Ancient Philosophy & Modern Neuroscience - Nate Klemp

You know, a lot of us live in fear and resistance to the worst things that could happen. And one of the things you can do with this process is just like imagine the worst thing that could happen, question it, see how it could actually be the best thing. And it's kind of like, oh wow, I can start to see how anything that happens could actually be a good thing.

What's up, fitness friends? Welcome back to the Future of Fitness podcast and interview series. This is your host, Eric Talzone. And this is episode number 139. I talked to Nate Clem, and uh I thoroughly enjoyed this. So much fun. And a little bit about Nate. Um, so he is the co-founder of Life XT. And uh, you can check out more, they do corporate health and wellness programs. And he's also an author. So he is the author of the New York Times bestseller Start Here, Master the Lifelong Habit of Well-being. What I like about Nate is he is deeply philosophical. Um, he's one of those rare people who actually got into philosophy as an education. Uh, I mean, I that's rare nowadays, right? It really is. And uh we just had great conversations about life, how to deal with anxiety, um, the neuroscience of anxiety and stress and how that affects health and fitness and all those things. And it's it's a really, really interesting topic that, you know, we could have gone on for hours, hours about this, um, not only from personal, you know, anecdotal uh references, but just uh the philosophy and science behind it. So it was fascinating. I really enjoyed it, and I hope you do too. Uh, I think you will. Before we get into the interview, of course, uh I just want to welcome you to Elite Gym Insider. So if you are a gym owner of or just about anybody really in the fitness industry who wants to talk about fitness, uh the business of fitness, uh, entrepreneurship, and all those things, just go to EliteGymInsiders.com, uh, fill out a short application. You can join our free Slack community. And it's really starting to heat up now. So I think we're over 400 members. Uh, it's growing every day. Um, we're not doing a whole lot of marketing for it besides what I'm talking about right now. Um, so it's a good group and very smart people. Uh, we're making great offers right now. Um we are promoting the Whole Life Challenge for a free offer for coaches to check that out. You can go check out wholelifechallenge.com. Um, next month we'll be a digital marketing agency partner that we'll be announcing soon. So get a discount on that. So lots of cool stuff, and all you have to do is join the Slack community um and be a part of the conversations. Uh, you don't have to do that, you can just lurk. You can be one of those people if you're a lurker. But go to leadgyminsiders.com, find out more about it. It's a short application uh to get in. And like I said, it's free, so why not check it out? And uh Slack is a really cool medium as well. Uh, I like it because I don't get sucked into the social media vortex uh like you do in Facebook groups or other uh groups like LinkedIn. So uh without further ado, let's get into it. So episode number 139, Nate Klemp. Enjoy the show, and uh, I'm gonna listen to a few times. All right, we're live. Nate, welcome, man. Good to be here. Thanks for having me, Eric. Yeah, yeah. Do I call you Dr. Nate or what's like you can just call me Nate. Okay, all right, cool. Yeah, uh, easier the better for me. So, man, I'm I'm really uh I've been looking forward to this since we had our first conversation on the Fitness Blitz podcast um a little while ago. And people can go check that out too. It's a shorter form uh interview with you. Um you do really interesting work, uh obviously a very smart guy. Um and uh you're you're what we would consider a modern day philosopher as well, a little bit, maybe.

Yeah, well, I I like to think that, yeah. I that was my previous training before I became an entrepreneur and got into this world. So that's kind of what I bring to it.

Awesome. And I mean, philosophy is I didn't really get into any form of philosophy until probably like my late 30s, 42 now. But um, you know, there's new and interesting twists on it nowadays, but I think it's something that a lot of people are missing. And I always kind of consider it like our our fundamental operating system as humans, right? Is the philosophies that we have and we take in. And so anyway, it's gonna be an interesting conversation. If you don't mind, let's just start off with give us your background, give us a little of your story, man. How did you get to where you are now?

Sure. Um, yeah, well, so it really does kind of begin with philosophy. Um, you know, I was in the late 90s going to college, trying to figure out what to do with my life. It was the dot-com revolution. I was right in the middle of it in Silicon Valley. I was at Stanford at the time. Uh so you know, most of my friends were starting up these internet startups. This is like in the days of Excite and Ulta Vista and all these things.

Yeah.

And um for whatever reason, I decided I wasn't really interested in that, which is ironic because now I do work at a startup, started a startup. Um, but you know, for me, I was like, well, I either want to play jazz piano for the rest of my life, which was one of my passions, right? Or I want to be a philosopher. And my jazz piano teacher at the time was like, you know, if you do this, you're probably gonna end up living under a bridge. So interestingly, for me, philosophy was like my pragmatic fallback option. It was like, oh, well, I need to make some money, so I'll be a philosopher, um, which is crazy, right?

Funny statement.

