Avoiding Burnout By Sustaining Your Energy Throughout The Day With Samuel Johnson [Episode 95]

Avoiding Burnout By Sustaining Your Energy Throughout The Day With Samuel Johnson

I’m bringing in another great guest. His name is Mr. Samuel Johnson. He runs a company called Travel Fit Company. He specializes in helping high-performing professionals with tools and information on how to increase and sustain energy, get more sleep, lose weight if they want to and do this all without slowing down at work. In other words, many of us are pushing that red line on the tachometer every single day and we keep doing it.

Sometimes, we don’t even know why we are doing it. You get to the end or throughout, you are getting tired and you realize, “I haven’t been taking care of myself the way I’m supposed to. My personal life might be in line or out of whack but things are off.” We are starting to head toward burnout. We know it or don’t know it. We keep going. We feel stressed and tired. We don’t eat right or sleep well. All of that stuff ends up catching up to us. From somebody who has experienced burnout, I can tell you it is not fun and it takes longer to recover than most people think.

I wanted to do this on this particular episode and bring Samuel in because he is an expert on this. I wanted to do this because a lot of times, people don’t think about this until it catches them. We are driving it. This has everything to do with revenue growth, profit growth and increasing sales. The reason I’m bringing this forth is it is such a needed resource and sometimes people don’t want to talk about it. The reality is we went a little longer than we do on a normal episode on this because there were so much great content, information, tools and tips that he gave that I wanted to get as much put into this as possible. Let me know what you think about it. Let’s talk to Samuel.

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Samuel, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.

Thank you for having me.

I was excited to have you here because we have a lot of high-performing CEOs, business owners and people reading this blog. Most of them work a lot and deplete their energy. They don’t get enough sleep. They eat out at restaurants. They are not eating appropriately. It is slowing them down at work. Some people’s heads are bobbing up and down as they are reading this. You are the person in your company, Travel Fit Company, that equips high professionals or high-performing professionals with these tools to increase and sustain energy, get more sleep and lose weight if they want to without slowing down at work. Did I get that right?

I love the word that you use in regard to tools because that is what we do. We help high performers, whether it is a CEO, an executive or a sales professional, build their toolboxes to be able to go through their days and do what they need to do with their health without sacrificing time away from work.

That almost sounds too good to be true I bet to some of these people who are reading. It certainly was for me. For years, I was that guy that usually worked seven days a week. It was rare that I took a day off and I would go for a year or so straight and go, “I need a vacation.” I remember I went for almost two years straight. One day, it was about 10:00 at night. I was sitting at my desk and I heard this weird voice talking to me and this weird string of energy coming by saying, “You are burnt. You are done.” I burned out.

It was weird because one day I went back to work but I couldn’t get back to work. It was slugging uphill in the mud in a rainstorm, trying to get to the top again. It was the weirdest thing. It took me about a year and a half before I came back and was able to go back to capacity. That was only because I took six months off.

Why do you think people do that to themselves? In other words, what makes somebody wants to get to that place where they don’t have the energy, long sleep, the loss of weight, slow down and eventually the body is telling them but they don’t pay attention to it and they do what I did? In your experience, what makes people do that?

The body always gets what it wants one way or another. It will force you to do what it wants to do whenever it wants you to do it. What will lead somebody to that place is 1 of 2 things. If you are a CEO, you own your business or you are running a company, a lot of times, it can be a high pressure to grow and short timelines to be able to reach goals that are probably difficult to reach. You are a high performer and shooting for the stars. You want to grow the business, serve as many people as you can and be able to serve the marketplace.

What happens is things begin to stack up in your days. Not only do you have your work life, you probably have a personal life too, whether you are married, have kids, a spouse or a partner. Before you know it, you wake up. You are bombarded by emails. You go right into work mode. You got to deal with the kids and get them off to school. You work for 10 to 12 hours a day. You got to pick the kids up. You get home and you are wiped. It ends up being this never-ending cycle.

One of the things that I have seen a lot of is aggressive timelines on goals, which forces people to push themselves to the limits. The mindset there is, “Once I reach this goal or get to this place, I will stop, slow down and take care of myself.” You know better than anybody else. We all know as high performers that there is going to be one other thing that you are going to start chasing. The key is to figure out how we manage it along the way. How do we do both things at the same time?

