Finding your Peak Performance with Said Hasyim

Wellness is a practice, not just a word.

Welcome to the Synergy podcast, where myself, Kelly Engelman and Lori Essery shed light on powerful tools and topics that nourish.

Your body and most importantly, feed your soul.

Hey, Senergy listeners. We are about to interview Saeed Hashim. I'm so excited about this interview. This is his very first podcast. He was all the way in Singapore, and I met him because Synergy chose his book, the Peak Human Performance as one of our books during this year to dig into, you know, how we can do things differently that may make a huge impact on the way we feel and function and on our productivity. And I had posted that on my website at Enhanced Wellness Living. And Saeed is an engineer and he had engineered a software that anytime someone mentioned his book, he would get an email. So Saeed reached out to me and said, hey, I see that you are promoting my book. I just want to thank you for that. So I sent him an email back to make sure it wasn't like a automatic robot response. Right? And he was a real person. I found out he was all the way across the world in Singapore and willing to do a podcast. So we invited him on the podcast. And you're going to be blessed by this podcast we dig into. He's got wisdom beyond his years, and we dig into some really practical things that you can be doing to improve your productivity and your joy in life. So listen up.

We are so excited to have you on here with us, Saeed. Welcome to the Senergy podcast. I just wanted to start out by asking you a little bit about your story. Tell us about you.

Okay. I was born in Indonesia. I live in a small town in Indonesia. And after high school, my parents sent me to Singapore to pursue a bachelor's degree. And I was lucky enough to be offered a job immediately after my school. And I joined in IT industry for about six years. The work was hectic for me. I mean, I had a lot of overwork in that company. And after work I just wanted to lie down on the couch and watch tv. And on the weekend I slept late and woke up very late. Life was miserable for me and I decided that I needed to change. I want to change if I want to pursue my goal. So I started figuring out how to improve my productivity. It all started by waking up earlier and gradually I piled up lot of habits on my own. So exercising in the morning and I even had time to take a nutritional course in the morning before going to work. So in 2019, when Covid hit Singapore and Covid hit Singapore, I witnessed the demise of my family members, the demise of my friends. And I realized that if I could survive, if I could survive this, what could have I contributed for posterity? Then I thought that maybe I should document. I mean, I should publish what I have documented throughout my journey to share with the world. So that's how I began writing the books about the productivity series. And, yep, that's how my book came about.

So when you started recognizing that your health was going in a bad direction, like the fatigue of just not wanting to do anything but sleep and be on the couch, how old were you when that started for you?

That was 26.

26. Okay. And you started making some changes, and you started documenting those changes.

That's right.

And then you started documenting those changes because you wanted to leave that for what. What were you. What was the reason for documenting that?

Because I wanted to keep that for my children. I mean, I wanted to see what works and what didn't work. And. And eventually I tried. I experimented with a lot of things. Many things worked. Many things didn't work. And the good thing is that, yeah, I ended up finding a lot of things that worked. So those are all the things that I documented down. I wanted to keep it and share it with my children.

And then Covid kind of changed your mind. Covid was like. You were like, everybody needs to know this. Right. Not just my children, but everybody really needs to know this. I think that's phenomenal. Yeah. What a great job at being so young and taking the time to document. Right. What you were seeing and feeling and experiencing. So what would you say are the foundational things that you learned through your experiment that have made the most difference initially and then continue to make a difference in your life? Now?

I felt that the foundational thing is that you need to take care of your body. That came first. That came first before anything else. And throughout my research on the productivity, there are various areas like developing good habits, developing good brain, and so on and so on. But the foundation is always starting with the good body. With a healthy body, I mean, of course, you can develop a habit on your own while you are being sick, but then it is not as accelerated as you could if you already have a healthy body. So that's why I think that developing a healthy body comes as the fundamental strategy if you want to synergize your entire operation.

And you actually narrowed down in this book, in your first book, you narrowed down three areas.

Right.

Three areas to improve health. And I just want to know how you chose those three, because there's just a lot of things that we all could be doing to change the overall health of our body. There are a lot of things, but you chose three. Name those three. And how did you choose those three?

