Today we wrap up our series on PERMA-V and wellbeing by talking about the final component Vitality.

We really like the idea of Vitality as a term over Health because Vitality implies energy applied to life and doing the things required to have enough energy to reach your full potential. Health is very important but is traditionally focused on preventative measures - avoiding sickness, etc.

We also discuss seven different types of rest from a great TED talk by Dr. Sandra Dalton-Smith: https://ideas.ted.com/the-7-types-of-rest-that-every-person-needs/

• Physical Rest - what we normally think of, sleeping/napping
• Mental Rest - Slow down, take breaks, get thoughts out of your head through journaling, etc.
• Sensory Rest - Take a break from screens
• Creative Rest - Activities that re-awaken the awe and wonder inside each of us
• Emotional Rest - Having time and space to express your feelings
• Social Rest - Focusing on relationships that revive us
• Spiritual Rest - Connecting beyond the physical

Thanks for joining us today and don't forget to hit the subscribe button or reach out at hello@wannagrabcoffee.com.

Charles Knight 0:00

Hey, what's up gents?

Robert Greiner 0:06

Have some computer problems?

Igor Geyfman 0:09

Yeah, I installed boot camp on this laptop. And it's been just a total nightmare. And so that was a mistake. It took me 15 minutes to boot up Mac. That's why I was late.

Robert Greiner 0:19

Are you trying to break your gear so that you can buy the new MacBook? Is that your ultimate goal?

Igor Geyfman 0:24

No, this is my personal computer.

Robert Greiner 0:26

Yeah, so

Igor Geyfman 0:27

Oh, you're saying you're

Robert Greiner 0:28

dropping off the legend. Yeah. But your new order and

Igor Geyfman 0:32

I'm waiting. My next computer is probably going to be an iMac. Like the new Apple silicone iMac.

Robert Greiner 0:38

Yeah.

Igor Geyfman 0:39

I've been like trying not to buy the Mac Mini. Just to play with.

Robert Greiner 0:44

Oh, yeah. The new chip.

Charles Knight 0:48

You're ready to talk vitality?

Robert Greiner 0:50

Yes. Fully acknowledging that the year is I think 5% over February 8. That's 10% over. So gotta get on those goals. Charles.

Charles Knight 0:59

Yeah. Gosh,

Robert Greiner 1:00

Father time is tick tick ticking away.

Charles Knight 1:03

Taken away. Yeah, by the way. I think I found a house to rent. Oh, cool. I gotta I gotta get I sent an email to the rental lady today saying, hey, I'd love to rent with you. And she hasn't responded back. I was like, Oh, no.

Robert Greiner 1:18

times are good. Yeah,

Igor Geyfman 1:21

they are good.

Charles Knight 1:22

Yeah. Anyway, in Richardson. Yep.

Igor Geyfman 1:26

Yep. That's okay. We can use All right, let's start over.

Charles Knight 1:30

Yeah, I figured we hadn't officially started yet. But y'all ready go now? Yeah, jumping.

Robert Greiner 1:35

Yeah, let's do it.

Charles Knight 1:36

I'm feeling pretty energized. Actually.

Igor Geyfman 1:38

Are you full of vitality.

Charles Knight 1:41

Oh, come

on, man. Like why are you gonna? We're gonna ruin my segway, dude. Okay, sorry. I take it back. Now. That's okay. Yeah. That was pretty lame of me to start with that comment. But yeah, I wanted to talk to you all we're in. This is the last deep dive episode on perma v. We've talked about the other elements of perma v. And the last one is vitality. alienated all of our listeners. We're back to zero.

Robert Greiner 2:06

It's been a long road. It's gonna knock off the last few if there's any remaining and then we'll start over next week.

Igor Geyfman 2:12

What episode number is this? Oh,

Robert Greiner 2:15

I can look. It's gonna be 25

Igor Geyfman 2:19

I feel like we should pop open champagne or something.

