on in the day, if you're stressed out, you can tap on that same section, and it kind of brings your body back into that state of stress or de stress and bliss and peace that you were experiencing during the morning meditation. It sets an anchor, a physical anchor that you can return to even if you don't have the time to meditate. And then what we do after that is we all take a deep breath in and then exhale any last little bits of stress out. We say the Lord's Prayer together. So we just recite that simple prayer, and then we have like a big team huddle. We hug, we check in on the day. What time's dinner? What are the boys doing today? What time's tennis? What time's jiu jitsu? Jessa, what time? Where are you going here? And when are we going to meet at the end of the day? And then it's kind of like that team huddle and clap. We all go our separate directions. And if no family member sees each other the rest of the day, we have that coming together at the beginning of the day, which has been really foundational for our family. And then at the very end of the day, we have a family dinner. We gather before dinner. My sons and I are always going through a book together, so I asked them a bunch of questions from the chapter of the book that we covered that day. I'm actually thinking about doing the Discipline is Destiny book next, by the way, as our next book, we're working through one called Tactics right now, which is a book on apologetics and rhetoric and argumentation. So I'll chat with the family for about 10 minutes before dinner. Then we play a song. Typically, we're all cooking dinner together, so we're gathered in the kitchen anyway, laughing and talking and telling stories and going through the book chapter. We bust out dinner. We play games all through family dinner. Card games, board games, you know, have chats, whatever. Dinner here is glorious. It's like an hour long affair of us just like hanging out and partying together as a family. And then the final spiritual piece. So the final two spiritual pieces is after dinner. And this is all related to kind of like treating your spiritual walk the same way you treat your physical fitness routine or your mental training routine, your business routine. So after dinner, once the kitchen is clean, we all gather in my son's bedroom. They're 14 now, but they're still in the same bedroom, and they're twin boys. And we open up those spiritual disciplines journals again. And this Time after we've started into about a minute or two of breath work, we do the process of self examination, which is a very powerful practice. A lot of philosophers and even some of the stoics that you talk about, Benjamin Franklin, a lot of people do this practice of evening self examination, which you close your eyes and you replay your entire day like a story in your mind, often watching yourself in the third person as a character acting in a movie. And so we all do that together. What did we do when we woke up? Who did we speak with? What do we have for breakfast? How do we tackle our morning work and routine? What do we do for lunch? How do we spend our afternoon? Who did or didn't we talk to during the day? Everything you play your entire day like a movie in your mind, we do that for about two or three minutes. And we replied it three questions. What good have I done this day? What could I have done better this day? Meaning identifying failures that may have built us or that we learned from. And then finally, where was I most purpose filled today? Back to that concept of ikigai. And that really, really helps, especially young men like my sons, identify those things they did during the day that felt most purpose filled. Each member of our family has honed and written our own purpose statement, which of course may change as your life progresses. But we can say it in one single succinct sentence. And if at the end of the day we find ourselves struggling to answer that question of what we found to be most purpose filled, then it's a pretty good indication that in the spirit of how we live our days is how we live our lives. We may need to reorient our day so that we actually are engaged in purpose filled activities. And so we do that typically. I'll play a little song on the guitar, kiss the boys to bed. And then the last element of the spiritual routine is my wife and I, every night, the very last thing we do when our heads hit the pillow, even if it's literally like in total exhaustion, fumbling for words as I fall asleep, I say a prayer for the family and I say a prayer for my wife and I. And then I fall asleep. And you know, when I get out of bed about 4:30 or 5 the next morning, get up and head down to the living room to stretch and start that morning spiritual care routine again. And yeah, long reply to your question, I realize, but that's kind of like what changed? What affected that change? And just a few little examples of how I've now woven a little Bit more attention to the spiritual disciplines throughout my life in a little bit of a scheduled way.

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What comes to mind though, Ben, is just it's this balance again because there's obviously a routine that is helping, you know, form some structure and make sure that these practices take place. But then the practices themselves are prompts and rituals that actually break the autopilot. From what I'm gathering, those questions like stop us especially and what a great gift to give to your boys growing up. And we need more of this. Kids, they're not taught this for the most part until a later age.