Those three are the exercise, food, and sleep. I think sleep come first. Sleep come first.

Let's talk about that. Sleep coming first.

Yeah, this took a lot of work for me too. I find it difficult to group this together, to group these three into the foundation, because when I started this, all of the information just jumbled up. You have a lot of things to take care if you want to be productive. But yeah, at the end I finalized that these three are the foundation that we must begin with. Sleep come first. Because we sleep very long, we sleep the longest. I mean, we sleep a lot of hours throughout our life. And the deprivation of sleep affects how you do your work on your day, what you can do in the day. So that's how I came about. Sleep is the most fundamental things to begin with. And I myself experienced that when I started this journey. Sleep was the first thing that I fixed before I could move on to anything else.

Wow, I think that's a mouthful right there. Yeah, I think a lot of times we try to skip sleep because we have so much to do, not recognizing how it's wrecking our productivity. So it may take us twice as long to do a task that if we had gotten proper sleep, we could have gotten completed. Right. But you learn that through what you were doing to monitor yourself. That's awesome.

So sleep first and then what?

Exercise next. So the exercise part helps you to increase your serotonin level, which uplifts your mood. Combine that with a good sleep, you could sustain a lot of your, you know, discipline tasks that you need to carry on whatever things that you want to build. I mean, whatever habits that you want to build that makes things easier for you to sustain, whatever you want to build. So that includes sleeping on time, which, you know, come back to your sleep because when you want to maintain a good sleep hygiene, you need to, you need to be able to sleep at a schedule that you've. You set yourself for. Sometimes you might be not as disciplined that today I want to sleep at this hour, but on weekend I want to sleep lighter. So yeah, exercise boosts your serotonin level as well as increase your mood, and that also makes you healthy. Being sick makes you lethargic and unable to do anything you want, demotivated to do whatever you like.

So were you saying that exercise impacts Your sleep. Is there a specific time of the day that you should be exercising or a type that improves sleep?

Yes, Based on my research, and I experienced this myself, there's some science behind it, that when you do the aerobic exercise in the morning, makes you sleep well at night compared to when you do it in the evening. Yes, compared to when you do it in the evening.

Yeah.

And if you do the anaerobic exercise, the heavy, the strength training late at night or closer to your bedtime, it makes it difficult for you to sleep because your heart rate elevated right after the exercise. Yeah, I experienced that too.

So what you were saying was sleep first got to fix that.

Right.

Improves performance, which probably allows you to exercise better.

Right.

And then turns around and helps you sleep. And then the last one in those three were food. Right? It was food. So tell us about that.

Well, I think that we need to favor whole food, cut out sugar and all those. Hold back on your exercise and help back on your sleep. You know, when you, when you eat good, you can sleep well, you can exercise well as well. You have the strength to carry on your exercise. So food, food also makes you healthy. Those are the three foundations that I found. Is the base, base things that we need to figure out.

And you said basically a whole food based diet. So real foods staying away from packaged, staying away from sugar. I mean, that's right up our alley. That's what we teach every single day.

So I have to ask this, what is your formal education?

Okay. I studied computer science. Computer science, majoring in digital security. So I'm a software engineer by training.

So how does that intersect with and how does that contribute? Like, how did you get where you're at now with essentially biohacking the body, as I like to call it?

Okay. I like to maximize everything that I do. When I do programming, I want to maximize its efficiency. And then the same goes to my goal. When I wanted to improve myself. I want to drill to the detail. I want to dig into the things that were what I can do to maximize its benefit, what I can do to synergize its impact. So that's how I came about that.

That's awesome. I mean, I just think it's pretty exciting to know that you took your detail of engineers. Kelly and I treat engineers in our practice and they have to know a lot of the why, like why, why, why, why, why before they'll do the what. Right. So, you know, I see that in you. You know, you had to understand and you took that and you applied your experience with wanting to improve productivity. And then you, you basically put it into action and now are turning it around into helping others improve their productivity.