Robert Greiner 2:22

Hey, that's a really good milestone. Yeah, I know. We talked about 100 last year. And we may hit that number this year. 25 is a good milestone. Good job, y'all soon. Eight is the average. Where are we lacking quality we can make up in quantity.

Igor Geyfman 2:36

That's been my like entire career.

Robert Greiner 2:38

That's right. Nothing wrong with that.

Charles Knight 2:40

A lot of this stuff that we've been talking about. It's rooted in positive psychology, this body of work and research that was born out of an extension of a lot of the humanist psychology stuff that gave us things like Maslow's hierarchy of needs and things like that. I don't know if I mentioned though, V for vitality is not an official component of the positive psychology definition of well being. So they actually use just perma

Igor Geyfman 3:08

is the Charles knighted edition.

Charles Knight 3:11

No, it's not. No, there's other folks out there that have said, Hey, what's missing is something like vitality. Other people actually found later on they call it health. Or just h for health.

Igor Geyfman 3:23

h h or perma?

Robert Greiner 3:25

Yeah, I like Perma V. Yeah. Is that what you said Igor?

Igor Geyfman 3:27

Yeah. Yeah,

Robert Greiner 3:29

yeah. Yeah, I think I do, too.

Charles Knight 3:30

I do too. And here's why. This is what I want to get into with you all.

Robert Greiner 3:34

Now. So I think Igor and I were just saying we like the letter V. And the way it said the acronym sounds you like the term vitality? over health is what you're about to get into a level or two deeper than

Igor Geyfman 3:48

Charles is about substance. Robert, you have to That's right.

Robert Greiner 3:50

That's right. Okay, great. So why do you like V for vitality over all other and maybe weave in why you think it needs to be added to like, why you agree with the analysis of perma by itself is not sufficient?

Charles Knight 4:03

Yeah. So let me answer that. And then I'll explain. Maybe through that, I'll explain why I like vitality as a word. At some point. A few years ago, after the birth of my kids, probably when I was sleep deprived, now that I think about it. I had a very profound insight. To me, it'll sound real simple, but it had a really profound impact on the way I thought about things and how I prioritize things. And I just had a realization at some point that what the most important thing that I can do to be a better husband, father, friend, co worker, manager, human being, was to just get more sleep.

Igor Geyfman 4:45

How much sleep were you getting, Charles?

Charles Knight 4:47

What like when early baby phases? Or

Igor Geyfman 4:50

Yeah, like you, you have this realization.

You're like, man, if

I could just get more sleep.

Robert Greiner 4:56

Two hours a night I imagine.

Charles Knight 4:59

It was rough my life sleeper when it comes down to it, and so any stirring, of baby would wake me up. And it was almost like I had PTSD.

Robert Greiner 5:10

Do you remember a time where it was too quiet? And you're like, Oh my gosh, what's wrong? Is my baby still alive?

Charles Knight 5:16

Yeah, yeah.

Robert Greiner 5:17

So even when they're noisy when they wake you up and

Igor Geyfman 5:21

can't win when

Robert Greiner 5:22

they're quiet, you get worried really quickly.

Charles Knight 5:25

Yep, yep. Yeah, who knows, man, I think I blocked off that part of my life, thinking about sleep being sleep deprived. So quality of sleep, in addition to quantity, you know, if I need a certain base level quantity of sleep hours, asleep, but really, once you get out of the baby can't sleep through the night. To me, it was all about the quality of sleep, you know, for the time that I'm sleeping, am I getting the most out of it possible. And so that that kind of sent me down this path of trying to clean up my health, in terms of eating, exercising, and stuff like that. And they all kind of compound and support one another. Nutrition working out, helps you sleep better helps you think better as it goes, a virtuous cycle that can be created if you start on any one of those three things. And at some point, I found myself getting a little wrapped up in terms of almost being too maniacal about those things, like trying to quantify in game, sleeping, and eating. And I was experimenting with fasting, maybe a little too extreme. And it too, without taking proper precautions and stuff like that, and exercising and hurting myself, as a result of trying to go too hard, too fast sort of thing. And at some point, I remember thinking, What am I doing? And why am I doing this stuff? Like I thought it was to be a better human being. That's what what started off with sleeping. And I at some point, I took stock and I was like, Hey, wait a second. I'm trying to do all of these things, move my body, eat better, sleep better, because I want the energy to do all of the other things that I want in my life that have nothing to do with that. You know, I don't want to be a professional power lifter. I don't want to be a nutritionist. I don't want to be a professional sleeper. Sounds cool.