I have a question on this because even in my life as I get older, my mother used to say to me, “It is too bad that energy is wasted on the youth and aged. Wisdom is wasted on the old.” I never got it when I was in my teens and twenties but I’m starting to get it now that I’m getting up there a bit. We are all rushing to a goal as a high-performer.

This is my theory. I want your feedback. My theory is we are running to goals that we don’t know we want or don’t want. We think when we are going to get to that goal, we are going to have this feeling of accomplishment or feeling like, “I have arrived.” In most cases, when I arrived, it wasn’t that great at that point. Why did I do all this? Why did I miss my birthday when my child was waiting for me to come home and give daddy a hug? I would justify it in my mind while doing it for them and this type of thing.

In reality, as I get older, I reflect on it and go, “I was trying to solve some childhood wounds that maybe I was never going to be good enough. Making $1 million a year wasn’t good enough. You got to make $2 million, $3 million or $5 million.” It was one of those perpetual things. I’m curious because I have never asked you this question. Do you find a common thread through most high performers as they are chasing things and they get there? Tony Robbins said, “This is all there is when you get there.” Do you find that as a thread?

I have spent some time around some successful business owners that have surpassed the 8-figure and 9-figure mark in terms of revenue per year and have done some incredible things in short amounts of time. I can tell you that they did the same thing. They got there and were like, “What was all this for?” Similar to what you said, “I have missed my daughter’s recitals. I missed sporting events. I wasn’t there to wake them up or put them to bed because I was at work.” It is a question that we can go deep on. We could probably talk about this for the entire hour but a lot of us find identity in work and accomplishments. We find this dopamine hit from reaching specific goals. Once that dopamine hits and goes away, what is next? We start chasing the next target.

It is interesting that you mentioned that you are probably trying to heal some childhood wounds. I will give you a quick story about how I found myself in this position. My father failed many times in business. He struggled to provide for his family. I grew up watching him beg my mom for money and not be able to provide. I watched him cry many times because he wasn’t able to give what he thought was what we wanted in terms of money and he wasn’t able to provide it.

From a young age, at fourteen years old, when I started work, I went into the same mode. I struggled for many years. I was always working out of scarcity. I said no to many things early on in my life because I was onto the next dollar. I have had to do a lot of work myself, realizing, “Who am I separate from work, my accolades, my achievements and everything that I want to do in the world? Who am I as a man outside of performance and work?”

As I started to do that work and uncover who I am, I was able to identify that my worth isn’t defined by work and accomplishments in work. It is about my impact on this earth. The more important things to me are love and connection to the people that I love. That was when I was able to start to shift away from constantly chasing the next thing. It is common you will see a lot of high-performing individuals do that. They got there and were like, “What is next?” Some people will throw it away and you see that all the time.

Your work and accomplishments do not define your worth. Click To Tweet

I would call it an addiction. It is like a form of ism, alcoholism and workism. I have a good friend. He built $1 billion worth of companies and lost almost all of it overnight, including his family. He went on a quest. He was like, “What is the purpose of this whole thing?” That started queuing me into what I was doing because I was similar in the personality side but a lot of high performers have that addiction when it comes down to it. I love the question you asked. We are speaking with Mr. Samuel Johnson. He owns a company called Travel Fit Company. He helps people increase and sustain their energy, get more sleep, lose weight, live healthier and be more focused without having to slow down at work, which is the key for all of us.

You asked an amazing question. It is, “Who am I separate from work?” I can imagine there is some person reading this crying because it is a good question. I have had to learn this the hard way. I’m sure that you have helped people do this. Your worth is not defined by your work. Here is what I have learned. If your worth is defined by your work and it doesn’t go well, as an entrepreneur, it is not always going to go great.

I have had partners embezzle money out of companies that I have been involved in. If we define ourselves based on the performance of that business or work, when things don’t go well, things are not going to go well for the rest of our lives. How does one separate themselves from work and their true self if that is what it should be called?

