MBA1928 Guest Teacher – Tanessa Shears – How to Eliminate Brain Fog for More Productivity, Energy, and Growth in Your Business

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Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show, helping you to get better every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest Teacher episode. On our Guest Teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Tennessa Shears for more productivity, more energy and growth in your business. Are you burning the midnight oil? Are you taking on the advice of Hustle harder and harder? Do you find yourself having to have a few cups of coffee a day just to stay focused while you're in for a treat? Today because we got Tennessa Shears who is a professional. She's a health consultant as well as the host of the Becoming Limitless podcast where she helps entrepreneurs scale their business by optimizing their health. Hey, if you've been a listener of this show for some time, you know how much I talk about making sure you take care of yourself, your body, your health. To make sure you show up to your company, to your business in tip top shape so that you can lead your company, so you can lead your team, so you can generate great ideas. This all does not happen if you can't think clearly, if you're not well rested, if you're not functioning at 100%. That's why today's guest teacher lesson is so important. Tanessa is going to share with you some easy to implement strategies that you can do right now, like today to improve your well being. To have well rested nights, to have more productive days. Can't wait to get into this one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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I'm so pumped to have Tanessa Shears on today's episode. She's going to show us how to get a well rested night's sleep consistently so that we can have more productive days and go at our business at 110%. I'm going to pass you on to Tanessa right now, but I'll be back to wrap up today's episode to give my own insights. But for now, take it away Tanessa.

Hello, my name is Tanessa Shears and I'm a health consultant and I work specifically with entrepreneurs. And today I'm so excited to talk to you about how to eliminate brain fog and wake up feeling well rested specifically so we can have more productivity, energy and growth in our businesses. Right? And one thing I've noticed over the years is that the entrepreneurial community has made it the standard to like hustle and grind and most commonly sacrifice our sleep and our well being in the name of number chasing and goal chasing. And we always think that we're gonna feel better or have more time to take care of our health when we get to that next milestone. We know like as business owners we are always pushing the boundary and we just never ever get to that, you know, that there where we're gonna start taking better care of ourselves and you know, value our brain health and our personal health. So we end up just feeling overtired and suffering from brain fog and even we try to use this foggy brain to run our businesses, serve our customers and create impact. And let's be real, it just feels terrible. So why is this so important? Well, a clear and well rested brain thinks faster, it makes better business decisions, it helps us hold our focus when we need it. Most and helps us stay emotionally in control far better than a sluggish and tired brain. We want this clear brain because it allows us to scale our business so much faster and get more done during our workday and those intentional work blocks we set up for ourselves so we don't have to take all of our to do lists and our work brain home and into our family time. So my mission in helping you with this today is to create a wave of well rested CEOs that have clear and sharp brains and I teach them how to do it with biohacking. And biohacking basically just explores the idea of creating personalized, measurable strategies for enhancing longevity and wellbeing and health so that we can have more fun and energy in our business. So I'm going to be sharing with you my top three biohacks that can help you eliminate brain fog and help your brain and body reach high performance. So for biohack number one, I'm going to have you complete a circadian rhythm reset. If you haven't heard the word circadian rhythm before, no big deal. It's basically your body's tendency to follow a 24 hour clock. I mean so many things in our bodies tend to happen routinely at the same time every single day. Things like temperature rises and drops and hormone shifts our sleep wakes cycle when we're hungry. So we want to actually lean into how our body follows this clock to get the most out of how our brain works. So how are you going to do the circadian reset? Well, you're going to choose a bedtime and a wake up time and you are going to follow those as consistently as possible seven days a week. Yes. That means even on weekends. And I know not all the time is going to be perfect. So what I always love to suggest is try to keep it plus or minus 30 minutes. That means if you're waking up at 6:30 every morning, waking up anytime between 6 and 7 will help your brain be more consistent with its energy. Now why is this while we're sleeping at night, your brain goes through several unique phases of sleep that have different purposes. We've probably heard of them before. Your brain goes through deep sleep mostly earlier in the night and that really helps with restoring our brain and converting long term memories and really just getting ourselves feeling refreshed and recovered for the next day. Mostly during the later part of the night we do a lot of dreaming and this is what I call on entrepreneurial gold because during this time we're more creative. It helps us think out of the box during the day. It helps us manage our emotions and our moods and just makes us better entrepreneurs. So now you know how I said the majority of the deep sleep happens earlier in the night and the majority of REM sleep or dreaming happens later in the night. Well, if you're constantly shifting your sleep and wake up times and you know by two to three hours every single night, so say you're going to bed at 10 on the weekdays and one on the