Robert Greiner 7:16

Now that sounds amazing. Okay, so you went down this rabbit hole, you had this period in your life where you weren't sleeping well. And that made you physiologically feel crummy, and probably impacted your psychological well being as well. And you You looked up and you said, Hey, I need to get more, quote unquote, healthy that starts with more sleep. And as you dug and dug, you went down this rabbit hole of nutrition and fasting and exercise. And you just dove into it headfirst, which resulted in some negative outcomes, like injuries and things like that. And then as you went really deep into this, you took a step back and you said, Hey, wait, what's like, why am I doing this? I want to be healthy. I want to level up my health so that I can go and have the energy to do all the things in my life that are really important to me. And if I don't have health on my side, I'm going to miss out on stuff.

Charles Knight 8:10

Yeah, absolutely.

Robert Greiner 8:11

So you kind of lost your way a little bit.

Charles Knight 8:14

Yeah,

Robert Greiner 8:15

you had to make overcorrected and had to maybe calibrate is that where is that what's coming next?

Charles Knight 8:20

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So that, that that made me think is, hey, I need to think more broadly than this. It's what are the things that I want to do in life and reorient towards that? And at the time, I didn't know perma v. But it's, hey, I want to be able to have the energy to play with my kids as they grow up. I want to be able to pick them up as they get older and heavier, and not hurt myself. I got I want to be 67 years old and hunched over and unable to move. And it's it made me think about things like that. And to me, instead of health, which had a weird connotation. For me. There's disease when you think about health, there's poor health, there's good health, too, but I searched for another term. And I really liked vitality even before I found perma V, which is somebody else's. Somebody else selected vitality as the thing to cover off on health. Because to me vitality is it's like this energetic feeling like this, like forward moving thing that that that's what I want to bring in every moment throughout my life if I can.

Robert Greiner 9:27

So looking up the definition, the state of being strong and active energy, that's a that's more of a optimistic, inspiring, aspirational way to look at something as broad as what health could mean.

Charles Knight 9:43

And I like that too. Because when people say health, a lot of times people think exercise and nutrition.

Robert Greiner 9:53

Oh, yeah. Because the definition there is the state of being free from illness or injury. That's not what you're talking about. That's not preventative. Yeah, you're talking about that the energy?

Yep.

idea. Yeah. Okay.

And so then with that, right, if I want to be more encompassing, holistic, whatever you want to call it beyond just nutrition and exercise. That's when it's like, oh, yeah, what about my mental health. And so for me, vitality, activities are things like going to therapy, it sucks in the moment. But having insights through going to therapy gives me energy, like an excitement to re enter life, meditation goes into there, not only because it's a good kind of stress relief thing, but it also helps me to be less reactive. So I can be more thoughtful in how I approach things. And so that maybe call that maybe it's a different kind of mental health. Because, again, mental health has this connotation of, you know, psychiatric disorders and stuff like that. That's, and so vitality, closely aligned to me with this idea of energy. And I want energy to live the life that I want to live. And perma v when I stumbled upon it allowed me to define different pillars underneath vitality, that helped me to have more a more diverse set of goals. When it came to health, it's no longer about how long can I go on a fast? Or how much weight I can lift? It's, it's, it's more inclusive than just those two things. That makes sense.