I absolutely love the engineer's mind. I do. And I think it's fascinating that you, you know, you measured everything, too. So tell us a little bit about how you were measuring yourself. You weren't just going by subjective feelings. You weren't saying, oh, I feel better. I mean, you were. But what were you measuring? What were your objective measurements that you were doing during this time?

All right, Every day when I wake up, when I wake up, the first thing I would do is I'll step on a digital scale and that will record my weight and it will be sent to the cloud, to the Internet, I mean, to my storage in the Internet every day. So I have the tracking record every day. And I have my OURA ring where I record my detail on that night. What did I do? What's happening on that day so that I can tally every week, I can tally what did I do on that day, and that contributes to this and that. Even my exercise, when I do the strength training, I record how much weight I lift today. Plus, I mean, even the calorie intakes. When I eat, whenever I eat, I weigh how much calories. I cut that down. But eventually you don't have to do that. I realized that that's a tedious work for you to do, to weigh every single food whenever you want to eat at the beginning. Yes, you need to. I mean, if you want to be very specific. So in my case, yes, I wanted to know. I wanted to know how much calories I took on the day. So I measured that long time ago. And now I don't have to because I have the gut feeling. I know already, I can.

Yeah. So you've walked yourself to a place of being able to have intuitive eating because you spent the time getting to know your body. Right. And what was working for you. I love that. That's what we teach also, is, you know, let's learn your body first. There goes a period of time where you're going to need to measure things and you're going to need to write things down and give us some objective data so that you can get to the place where intuitive eating makes sense. Right.

You know, we often say you can't manage what you don't measure. And although that is tedious work in the very beginning, it's necessary work that has to be done so that you can begin to see and create your own connections. I feel this way. I See this data? And then after you create those connections, you have to do less of that monitoring. Although I have to say, I do like monitoring. And I love that you use an OURA ring. We use our oura rings, too. We love oura. We love the data. And I'm falling more in love with it because, you know, of course, they're. They're adding more and more parameters. More things that we get some. Yeah, more. More things that we get to. To monitor, which is. Is really awesome. So I want to ask you a little bit about your book, your first book, and I hear that you now have four books and a fifth book on the horizon, I believe. So we'll talk about all of those, but the one that I'm specifically talking about right now is Peak Human Clock, which is your first book. And I want to know, who's Jack and who's Johnny?

Oh, those are fictional characters.

Okay.

You know, sometimes we have fictional characters that are family members, or maybe they're ourselves, and we make it up. So they're just fictional.

Yeah, those are fictional. But Jack is someone who was like me when I was young.

Okay. Okay.

Yes.

And like most of my colleagues when I was young. Yes. So I need to make up one character who represents this group of people so that I can make it easier for reader to understand.

Yes, absolutely. Yeah. So it was using your own story. It was your own story. Yes. I'm saying that to really say to you and really to our listeners, that our stories are powerful. Our stories are really, really powerful. You know, Kelly's story, my story, landed us where we are today, doing what we're doing today, talking to you and connecting with someone all the way over in Singapore. And I just think that's really cool that our goal uniformly is we basically have the same goal, which is to improve people's lives, help them live optimally. And it doesn't matter where we live. We have that power to do that. So I just think it's really brave of you to begin writing these books. I know we have used this book in our practices, and they have already begun. They make sense. They've had an impact already. And I can't wait to read your other four, and I can't wait for the fifth one. So can you walk us through those four books that are out and then that fifth book that's coming? Tell us a little bit more about them?

Sure. The second book is Peak Self Control. It is about building willpower, building our own willpower to sustain habits. To sustain a habit. So it is More about the scientific explanation on why some people fail their New Year resolution, why some people succeed. You know, some people just fail to build their habit 30 days later. Some people could succeed in doing that. So those are talking about building a good discipline, building a self control that you can stack up on your own to create more good habits for yourself so that you can create a ripple effect throughout your life.

So what are the key factors there that help us build sustainability with our goals? Because we all know that willpower is kind of a self limiting. It's almost like a fallacy. Right. We can't have enough willpower in and of ourselves. We have to create it. Right. So what are the key factors that help us create that ongoing drive to sustain our habits?