This was a spiritual journey. The short story of it is I was raised Catholic and didn’t have a relationship with God. I became an atheist at twelve years old and drew away. I found my identity personally in things from the world. For me, it was work and women. I grew up with a lot of pain and trauma in my household. My escape was drugs, alcohol and work. If I wasn’t working, it was one of those things. I battled addiction to drugs, alcohol, pornography and sex for many years.  

Finally, I reached a breaking point where I said, “I can’t do this anymore.” That was when God came in and saved my life. He has taken me on this journey for the last several years of discovering who I am as a man and a son of God. For me, it was a spiritual journey. To answer your question, a lot of times, what we have to do is pull back and start to ask some hard questions.

You said something that caught my ear. “A lot of us think that we are going to feel a certain way once we reach the mountaintop or goal.” The reality is most of us have no idea how we want to feel. We also don’t know what we want. We think we have ideas and a lot of those ideas tend to be influenced by other people whom we look up to and idolize. We start chasing things that are an endless cycle that never bring us joy and fulfillment.

For somebody to be able to find themselves and find an identity outside of work, that is where we have to step back and start to look at the heart and what we want to feel. “Who am I as a man or as a woman outside of my performance and work? Who do I want to become as a father, as a wife or as a friend?” Begin to seek and get clarity on that. If you have a spiritual life, my recommendation is to pursue that in one way or another and seek the answers in that realm. If you don’t have a spiritual life, it comes down to starting to ask yourself some hard questions about what all this is for. What happens when I get to this point and I reach the goal, I hit $100 million or $1 billion and begin to exhaust those answers?

Step back and look at your heart if you want to find your identity outside of work. Look at what you want to feel and who you want to be outside of work. Click To Tweet

It is a great question. The answer is it is not a bad thing to be a multi-billionaire if we have joy and fulfillment in that. When you have lots of funds, you can do lots of great stuff for people. The old money magnifies the person. If the person is that giving-type of person, when they get there, they usually are like, “How many shoes can I wear? How many cars can I drive? Let me go help this and that cause.” Those are wonderful things. There is nothing wrong. I don’t want anybody thinking we are beating up on people who are high performers. That is not what we are doing here.

What we are doing is we are saying, “Let’s be in congruency with who we truly are and be a high performer.” There are some tools that you help people with. Let’s talk about some of the tools. I want to be pushing the red line all the time. I’m revving the engine. That thing is going up. That tachometer is going to the red line every single time. I’m not too far. I’m going to burn out. I’m performing at a high peak capacity. What are some of the tools that people can use? Let’s say I wanted to have a little bit more energy, for example.

The way I explain energy is like this. We have an energy bank account. In life and business, most of the time, all we are doing is expending energy all day long. On this show, we are expending energy. We are pouring into this show. You said that you were on multiple calls before this. You are expending energy on that. You are solving problems and helping people. You have a family. Nonstop energy is being spent.

Most of the time, what happens is people spend energy but don’t ever recover it. One of the easiest ways that you can recover energy throughout the day without it taking away from work is what I call micro-deposits. Finding simple ways that we can deposit our energy through movement, breathing, hydration or nutrition.

Find simple ways to deposit your energy through movement, breathing, hydration, or nutrition. Click To Tweet

For example, after I get off this interview, I may take 60 seconds and do some deep breathing. I may do 5 squats and go on a 5-minute walk to be able to disconnect and recover some of that energy that I have expended. I always look for little areas throughout our day where we can do micro-deposits into our energy after we get done completing task projects, calls or meetings. That is the saying that we want to look at. After I finish this meeting, I will go for a five-minute walk because that is something that is going to be consistent in your schedule and we can place that new habit behind us.

Another thing that we want to consider is how we start our days with energy and be able to sustain that throughout the day. One of the best things that we can do as high performers in the morning is to get sunlight. It is free and it is one of the best ways to be able to charge your system up and sustain energy throughout the day because it is going to elevate cortisol levels, which is a good thing. That is what you want early on in the day. Sunlight is also going to help clear adenosine, which is the molecule that makes you feel sleepy. It will clear that out early on in the day and that will help bring your energy levels up and set your circadian rhythms.