I think most people land our calories in and calories out, or how much sugar did I take in? How many minutes a day to exercise? How far can I run? Those are all fine measurements. I think, though, when you there's two things I heard you say, which is really interesting, to me, at least is one vitality is so broad, that there is a broader level of measures or things you could focus on to get to that state. And then two that sort of default, metrics and measures around health or fitness, or how you're eating are not sufficient, there may be a good place to start. But at some point, you got to get past them.

Yeah. And you made me remember something else that I've done too, recently. It's like those measures that you talked about. They're quantitative. It's like how many minutes? Or how many calories? They're easy to track to nowadays, especially. But what about things like, what's your mood? Like? How do you feel today? Like, how was your day today? Overall, are you happy, were you miserable, were you blah, and to me, like the mood state of minds, whatever you want to call it, that fits more it, to me, it correlates more with energy than it does with the quantitative stuff. And so I could, I could work out, and I could meet my calorie goals and be miserable. That's not good. That's not the outcome that I want. Like, I want to be ecstatic. I want peak experiences, if I can get them. And so it also helped me loosen this attachment to it says, I've got to fast for 18 hours, and I've got 17 hours and 50 minutes left, and I'm dying, but I'm gonna wait those last 10 minutes. It's like, why I can make myself miserable.

Yeah, there's a level of like flexibility, or sort of the 8020 idea when you don't have to go all in hardcore on some of these things. As long as you're making forward progress and getting that last 10 minutes of that last hour. Sometimes it's important if you're doing something like physical rehab, PT is something that can be important, but it just day in, day out. It's more about the practice and the and the consistency, and not about like checking every single box, which will could lead to burnout or something like that.

I think you said it best where I had lost my why, and I'm reconnecting with that has been important to help me find balance across this domain of my life, which is which is very important because of the energy aspect.

I mean, I think this is a recurring theme in the perma v discussion that we've had, which is like finding and maintaining the why behind what you're doing and intentionality. And it's just as applicable in the vitality sphere as it is in an all the other components.

It doesn't make me wonder though, at our company, we did a little bit of a poll of our employees, and a good deal of them identified vitality as something that they wanted to improve upon. And I want to hear from you all, why do you think it's so hard? We've talked about this before, right of sticking with those things that give us vitality that improve our health? And I don't know it seems different.

I think there's a couple of components that come to mind for me, Charles, and one is that for a long time, we did not have to think about vitality as something that we have to do. We did quote unquote vitality activities, because we're always walking, running, jumping

You're going way back

way back, food was scarce. And so our lives were tightly intertwined with activities that we associate with vitality outcomes, including sleep, and this shift to a more sedentary lifestyle and divorcing it from sort of activities that have to happen. And then a related factor is that I think most people consider vitality activities as discretionary. Basically, any time some other activity pops up on your radar, you eat into your discretionary activity bucket. And that's where a lot of vitality stuff lies for folks.

That's true. For me,

that is so true.

I never thought of it that way. But I totally agree with what you're saying. At mine. I mentioned this in the last episode, vitality or health. Also, in general fitness, things like that. There's a bit of a delay between making suboptimal choices and feeling the results of that now, if you go and have a huge meal and eat three desserts, that's different, there's still a little bit of skipping your exercise every day for two or three months, that stuff will build up slowly, and you'll feel bad later, but you don't feel bad right away. Whereas if something of work related or friend related or family related comes in, it's a little bit maybe more urgent, and you feel the pain of not delivering on that thing at that time. And so that that could be the case as well, you just you don't you're not wired maybe to think that far in the future make those trade offs subconsciously.