weekends. Well, what actually happens is you don't end up just cutting into your sleep by a couple hours. You might be cutting out entire quality portions of your sleep. So here's an example. If during the earlier part of the night you are experiencing most of your deep sleep, but you stay up two to three hours later, you might actually be cutting out like 60% of your deep sleep. So if you're constantly waking up feeling like you have jet lag and never feeling refreshed, it might be because your circadian rhythm needs a bit of a reset. So I always recommend follow it for two to three weeks and you're going to start to notice your body naturally getting tired and waking up at the same time. And you can take advantage of your natural hormone shifts that help you wake up, feel alert and have clear thinking. On top of that, you're going to get the full spectrum of quality sleep so that your brain can be focused during the day. Biohack number two takes us into our bedroom. Yep, you can biohack your bedroom because the environment you sleep in contributes so much to your ability to to get high quality sleep. And we need high quality sleep for our brains to be working at peak performance. So the first thing you're gonna do right when you're ready to go to sleep tonight, you are going to hold your hand 6 inches in front of your face. Now while you're doing this, make sure all of your lights are out just like it would be as if you were sleeping. Now, if you can see your hand, that means there's too much light coming into your bedroom, whether that be from the curtains or maybe there is an LED light that's lighting up on one of your devices. So if you fail the hand test, there's a couple you can look at first. Number one is investing in proper blackout curtains. Now when you order these, I highly recommend going in store because I like to take the flashlight on my phone and hold them up through the back of the curtain to see if I can see the light. Because a lot of blackout curtains that you'll find in the store, they actually aren't true blackout curtains. So we want to make sure we can't see any light coming through. Then, if you want to really biohack your room, what I love to do is take a little bit of Velcro and Velcro the sides of your curtains or your roller blinds right to the wall. That'll help seal out any light. Why is this so important? Well, if light is creeping into our bedrooms, whether that be from the neighbor's porch light, a street light, or maybe the sun coming up early in the morning, this actually allows our brain to slip out of sleep a lot easier, and that can really disrupt the quality of your sleep. So in order for our brain to feel well rested when we wake up, we need to make sure our sleep is of the highest quality. Now, while you're performing your hand test, I don't only want you to look for light that might be coming in through a window, but I want you to be looking for light that might be coming from a flashing phone or from a speaker or from your air conditioning unit, any type of LED light that might be lighting up. Things to look for also include, like, the face of your clock. We don't want any light to be shining in our room. We want it to be absolutely pitch black. So one of my favorite hacks that I like to do is just get a piece of black electrician's tape or walk around my room and make sure that all of the LED lights are completely blocked out so they're not disrupting our sleep. So biohacking your bedroom can mean a whole bunch of different things. Like, we can even look at things like the temperature, what kind of bedding you're using, how soft your pillow is. But the biggest thing that we need to address first is always going to be performing that hand test and making sure there's no light disrupting our sleep. The third and final biohack I'm talking to you about is the ability to shift your brain waves into a state of relax before bed in order to prep you for high quality sleep. Now, I want you to think about this when you're focused and alert in your business, you're having conversation, or maybe even when you're listening to this right now, your brain waves are oscillating at a frequency called beta. That's a great thing. We love this in our business. But so many entrepreneurs operate in this state right up until they turn out their lights to go to bed, and then they wonder why they either have trouble falling asleep or are Waking up repeatedly throughout the night and have trouble falling back to sleep then. So what can you do for this? Well, we need to actually biohack our brainwaves. So there is actually a different brainwave state that has a bit slower brainwave frequency and it's called alpha. We need to be proactively allowing our brain to spend time in alpha frequency before we go to bed. And this really helps prep us for restful, high quality sleep. Now, we're going to do this by proactively shifting or downshifting to alpha wave activities before bed to allow our brain to unload and unwind. So while we're working all day long, we have a ton of stuff on our plate. We're processing decisions all day and we're being creative and perhaps we're working with customers or clients. There's a lot on our brain we need to deload that kind of think of it almost as like a cognitive deload that needs to happen before we go to bed. Now, it's not always about the activity. We're often taught that it needs to be bubble baths or, you know, quiet time or meditation to take us out of this focus and alert state. But I'm going to offer to you that it might more be about the experience than the activity. Let's take reading a book, for example. So I know for me, if I pick up a book on marketing or business or even health and nutrition, my brain lights up. I am so excited. I have my two highlighters and my pen and my sticky notes and I'm thinking, oh, this will be great content. Or I'd really like to write a post on this, or I can implement this. And this type of reading keeps my brain in beta. And I'm going to contrast that with reading like a fluffy fiction book, something that, you know, makes me just completely relax, tune out, enter a different world. That really helps my brain enter alpha waves. So don't think of it so much as the activity you're doing, but how the experience makes