If there is one thing that I encourage every single client that comes into work with us, it is to find a way to get sunlight in the morning. If it is sunny out and there is no cloud coverage, after two minutes, you are rocking and rolling. If it is cloudy out, probably more than ten minutes is going to be ideal to be able to get that light because you are still getting UV light coming through the clouds. Sunlight is one of my favorites in regard to increasing energy.

What about the people who go, “I live in New England or Canada. It is the middle of the winter and it is snowing. There is no sunlight out.” What do they do?

Even if it is cloudy, you would want to spend more time out. In Canada, you can get into negative 30 degrees and negative 40 degrees. I have some friends that live up there. I’m not necessarily encouraging you to go and stand out in that weather to be able to get sunlight. You can get artificial light but the time that it takes for artificial light to trigger circadian rhythm and trigger cortisol is significantly longer. If we were outside, it is typically 2 to 10 minutes if it is sunny out. If it is cloudy, it is more than 10 to 30 minutes.

However, if we are using artificial light, that can be upwards of six hours that it can take for that to take place. Let’s say that you are in the UK, where it is cloudy out quite a bit. You would want to spend more time outside in the morning. You can double down, go outside and get a walk. Do not wear sunglasses while you are doing that and that is going to do it for you.

You had said, “Movement, breathing and hydration.” Was there a fourth one that I missed?

Nutrition.

That one I’d like to dig into.

It is always the most difficult.

That is why I want to dig into it. Let’s talk about nutrition because a lot of people are confused about what nutrition means. Anytime you read something it’s like, “That was good several years ago. This is no longer good now.” What would be some easy nutritional type of routine that somebody could embrace?

The first thing I want to say is I am not a medical doctor. This is not nutritional advice. These are suggestions that you can consider. The best thing that you can always do is get blood work done, talk to your physician and see what your body needs. The first step that I recommend anybody to take is to get some labs done. That way, you can design a protocol that is specific to you rather than reading something on the internet or seeing something on Instagram and going, “I’m going to do that.” Get some blood work done. That is the best thing that you can do.

If we are not going to do blood work, one of the first places that we want to start is protein. Most people lack protein. Finding ways that we can consistently get protein in throughout the day is going to be huge. For a lot of high performers, people that are busy, what I find is most people will tend to skip breakfast. It doesn’t make sense with your schedule and your appetite doesn’t kick in until more around 10:00 to 12:00 PM.

What we want to do is make sure that if you are skipping breakfast, you are starting your day with quite a bit of protein and making sure that as you go through the day, you are getting consistent protein at least every 2 to 4 hours. Protein is going to be one of the most important because it has a high thermic effect on the body, which means that it requires more energy to break down and it is going to help build muscle. If you are in resistance training, it is important. Not only that but it is going to help you stay full, which will help prevent you from overeating.

One of the things that you mentioned is people that are going out to client dinners and client lunches. You are always on the go. You are stopping and eating fast food regularly. What I typically will recommend for people is two things. Number one is that we want to make sure that we have higher protein snacks and/or protein shakes with us at all times.

If you are on the go or in the office all day long, keep a protein shake or beef jerky if you are okay eating processed foods or protein bars. You could even do little packets of tuna or something of that nature. Keeping those on hand and close by is going to be helpful for you to be able to turn to that rather than turning to whatever is in the vending machine or drive-thru.

The second thing is when you eat out, the big thing we have to consider is that fast food and/or eating at a restaurant, the meals are always going to be higher in fat and carbohydrate. They are going to be lower in protein and higher in fat and carbohydrate. There is nothing wrong with fat or carbs. I’m not demonizing those. We want to be aware of that. That way, we can backfill it later on.

What we have to do is look at how we can make decisions on the go at these restaurants where we can focus more on protein and make decisions that allow us to eat fewer carbs and fat at those restaurants. For example, if you were to go to Chick-fil-A, if you have that one of those near you, rather than getting a spicy chicken sandwich and waffle fries, you could do a grilled chicken sandwich with some grilled nuggets and a small side salad. The big thing to realize is that you can make good decisions anywhere that you go. It is a matter of having the knowledge of how to do it, what to look for and what to stay away from.

Samuel, if somebody wants to get ahold of you and your company, how do they do so?