that makes total sense. I wanted to share a quote. So for each area of my life that I set goals for, like vitality, being one of them, like family, friends, being another work being another one, I find inspiring quote, reminds me and re motivates me to commit to this area of my life. Martha Graham, who was actually a choreographer, I know who she is, I don't know what she choreographed. But I came across this and I was like, Oh, my gosh, this hits deep. So she says, there was a vitality, a life force, and energy, a quickening, that has translated through you into action. And because there is only one of you, in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium, and it will be lost. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly to keep the channel open. And so I know that she's talking about this, or I guess, I assume she's talking about this from the standpoint of like creative expression, like through dance. That's what I assume, given she's a choreographer. But that's so beautiful. Like, in a way, this energy that I have right now, in this moment, will never happen again. Right? It's a unique expression of me right now. And if I don't work out, if I don't eat well, if I don't sleep, that energy goes down, it gets depleted, gets blocked, and I'm limiting my expression in the universe, and for all of time. And this kind of gets back to what I think I said in prior episodes about, like, Hey, what's my overarching goal that I'm trying to achieve, hey, I want to have the biggest impact on the universe as possible, which sounds lofty and arrogant, that this sort of thing motivates me, it's like, Hey, I have to do this vitality stuff. Because I want to help so many other people in my lifetime. So that reading that is just, I can get emotional. Sometimes when I read it, if I'm in the certain frame of mind,

you know, that fits in well, with stuff we've been talking about before. We talked about the talent stack. Similar, I think I read, if you're playing a simple game like chess, even by the time you're five moves in, you're playing a game that's never been played before. That's cool. There's just so many combinations, permutations, just like you, even though we're all consultants, relatively the same age, similar levels, we have completely different career objectives, what we want to grow up and do and, and things like that. And the skills that we bring to bear are completely different. And so if you take the idea of your talent stack, and the things you're good at, and the things that you're building, paired with the energy that you apply in a given point in time, that is a very unique energy you're putting into your organization, into your relationships into your family, whatever. And then the analogy I always like to think about with what you said, Charles, is your ripple effect, how wide are your ripples and dense? What are the amplitude of those concentric rings throughout your life. And each ripple takes more time and energy and responsibility. So what you're doing what you're talking about is doing the things required so that you are maximally optimized to create the widest ripple effect possible in your life across you know, personal professional type dimensions and we've come full circle, which is funny because it's our last episode on perma V, where these things tie together and your specific why which I think is a really cool way to look at it is I need to do things. So I have the energy to actually achieve my potential and my goals in life as lofty as they may be.

You're just

saying things way more beautifully than I have, Robert. So thank you for that.

I think there's a really interesting relationship. You know, as you're tying it all together, Robert, that you can use the perma function to help with the V, if that makes sense. Like you can lean into engagement and achievement and positive emotions and relationships as a way to help you meet your vitality objectives. And by meeting your vitality objectives, you can increase outcomes in the perma section, right? There's this beautiful, I think earlier in the episode, you said, virtuous cycle. That happens, but that virtuous cycle feeds this perma v model. And that quote, just goes to say that the more vitality you have, the more time and energy and better outcomes you will have, and all the other great components of your kind of perma system. So I think that relationships really important.

But concrete example of that. Igor, is I try to set goals that will hit multiple elements of perma v. Does that make sense? Right, like, yeah,

yeah, we're trying to get like a two for one or three for one there.

Yeah, yeah, this is not a real life example. But because I can't think of one right now. But if you can work out, in a group setting, pandemic aside, and with your friends, and you do something that you love to do, which might be dancing, which gives you a lot of positive emotions, and is something is an activity that you can get really engaged with. And you feel like you're part of a broader community that is doing good in the world, you have done one activity that hits every single element of perma v.

I like playing golf, there are times are just go walk. When you drive carts, and your ball goes in different locations like you, you spend time apart anyway, and so you get about the same level of camaraderie there. And I've been doing these sort of weekly stand downs with the team. And a lot of times I'll go on a walk, and that'll encourage them to the same. So instead of sitting in my chair, on zoom, pretty tired of being on this camera, I'll just be outside walking fresh air hear, the birds, and there's no time loss that's found time. And there's no, you know, diminished quality of the discussion. And even if it did, 10-15%,

did we just come up with the idea or the concept of a goal stack? Does that apply to what we're talking about here? There's a talent stack if you stack skills together? use them in a certain combination. This idea, maybe we should trademark them? called a goal stack

should edit this out. So we can,

why not? don't edit it out?