But nonetheless, that's sort of where I ended up going. So um, you know, that led me on this kind of tenure journey where I studied philosophy as an undergrad. I got a master's in philosophy, I got a PhD, because that's really the sort of career track of the modern philosopher. And then, you know, got to the end of that whole process and had this just really sort of life-shattering realization, which was that I started this whole thing in the hopes that I was gonna learn how to live a good life, I was gonna, you know, embody human flourishing and happiness and all these things that Aristotle and Plato and Emerson and all these guys talk about. But at the end of that journey, I looked at my life, the life of all my fellow grad students, and like it was just falling apart. Like I physically I felt horrible. I was, you know, losing my sort of resilience, my sense of focus. Like it was kind of falling apart. Part of that was because of a bike accident, but part of it was just, you know, all I did for years was just sit in a library and read for like 13 hours a day and think. And and that clearly wasn't the path to well-being, at least as I saw it. So I did end up becoming a philosophy professor, but I was really interested in this question of how do you train mental qualities of resilience, well-being, happiness, etc., so that they're actually experienced states, not just, you know, something you're thinking about. Um, and that led me into yoga and mindfulness and all sorts of different, what I would call inner technologies of the mind. Um, and then ultimately I left my job as a professor about seven years ago, started a company called Life XT, wrote a book called Start Here. The whole goal of all that was basically kind of like putting structure around this idea that you can create these simple habits in the midst of your everyday life to train happiness and well-being. And so that's what I've been up to for the last seven years or so.

Yeah. Wow, what a journey, man. Yeah. It's it's just, yeah, it's really funny. It's like, well, out of two career paths, I'm gonna go into philosophy because that's where I can make some money.

Like that's yeah, which I would not recommend that to anybody. Yeah, right, right. It's not a smart move.

I don't know too many philosophers. Well, I don't know too many philosophers, first of all. Yeah. But I certainly don't know any that um are making unless they you author a book. I think we you and I talked about like Orion Holiday. Uh yes. You know, his son's written some great books on on the topic. Um, what is your book about? Give us some insights. I apologize. Normally I would read it, but I just have been so busy.

Yeah. So it's called Start Here, Master the Lifelong Habit of Well-Being. And basically what we set out to do was essentially bring together the best of ancient wisdom, you know, thousands of years of spiritual traditions, philosophical traditions, writing and talking about how you live a better life, what practices are most effective. We wanted to bring that together with all this emerging science from positive psychology to modern neuroscience that's essentially validating all these ideas and practices, showing that they actually work. Um, and then finally, we wanted to bring a set of practices together in such a way that was really accessible and um, you know, kind of wrapped around this idea of habit formation that, you know, these are things you can do, you can integrate them into the midst of your everyday life. Anybody can do it. And really the key is creating these habits. Um, and so one of the tools we talk a lot about in the book is this idea of notice, shift, rewire, um, which is kind of like the primary habit-forming algorithm that we talk about a lot in the book. It's the idea of just noticing where your mind is at any given moment. Generally, it's wandering. That's what the research says. It's not here, present. Um, shifting is just sort of reorienting the mind to a more productive object of concentration. And then the rewire stage is just to kind of really take a moment to savor that experience of being able to direct your attention in a more skillful way. Um, so that's really the core of the book. And the reason we call it life cross-training is actually at the time we were really inspired by the fitness industry. So this is like seven years ago, the time of P90X. I don't know where P90X is today, but like it was huge seven years ago, right? It was the rage. Um, and CrossFit, obviously, you know, which I think is still big. But you know, we looked at what was going on in fitness, and we thought, this is it's really interesting how you have this idea that there's not one single exercise that's sort of the panacea for how you train your body. And we noticed that when it came to mental and emotional fitness, our experience was very much the same. Meditation is amazing, but it's not the only tool. And for some people, meditation doesn't work. So that kind of led us to this idea that the real key is to think about training your mind and your bot and your emotions the way you think about training your body, with this kind of um technique of cross-training in mind, you know, using the set of multiple practices that are gonna help boost your performance in the in the most efficient way.

Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. Meditation seems to be pushed on people quite often now. Yes. Yeah. Like uh, and I I I've been guilty. I've told, you know, back in the day when I started playing with meditation, like everybody needs to do this, right? So all my clients had to do meditation now. And they're like, I want to do meditation, and it doesn't work for me. Yeah. Um, but it's just so popular. It's like everybody like you have to be doing meditation. You have to be. Yeah. Or you're just not, you know, at par with everybody else. And it's it's an interesting, I know a lot of very happy, successful people who never meditated, you know. Yeah. But they have their own form of it. It's funny thing is if you dig into it, they have their own form, whether it's physical exercise, whether it's like uh a long bath, or you know, me, it's cold showers, right? That's kind of what I need to do. Um what are some of the other what are some of the other tools?