Yeah. There's other questions you can ask too. Like sometimes we'll change it up. For example, one we did for 30 days was just what did I learn about myself today? We changed the evening one for just what did I learn about myself today? And that's really interesting to do for 30 days as well because it forces you, via that process of self examination to know thyself just a little bit better. And as, as Gabor Mate, who's kind of a modern day psychologist who I follow a little bit, he defines trauma as a disconnection from true self. Well, it's very difficult to be disconnected from your true self if you are engaged in that process of daily self examination or you're even asking yourself at the end of the day a question like that, what did I learn about myself? Because it does really allow yourself to know yourself better.

Yeah. Again, this is why I love questions so much because they give us the luxury of a pause. Because without asking that question, you just rinse into the next day and you've left all of this insight or potential insight on the table. And that's when you start missing things. And I know you're a fan of James Clear, he's been on the show as well, and I'm borrowing this from him. But this is where you get to the top of the mountain and you're like, shit, I climbed the wrong mountain. It's like, how did that happen? How did I get there? But it's those little micro pauses where you can course correct.

Yes. And you didn't climb the wrong mountain, you climbed the mountain. That was part of the great story that was written for your life, but you climbed the mountain that you didn't realize was the mountain. You know, it's God draws straight with crooked lines. You know, the path to whatever the mountain is is a zigzagging path that may indeed involve other mountains, other peaks. But, yeah, everyone, I think somewhere between the age of about 25 and 40, climbs the mountain that they think is the right mountain, gets to the top of that mountain and realizes, either with joy or trepidation, oh, look, off in the distance, there's the mountain that will bring more meaning to my life, more impact to the world, and allow me to love others and love God even more fully than I have in this climb.

So one of the topics, obviously spirituality, and for you, that's being a Christian, and for others that might be other religions and so forth. For me, you know, I have Ryan Holiday's books beside my coffee machine or Robert Green. And like, for me in the morning, that's the perspective shift that. That I need or to start the day thriving and so forth. But what I really liked about anything that you've written in this book is just the idea that having a higher belief system or something, you know, bigger than yourself and how that can help with temptation. Like, I never thought of temptation the way that. That how intertwined. Like, it's everything, whether it's sexual temptations in relationships or temptations with food or thought, like, everything, to me at least, links to some sort of temptation. And you talk about this nicely about, like, how we're always essentially looking for that dopamine and serotonin hit or the dopamine fulfillment. So why don't you just. Yeah, just tell people a little bit about just that link for you and what you wrote about.

Sure. Let's use sexual temptation as an example of where something like a dependency or a belief in a higher power or absolute morality or a set of universal truths might actually help you in that type of scenario. Ladies, I'm sorry, but I'm a man, so let's use me as a male as an example. This might at first seem like a little bit of a disconnect, but you'll see where I'm going with this. Let's say that I'm sexually tempted when I'm traveling. I often am. I speak at conferences. A lot of times they're health and fitness conferences with hot and healthy and fit ladies. And when I'm in that environment, I'm supposed to be the fitness icon, the guru, the alpha male. And I will have women who will slip me their hotel room key or write down their phone number on a slip of paper or ask me what I'm doing later that evening and you get the whole let's go watch Netflix on the the couch type of scenario. It is difficult. And there were even, and this actually was related to the initial fallout between my wife and I that I alluded to earlier was I did succumb to temptation several times. And that's one of the things that was beginning to rip apart our marriage. And now I can tell you that by the grace of God, beyond a shadow of a doubt, I am not tempted in the least. I mean, well, I should say I am tempted in that opportunities present themselves. But I do not succumb to that temptation. And the reason for that is because I have created a greater why. And this is important. For example, we worked with a foundation called the Legado Family Foundation. And what that family foundation does, it brands your family. We have a giant book that is our entire Greenfield family playbook. It's our family mission statement, our family values, our family crest, our family banking officers, what we do on Christmas and Easter and Thanksgiving. When my sons go through their rite of passage into adolescence, when a green filled man goes through rite of passage into adulthood, the family hex colors for each individual member of the family, the family spirit animals. Imagine a business branding book. But that for a family we have woven in over the past four years or so, a deep sense of legacy in terms of a desire to make the Greenfield name great, or at least specifically create generational wealth and meaning and impact for my sons, my son's sons, my great grandchildren and beyond. There are flags that fly the Greenfield logo that hang outside the front door. There's the Greenfield family crest hanging over the fireplace. You come over to our house and have a glass of wine, you'll be picking your glass of wine up off the Greenfield family coasters, Greenfield throw pillows and hats and hoodies. And what that means is that when I'm approached by a woman at a bar, at a conference who wants to sleep with me, that short term pleasure is in no way anywhere near palatable to me as the long term legacy that I'm building to make the family great. And I realize the extent to which the short term pleasure and a 30 second orgasm could rip apart not only my own life, but the entire legacy for generations and generations beyond. Now back to your question related to the concept of a higher power. Well, if we deny absolute truth, if we deny the existence of a higher power, if we deny the existence of absolute morality, then legacy doesn't matter. We're all a bunch of chunks of flesh and blood flying on a giant rock through space, seeing who can the most and have the biggest houses and have the most cars and make the most money and have the most followers on Instagram. And there would be no reason to build legacy, because when it's over, it's over. Who cares? But if you have a belief in a higher power, and you acknowledge there's a greater story written for your life, and there are certain rules for life that lend order and societal stability to our existence, and then you begin to weave those concepts into your life because you believe in that higher power, and you develop a sense of legacy, and you develop a sense of truth and commitment and fidelity and discipline and everything that brings forth that legacy. Then you all of a sudden have created a fabric, a structure that empowers and enables you to resist temptation. Even though you may not ever experience the absence of it, you're far more empowered to be able to handle it. You know, scripture says that in the Bible, it says God will not throw any temptation at you that he doesn't also give you the capability to handle. Or we see things like, well, I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. But that doesn't mean you sit on your hands and just say, well, temptation comes. I'll be ready because God has given me everything I need. No, it's like you take God's advice and you build a legacy and you follow his law and you honor your father and mother, and you take your children and you train them up in the ways of wisdom and discipline and teach them about legacy. And all these things kind of come together. Right. It's a combination of believing in a higher power, but then also chopping wood and carrying water in the way that that higher power has dictated. And when you put that together, that's when you're in a situation in which not only temptation becomes easier to resist, but any struggle that life might throw at you becomes easier to manage because you have a. A set of rules to live by, you know?

