Connecting Your Mind And Body For Optimal Performance, with Michael Ceely

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Welcome to the Meaningful Revolution podcast. I am your host, Sean Butter, certified high performance coach. This is the podcast where we help you create, build and implement a life that you find fulfilling and is worth living. And today's guest is a repeat guest. I'm really excited to have him on today. He's a elite mindset coach at mft. He helps athletes, teams and organizations use the power of psychology to get results beyond their expectations. He's also an athlete himself, loving cycling, and he's won some titles. He's gone to the Olympic trials twice. It's really amazing. He's got a new book coming out called Make a Break that's debuting soon. I'm really excited to have back on the podcast. Mr. Michael Seeley. Michael, welcome.

Sean, always a pleasure talking with you.

Likewise. I just wanted to say that another reason why I'm excited for you being a repeat guest is I've always found you really thoughtful. I know that you're really a go getter and you have a lot of empathy in the work you do. So I just wanted to first honor that as we go into today's topic, which we think we have a couple of different angles to go after, but originally we're talking about nutrition and health in respect to being an athlete. But I think you can't talk about health and nutrition without talking about mindset, without talking about how you operate in the world. To start off with a story, I'd love to know a little bit more about how you think about that. Like body, mind connection. And we didn't really talk about this before, so I'm putting you on the spot a little bit. But we talk about that mind, body connection, and maybe how your mindsets around your health help you succeed and perform out in the world, either in your sport, in your profession, or just in life in general.

Yeah. So mind, body connection. Yeah, they're very dependent on each other. So just the basics there. Shawn, if you are a go getter like you described me, and I would say that you are too, and that's why we like talking with each other. But if you are that way, if you are wired for chasing your dreams and you're passionate about what you do, you gotta take care of your body. Especially I think the number one is sleep. Now, when I work with my clients in my psychotherapy practice and even athletes in my mindset coaching programs, I always ask them what their sleep hygiene is called. Sleep hygiene. Like, how good are you about your quality of sleep, your depth of sleep, your consistency of what time you go to bed, which time you wake up in the morning. I think a lot of people in our society skimp on sleep or cheat their sleep and really don't prioritize it enough. So that is a big thing right there. The next thing of course I would say is hydration and nutrition. I've got some hydration right here. Always drinking water pretty much all day long. There we go. Most folks are a little dehydrated. Quality of food is important. Not having too much sugar, making sure that you don't eat before you go to bed. Just the basic stuff that everybody knows anyway it merits repeating because so many of us break those rules. I find myself doing that from time to time. Being hypocritical. Oh man. I need to really practice what I preach. So it's really easy to forget about the basics about taking care of yourself, basically hydration, nutrition and sleep. So that's, that's for starters there for the mind body connection, right?

Yeah. One of my mentors often says that common sense often isn't common practice. And so I think especially as a coach talking about health, a lot of times I found that on sleep, nutrition and hydration is something we all really, I think as a society devalue because all the like coffee, Red Bull, all the other things that you could juice like all these other things. Was there a time in your life, either as an athlete or as a professional where you noticed that you weren't getting enough sleep or you weren't. Didn't have one of these pieces in line? I know, I heard you talk about that sometimes you're hypocritical. But as your life coach, I'd say that that's a little bit of negative self talk. But we all fall off the wagon. We all need to get back on track. Is there, do you have. Okay, there's a lot of hyper inspiring million miles a minute. So the question, we'll start with this question. When you get off track on these basic habits, how do you prevent that beating up on yourself and get back into what you need to be doing? Get back on track.

Yeah. The biggest trick I use on myself and advise the clients to do this as well is think about what you would say to your best friend if they did the same thing.

Right.