Thank you. lawyer. Yeah,

there's goal stack reasoning group called stack planning and artificial intelligence. Goalstack for managing one's priorities. Sorry, there's YouTube videos. Later, there's both a sort of career personal development thing. And it's an AI type thing. So you lose twice. Charles? Sorry. I love the idea that we I think we should have a future episode on that, though, because we talked about this, as we're setting priorities for the year, we don't have as much time as we need to do things. And so maybe we focus our energy on if our activities can fit in our straddle between two objectives that may increase its relative priority, because it's checking multiple boxes where before, maybe that wasn't really a consideration. So absolutely, yeah, that idea, I think works well, at work and then in personal life.

Okay. So question for you to want to broaden the discussion a little bit here. So when I think of vitality, I think of more than just exercise, nutrition, sleep, right? Those sorts of things that we talked about? How do you think about vitality or health? Are there non obvious things that you would fit underneath this category that might make sense to share to help people get a, maybe a different or broader perspective on vitality or health.

So this was posted on TED Talks, by Sandra Dalton Smith, who's a medical doctor, a physician, and it talks about seven different types of rest. I think, most of the time, when somebody says rest, you think, sleep, I'll just go through the seven. If these key areas of life that you need no rest in physical rest. That's probably the one that we're familiar with. And we think about sleeping or napping. But in her article, she also talks about restorative physical activity. So if you're doing like restorative yoga, which doesn't strain but instead helps to revitalize your physiology, that's part of a physical rest, mental rest, mental break, sensory rest, so that's turning off devices. And other sensory sort of things. Right. So if you think of the five senses, giving all five of your senses a break,

if you're introverted, you feel this more, you have more of a need to regularly

have sensory rest. Sure.

And I think some people require reduced sensory mode, depending on their physiology and stuff like that. They may be much more mandatory, creative rest, I thought this was really interesting, undertaking processes that re reawakens wonder and awe and so it's enjoying nature, it's enjoying the arts, it's being inspired, you know, and that's, that's a sense of rest, emotional rest, maybe social rest. And then finally, spiritual rest. And a spiritual in this case is engaging with something that's greater than yourself. And it could be for some prayer, or meditation, or, or maybe some sort of community service, you know, and involvement in sort of altruistic deeds, right, it doesn't have to strictly be about spirituality in the sense that we might think about it. And so when I looked at all those, as we're prepping for the vitality episode, I was like, you know, we're going to talk about sleep, for sure. But man, there's all these other components that we may not consider. That, to me, at least intuitively make a lot of sense when I,

when I read them.

One is counterintuitive on like the spiritual rest. So you may go volunteer, for instance, at Habitat for Humanity, and spend the weekends after a full workweek, which could be busy and hectic and stressful, outside in the heat building a house. But yet, that could be restful for you. So we don't necessarily mean leisure or downtime, or pure quiet or sleep, although that's part of it. And then on this article you sent, which I immediately hit me at the beginning, there's a sort of artwork image at the top. And it's of a lady pouring some kind of liquid into multiple different sized containers, and some are lower, like percentage wise, lower, some containers are smaller, some are larger, some are wider. If you think about that, as an analogy, those containers for you, as an individual are all different, and drain differently. And some take more energy to fill up or time to fill up. But the point is, they all need attention. And if, like we said before, there, if you're feeling burnt out, it could be that one of the sort of rest dimensions has not been properly taken care of over time,