Yeah. You're not just. You're not in a rudderless boat, essentially, you know, in the ocean. That's right. I love that you've given me. Definitely give me a lot to think about as. As the Champagne family over here grows and evolves and whatnot. I'd love to just understand, you know, like, what truly makes you smile each day.

I think that, you know, back to that. That idea of hedonism, the things that make me smile are probably no surprise to people because they're the same type of dopaminergic triggers that would cause many people to smile, right? Music and food and sex and children and laughter and the like. But I would say probably the major things that are repeated habits that make me smile is I have a friend whose name is Paul Check, he's kind of a fitness icon and he says that many of us have forgotten to dream and to sing and to dance. And so for those morning meditations that we do as a family, typically two or three of them during the week involve playing a song very loud over the house speaker system and dancing and weaving and singing and bouncing and almost having our own little ecstatic dance party around the kitchen table. And I would do that whether or not I had children. I will do that for the rest of my life. You don't have to do it every day. But dancing to music at some point early in the day is a really, really good habit to weave into your life. And that's one happiness inducing habit that I have. The next would be these family dinners that we have. I would say the best $25 that I spend each month is when I take my sons to Barnes and Noble and we all pick out a game together and then we go home and sometimes we will use the Internet to check out the rating of the game, make sure it has a good review. And it's not one of those crappy, poorly designed games that hasn't been beta tested heavily and needs some tweaking. And we're actually having done this now for nearly 10 years, we can tell straight out of the box whether a game is well designed or not. There are even certain game designers and production companies who we'll go with because we know that they heavily vet their games and a lot of people have played them by the time we get them. But you know, we'll get whatever exploding kittens or unstable unicorns or monstrosity or wavelength or fuzzy logic or even some old school ones like Scrabble or Boggle or Scattergories, for example. And we play nearly every night. We allow for one dinner night that's just discussing catching up. My sons are homeschooled, so that includes a big discussion about their current passions and interests and desires. Because the way that we homeschool them is that we let them fill us in on what it is that they're interested in. And then in the spirit of trying to enable them to be as self actualized as possible, we simply surround them with all the tutors, the books, the travel, the games, the toys, the website, anything that they need to be able to pursue that passion. And of course, in order to do that, there has to be touch points woven in throughout the week, where it's basically like, okay, how'd this week go? What are you guys looking forward to? Any new things you want to know about that mom and dad can help you to discover or learn, et cetera. But besides that one night of the week that allows us to kind of feed that stuff into their unschooling homeschooling scenario. We have these massive game nights, and we play typically for an hour. Again, like I mentioned earlier, right after we've all cooked dinner together. So every night at our house is like a glorious party. And sometimes other people from town are invited. And we typically throw a massive dinner party about once every two weeks, where it's just a ragtag group of island of Misfit Toys, esque folks from the local community, entrepreneurs and house cleaners and car mechanics. There's everybody in our lives. We just invite them all over and we throw a giant feast. Because there's a guy who writes cookbooks and is in the nutrition industry, I inevitably often have a lot of steaks and chicken and bone broth and all sorts of cuts in the freezer. So I got to figure out a way to feed people. So we have these dinner parties, the family dinner parties, and then the bigger dinner parties in addition to the morning dance parties would be a source of joy. And I would say that the last thing that brings me joy, I'll give you something that's new that I just kind of recently started doing of late. It's related to male friendship, not only with my