you feel. We want that relaxed, loose focus, kind of like a loose attention that happens when we are in alpha alpha. So some things that might really help to experiment with include meditation, journaling, stretching, talking to your partner, all kinds of things like that. Now, if you're like, I can't even remember the last time I could turn my brain off like that, there is an app that I love to recommend to my clients. It's called Brain fm. They have a relaxed channel on there and it basically invites your brain into alpha wave. A lot faster that I find it's a really good example to be like, oh, that's what my brain feels like when it's relaxed. And it kind of creates a target for your brain to hit. So that has been an app that has worked wonderfully for my clients as they're learning how to shift their brain waves into alpha frequency before bed. So those are my three biohacks that are really gonna help your brain enjoy high quality, restful sleep so that you can have the recovery and feel fully recharged for your next day in your business. So you can hit the ground running feeling productive, focused and alert. So my name again is Tennessa Shears. If you want to dive way deeper into biohacking and you just think that this is is so fun, I feel like I'm just getting started on brain performance. You can head to TonessaShears.com energy and there you'll be able to download my entrepreneur's playbook. It's called 12 Ways to Biohack your energy. I created this based on the 12 biohacks that I've worked on with my clients that deliver the biggest results in their businesses and how they feel every single morning to make them feel more productive and more energized. So you can head there, grab that free download, and I hope that you can start implementing all of this stuff so that your brain can feel fully clear and alert and you can eliminate brain fog and wake up feeling much more well rested for higher productivity, energy and growth in your business. Thanks again for joining me today. And now I'll give you back to.

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Such an Important Lesson by Tennessa Shears. Don't forget to visit her website and grab her freebie over@tennessashears.com energy that's tennessa s h e a r s.com energy I loved her lesson because many of the things I that she shared I've tried and really work and a few I haven't tried and I can't wait to try them out. But definitely having a set cycle of sleep, meaning you sleep at the same time, wake up at the same time every single day really helps. I have seen this in my own life. I try to stay as disciplined as possible with that. Sometimes I have a little bit of wiggle room on the weekend, but it's more like a half hour, an hour. But the great thing is, as I wake up, I don't feel like I want to stay in bed. I feel like I need to get up and move. I'm ready to go. And that first four hours where I am awake, I am so productive. So her advice is absolutely spot on. Also, blocking out any light in your bedroom, making sure it's as dark as possible when you sleep, is super, super helpful. A lot of you might have experienced this outside your house. Like, you go to a hotel and they have blacked out curtains and you're like, wow, I slept so well. And that has a lot to do with it. One of the challenges I have is that I love reading nonfiction books. And I got to stop myself from reading a business book or something like that before bed because it does stimulate me, gets my ideas flowing in my head. So I have to switch to fiction or even history or even sometimes I read travel guides. I just love learning about different cultures in different countries. It's not super stimulating yet interesting, and it kind of lulls me to sleep. My rule of thumb is that anything that I read that would cause me to want to take down a note or to jot it down or highlight it is too stimulating. I need something that I could read and probably forget in the next five minutes. All in all, we can do a lot to improve our sleep. We could just follow the steps Sanessa has laid out today, and it's an investment in ourselves. It's an investment in our business. Remember, you are the leader of your company. And, and how you perform is really how your company's going to perform, because your decisions affect everybody. Affect your customers, affect your employees, affect your overall success. So even if you implement one or two of the strategies that were shared today, it's going to make all the difference. But do it. Try something. You won't regret it. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you love what you hear, leave us an Apple podcast rating and review. We'd love to hear what you think of the show and. And smash that subscribe button, follow button so you don't miss the next episode. Speaking of the next episode, tomorrow we get into the metaverse. Yep. We discuss what does Facebook's metaverse mean for your business? Is there something that you can do to prepare for it? How soon is this going to be a mainstream? Are there opportunities that your business can take advantage of? That's what we get into in tomorrow's episode. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I can only speak from my own experience, but the quality of my sleep really matters a lot in terms of my overall life satisfaction. Just like how good my life is. Because if I don't sleep well, I don't feel well. It's going to affect the way I am in business. In life. I'll feel cranky. I won't feel like going to the gym because I'll be tired. I'll feel a bit lazy. My decision making abilities won't be the best. Is just horrible. Really. It's just a bad idea not to sleep well. This is why sleep and when I sleep and when I would get up is so important to me. It's like high, high priority. I do not sacrifice this because it's going to really ruin my next day if I don't do that. And sometimes more than just one day, maybe there's a ripple effect and it kind of affects the day after that as well. Until I kind of recover. This means sometimes me saying no to late nights or late hangouts or late dinners. I always regret it when I break my sleep schedule. It's just not worth it for me. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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