All right, so the very first thing that we need to take care of that is that we need to make sure we need to identify things that draw our willpower, the things that drain our willpower. For example, a pack of potato chips in our kitchen's cabinet.

Oh, now you're getting nosy.

Yeah, that was me when I was young. That was me. Every time you wanted to eat good, like you wanted to eat an oatmeal, for example, whenever you open up your kitchen cabinet, there's a potato chip staring.

At you, talking to you. They talk to me. Do they talk to you? They say, I'm over here.

Hello. That itself is drawing your willpower. That itself, just having the potato chips lying on your kitchen cabinet is drawing your willpower. We haven't mentioned about the design of the package, the packaging, the psychological December, the company to draw you to pick up that potato chip and eat that. We haven't talked about that yet. So that itself is already drawing your willpower. So we cannot fight against our willpower forever. There's just a limit. There's just a limit. So we need to identify the list of factors that draw our willpower and then eliminate them. That way we don't have to fight, we don't have to resist against our willpower. So we can use our willpower, the full tank of willpower, for really something useful to build a new habit. So yes, that's really something that, I mean, the book will revolve around talking about willpower.

I love that, you know, every January we really focus on the power of creating habits that are going to be sustainable. And so I'm just going to say to the listeners, this would be a really good read to dig into. I know from your first book, it's very, it's going to be very engaging. And also very practical. And how do you implement? Right.

And I think you hit on the point that creating an environment that leads to success. Right. Because if you have more things in your environment that are drawing away from your willpower, then you're not going to be able to sustain.

So it's like the thing you used to say, Lori, time under tension.

Yes.

And the longer time under tension, the more opportunity for making a bad decision. Right. Same thing with setting that environment up in a good way.

Exactly. So book number three. Tell us about that.

Book number three is about brain plasticity. How do we improve our brain power? Our brain is the CEO of our whole life. If we want to maximize our productivity, I feel that we need to fine tune our brain power, increase our cognitive performance. The book will talk mostly about increasing the neurogenesis, or rather the regeneration of our neuron, of our cell, of our brain cell.

You know, we used to think that once those brain cells were gone, they're gone. And now we know with neuroplasticity we can regrow those connections. Right.

Yes.

How powerful is that to think we can undo some of the things we did in our younger days.

That's right. And the powerful thing about that is the earlier you start, the more benefits you get.

Yes.

As you get older, the earlier you start. Because if not you are, the longer you wait, the more your brain cell would have decayed. Would have decayed. And then it would take longer time to grow that back.

Yep. Yes.

So that's a hot topic right now.

Absolutely.

Brain health is a really hot topic. I think people are at the age where they're seeing the consequences of damage to the brain through Alzheimer's and dementia. You know, those conditions are on the rise. We're living longer, so we're seeing more of that happen. So, yeah, that's gonna be really fun to dig into.

And then we're also seeing that brain degradation or functionality of the brain decline is beginning earlier. Earlier and earlier. You know, 20s and 30s, 30s and 40s. You know, it's not in the later decades of life, it's earlier. So such an important topic. And we know the role that a poor diet has on the brain health. We do know that. But I love that that's a part of what you talk about in respect.

To productivity and thinking about those foods that are neurotoxins, or we call them foods, food, like substances in the packaging that are neurotoxin. And, you know, we're consuming those, as I say, as Americans, but I guess in Singapore, you guys have Access to processed foods as well. And so, you know, that's a big part of what's creating the damage and the inflammation in the brain.

And so the next book is on.

Peak mindset that talks about living heavier and how you exploit our subconsciousness to move forward with your goal.

So the power of your mind. Right. How you think so as you are. Yeah. And I think about. May I ask you how old you are? It seems like you have a lot of wisdom for. For being someone that is how old?

I'm 36 right now.

Oh, wow. Wow. Right.

So, Kelly, what do you think about that?