Um besides Yeah. Well, so yeah, and just to get to your point, um, yeah, meditation is amazing. I do it every day. I think the reason it's the rage is that there's just so much research that's been done on meditation. But as you say, meditation does not work for everybody. In fact, there's a growing body of research that says for some people, meditation is can actually be harmful potentially. Um, you know, if you're really having problems with like, like on the border of mental illness, that sort of thing, meditation's probably not the best thing. Um, so yeah, you know, there are a lot of other tools that I think are worth using in the tool bag besides just meditation. Um, some of the ones we talk about a lot in the book are actually movements, you know, exercising, doing it mindfully. Um, there's all sorts of research, I'm sure you know, that, you know, regular exercise isn't just good for your heart or preventing diabetes or these other sort of physical health conditions. It actually has amazing effects on the brain and on our happiness levels, on our ability to learn, cognitive performance, etc. So that's one of the things we talk a lot about. But then there are other practices, like one of my favorites is a practice we call inquiry in the book, which is essentially the practice of questioning stressful thoughts and beliefs that cause suffering in our lives. And that may sound like a trivial thing, but what's really cool about this practice, and it's something that goes really back to Socrates, but you can find it in more contemporary forms. Um, what's so amazing about this practice is you start to see how your entire worldview, you know, your entire web of beliefs about reality and your life are sort of structured around these stressful thoughts that may or may not actually be true. Right. And when you start to see that, there's actually an incredible experience of sort of mental and psychological freedom that starts to unleash, you know, because all of a sudden these assumptions that you've been sort of running your life on don't feel as firm and as sort of you know certain. So that's an example of another practice that I think is just amazing. I think of it like it's almost like yoga for the mind, right? Like we all know it's important to be pliable and flexible in the body, but we don't think of that as much in the mind. But you know, when we become really rigid in our thinking, um, the result is anxiety, depression, all these things that are really not good for us. So that's a practice where you're kind of just like stretching the mind, seeing your life and the world from a bigger perspective. And you know, that's a tremendous thing, tremendous gift for many of us.

Um unpack that a little bit. So maybe we can use like a practical example. That's a really interesting to me. So um, and I I I want to share my my personal, but I want to hear what let's go through an example.

Sure. Okay. Well, so um, well, first of all, I would say this. There are thousands just like meditation, where there's thousands of different meditation techniques, in the realm of inquiry, there's a whole suite of different tools that different people have used. There's a whole field of psychology called cognitive behavioral therapy, which is basically structured around this insight that they learned from Socrates and Lao Tzu and all these ancient thinkers. So there's a lot of different techniques. The one that I love that we talk about in our book is uh a technique that was developed by Byron Cady, who is a fairly famous author in kind of the self-improvement space. It's called the work. And it's basically a systematic way of taking a stressful thought, asking, is it true, sort of questioning it, and then turning that thought around. Um, so an example would be like I'm currently selling my next book, which is an incredibly weird and stressful process. You know, I have a literary agent, they're sending it to publishers, and I have meetings with these publishers, and you know, sometimes they like it, sometimes they think it's horrible, right? And you know, I've spent months and months developing this content. I think the idea is amazing, right? And so, like, I was doing this just the other day uh on one of the publishers who I was really attached to. I really wanted them to buy a book. They seem like the perfect publisher in my mind. So a thought I was questioning is this publisher should buy my book. And the first step was to ask, is that true? Yeah, they should. My book's awesome. They should totally buy it. Can I absolutely know that that's true? Is the second question? No, I don't. I I can't know that. How can I know that? Right. And then you're asked to think about what happens when you believe that belief. So, this belief that the publisher should buy my book. Well, I feel like constricted and I feel nervous and I'm like dreading what they're gonna say. And, you know, it's like there's all sorts of like tension in my body, and all sorts of things happen when I believe that. The fourth step, who would I be without that thought? Is an invitation to just imagine the same reality, same situation. I'm selling the book, but I just don't even have the thought. And in that case, it's like, who would I be without the thought? I guess I'd just be like open to whatever happens is going to be best for me in this book. Like if they, if this isn't a good match, then you know, that's just reality telling me there's a different path that I need to go down. There's there's no problem there.

Yeah.

And then the final step is to turn the thought around, where you essentially take the thought and you consider three reasons why its opposite is true. So this publisher should buy my book, this publisher shouldn't buy my book. How is that true? Well, they wanted me to change the the central focus of the book. I don't want to do that, right? They wanted me to um, you know, spend the next 10 years of my life promoting this book. I don't want to do that either, right? Like, so so you start to see how the opposite is actually just as true, if not truer. And then all of a sudden you're left with kind of this feeling of of the belief almost being liberated in a way. Yeah.

It's like a uh it's a very well-articulated way of letting go of expectations in some ways, right? I mean, I think oversimplified summary, but it's it's what it feels like.

Yeah. Or taking, you know, a lot of us live in fear and resistance to the worst things that could happen. And one of the things you can do with this process is just like imagine the worst thing that could happen, question it, see how it could actually be the best thing. Yeah. You know, I developed cancer. That's horrible. I never want that to happen. But how could that actually be a good thing? Well, you know, there's all sorts of cancer survivors who talk about how the experience changed their life, and it was a you know, they they completely changed careers, they saw the world from a different perspective, right? Like, you know, not to say I want cancer or I want anybody else to get it, but you start to just see how, you know, no matter what happens in reality, there's there's always a different, bigger perspective. Um, so it's it can be really liberating.

Yeah. You know, it's interesting. You know, I was actually interviewed on a podcast this morning. Um, and we talked about like, you know, creating change in one's life. And the first, the most powerful question I've come across in like the last decade of my life is what's the worst thing that can happen? Yeah. Because anything you look at, um, you know, whether it was for me making a huge life shift and selling, you know, one business and and going into the the unknown, yeah, you're just like, well, what's the worst thing that can happen? And it's like, well, you know, uh, my wife and I live in a van. Totally. And uh that's it. That's and then you're like, once you get there, you're like, Yeah, well, that's not that bad.

And for some people, that's like amazing. Like, you know, that's like the dream. People are working to get the van so they can live in the van like you.