So like you're say your best friend says, hey Sean, I've been since I slept in this morning. A couple nights ago I had too much alcohol to drink. I really don't think I'm really. Or I'm being hypocritical or I'm you know, I'm not really living up to my standards, I suck or whatever it is. Like that negative self talk. Like, how would you respond to that friend? And that's what you want to do with yourself in your own head, is be your own best friend. How would you respond to that? Because if you do respond to a friend, you probably say something like, hey, look, you've been so consistent already. It's just a blip in the radar. Don't worry about it. Words of encouragement and kind of painting the bigger picture. But for most of us, really, we do beat up on ourselves. We're our own worst critic. So just catching yourself and saying, yeah, what would my best friend say to me? Right. Right now that works for me. And it's not B.S. it's like, I really, if I was given that advice to a friend, I wouldn't, I would genuinely say the truth. Right? So just say the truth back to yourself. And that really diminishes that inner critic. So that's one of the big tricks I do. Also looking at, I think about a graph, like a stock market graph. If it's, if you have a good portfolio and your portfolio is you, meaning you're a good person, you're. You have some accomplishments like you, basically you're a good person like that your portfolio, if you will, is strong. So therefore it's going to perform. So if you look at in the stock market, there's going to be ups and downs, but the trajectory is on the upswing. You want to be looking at that overall, how have you been doing over the last couple of years? Right. Actually been doing pretty well. So that helps for me just like the big picture graph. And then treat yourself like your own best friend.

I love that insight to think about it over time. A lot of times when I'm checking with my coaching clients, it's how well were you exercising the last three months? And I think you get a different answer than how were you today or how were you this week? Because I think people a lot of times will crunch that that time. So I think that's a really important insight on. I love that portfolio thing. Also celebrate everything that is good about you, even when we fumble like we're humans, like this is part of life is the mess and managing the mess and not letting it stop you. So I absolutely love that idea too. So I'm curious then, in your practice, do you see common places where people get tripped up on health? I know you said the diagnostic of sleep, nutrition, hydration basics. Do you see Any, like, common threads or common things that have happened recently, maybe since the pandemic or anything of that nature?

Sure, yeah. Glad you brought that up. Things trend since the pandemic. A lot of us were really isolated during the pandemic. Depending on your situation, people who are just couples got sick of each other, or families got sick of each other, or people who were single. We got really lonely and we. I think we got into this habit of staying in this bubble. And on that notice, the things that trip you up could be isolating yourself. It doesn't even have to be really physically, but also emotionally. Are you staying in regular contact with old friends from college or something like that? Do you have a regular cadence with talking with family members? Do you have a regular cadence of doing hobbies and fun things with your friends? So just being really mindful and asking yourself, am I isolating myself? And there's this tendency, I would say human tendency, if you're not feeling in a good mood, you tend not to want to go hang out with other people. You don't feel very sociable. And so the thing to do then is to really to force yourself to do it. And at least to a certain extent, if you're not like, hanging out with anyone for a couple of weeks, depends on your general default style. But if you find yourself isolating, force yourself to get out there and do something. Most likely you're gonna, worst case scenario, be bored or something's not gonna kill you, but you want to be less isolating. That's one thing I've seen since the pandemic, is that people need to really get out more, do some things more with other people.

Right on. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So we have a lot of different ways we could go down here. So I'm curious, what are your health habits? So I've recently started using, like, the Carbon app from. I think I'll get the guy's name wrong. I'll confuse the guy, but. So I've been like, tracking my food, which has been a new kind of insightful thing. I've been doing, like, athletic greens for supplements. Found out that I've actually been sleeping well with that particular supplement, which is cool. So I'm curious, do you do supplements? How do you think of your nutrition throughout the day or throughout the week? I guess as an athlete and as a high performance mindset coach.

Yeah, I definitely noticed there's certain foods and things like that that make me think more clearly. I typically. Every single day. I'm not a dietitian. Here. But I'll just tell you what works for me is I do supplements and I actually crush them up so that they basically are absorbed quicker into my body. Because sometimes you hear about you have a pill that's covered in gelatin, like you don't get much out of that. So I crush up my vitamins and I put a, I make a smoothie and I put a fair amount of olive oil in that as well, which is an anti inflammatory, it's antioxidants. So I have this basically a smoothie I make every day after my workout. That's one of the things that I do. If I don't do that, I do notice I don't think it's a placebo but I'll notice I'm not quite as sharp thinking during the day. So. So that's one thing that I do. Again, just regular, regularity of when you eat is important in our high paced society. You skip lunch, badge of honor, go all afternoon, didn't eat. You really gotta have that regular time. And what I do and what I suggest for my psychotherapy clients and for my athletes is you actually block out time for dinner, you block, block out time for lunch. So my calendar, there's basically no gaps in it because I have lunch break, I have dinner and it's when that hour hits, I try to drop everything, just go do it. So really consistency in, especially in your diet, your body gets really used to that rhythm. So that's what I do.