One of the easiest ways you can go is to www.TravelFitCo.com. You can submit a form where you can opt into our email list. If you want to reach me directly, I’m on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. On Instagram, it is @SammyGFit. On LinkedIn, it is Samuel Johnson. Social media is going to be the best way to do that.

Hydration is key to our bodies. We all know that but people were like, “I do many read.” This person says you got to drink this many gallons of water.” This person says, “Don’t do that.” This person says, “You will kill yourself if you drink too much.” This is all kinds of things out there. They are probably all true in some capacity and not in others. What is hydration? If they want to have more energy, what should they be doing?

Hydration is not just water. That is the first place that we go wrong. Hydration or dehydration, there are three things that we are looking at, water intake, salt intake and electrolytes or minerals. It is important to make sure that we are covering all three of those. I’m not recommending that you begin to consume salt but most people tend to turn away from salt. They think it is bad because that is what we have been told for many years. It depends on their circumstances. I always would reference, talk to your physician before you make any changes and consult with somebody on blood work to know what you need.

When we are looking at hydration, we want to make sure that we are addressing those three areas. For example, if you are able to wake up and start your day with 12 to 24 ounces of water, that is going to be great. You are also going to want to make sure that you are getting pink Himalayan sea salt or an electrolyte powder because if you drink too much water, that can tend to flush out electrolytes. We get this mineral deficiency or an imbalance of electrolytes, which you can find in people that may drink a gallon of water but they are still dehydrated or cramping.

Those are the three areas we have to look at. How much water are you consuming? I typically will recommend that people start at 100 ounces a day or 3 liters. An easy way to be able to implement that into your day, especially if you tend to forget to drink water throughout the day, is at each meal that you eat, drink a liter of water. A liter of water is about 33 ounces of water. That is a good place to start.

From there, we want to look at your salt intake. If you can, salt your food. What you can do is take a pinch of sea salt and put it in your water. That is going to help you increase your sodium intake. The body requires about 4,000 milligrams of sodium a day in itself. You can get electrolytes through food but another simple way for somebody that is a high performer to do that is an electrolyte powder.

What a lot of people don’t realize is your cells, heart and nervous system need this. It is not something that is not needed. Get lab work done first. I have done this and micronutrient tests and all kinds of things. It is interesting to find out you are not getting enough vitamin D or vitamin B12. As soon as I started changing that around, I was like, “My energy is better.” Especially as we age, our bodies change. When we are 20 and 55, it is a different body. It doesn’t mean it is good or bad. It means we are aging in some capacity.

Before we move on, I want to touch on that vitamin D comment. I got blood work done and I am intentional about getting some iodine in every day. I would like to think that I eat relatively well in terms of foods that are going to have some vitamin D in them. I still came up at 27 out of 100 on a scale. My vitamin D is low. Vitamin D is the most important vitamin in your body. It is the only vitamin that our body makes. Most people are running low on it. That is an easy supplement that you can implement into your routine that is going to help bring your energy levels up.

If it is winter, usually between October to March and if you are not in the sun as much during the winter, I would recommend somewhere between 5,000 IUs to 10,000 IUs a day. If you can get your vitamin D levels up, that is going to help hormonal function and energy levels. It is super simple to be able to take every single day. I wanted to hit that real quick because it is a simple one to do.

I do it sublingually. I take a liquid and squirt it into my mouth. It doesn’t taste all that great, guys and gals. The reality is that it does work. It works great and it is easy to do. You can drop it into a smoothie. You can do anything you want with the thing but it does make a big difference. I have seen studies that show that it is also helpful with COVID. There is some thinking, “This might help prevent severe things with COVID.” But I’m not a doctor. We are just two guys talking.

I want to go to the last one. Morning routines are important. Everything I hear you say is, “If I eat better, breathe better, move more, I’m taking care of everything, I’m going to lose some weight and my body is naturally going to go to where it is going to be. I don’t have to slow down because my energy levels are going to go up.” It makes total sense to me.

What about the mind? Sometimes people are like, “I don’t want to talk, study and do anything about that. I want to focus on making more money.” What I tell people is, “One of the primary reasons you make or don’t make more money is how we think.” If you wouldn’t mind, in closing, are there tools that people can do or something they can do to get them oriented in the right direction during the day?

For mindset?