Yeah, yeah.

And uh, you know, so that's like, oh, well, what's the worst thing happened? We'll just live in the van for a while, and uh all we have to do is cover our food and and the van payment, and uh, and we're good. You know, we can do that, right?

Totally. Well, and one one practice you can do, this one is just can be really mind-blowing. You come up with that worst case scenario. So, like, I'm living in the van. Yeah, and then you write three reasons why that situation is better for you, why that situation is better for your wife, yeah, why that situation is better for the world. So three reasons for each of those. Yeah. And it's kind of like, oh wow, I can start to see how anything that happens could actually be a good thing. Yeah. And that's kind of a wild thing to see.

Yeah, yeah. And it's crazy. And I and you know, I I I use that example. I know some other people will think, like, well, Eric, you know, you don't have four kids and a mortgage and all that. Well, I actually do have two mortgages, but I just have renters, right? Right. Um, yeah, I don't have kids, but you know, I have aging parents and there's a responsibility there. And, you know, there's a lot of things, and but you you everyone comes up with, you know, well, they uh that's not me. Well, you're gonna have your own worst case scenario. Totally. And that's why the the exercise is important. You know, and one of the things like when people I ask people, well, what's the worst case scenario if you do this, right? And then they give it to me. I'm like, well, okay, question number two is ten years from now, if you don't try, are you gonna repeat? Regret it. Yeah. And those two things should give you enough clarity on what what to do next. And yeah. Man, it's powerful. That's really cool. You know, it's interesting to me. I I um I have since going through kind of a rough period at one point in my life, I've always I I used to be a very relaxed guy, and I still am. Everyone who talks to me is like, really? You seem like the most calm dude ever. But I actually have a default of anxiety that I wake up with every morning, right? Like I just wake up, I'm like, oh, I must have a million things to do today. Like, what happens if this happens, right? And that's just like my default, and I wake up. And now I've gone through my own way of kind of, you know, we talked about cold water exposure, um, you know, some breathing techniques and things like that. And it's slowly turning over. Um, but I feel like a lot of people live in that state of anxiety. It's like a default, right? Like, where do you see? I mean, I know the entrepreneurs I talk to, I know the gym owners I talk to. Um, a lot of people in the fitness space there, the operators tend to be in a state of anxiety all the time.

Yeah.

Um what like how big of a problem do you think that is, in your opinion?

Yeah. Well, so first of all, I think it's a huge thing. I think my experience, you know, we work a lot in law and healthcare and consulting, and what we're seeing is rising rates of anxiety, depression, et cetera. Yeah. I think largely that I think it's correlated with just, you know, the sort of technological overwhelm of distractions and information and the devices we have in our pocket that we're constantly looking at. Like we are constantly stimulating our brains through the technologies in our pocket, email, social media, et cetera. And then we're like confused as to why our brain doesn't immediately go into this nice, blissed out, relaxed state. It's like we've been conditioning it to be anxious, right? So yeah, so you know, I think um, I think it's a problem that's a a rising issue. I mean, it's always been an issue, but I think it's it's even more so than before. Um, it's certainly been a central thing in my life that I've had to work on and continue to work on all the time, like you. Yeah. That's sort of like a default state of my brain is anxiety. Um, and so I've sort of found that there are a couple, there are two main buckets of techniques that you can use with anxiety. So one is kind of like the mindfulness approach, where you're not actually trying to change the anxiety or the experience of the state. You're trying to just like become more desensitized to it, more friendly with it, more sort of aware of it, more able to just like be in the discomfort of that state. And that can be really powerful. So, like a lot of meditation and mindfulness practice is about just being with things as they are. So, when it comes to anxiety or fear, the basic technique is you stay open, you stay with it, you don't resist it, you just kind of like sit in that gnarly, queasy, edgy state that you want to run away from. You just like train your ability to be with it. So that's super powerful. And yet, I think like there's also value to a whole other suite of techniques where you're trying to kind of like alter the uh nervous system, the mind, the body to diminish the state of anxiety. Because let's face it, like if you're experiencing a lot of anxiety, there's only so long you can just sit in the midst of it. Like, you know, we have our limits, right? So, so this other approach I think is really powerful. And you know, there's so many different ways to do that, right? Like yoga is an amazing technology for that. Um, just you mentioned breathing, and one of the things I've been playing with a lot over the last couple of years is just even just altering the ratios of the breath consciously can start to have a pretty profound shift on your mental state. So, you know, when you do a um longer exhale, so if you're breathing with a ratio of one on your inhale, two on your exhale, and you're really kind of just like relaxing into that inhale, maybe even holding at the end of the inhale, that alone, if you do that for like five to ten minutes, like radically shifts the state of the nervous system. And then if you do like an entire yoga practice with that kind of a breath ratio where you're really focusing on extending the exhale and just like letting the whole system calm down, I mean that can be powerful. Yoga nidra is another thing I do a lot where you're it's basically like a meditation where you're lying down in shavasana, which is corpse pose, yep, and you're just, you know, for half an hour or 20 minutes, you're being guided through this kind of like systematic process of relaxation. But I think like the there's so there's like a million different ways to do that, but the underlying theme is that we're so stimulated and overwhelmed that it's really difficult to be relaxed. And then we have to almost train the state of relaxation, and we can do that through a number of things. And then there's herbs and all sorts of things, you know, those are amazing too. So, but but in terms of practice, those are the two approaches. I'd say the mindfulness and then the like, you know, more active kind of relaxation strategies.