Right on. So I'm hearing the word consistency a lot and I think that is as I performance coach a lot of my goal is to get people more consistent in what they're doing to reach that next level. So consistent sleep times, consistent meal times, consistent shake, special shake after you work out. Where are some other areas that are really good for that? You need consistency to see the benefits in your physical and mental health.

Yeah. So are you talking about athletics or are you talking about just like for everyone?

I'd say just probably for everyone. Imagine that you're, you're not maybe going to have as big of meals if you're an athlete, but I'm sure a lot of these principles are probably the same across the board.

Yeah, yeah. So consistency is one of my mantras and it's consistency in the things that you know that if you miss them it's going to affect you detrimentally. So that on the daily, having consistent daily habits, having consistent weekly habits, if you're in a relationship, having a date night at least once a month, minimum Things that are just calendared. I'm a big fan of putting stuff in the calendar. Schedule a vacation six months out, have that sort of a cadence. I take a vacation every six months. I visit my family every year, whatever it is. And just really putting all of that in the calendar ahead of time because it's easy to get caught up. We'll postpone our vacation. I'm not going to visit family this year. I'm too busy. Put your calendar out, literally, like, for the full year, and make these sort of quarterly things, quarterly habits that you got going yearly. Even out a couple of years if you want. You can do that in your Google calendar or whatever. So there's a big power. There's a difference between talking about wanting to do something and actually scheduling it right. Because you need to schedule it. It's real. It's there looking back at you. Then the next step, of course, is following through and obeying your schedule. I call it obey the schedule. It's like a mandate from you from the past, who wrote this stuff down for a reason. You from the past who says, I want to make sure that I exercise where I visit family. You wrote it down for a reason. You put it in your schedule for a reason. That when you're looking at it later on, you go remind yourself, like, why did I put this down? Oh, because it rejuvenates me. It sharpens the saw, if you will. Like, I put all the stuff down for a reason. So calendar consistency.

See, I love it. Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm someone that's resisted the calendar. I don't. I don't like structure. And I know that structure is what helps me follow through and actually moves the football forward, as they say. Yeah. How do you make it fun?

You don't make it fun.

Okay.

Because if you think it's going to be fun, if you think it, if you come into it, think with a complaining attitude, like, this is drudgery. I got to make this fun. I got to spice it up. Think of how you feel after you do something. Even say, your finances or QuickBooks or taxes. What. When you get done doing something that. This kind of drudgery, do you feel better? Probably, Right. Maybe you don't. I don't know. But the point is, it's not really supposed to be fun. So if you want to drop that and think about more of a different feeling of pride and accomplishment so that you look back and you said, hey, I was really consistent with these things that are important to me. It fills you with a different type of happiness. It's more of this sort of glowing pride, like feeling just satisfied. So satisfaction as opposed to happiness, which is fleeting. Satisfaction in yourself and feeling proud of your accomplishments last longer. So I tell people to focus on that. Another thing, Sean, that I thought of is the power of accountability. So that if you have the calendar and it's just you being accountable, accountable for you, that's tough. Right. But if you have some accountability, buddy, so you can put it in your calendar. And this may sound kind of goofy, but you maybe someone else who has their own business say, we do our books once a week and we text each other and we ask, hey, did you do your books this week or did you exercise this morning? Texting. Getting accountability buddies is huge. So I'm a big fan of that. I know we have our regular zoom meetings. I look forward to those. And that pushes me because I'm going to be talking to Sean. We last month we talked about this thing and I haven't done much and that lights a fire and it gets me going. So use. Use the power of the calendar, power of accountability. Those two combined will override any sense of. This isn't fun.

Gotcha. That's a very interesting. So I love it. I absolutely believe in accountability and the calendar. I guess maybe my style is. I also interesting. I'm not looking to be happy while I'm doing things, but I want to look forward to doing things. And so sometimes when you have to do your taxes, I like the how do you feel after it? But it's also, you can learn a lot about how the year went by going through a lot of that stuff. I know. So I'm always trying to make things as enjoyable as possible. And realizing that sometimes as enjoyable as possible is just tolerating and just getting through it. My mantra, like for a lot of those types of tasks is this must get done and for whatever, that's what works for me. Where it's just, okay, that gotta push through this and get on to the next thing.