sons, but with other males. I've realized that sometimes males tend to look at females and the way that they structure their relationships and their friendships and they, like, do a lot of things together. And I'll stereotype here, they go to the cocktail bar together, or they go do get a pedicure together and chat, or they have little dinner parties and talk, talk, talk, and all that's fine. But a lot of times males bond over shared experiences that don't necessarily involve us engaged in heavy discourse or putting ourselves under the pressure of having to engage in conversation the whole time. So I will call up friends and just say, hey, you want to go for a walk? But we'll literally just be, like, listening to each of our own separate audiobooks and going for a walk together. Or I'll grab my sons and say, you guys got a stack of books like I do? All right, let's go hit the sauna for an hour, and we'll just sit on the floor of the sauna altogether. Reading books, like sharing an experience together. It kind of works. It's odd. Or another example would be the gym, right? I'll ask one of my friends now to hit the gym, but we aren't doing a workout together. We're just at the gym at the same time, sharing that experience. And it's almost kind of freeing because sometimes you want to be in your own space and you got these books you want to catch up on, or podcasts or audiobooks, but at the same time, you know that good for you to be with other people. And, of course, this habit involves a coming together, a greeting, sharing an experience together, even if you're not doing the same thing together, and then some form of a departure greeting and a farewell, and then you're off to the rest of your day. And I think giving yourself permission, especially as a male, to understand that, oh, I can engage in shared experiences. I don't necessarily have to have people all up in my business the whole time, and I can still kind of do my own thing. But it's something that, surprisingly, I found some meaning derived from, and it's allowed me to kind of, like, passively build friendships in ways that I would have otherwise resisted until I'd given myself the permission to just share an experience without the pressure of having it have to be like, intense dialogue the entire time. Does that make sense?

100%. You are one fascinated human, Mr. Greenfield. Speaking experiences. I have to thank you for this one. You've. You can probably see it and just in the video. I mean, my mind is. Is spinning in the sense of things I'd like to try with my own family and different little rituals and routines to inject my own routine and so forth. It's been really a very mentally stimulated conversation, and. And I want to thank you for that first and foremost. But then also just, you know, you being you, and you've. You've said this in other interviews, but just like embracing, almost like embracing your weird. Let's just say it, and trying new things and doing things against the grain and so forth that are help many people around the world. So thank you for that.

Oh, well, you're welcome. Of course, that comes as no surprise to people, right? There's the deathbed moments, right? I wish I'd chose to be happier. I wish I'd chosen my emotions or chosen to show my emotions more readily. I wish I'd worked less. I wish I'd stayed in touch with old friends. And then the fifth is, I wish I'd chosen to be my true, authentic self rather than who the world expected me to be. And I wish more people would just, like, embrace their weird self. And, yeah, you're gonna do a lot of things wrong and you're gonna live half your life with imposter syndrome, but it's kind of fun to live your life with imposter syndrome and just kind of break into something new and learn the rules as you go. And, you know, as I said on the pickleball court the other day, hey, you know what? That shot doesn't exist or didn't exist, but it does now. So there you go.

Well said. Well said. Thanks, Ben.

All right. Thanks, Mark.

More than ever these days, people like you and me need a fresh, entertaining, well informed, and often outside the box approach to discovering the health and happiness and hope that we all crave. So I hope I've been able to do that for you on this episode today. And if you liked it or if you love what I'm up to, then please leave me a review on your preferred podcast listening channel, wherever that might be, and just find the Ben Greenfield Life episode. Say something nice. Thanks so much. Means a lot.