I think there's a lot to that second piece that people have yet to discover, right? Um, I think there's huge pieces of that. You know, like thinking of an example of this is I usually sleep with my cell phone in the other room, right? Um because I've learned I don't want to check it right before I don't want to do anything around bedtime or waking. Um just the other morning, for some reason, like something happened and there was a noise. I thought maybe it was a bear. I'm in Montana, right? Right. Got up in the middle of the night and grabbed my phone, and it was usually, and I put the phone next to my bed again. And when I woke up, I woke up around 5:15 and uh and I just looked at my phone to see what time it was. And I saw three WhatsApp messages, a couple text messages. And I'm like, well, I'm gonna sleep for an extra. I couldn't sleep. I was like, I gotta get back to these people, right? And it was just like that cra like just that little thing is enough to to change everything. But I would like to get your feedback on some stuff I've been doing because it seems a little crazy. So, okay, here's what I do, right? I wake up in the morning. Yeah, first thing I do is I uh I go and I take a ice cold shower, right? Five, five to ten minutes, depending on how long I can deal with it. That's enough to shock my nervous system into a completely different state. And then obviously it releases cortisol, adrenaline, all those things, right? Sure. Um, so I'm I'm immediately kind of going, then I go into um a practice where I listen, I do with some three sets of Wim Hof breathing, you know, going into a breath hold period, and then I kind of listen to some goals or some meditations I recorded for myself. Um after that, dude, I'm pretty good. Like I'm pretty good for the rest of the day. And what I found uh now is that after a period of of you know almost 90 days of doing this consistently every day, I can actually control my adrenaline a little bit. Like if I'm in a state where I'm like I start to feel anxiety overwhelming me, um, I just take five, five to ten like Wim Hof, just really deep in inhales and exhales. And within 10 seconds, I feel almost a warm wash of calm. And I do believe that's cortisol. Yeah. Yeah. What's the what's going on there?

Do you have any idea? Well, I mean, you know, I do think it's pretty clear, both from the scientific research and just like the tradition of yoga and Ayurveda, that like they say a lot in yoga, the mind follows the breath. And if the breath is really tight and constricted, the mind starts to race and get tight and constricted. If you start to open up the breath, the mind can kind of open up with it, right? And so it seems like that's kind of what you're describing. But then you're also like you're activating kind of like the relaxation response. So, you know, physiologically, you're shutting down a lot of those systems when you go into that more like slow abdominal breathing. Um, you know, you're you're basically activating the systems in the body responsible for relaxation. So it makes total sense to me. Um, you know, so I think that's super powerful. And the other thing though is I don't want to like downplay the mindfulness technique. Yeah. Because what's really cool is like the other thing you can do in that state is you can just be with that anxiety and see where it takes you. Yeah. With no attempt to change it. So like not try because you know, the breathing is like it's awesome. It can, it can relax you, make you feel better. But there's some real power too in not making yourself feel better and just feeling the discomfort and the utter like scariness of that anxious state, and then watching its impermanence because it never lasts, it always goes away, right? And it's never even the same one moment to the next, right? It's it's like a cloud in the sky that's like and that's kind of the you know, the the Buddhist mindfulness approach is like you start to see that, and all of a sudden, like you see that there anxiety isn't really this thing. It's not like a like it's less like a block of ice and more like water, you know, it's just kind of yeah, so that can be liberating too.

So yeah, yeah. I mean, there's a lot of ways to approach it. And I think ultimately it comes down to a mix of of all of it, right? And one thing I remember a coach telling me, um, James, who's been on the show a couple times, is when I was telling him, like, dude, I'm always as an entrepreneur, I'm always anxious, right? Yeah. Well, you know, and and in our society it too, I feel like as mindfulness is taking a bigger, bigger role every day, people are like, well, you just gotta you gotta push away the anxiety, resist it. But, you know, he made a good point. He's like, sometimes anxiety is just awareness. Maybe you're just freaking aware that you have challenges. There are um things that you know are putting you at risk right now and that you need to deal with them. Maybe that's a signal that you need to pay attention to versus just trying to drive away. And I think that's a big part of it too, is everyone's like, well, I can't have any anxiety in my life. No, anxiety is just gonna be there, right? Yeah, it's just gonna be there. So it's like learn to live with it better, understand what signals it's it's showing you because you're you're right, it does, it comes and goes, but it's usually there for not usually, I I would imagine you would know better than I do. A lot of times it's for there for a reason, right? It's uh the signal.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a signal. And um, like if I'm giving a really important talk or presentation or have a really important meeting, if I don't feel anxious, that's like a problem for me, right? Like the anxiety, it's just it's like energy rising so that I can meet this challenge, you know. And if I can just ride the wave of the energy, almost like if you think about it, like surfing, right? You know, you you got a big wave, you can either like thrash against it and be like, no, I don't want to be in this wave. And everybody knows what happens if you do that, you get crushed by the wave. It sucks, right? Yeah, or you can you can surf the wave and just say, like, okay, this is exactly what I need right now. You know, if you're about to give a talk for like a thousand people, twenty thousand people, a hundred people, whatever. Like, you need big energy to show up for that. So, and and and so if you're just feeling like you came out of a massage, you're not gonna be, you're not gonna give a great talk. Right. I know for me, like I need to have a certain level of adrenaline and activation and stimulation to think clearly and to be sharp and to be fast and quick. You know, so it's yeah, I like your point about really like you can shift the frame. It's almost like we just did inquiry there, basically, to go back to what we were talking about earlier. Anxiety is bad. Turn that around. Anxiety is good. How is that true? You need it, like it's important. You might drop balls, things might happen. You know, like you need the energy if you're gonna be at your best and present or whatever it is. So yeah, and it can be an extremely powerful motivator.