I think. I think it's incredible. I think it's absolutely incredible. What do you think from a mindset perspective? What are the biggest things that we can be doing to improve our mindset? Because if we sit and watch the news, the sky is falling. And I have to tell you a funny story about the oura ring before you answer the question, but I had a patient come in to me last week with his heart rate variability. Right. He had a very low heart rate variability. And he goes, according to Google, I'm going to die. And I mean, that's just bad news. Right? He was funny. He was laughing about it. He's an engineer. He's got an engineer's brain. So he's tracking everything, which I love. But there's bad news everywhere, is what I'm saying. And if we are a consumer of bad news all the time, that's making an impact on how we position ourselves with mindset, I would think. Was that what you found? And tell me more about how we create a mindset that's positive and healing.

All right. You know, Kelly and Laurie, I haven't been watching news for maybe a decade, I would say. Haven't been watching news for so long. And I haven't been following. I haven't been using social media, Facebook, Instagram. I haven't been using it. I haven't been using it for a long time. At one point when I was 27 or 28, I deleted my Facebook account. So I think the very first thing that we need to keep our brain, our mind healthy is that we need to stay away from all the. Any news that is not useful for us. So I know Covid has been around for a long time. When I first heard about COVID it was really devastating. And it was all over the news. It can't be helped, but people feel anxious. You know, that just makes matter worse. But then I found that there was nothing else I could do other than following the authorities, they say they asked us to stay at home. Yes, we will stay at home, keep a 1 meter distance and so on. So there was nothing else we could do. Even if we continue to be fearful, we can't do much about it. It's beyond our control. So rather than putting our mind into that direction, we could channel its power into doing something else. So in my case, what I did was I used most of my time during COVID time writing books and the outcome was I got to publish my book. That's the difference versus keeping, keeping on the news to check how many cases we have today, you know, what's happening today. I can't do anything with that already. So, you know, so that's what I've been doing. So as of now, I also am staying away from news.

I just have to say, like what I hear you saying is that distractions the things around us, we really again, going back to what you said before, is that environmental, looking at the environment and decreasing that and controlling what, what we can control and focusing our attention on what we can make an impact on.

Absolutely. What I was going to say is I feel like some of our listeners are cringing, thinking they can't give up the news. Right. They have to watch the news, they have to know what's going on. And what I would say to that is you have someone in your life, that's the headline news. They're going to let you know if the sky's falling. You don't have to sit there and watch it. I promise you can. You can learn about current events in a different way.

So those four books are done and they're published and we're super excited about those. And the fifth one you have on the horizon is about what about life's.

Work, what you were born to do and how you can maximize the impact of what you're going to do for the world. So that books will talk about increasing your creativity, see what you can do to see your goal achieved. Yeah, so, so, so that books will talk about that as a whole.

So all of these together really are your goal in all in writing, all of these is to improve or share with people how they can improve their productivity and how they can improve their life and have the joy filled life it sounds like that they deserve to have. Is that correct?

Yeah. Yes, that's right. I want to help them achieve their goal. So I start by stacking up the foundation that is having a good sleep, exercise and eating a good food, followed by developing good habits and then improve your brain power. Then create a happier life. Happier, a joyful life by using your subconsciousness. And then finally do what you were born to do. Realize your goal at the end.

And leaving that legacy, what a legacy you're leaving to your kids through your books. Right. And to the rest of the world. I love it.

Yep. And then, Saeed, this is your first podcast, right?

That's right. That's my first podcast.

Yeah.

So I just, I want to, you know, one of the things Kelly and I were talking about. We are excited to have you on here, to talk with you about this and have you on here for your first podcast. I can't wait to say that I knew you win because I think what you're writing and what you're doing is powerful. And I truly believe that people's lives are going to be changed as a result of what you're doing.

Thank you.

So, Saeed, can you tell us, can you tell our listeners where they can find your books and where. Where they can find more information out about you?

I can be found in my website, saeed hashim.com that's my full name, and it contains all the references to all my books. And my books are also in Amazon. So, yep, Feel free to check that out.

And you also have. They're available on. Is it Audible as well? They're recorded also?

Yes, the audiobooks are in audible.

Well, thank you so much for being here. We're so excited that you joined us.

Yes, thank you. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. You can find more information about Synergy at Synergy for Life. That's S Y N E R G e the number4life.com.

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