JJ Virgin gamified her self-care routine by assigning daily points for cold plunges, meditation, resistance training, and other practices, aiming for 21 points a week. She uses DEXA scans to track muscle and bone density, prioritizes sleep with eye masks and blackout stickers, and focuses on heavy resistance training because exercise influences 11 of the 12 hallmarks of aging.
How would you like to continue to grow? Someone asked me the other day, like, what was my— how are things working so well with my husband? What would I give for my relationship success? And I say, because we're always working on new personal development goals and doing cool new things like going to a Dr. Joe Dispenza event. We go to a Transformation Leadership Council. We're always working, reading a book together. So what can you do for spiritual goals to continue to push you out of your comfort zone? And by the way, all of these things, All these new experiences are focused on getting me out of my comfort zone. Now, I had the pleasure of hearing Stephen Kotler talk about this recently in his new book, "Nar Country," and he talks about pushing yourself in new activities. And again, it can be so easy to get into a rut, right? I mean, that is the thing that I'm fighting against is getting into a rut. So I've been really working on these new activities. So I'm going to walk through some of the things that I've done to see if they inspire you as well, because I've really doubled down on wellness and self-care. And I think one of the things that happens when we're 40-plus is we have to really take care of our nervous system. And so I actually started to gamify my self-care, and I got over this whole guilty feeling of like, oh my gosh, I'm taking a hot bath and I'm not working. I got over that. Okay, so the first thing that I did, and I'm actually going to do another one in a week, is I did a deep dive assessment on— by using a DEXA so that I could look at my skeletal muscle, I could look at my bones and my bone mineral density, and then I could look at my fat mass, my vat fat, and my— and again, what I really want to make sure is that right now I'm focused on putting on as much muscle as humanly possible. Now at home I have a bioimpedance scale and a tape measure But what I did was I set some really ambitious goals for myself in terms of resistance training and lifting really heavy weights, and even adding in some things like agility training and plyometric stuff. Not fun, I will tell you, not fun at all. But boy, I'm really seeing the benefits of it. It's fun to start challenging again. The other thing that I've been focusing on is sleep. And I will tell you that I genetically am not a good deep sleeper. It's a big challenge for me. And when I like did 23andMe and every genetic test comes out and goes, you're not a good deep sleeper. I'm like, no kidding. What I have to do to really help with that, because any little thing— wine before bed messed up deep sleep, you know, any kind of tech before bed messed up deep sleep. So, um, one of the things that I stopped doing in preparation for all this was I was got into a habit of drinking more wine than I should have, and now I drink 1 to 3 glasses a week. I really cut it way back and save it for special, like if we're going out to dinner or we're with friends. But I've really been focusing on my sleep. And working on, you know, I travel now with always with an eye mask, earplugs, and those little stickers to cover all the lights because that's a problem. So that's the next thing. Now, one of the other things that I've been working on, and I think this is a shift that happens in your 40s or 50s, is that realization that you're going to need more self-care. Like, to get to the place where it was easy in the 20s or 30s, need more self-care. And I had to get over some of the guilt of like taking that time for myself. So what I've done to do it is gamified it and gotten into some routines. But I found at night that my routine was— I didn't have a specific routine. So what I did instead was give myself self-care points. So I want to earn at least 3 self-care points a day. Here's what counts as a self-care: the cold plunge, meditation, working out, journaling, reading a positive book, a personal development book, taking a hot Epsom salts bath, doing my red lights, using my sunlight and sauna, going for a walk after dinner. So all of those things count. And when I do it now, I just say I have to— I'm— my goal is to get 3 a day or 21 a week. So if I miss a day, then I can back it up onto the next. But I'm finding I'm getting more like 4 or 5 because I tend to be an overachiever. So try that one if you're having trouble like getting that stable routine. Now one night I sauna, one night I walk. But I find that's been really, really easy. Now in terms of my workout, the first thing that I did was really assess where I was at, and I did a grip strength— I got a hand dynamometer, grip dynamometer— I did my grip strength and I checked how many push-ups that I could do, and what I really worked on was how many push-ups could I hold. And another thing that you could do at home is you can do either a 1-mile walk test, you can do a 12-minute cardio test, but you want to do something where you can really see how your cardio is doing. Because I know for me, one of the things I had to like deal with was that I will— I love to do resistance training, but I don't love yoga and I don't really like cardio. So I had to really get serious with myself of getting my cardio built into my schedule because I will blow it off given the opportunity. Won't blow off my weights, I'll blow off my cardio because I don't really like it. So I really measured that now and I put some goals in there for myself. Ditto on my balance and flexibility, because when you think about fitness as we age. And what's interesting, when you age, the biggest hallmarks of aging— like, there's now 12, but 11 of the 12, exercise improves. It's the only thing that is like the universal thing that's helping all of this exercise.