Yeah, for sure. Um, I've done some of my more risky maneuvers in life due to some level of anxiety. Yeah. You know, some of them panned out, some of them didn't, for sure. Yeah, for sure. But you know, it I went for it, right? Exactly. Because I felt like I need I needed to do something needed to change, right? And I did it.

Um, yeah, man. I remember a psychologist once told me anxiety, it's almost impossible to be in a state of high anxiety for longer than 30 minutes. Like the body just at a certain point gets tired because the body has to put out a lot of energy to do that. And I think so that's kind of a scientific thing. Who knows whether that's true or not? But I would say if you're really aware and with it, I think it's it's difficult for that anxiety to last very long because you've kind of stopped resisting it. You're just kind of watching it and being with it, and it'll run its course.

How do you feel about gratitude practice? That's another really hot, hot thing, right? Like everyone's like, well, you just need more gratitude, and yeah, everything will be fine, you'll be happy. And it's somewhat true, you know, if you do if you do focus on the things that you're thankful for and that you have in your life and makes you less want less or feel that you need that you're missing things. But I'm curious, you know, what is is there are you familiar with like the science behind it? What I like about you is that you actually back things with science, which is yeah, you know, which is needed more. Right. Where do you what's your what's your stance on that?

Yeah, no, I think gratitude in a way, I like to think of it as like the most efficient way to change your mental state. Um, like meditation, it takes a long time to get there, you know. Um, but gratitude to me seems like the most efficient shift that I've experienced thus far. Where you know, you can literally be sitting there at lunch or dinner with your friends or your family. You can each go around the table, express one thing that you're grateful for, which is what we do in my house every day. It's pretty awesome. Nice. Um, and like boom, there's a there's a shift that happens. Um, so I think there is a it's a really efficient way of shifting your state. There is a lot of research on gratitude, as you can imagine. Um, and you know, one of the classic studies, I think it was Amons and McCullough, um, hoping I get that name right. They basically gave people for eight weeks one group where they gave them uh like a negativity journal. So these people wrote down at the end of the day everything that sucked, everything that they hated, all the inconveniences and hassles, right? Then they had another group that wrote down like the things they were grateful for, things that worked out, right? And as you can imagine, you get to the end of eight weeks, and the results on basically all levels were profoundly different. So they found that the people who are in the gratitude group they slept better. Uh, there were increases in um cardiovascular health, things like that. Um, so like physical, it's changing the body physically, making it more healthy, um, enhancing the immune system, etc. But there's also just like a boost in mood that happens through gratitude. Um, so I think it is really powerful. And it's also one of those practices that just runs throughout all these philosophical and religious traditions. Like, I think you can probably find gratitude in every major tradition. Um, and I think there's probably a reason for that, right? Like it it's it's such a central practice. Um and I think it was Epictetus who said, you know, I want to be grateful for what I have, not what I wish to have. And I'm not getting the quote exactly right, but I think that distinction between what you already have and what you wish you had is like that's the whole game of gratitude, is just shifting your mental energy away from all the things that you wish would happen back to like what you already have. Um, so I think it's really, really powerful. And I think our tendency, especially in the culture we live in, is to constantly be thinking about, you know, what we wish we had, to be comparing ourselves to like, you know, the guy who's got the podcast with a million subscribers, or the person who just landed a book deal with Harper Collins, or the, you know, whatever, right? Like for all of us, we have different things that we're comparing, but like gratitude kind of shuts down the comparison and just brings you back to the present moment. What's your comparison trap, man?

That's yeah, that's that's uh that is a sinkhole. And you know, I think there's also a um a cousin, right, to gratitude in its perspective. Um, you know, a lot of people, you know, especially in North America, don't realize that just by where you live, by the nature of where you live, you're in the top X percentile of the quality of your life, right? Exactly. Very blessed. And um, you know, people close to me who um, you know, probably one percenters, right, are always comparing themselves to the 0.01 percent. Exactly. Well, I don't always compare up. You always compare it up, yeah. Yeah, in perspective, right? And if if you just have perspective, you know, my my wife is Brazilian, and you know, right now, you know, as a day of this recording, the you know, June 2019, this the state of things in Brazil is not great. You know, and it's tough. Life is hard. And you know, just having that connection to to that has been incredibly um valuable to me for getting out of that state of wanting all the time. Because you're like, you know what? Like it doesn't really get better than this. I mean, people look at my life, like, oh, the guy travels, you know, he gets to work remotely, um, you know, skis 60 days a year, uh, does all these things. They're probably like look at me like, wow, that guy's got it all. But and then I'm looking to some other guy, right? Who's like, you know, got this, you know, the private jet and flies wherever they want all the time. Totally. You know, but you're it's it's it's an interesting thing. If I if I if I went the other way, you know, and I guess went uh gratitude down or whatever you want to say it, like it's it's an interesting thought that we just don't do that, right? Yeah. Where where is that rooted? Is that like wired in some tribal thing that we have in our inner brains, or where does that come from?