I completely ignored or didn't notice the graphic at the top of that article. But I love that because I remember telling people about perma V, and essentially describing the same thing, the name of the game is not to play whack a mole. That's like, Oh, I'm low on vitality. Let me drop everything and focus on vitality for three months and feel great, and then ignore it again, and then go to back to achievements and then focus on that and vitality. Cool, isn't it, it's like you're playing whack a mole. With that sort of strategy, which I think it's easy to fall into, you have to figure out activities for each that you can introduce into your life and figure out the right cadence, and recurrence of that activity that will maintain the level of that bucket, right, whether it's vitality, or achievement or something like that. Because some people will need daily activities to keep one of those elements of perma v or even these rest, this rest framework here to other people will be okay with once a week. Or what was this again, the last one spiritual rest. Maybe you're good with that like once a quarter, or once a year, or something like that. Or maybe that's really important. You do something once a week. And so I love this because we were just talking about like, how do you allocate time to do the things that you know are important to do? And so not only how much time do you need. Okay, I need 30 minutes to work out a day, but how frequently, how often depending upon your unique levels and the levels that you want to maintain across all of these things, whether it's permanent V or some other framework. So it's a cool idea to think about, you've got these different buckets that are at different levels and different things will fill it up and deplete it. And you got to your job is just to design your day, week, month, year, life to find some way to maintain adequate levels so that way you can thrive.

I'm going to throw a complete wrench into the works of Dr. Chris Paradis. I'm sure you do. Yeah. StarLord StarLord. Yeah, yeah. Some might call him the next generations. Indiana Jones. TBD on that one.

Andy. Andy Dwyer, right.

Yeah. Andy Dwyer from Parks and Rec, which is probably maybe the first time you saw him. Right and So Chris Pratt is at the pinnacle of physical fitness.

And not when he started as Andy Dwyer.

That's right. And he has said on interviews, especially as a my, my wife liked it when I was a little bit softer. I'm not as much fun right now, all I do, I'm really boring. All I talk about is fitness. I used to be really fun. And everyone should know, when the movie stuff is over, I might go back to being the fat guy, my wife wants a pizza oven, she's gonna learn how to bake bread, and I'm going to eat it. And so it is. I think there might be an example of an extreme transformation that while vitality, or whatever physical fitness went through the roof, which probably helped him stay healthier, avoid chronic disease, all sorts of gave more energy, all those things are probably absolutely true. And not an argument that's part of his life that he enjoyed and was resonated with, and people enjoyed about him, went away. And so there is certainly a balance here. And you can absolutely take it too far, one way or another.

On Parks and Rec, you know, this kind of during the final season, they had to sort of remark on his physical transformation, right.

And so when they were in England. They were in London, and he just said he stopped beer.

And then they're like, Oh, okay.

How much beer were you drinking?

That was it.

Obviously, it

took a lot more work than not drinking beer.

I think it's an important point, there's always a balanced to achieve. And then there's a being clear about that, and not just taking it to its full conclusion. And Charles, you said, You suffered from that earlier on in this episode, where you just you went all in, and that can negatively impact other areas of your life,

I forgot. I think we need to share something that maybe our listeners can do, like a call to action sort of thing.

We've gotten covered vitality from all different angles. And if you're listening might not be clear where to start. Do you have anything in mind is a recommendation on where anyone listening can go from here?

Yeah, I would suggest I've done this once in my life. So this is not something that I'm going to suggest that you have to build into as a practice or a habit. So it should be real easy. It's one time thing. And I think that what people should do is for two weeks or so you could probably get away with just one week, just record in an Excel spreadsheet, everything that you eat or drink. And then at the end of that, just look back on it and say, how is this either contributing or detracting from my vitality?

And can I add like a suggestion to that, Charles? Because, yeah, I've done this quite a bit. And there's an app that I recommend, because when you're using Excel, it can be very straightforward, but it can also be like, not ideal. Sure. And so both on Android and Apple, he can download, lose it. And it has like barcode scanners, and reminders and all these other sort of things that that will help you maintain the practice of logging every day. So just like maybe helpful hint for that.