Stuff is going to happen. We all know that. We are all in business. I always say, “Business is easy until you have people.” People have different desires, wants and needs. They do stuff and mess things up here and there. That is where we can step up, learn new things and grow. That is what we do as entrepreneurs. If they want to be a high-performing professional and they want to keep going and moving the red line of the tachometer, those RPMs up, they are going to run into stuff. How do they do negative mind prevention? Maybe there is no way. I’m asking you because you are the expert.

A couple of things that come to mind for me are journaling, which may sound like a bit of an odd answer but for a lot of high performers, a lot of times, what we do is bottle things up. We get punched in the face all day long, bottle it up and don’t process it. From an emotional perspective, the number one skill that anybody can learn is how to regulate emotions. If things go wrong and that throws your whole day off, you are losing time, productive hours and the ability to lead.

What I have found to be one of the best tools that I use every day and that I have been doing for several years is journaling. What I do is at the end of every day, I do a journal. I will recommend an app. I have no affiliation with this app. It is called Day One. It is an awesome app. You can voice record and upload pictures. What it will do is keep logs of your journals. As time goes on, it will pop up previous journals that you had several years ago.

This offers a couple of different things. Number one, it allows you to be able to process. Most of us are running nonstop and we never slow down to process what has happened. Stopping and getting everything out of your head is going to help big time. It will help you be able to see clearly, think more clearly and be able to process what is happening rather than bottling it up.

The other thing is it allows you to learn and reflect. It allows you to see things that are going well and not going well. For somebody that doesn’t journal, it could take you 1 to 3 months to learn a lesson because you don’t have that awareness of what is going on. For me, because I journal every day, I might be able to look back and see common themes and threads in how I’m thinking and feeling. I can start to ask myself questions.

If I read a journal or I’ve journaled the past several days that I’m low on energy and I’m feeling a bit down, I can start to think about, “What is going on? Is there anything that is changed in my routines? Is this a certain time of year? Have things happened in my past?” Journaling is one of the best tools, in my opinion.

The second thing that I would encourage is to get clarity on your vision, not only for your professional life but also for your personal life. We talked about this earlier but most people don’t know what they want to feel and want. They have ideas. Stopping and getting some time to get clarity, writing down your vision not only of what you want to achieve but whom you are becoming.

The two most powerful words in the English language, in my opinion, are I am because what comes after that those two words describes how you think about yourself. Doing work on your identity, beginning to speak life over yourself and continuing to develop the person that you want to become is going to be super helpful.

Every morning you could take 2 or 3 minutes and read over your vision. You can read some “I am” statements like, “I am a man that takes time to slow down and process how I feel if I feel overwhelmed or emotional, rather than bottling it up.” The more you start to speak that out over yourself, you are going to program your subconscious mind and you will begin to follow that up.

Those are probably the two tools that come to mind. One is done in the morning and one is done in the evening. The vision in terms of reading over would be done in the morning and the journaling would be done at night. That is going to also allow you to get better sleep, which my third tool is to get more sleep. Sleep deprivation will influence every aspect of your life and distort your ability to be able to understand and perceive what is going on from an emotional level, spiritual level and physical perspective.

If you are sleep deprived, which most people are, it is going to make everything harder. It is the reality of it. There’s a lot of science. We can talk about that if you would like. If you can find ways to get more sleep and the more rested you are, the better you will be able to manage your emotions and mindset, especially when things are not going well.

We normally don’t go this long on the show but I want to take a little extra time. Let’s talk about sleep because it is important for people. Put some tools to get some better sleep.

The two main drivers of sleep are light and temperature. To keep it simple, in the morning, we want to increase our body temperature. One of the main reasons that people wake up is because their body temperature rises 1 to 3 degrees. At night, it is going to fall 1 to 3 degrees. In the morning, it is important because it sets the tone for the night.

In the morning, we want to raise our body temperature, so we can do that through exercise. In my opinion, one of the best ways to be able to do that, which will also lead to more mental toughness and resilience, is through cold exposure. A cold shower or deliberate cold plunging into a cold body of water, and we want to consume sunlight.