Yeah, I mean, I I'm not sure exactly uh the answer to that question, but I do think that um, you know, the a lot of the sort of research that's come out over the last 20 years has said that um, you know, if you look at just like the evolution of the human brain, it hasn't really changed that much since we were living out on the savannah, running away from you know saber-toothed tigers and things like that. Right. So we've had tremendous cultural change, but if you look at the actual hardware of the brain itself, it hasn't actually evolved that much. So, you know, we're still in a state where we have these kind of prehistoric instincts. We're wired for vigilance. You know, there's a um guy named Rick Hansen who writes that the brain is like Teflon for the positive and Velcro for the negative. I think that's really true. What he's trying to get at there is like if you have a really traumatic experience, it just sticks. Right? You can take an entire lifetime and it'll never go away. You can do therapy for 20 years, right?

Yeah.

But if you have an amazing experience, it kind of goes away unless you like really take the time to encode that positive experience. So one of the things that I think we're doing with gratitude practice is we're trying to kind of like hack that feature of the brain. You know, we're trying to, we know that like the good things in life are just gonna slip away, we're not even gonna notice them. So gratitude is about like, hey, no, no, no, let's take a second. Like, think about how great it is that we're here today or whatever it is, right? Like, we have clean food, we have clean water, we're able to do, you know, talk about the things we love, uh, read good books, etc. Like you're you're kind of hacking the ordinary functioning of the brain. Um, but I think it's that kind of vigilance and constant anxiety that we were the brain was wired for, which is good for survival, but maybe not for happiness, that kind of leads us out of like makes it so that our habitual ordinary way of being is not gratitude. It's it's kind of the opposite.

Oh man. There's so many, so many ways we can dive into that one even further. Right. Um, like we had over. the winter this uh we had one in montana we had like the coldest winter in 30 years right um got down to you know well double digits it's double digits negative Fahrenheit for days days on end and the uh the um one of the lines in the in the in our house froze solid right it was the septic line tank to the the leech field for anyone who knows what I mean doesn't matter but it wasn't good right so for a period of weeks like we really had very little running water we can use it was oh my gosh going into a bucket and then we dump it outside right we had to go to um the gym to take our showers and and all that stuff and I just when when it came back I was like isn't this amazing like you know look at this water and it was like that little bit of perspective where I was like damn life is is amazing I can't have all these conveniences and I feel like you know there's so much convenience in our life days nowadays that we totally forget what it was like you know like when people complain about there's a Louis C.K skit and for you know obviously Louis C.K is in a little bit of trouble nowadays but sure you know he talks about like someone complaining about a millennial complaining about their how their phone is slow. Yeah yeah are you kidding me like that signal is going from your phone up to a satellite back down to somewhere else and you're connected to this worldwide web at your fingertips and you're complaining about the speed right and I think that's just part of our modern society is we're so convenienced.

Totally Yeah and I think um to me what this all boils down to is there's this one quote from Byron Katie that I love that the world is a mirror image of your mind. And what I think she means by that is like whatever your state of mind is the world will start to reflect that. So if you feel constantly irritated and never grateful for anything like that's what the world's going to look like. Everywhere you go that's going to be reflected back. You're gonna go to the airport and it's gonna be a total pain in the ass. You know you're gonna drive down the street and try to get a parking spot and you're gonna be pissed at everybody who's like you know taking your spots or taking too long to reverse their car, right? Like there really is this way in which our mindset creates reality. And I think what's so powerful about that idea is that through all these practices through gratitude through inquiry through meditation through just being present whatever it is whatever your practice is you're essentially changing the world even though you nothing has actually changed. Like the guy who's slowly reversing his car is still slowly reversing his car but your world has changed right yeah um so you know to me that that's what kind of gets me inspired about the power of these practices is thinking like wow you know there's a famous saying and I it's some sort of a Zen story that it's much easier to put a small piece of leather under your feet than to try to cover the world in leather so that you don't cut your feet. Yeah right like if you can just do that change at sort of your own internal level and shift your own mind state the world shifts um so so to me that's kind of the whole game when it can and I realize we're sort of outside of the realm of physical exercise that's but in the realm of mental and emotional exercise which I think is just as important and has physical implications that feels like the whole game you know just kind of like reorienting your mindset and changing the world as a result.