Yeah. Yeah. A couple other real simple things too, is I listen to music sometimes if I'm doing something that's not really exciting, people, I think don't listen to enough music, that can be helpful. But really thinking about how you're going to feel when it's done, not as a sense of relief, but more of I'm going to feel like, proud of myself. This is me being responsible. I feel good about that. That kind of a feeling, chasing that feeling can get you through the task.

Gotcha.

Yeah. Okay.

We don't need to beat that dead horse.

Beat the dead horse, yeah.

I'm curious then, what have you really found? Started the podcast talking about sleep. It's something that I have bouts of insomnia in and out and something I'm always kind of working on. Been following a bunch of neuroscientists. I focus on sleep.

Like.

Walker. I can't remember his first name. He's at UC Cal here. Berkeley.

In Berkeley.

How have you dialed in your sleep routine over the years? As I'm sure that being an athlete and just out in life and helping people maximize their athleticism or their life and your therapy practice probably comes up quite a bit.

Yeah, a couple, two things there. So you talk about insomnia. Let's table that for a second. But generally speaking, for good sleep hygiene, you do want to get that consistency in the wake up time and the go to bed time. So that as hard as it is, if you want to sleep in, just really resist that and go for being tired during that day and just staying that consistent structure. Bedtime, sleep time. Another thing you can do is have a winding down ritual in the evening. Something that triggers your brain that you are preparing for bed. So that could be some journaling, it could be prayer, it could be something light exercise or a meditation. It doesn't even have to be that long, like maybe a couple of minutes so that your brain goes, oh, here's the ritual, my evening ritual. Then you start training yourself to wind down. Another couple things too is can you dim the lights? Turning out lights, you get closer to. Bedtime is really powerful in any kind of especially fluorescent lights or blue lights or things like that. I have an all screens off time set and that's usually for me is 9pm like no more screens. That can be helpful too because what happens to your brain as you start looking at a screen is it just gets all. Your brain gets all lit up. So a couple things there, winding down ritual, having that screen's off time. So the insomnia is a common thing for a lot of us. And it typically involves thinking, thinking about something. So if you're laying down to sleep, there's something on your mind. That's typically what the insomnia is. And it's basically your mind is revved up. It's in problem solving mode. It's not yet in wind down mode. A couple tricks for that is again, the power that journaling is you can do. I call it like a vomit journal. So that you put down all your worries, all the things and Just write it out on a piece of paper and then it kind, it gets out of your head onto the paper and what you can do for that, and this is a little more advanced first. Yeah, first you can just write it out. The next thing you can do is write a mini solution to each of those worries or thoughts and it's just a one small action that you're going to do the next day that's going to reduce that problem. So being really practical, instead of having worrying about it, you basically before you go to bed, you put to bed all of the worries and you remedy it with a little action. Tomorrow I am going to do 15 minutes of bookkeeping. Tomorrow I'm going to do a half hour of taxes. I'm going to time it. Tomorrow I'm going to email a friend of mine that I owe him this project. I'm going to tell him I'm actually going to be late. And so the night before you vomit out all the stuff that's in your head, then you write down mini solutions and you got this in your diary. You close the diary, that's another ritual and you go to bed. That can help the insomnia. Now there's other things too. Being a psychotherapist is that legitimately people are wired in different ways. And so it could be some people may need some sleep medication for a short period of time. Right. Being open minded about some of the solutions available. So I'm not necessarily recommending that. I'm just saying that keep in mind all the options there. Exercise is huge what that does. And I don't recommend actually exercise later in the evening or later in the afternoon because that gets you amped up. But daily regular exercise produces all of these neurotransmitters and hormones that buffer the stress hormone, which is cortisol. Cortisol gets you amped up in fight or flight mode. The exercise hormones, neurotransmitters, buffer that so that you can sleep better every night. So that's some basic stuff on sleep hygiene. A little bit about insomnia. There some tricks for you. Awesome.