On the flip side of them, at night, what we want to do is we want to try to develop some behaviors where we are able to decrease our body temperature and heat decreases your body temperature. If you have a sauna at your house, doing 10 to 15 minutes in the sauna would be a great idea. If you don’t have a sauna, you could do a warm shower for ten minutes. That is going to help trigger your body to cool down.

The second thing to get better sleep is to decrease light consumption. How much artificial light are you taking in? An hour before bed, what I would encourage you to do and this is a super simple action that you can take is to turn out all overhead lights. The only lights in your house would be eye level, preferably below eye level, lamps, candlelight or night lights. If you consume light at night, it will shut down the production of melatonin. We don’t want to do that. Most of us are on screens. We are looking at phones and working super late at night. There are overhead lights on. Even if you are wearing blue-light-blocking glasses, you are still consuming light.

If you consume light at night, it will shut down your production of melatonin. Click To Tweet

Those would be the two things that I would look to do that you can take immediate action on. If you can do some cold exposure in the morning and get some sunlight, that is going to help you wake up. It is going to set your circadian clock. In the evening, decrease the amount of light that you are consuming that is coming in through your eyes. Turn all overhead lights out an hour before bed and do a warm shower. That will help.

One of the other things that I want to say here real quick that would be useful for a lot of high performers is journaling. We already talked about it but most of the time, people struggle to fall asleep. You are tossing and turning about everything that happened in the day or maybe you are exhausted in general and you pass out. If you struggle to fall asleep at night and stay asleep at night, doing some journaling is going to be easy for you. It is going to be an easy way to be able to get everything out of your head and process the day. That way, you are not getting into bed, tossing and turning about what went right and what didn’t get done in a state of stress while you are in bed.

There are a ton of other steps that you can take but those would be the two main things that I would do. The next would be breathing, doing some simple breath work. My favorite breathing method to do before bed is called 478 breathing. You do a 4-second inhale through the nose, hold for 7 seconds and exhale for 8 seconds. You are going to exhale through your mouth and make a whoosh sound. Every night for 6 to 8 minutes, I lie down on the ground, put my feet up on the wall and do 478 breathing. It is one of the best ways for me to down-regulate my nervous system, relax to get some oxygen and clear my mind for the day. I’m able to sleep well.

Samuel, thanks for being here. I appreciate it. I know other people who are reading this are going, “Wow.” I love to have you back on the show in the future if you like to.

Thanks, Doug. I appreciate it. Thank you for your time.

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I got pages of notes and I won’t do a fifteen-minute deep brief on this whole thing but I would recommend you read this over and over again. There were so many great nuggets of wisdom. I would say practicality is the word. Practical tools, tips and things that were working there. Here is the deal. Morning routine and night routine. If you talk to most billionaires and people who have been high performers and keep going, they have morning and evening routines or night routines that set them up for success the next day. People who are high performers who are doing well and not burning out know these tools and processes. They utilize them to get more energy into their life.

The crazy part about this is when we get clear on our identity, vision, process and tools, a lot of stuff starts falling in line that we were like, “This is magic.” It is about performing and being able to be happy in that process, not just getting to the end of a goal going, “I got there. That was great. Let me move on to the next goal. That wasn’t worth the energy.” The effort I put into that, I know we have all done that. I have done that myself. What we want to do is take care of ourselves as we are taking care of others as we go along.

Reach out to Samuel. He’s got some group coaching and one-on-one coaching if you feel that is appropriate for you. If you like this content, let us know. If you love it, please give it a five-star review. I know it takes a few minutes and that is an ask of me but I’m going to keep bringing great information and guests to you. If you would like to reward me back, that would be helpful.

If there is a subject matter that you feel you are an expert on and you want to be on the show, reach out to us. We will review all of these requests. If you know somebody, recommend them. That would be helpful. As always, if you want to reach out to us, you want to be in the top 1% of sellers or grow the revenue and profit in your company, we help companies do that. Reach out to me at Doug@CEOSalesStrategies.com.

For all other inquiries, you can reach out to us at YouMatter@CEOSalesStrategies.com. I’m also on LinkedIn, @DougBrown123. As always, as we sign off, go out, sell something and sell a lot of it. Do it in a win-win fashion and help other people and yourself. Make the day a little brighter for other people and you will win too. Until next time. To your success.

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