Well you know it's it and we can circle that back to fitness because I think um you know on on the other show you're on I asked people obviously I'm I'm into technology yeah how it's changing fitness how it's changing health um how it's changing our everyday lives and I asked you know in my other show I I've asked 350 plus fitness professionals what piece of technology they think is going to change the industry. And I get a lot of things you know I get wearables right is obviously nothing I get social media I get all this stuff apps um in my mind people sometimes people have turned back and ask me and you know there's a couple things and it always relates to the field of neuroscience because I think um if we can learn like let's face it like the reason people don't adhere or stick to any kind of plan you know which is ultimately we you know we won't have time to get into habits which I know we wanted to maybe that's next show is because their mind it it directs everything. So if you want to stick to a workout plan, if you want to you know lose weight if you want to feel better if you want to do all these things it all starts upstairs and for us to start understanding what's going on upstairs right and how we can start to shift it um so that we can control these things better because you know 21 day set challenges or resets aren't going to get you there for the lifetime goal. So I think neuroscience is is something that people um we it's really exciting. Let's put it that way.

Yeah. Well and I think yeah that so neuroscience is really exciting and also what I love about like some of the mindfulness practices that are becoming very popular right now is I think the way it applies to like diet and fitness is that these are practices that are kind of allowing us to take a step outside of our ordinary habit of seeking short-term pleasure and being sort of totally resistant to discomfort. So like if I think about somebody who's having trouble exercising or having trouble sticking to a diet like there's all sorts of reasons obviously but if we strip it down to the very core what I think is really happening is you've got somebody who is wants the short-term pleasure hit of sitting on the couch and eating a bag of chips because it is pleasurable to watch Netflix and eat chips. Like let's face it it's way better than like going on a super hard interval run or something like that, right? So they're they're drawn to that and they're sort of resisting the discomfort that comes with eating foods that maybe aren't their favorite not eating their you know ice cream every night or whatever or uh you know when you're starting an exercise program it is uncomfortable. Right. So like if we could just look at that how do you become more comfortable with discomfort as weird as that sounds like that could be a huge shift. And that's that's really in the realm of sort of mental fitness mindfulness. But that's I think how these two can start to fit together is you can use some of these techniques to sort of unwind that ordinary habit that makes it very difficult to make these changes.

Yeah you're spot on man and you know the um being comfortable with discomfort is is something that you know I was taught a long time ago is is a big focus for for training people, getting people to their health goals. And one of the reasons I do take a cold shower every morning I was going to say your cold showering is like the perfect example of that right yeah I I got it I get up and like uh and I have you know Jake um is the guy who got me into this and and he texts me every morning and he gets up at 4 a.m and does it right wow and he texts me when he's done so I have this accountability that like I feel like a jerk if I don't jump in that shot. Totally I can lie yeah just be like yeah sure done yeah totally did it. Right really cool. Exactly um but but that's not serving me. And you know once you kind of if you can find something I think especially in the first thing in the morning that you're uncomfortable with and you do it. Yeah it's it's a muscle that that's being trained is how to deal with that discomfort. And eventually in some strange way you seek it out after you realize how good it is. Yeah. Yeah exactly yeah there's a lot to that man um but uh I think we're we're probably running out of time here. What hey dude uh where do people find you what tell us about the new book give us all that stuff.

Oh yeah uh well so my company is Life Cross Training lifecross training.com um we do well-being training for professionals in law consulting and healthcare um I have a bunch of stuff I do a lot on LinkedIn so if you find MayClump on LinkedIn follow me there uh start here is the book start here master the lifelong habit of wellbeing I've got a new one in the works but it's gonna be a while no use promoting that now uh but you know someday maybe I'll come back on and talk about it it's about marriage okay and uh marriage in the modern world with two careers so yeah yeah because that institution's different yeah for sure yeah for sure uh there's a lot of different ways to approach marriage though anyway well man this is this has been great it's been a really fun conversation for me and I know you know due to um some of the the past episodes I've done that have faced you know anxiety and burnout and all that stuff that people I get a lot of emails from stuff like this you know like hey man you know right I resonate with this so there's like there's it's just some it's a weird topic that people don't like to talk about as much as they'll grab value in that I uh yeah thanks thanks for coming on man it's been great. Yeah and I think you know just the last thing I would say about anxiety I think there's incredible value of just acknowledging that this is something a lot of people are dealing with something I've dealt with my whole life sounds like you've dealt with it right like just even that it's kind of like the open secret that we don't share on Facebook and social media but like you can start to think you're the only one dealing with this or there's something wrong with you. And so that's why I think being out in the open with it can be really liberating and important. Yeah.

Yeah man I agree. Well hopefully this uh let's get some people to talk about it. But uh awesome yeah man we'll uh we'll talk soon for sure okay thanks so much Eric yeah thank you hey fitness fans don't leave yet it's your host Eric Malzone and I have a quick favor to ask actually three favors so number one if you're a fan of our show I ask you to do something that takes under three minutes. Go to iTunes please and subscribe to our show please please please it means so much to us it's so important and then give us a favorable review we would really really appreciate it and uh I can't tell you how much it means it helps us out. So I know it takes two minutes of your day and uh it means a lot to us. So please do that. Number two, go to our YouTube channel or fitness marketing alliance and uh please subscribe to our YouTube channel there. Number three, if you like this episode or any of the episodes that we've released, share it on social. That's huge. That's a big deal for us. And we're we put a lot of work into these episodes uh trying to give you great actionable content uh for the fitness industry so that would mean a lot and that's it so we have some big plans coming up for this show. I'll be talking about that in the next couple episodes but thank you so much for listening. It means so much and uh if you have any questions please reach out to me. I'd love to hear from everybody. Eric E R I C at fitnessmarketingalliance calm