Yeah, I love it. There's some other things that I have heard of. Again, talk to your health professionals, everyone before experimenting with this. We're not doing recommendations but so first off, like when you get. Daylight is important from what I've also read and studied. So right when you get up, getting in the sun or getting into bright light to help set your internal clock to the right things and it's morning and evening light are way more important than we think magnesium is supposed to actually help with sleep. I know some people like for supplements too. Melatonin can be helpful. I found that it wasn't consistently effective. And what I've read is that that's another like short term solution that can help you if you like travel and are jet lags. There's so many different types of sleep aids rituals that can really help.

Another thing too Sean just thought of is you can have a phrase that you use. If you are laying there in bed and you start to think and your brain is running fast is you can say something like I'll figure it out tomorrow, as simple as that is, or the day is done or let it go, pick it up tomorrow. As simple as that is. It is a command to your brain and your brain takes language verbatim. That can be helpful too. It gives you permission to chill out and go to sleep.

Right on. Awesome. Let's see where another good place to go. So we talked a little bit about nutrition, we talked a little bit about sleep. How about exercise? What do you think? So like you work with athletes that are at the higher end professionalism. So for the everyday folks, do you have in your like psychotherapy practice a recommendation for exercise that, that you talk to people about?

Yeah, I prescribe it for all my clients. Some sort of exercise. Now again you want to be going to your doctor, so do your due diligence and see if it's okay for you to exercise before you actually do it. But if you get the green light from your doctor to exercise, absolutely. The benefits are just are huge. Our bodies are designed for motion and activities. So that's. We have this design from being hunter gatherers and it's still. We haven't updated to robots yet, hope we never will. But point being, body's made for exercise and you gotta exercise. So ideally in the morning that's really the best time to do it. You get it out of the way, you're not putting it off throughout the day. It really does give you this cocktail of good hormones and neurotransmitters to set yourself up for success throughout the entire day. So yeah, everyone I talk with who is not an athlete, I have them start some sort of an exercise program. Absolutely.

Okay. I know on the high performance side, we have a kind of catch all recommendation for people. If you're not doing anything. If you can work up to two like 30 minute cardio workouts a week and two 20 minute like weightlifting again if you're able to, after you contact your health professionals, it's just like a general, like aim for that. Some people maybe it's just walking every day for an hour is the edge of what you're able to do. And that's like anything that's active is great. I think getting outside is important and I think making sure you're balancing weight and cardiovascular is also important. If you're able to do it. Do you have any recommendations like that for how you break down the exercise or just do it consistently?

Yeah, I think I'll go back to the calendar. If you put it in your calendar and it's staring back at you, there it is. So if you have this intention of. I'm going to work out a couple of times a week. That's very vague. You want to be very intentional about what days you're working out, what days you're lifting weights, what days you're walking or whatever that is and have that dialed in there and again use that power of accountability. So can you go for a walk with a friend somewhere? Even if you have to drive there to meet them, you're going to make sure that you do it. So I'm a fan of doing something every single day for exercise and I push people to do that. Of course I respect if they don't want to do that, but I err on the side of the more activity and maybe less time spent during the day, but more, more daily getting that rhythm going on a daily basis. So typically you want to be doing at least 30 minutes of sleep something and ideally first thing in the morning so it's done. So the way you get that confidence boost again, the neurotransmitters and hormones are really going to help you. So that's what I recommend.

Okay, right on. As we've been talking about health, is there anything or any area we haven't really focused in on yet that is also helpful from a general mental and physical health?

Yeah, the power of taking vacations or even mini vacations, having that again in your schedule, in your subconscious mind, you having something to look forward to. It's in there, it's scheduled. I'm going to a three day beach weekend or something like that. Once you get in that new location, you don't have all the distractions from your home, you don't have the distractions from work and you can really just even notice like your muscle tension relax. So something happens when you do some sort of a vacation, a big vacation or even a small one or even one day, but you want to be leaving your zip code and going Somewhere that can be really helpful.

Okay, I guess another good question then related to this. Is there anything that you find is uniquely something that you do or believe in regards to health, that other people maybe think you're a little crazy for, which I love those types of things but. Or just things that are not common. It doesn't have to be a big crazy thing.

Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah, here's one. This a little bit wacky, but I'm proud of it. I take a cold shower every morning. So I start out with warm water so I don't shock myself totally. And then. But what I finish off is all the way cold now. There's a lot of research going on now about the power of cold baths and things like that. I've been doing that in Scandinavia for centuries. The saunas and the cold baths and all this stuff. So that's something I do every day. And if I miss cold showers, I notice a difference. What happens is it does. It lights up parts of your system and activates certain organs. Like it's really good for you. So the extent that you can start doing some sort of a cold water therapy regularly and you get used to it as well and you get to the point where I want the cold shower. So that's something a little bit nutty about me. Wait, you take cold showers? Yes, I do and I'm proud of it.

Yeah, right on. I've done that before. I've done cryo. Could you explain a little bit of maybe like could you do one day when you don't take your cold shower? How does that impact your day and then the converse of another day when you take your cold shower. What kind of. I guess focusing on what benefits are you getting or missing from the cold shower in particular.

Yeah. Not just the physiological benefits. That activates a lot of good hormones, gets your adrenaline going. Like a lot of good things there physiologically. But psychologically something interesting happens is that it's not really a pleasant thing to all of a sudden have cold water poured on you. But if you have this mindset of leaning into the pain, if you will, leaning into the discomfort and you do it like you say, I'm the kind of person who takes a cold shower. There's a little switch that's flipped every day that when you step into that cold water is that it gets you less and less complaining and more and more I get to do this as opposed to I have to do this. So some psychological training where that maybe you see some sort of a daunting task during the day. Hey, there's my cold shower. So it's a little bit of positive brainwashing in that respect of leaning into something that's uncomfortable.

Right on. So I noticed. So I don't do the cold shower stuff because that's terrible in my opinion. But I do, I have, there's a, like a cryo spa that I go to pretty regularly. Like once a week. Once every other week. Or not recently, but there was a time I've found that it's strangely relaxing to have to sit in three minutes and like negative 160 degree weather or air your hands and head covered up. It's for lack of a better word, it's like a mental reset. Like you can almost feels like a nap after three minutes of extreme cold exposure. Like that. Or I've done the ice baths too. Or I think it's similar. I also think physiologically for me I've noticed a lot less inflammation. Like I just feel allergies. If my sinuses and eyes are puffy, that's a little bit more reduced and whatnot. So I think there is a lot of. At least I could say that personally. That's been the benefit for me and there's a ton of research. There's the Huberman podcast, if you've heard of him, where he talks a lot about like hot heat and cold exposure stuff and Tony Robbins, Wim Hof, all those guys. So that's pretty awesome. I love that. Yeah, that's a tough one. I have mad respect that every morning you're like, okay, let's crank up the cold water.

Kudos to you for stepping into 160 below zero, whatever the temperature is. I've heard that can have some big benefits too. Of course you don't want to be doing that on your own. You want to go to a facility, right. So you know, freeze to death. But they're like, you're talking about the anti inflammatory benefits of cold therapy. And by the way, cortisol, the major stress hormone produces a lot of inflammation. Inflammation, right. So that's one of the byproducts. It's kerosene. Like it's meant for fight or flight, but it does cause inflammation. I tried green tea for a while, which is a huge anti inflammatory. But we both like coffee and I tell you, like, I can't give up my coffee, but green tea is good also. What is like cumin, things like that. Some of those spices from India are helpful. Curry. Yeah. In the modern age there's a lot of stuff that stresses us out. There's a lot of temptations out there. Big, the shiny screens, skip lunch, all this kind of mentality. So you really do have to have some baseline behaviors scheduled in that you do regularly so that you don't fall into the sort of the madness of the modern era. You get swept away in that. So you really have to intentionally schedule these things, get accountability buddies and just really just take care of yourself. Because, yeah, if you. This is the only body you get. You got to take care of it.

Yeah, 100%. So I'm gonna pin a quick talk about coffee and just on a practical level. So you have all these things scheduled on your calendar. So you might have your morning ritual, your after workout ritual, your actual workout ritual. So I think I have an impression that a lot of times people fall apart from. Okay, this is the thing that I'm supposed to be doing at 9 o' clock every day is working out. How do you translate that into actual. An actual workout? Is it like, do you think you're probably so into it that you don't. You're on that autopilot. But how do you. If you're starting a new. Say you're in a power lift now, assuming that you. You're not doing that already, how would you go about starting that habit, getting it scheduled, figuring out how to implement it, get into it in like the first two weeks of a new habit?

Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. And you and I are coaches and we know the power of having a coach. If you want to start working out at a gym and they have personal trainers there, get yourself a personal trainer to kickstart things to get that habit. I am telling you that I'll drive this home. But the power of accountability is so huge. You spent the money, you don't want to. You don't want to embarrass yourself. That's what I would suggest is you want to get started a routine, get some accountability and whatever it is. And it could be a workout buddy. It could also be, hey, do you mind if I text you after I work out? And if you don't get a text from me, you're going to text me back. Friends will do that. Family members will do that.

So.

So it's really shown as setting up all the structure ahead of time. So you think about, if I'm tempted to tap out, oh, here's this wall I'm going to hit that's going to bounce me back in. So set up as many walls and structures as you can so that you can't quit, and that's really the key. And then like you said, once you get that momentum and rhythm becomes a habit, then it gets easier. But the first two weeks, probably the hardest, then it's the first two months are hard as well. You'll have a couple of skipped days in there. Even if you have, like, accountability, you're still gonna have some skipped days. And again, look at that overall graph of your stock market portfolio. Am I consistent enough? Am I progressing as opposed to, oh, I skipped a day, I suck. I'm not cut out for this. No, I keep going. Also use that technique of, what would you tell your best friend? Right, who screwed up? Or whatever. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah. You'd encourage them as opposed to saying, yeah, it's time to quit. You're not meant for this. So that's some stuff to really get the ball rolling on. The exercise program, workout routine.

Right on. Yeah, that and I love to add on to. In my experience, I feel like when you have something scheduled on a calendar, sometimes you're not clear what it actually means. So if you're starting to power lift, what does that actually mean? That means you're going to deadlift, you're going to do bench or whatever the actual thing is. So making sure you're exact, you're clear on what you need to do in that time is a lot of the work that I do as a coach, which is why it's really great to hire a coach that's in to get back to that point. I also encourage people to do some, like, behavioral economics on themselves where, like, when you're starting out, like, when I started out running, the first two weeks of that was just me. Did I put on my running stuff and did I go to the start line? And that's a lot easier hurdle to jump over than I have to run three miles, like. And so what happens is there is one day where I showed up and I'm like, I don't really feel like doing this, and it's cold and it's raining and I'm going back. But then I showed up the next day and it was the same. And I'm like, you know what? I'm here. Let me just try. And a couple of minutes of running and just sometimes setting the initial bar low to where you can get some momentum is really helpful too. Just to point out that you don't have to start out nailing everything. 100, going 100.

Like, I agree. That's so true. Is the whole Point is, you want a lifestyle change. You don't want to be. You want a lifestyle change so that however you can start that consistency going, that, that's the whole point is you want to be consistent six months from now. Not really at the start, obviously at the start, but if you're having trouble with that, like you say, just show up, right. And then you get that time block where you're outside walking instead of running. That's okay, you did it. That's the whole point is just to be consistent with that activity over the long haul.

Absolutely. I have a weird belief that if you show up enough, it's human nature to be like, to not want to settle. This isn't good. Like I set out to do running, I'm walking now.

Let me.

You will naturally motivate yourself. And maybe I'm weird for that belief, but I found it helpful.

No, I think that's universal. Yeah. Cool.

All right, so coffee. I want to talk about coffee real quick.

So coffee. Yeah.

Something I've been playing with that I found really helpful is so two things, right? One, knowing the half life of caffeine, it's like in days and not hours. So the cup of coffee you had, I think it's like a 48 day, like out of your system timeline.

48 hours.

48 hours, yes. Sorry.

Unless you're drinking some really powerful coffee that you don't have a quality about.