Yeah. So why lose it over the other dozen or two apps that do very similar things? What do you like just that app?

Igor is very picky and persnickety about this kind of stuff. So I'm gonna trust you on that one. You can also write it down on paper.

Absolutely, absolutely. You don't, you don't have to have phone, you don't have to have apps, you don't have to have Excel, you can scratch it on a back of a napkin and nothing wrong.

Yeah,

I start with there. Because I think we, what we eat and consume and drink is born out of habit. Like from childhood, you know, and beyond even from what our parents ate. And so we just may not be aware, we typically are not aware of what we consume. And to me the first step to making material progress in this space, if you want, right, if it's important to you, is just become aware of what you are consuming. And just ask yourself, Is this helping me or hurting me? And if it's hurting you, then you can say all right, how do I how do I get better sleep? You know what, Charles, I just need to stop drinking any alcohol whatsoever. Even a half a glass of something will negatively impact my sleep. You know what, fine, I'll let it go. So it gives you that kind of tangible, concrete thing to look at, reflect upon ask yourself, what do I want to do with this? And all by simply just writing it down for a week, seven days. That's it. Yeah.

And then a few eat the cheesecake. At least it's intentional, which is totally fine. Yeah, I think the point here is that autopilot can be harmful. And you can be doing things inadvertently. And if you cut out the alcohol, like you said, or the cheesecake or whatever that you look at, it's not really helpful. But I don't even care so much about this. My big thing is fries, I love fries. I know you do, too, if I go and get fries now because everything is to go, and they're terrible, they're cold, or I don't like a lot of times, I'll eat them all anyway, I don't even like them, it would be easier just to toss them at that point, since you're bringing all this up and, and it clicked for me to just like toss them, it's no big deal. And that that's that was an easy thing for me to do. And it's adds that intentionality back in.

What I think you'll notice, too, with with the measurement is that you'll activate the observer principle or the observer effect, and that when you measure things, and you start seeing, you actually think about, am I gonna eat that cheesecake? Am I gonna, am I gonna eat that cheesecake. And at one point, when I was really measuring stuff, it was like, I would just plan my day ahead, I knew what I was going to eat, because I already put it into the system. And most days, I would eat the same thing, because that was the easiest way for me to like, put stuff into the system. So so you it's the measurement itself will already start to affect your outcomes, whether you're mindful of that or not.

Yeah, that's right. That's exactly why I recommend it. Because naturally, you will say, wait a second, I actually eat way too much. Probably. And if you're like most people are fighting an uphill battle. Like most people, if you go out, they're gonna give you way too much food, three servings worth of what you really need. I 100% agree with Igor.

They're these little things that may work for me may not work for you. I know, David Goggins. He's like a ex navy seal. He was 300 pounds before he joined the seals and had to lose a lot of weight and get into fitness in a very short amount of time to meet some deadline cut off like age or something like that. He loves watching TV, like maybe an unhealthy amount of TV. But that's too hard to cut out when you're cutting out these other things. So he said, I put a bike in front of the TV a stationary bike. So if I wanted to watch TV, at a minimum, I had to earn it. And that worked for him that was part of his solution, and app or the observer effect that Igor talked about or whatever, there's going to be something that clicks for you individually, that may not work for me. And that's why I think the experimentation side of this approaching it with a bit of an open mind is really important.

And no judgement too with what you find. Because I remember when I did the exercise, like I was embarrassed and ashamed of what I consumed. And that's probably a whole separate episode, if we want to get into that.

Yeah, no one's harder on Charles than Charles. Mr. Charles. Yeah. Hey, guys, this was really great. Thanks for your time. It feels like just yesterday, we started perma V, I can't believe we're 25 episodes in That's crazy.

We will pop the champagne or let's talk about next.

That's right. Well, thanks, guys. And great talking to you. And I'll see you next week.

see you next week.

All right. Bye, guys.

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