It's like the uranium plated, bulletproof coffee. You're putting some plutonium in there. It's 48 hours. So being careful of how much caffeine you're consuming. Some people are more sensitive than others and like that can really mess with sleep. The second thing though that I found is really interesting is I read a some grad student did a paper on the optimal time to drink coffee in the morning, right. And so they broke down like all the times. And going back to cortisol, like cortisol helps you get up in the morning. That's the hormone. That's, hey, time to get ready for the day. And your body will naturally spike it when you wake up and it'll slowly decrease over time. What you don't want to do is while it's naturally supposed to decrease, hit some caffeine, which will then again spike your cortisol. So having your first bit of caffeine and hour and a half after you wake up can actually switch how you feel during the day. I've noticed I'm less jittery when I wait for that first cup of coffee. So that's something that I found really helpful that I wanted to share. But I'm also curious. Do you have any procedures for coffee and caffeine? And I know one of the potential titles for this was like, Keith's Coffee Rules for this episode today, which I think would be a great episode title. But what are your procedures and structure around it?

You're right. I am a big fan of Pete's Coffee, which started in Berkeley, California, and that's my brand. And your body does get used to the type of caffeine definitely does. So rituals for me, I told you about some of the evening rituals. Rituals are really powerful because it does cue you up. It triggers this. Now I'm doing this. Now I'm doing this ritual. So for me, I do pour over a cup of coffee. I have a grinder that has. It's called a burr grinder, so it grinds it in a really nice way. I use an unbleached filter so I can taste the difference between a bleach filter and unbleached. I'll use the Melita number four. And I grind up a big old pile of grounds in there, and I do a pour over into a nice ceramic mug. And I do that every single morning at the same time. And I get a little bit of jolt of caffeine. And that's it. I don't drink any more coffee the rest of the day. That is my. That's my technique. I love it. Like I said, I tried doing some other things, like green tea. I've tried going off a coffee. Not just didn't really work for me, but I know people actually who don't drink coffee at all. They don't like the taste of it. I'm like, that's cool, whatever. And there are people who just don't consume any caffeine at all. So to each his own. But that's my little coffee ritual there. So that's some inside secrets for the viewers there. How to get a really good cup of coffee.

Yeah, I'm. I think my ritual every morning is fairly similar, except I'm doing a Chemex instead of a single pour over because I'll make coffee for me and my wife. So it's just a. It's the same concept, just a bigger quantity.

Yeah.

The burg rider is absolutely key. And I agree with you. The filters do you. So I. My wife gets on my case because I'll call it polluting her coffee with things like oat milk or whatever. I'm a coffee purist. Myself.

Do you do any additives for I go in phases. I'll do just straight black coffee. That's probably my favorite. But if I get a really good organic cream, half and half, I like a little bit of that in there too, but no sugar. I have a cousin who's half Brazilian and she does this like high cream, heavy sugar Brazilian coffee, which is interesting. Got into that for a while. But I am a bit of a purist so black coffee really I think is the best.

I agree with that. And to each their own. It's a personal preference. But yeah, Ashley does not like it when I'm like hey, why are you poisoning or polluting your that perfect cup of coffee tells me to back off. So that said, is there anything else you wanted to talk about health wise or do you want just want to get into anything that you're promoting or anything that the good folks should know to follow up with you or to look out for?

Yeah, I don't think anything really new on the health front. I think we, we talked about a lot of important stuff today. I think just the general, general idea that is this is the only body you get. You got to treat it well, that you deserve to treat yourself well. That really you got to prioritize yourself and in doing that it's actually better for everybody. You're going to be a better version of yourself showing up, you're going to your cup will be full and it will offer more to others. So it's you need to prioritize yourself. It's okay. And it's actually better for everyone if you do that. So that's what I would say really summarizing the health front, I will say if you want, if you're an athlete listening, you can check out michaelsealy.com and all my coaching programs are there. I'm also a licensed psychotherapist in the state of California and Wisconsin and Florida. So I do a practice that way via telehealth, via Zoom and in all those states. And so that's me.

All right, I'll have those links again in the show notes. I'll have a link to our previous conversation. We talked about flipping the switch and the mindset for high performance. Michael, always a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and for hopefully inspiring everyone to live a healthier life. I think we can make it as easy or complex as you want, folks. Start with easy, work up the complex, but get in the game because as our wise friend said, you only have one body. This life. So take care of it. With that said, guys, we'll see you in the next episode of the Meaningful Revolution podcast. This is Sean Butler signing off. Thank you again, Michael. And we'll have you again on hopefully in a little bit, too.

Thanks, Sean.