On Health, Meditation and Why Roger Federer Gets 12 Hours of Sleep Per Day

I recently read a quote that really got me thinking about how finite

our time is here on this earth.

When we're young, we feel invincible.

We can do whatever we want with our bodies.

We can drink whatever we want, eat, whatever we want,

stay up as late as we want.

But as we age our bodies and our mind can't really keep up as

they could when we were younger.

The quote that I heard goes, something like this.

He who has his health has a thousand dreams.

He who did not have his health has only one.

So this really got me thinking.

The challenge is that our society put so much emphasis on financial wealth and

financial wellbeing that we often put our mental and our physical wellbeing aside.

So if you find that you've neglected your body or your mind, or your mental health

for the last few decades of your life, I'm here to tell you that it's not too late.

In this episode, I'm going to be talking about a few things that may

surprise you when it comes to your physical and your mental health.

I'm Amin Ahmed and welcome to be.

Well do.

Well,

The first point I wanna make is about your mental health.

And I've probably said this before on previous episodes is meditation.

Meditation is something that is just so helpful and even just a few minutes

a day can make a profound difference.

If you've never meditated before, it can be a bit challenging initially,

but there's lots of apps available.

There's lots of tutorials or YouTube videos.

I can show you how to do it.

And when I talk about meditation, I'm not talking about sitting in

an uncomfortable, lotus position on the ground, on a meditation pillow.

You can sit on a couch, sit on your chair, even in your car.

And even a minute, two or three minutes to start is more than enough.

Now, if you remember when computers first came out, they had this

thing in windows called defrag.

And what it would do is essentially it would take your files that were scattered

across your hard drive, and it would put them all together, nicely and neatly,

and it would organize them for you.

If you remember, it was this big colorful grid and all the picked, all

the colors were in different spots.

And then when you hit the defrag button, it would take the colors and

it would just arrange them and it would put them in a nice little pattern.

So meditation is kind of like that for your brain.

I like to think of it as defrag for your brain.

If you're feeling scattered, if you're feeling distracted and you feel like

things are all over the place, just sitting down, settling your body, settling

your mind, and just maybe focusing on your breath initially, or if you feel like

getting a little bit more advanced, you can do a body scan where you go top to

bottom on your body and back and forth.

And you just notice the sensations in your body.

It's a really good way to meditate, especially if you're just a beginner.

The second point I'd like to make here is about movement.

Now notice, I didn't say exercise.

I said movement, and there's a big difference between exercise and movement.

The difference between exercise and movement is that with exercise, you go

to the gym in the morning and you do your workout and then you come back.

Movement happens throughout your day.

Now I sit at my desk all day and so I'm working maybe 5, 6, 7,

sometimes 10 hours a day at my desk.

And it's really challenging sometimes because I don't move around and

I can tell my body starts to ache and I start to feel sluggish and

I lose energy throughout the day.

Those days that I actually plan my movement throughout

my days, I feel a lot better.

I feel like I have more energy throughout the day.

Some of the ways that you can do that is by setting a timer.

A pomodoro timer is a great way to do it.

Every 25 minutes, you take a five minute break and then after your third

cycle, you take a 15 minute break.

In order to incorporate more movement into my day, I started looking into ergonomics.

So I tried using a standing desk and that was okay for a little while, but

I found that I was restless and I was just moving around a little bit too

much and I wasn't very comfortable.

And so I decided to go back to a sitting desk and look for some ergonomic chairs.

Now, when I was doing a search for ergonomic chair, two things came up.

One was the really expensive chairs that looked like an

airplane captain's pilot chair.

And those were sometimes five, seven, $800 or thousands of dollars.

Out of my budget at the time and I didn't want to invest in

something like that, that I wasn't sure was going to work for me.

On the opposite end of the spectrum I found that some of the health

professionals like physiotherapists and occupational therapists, they

were recommending sitting on a body ball or a big, large ball,

and having that is your office.

I tried that too in the past and it was really good.

I found it was great, but I had to keep pumping up the ball or it was squeaky and

I had to make adjustments while I was in a meeting and it just wasn't professional.

So in doing more research, I actually came across something called the

Core Chair and I ended up buying it.

I really like it.

And the way that the Core Chair is designed is that the platform,

the base that you sit on first is extremely comfortable and

there's not a tall back support.

It's just a little lumbar support that supports your lower back.

Then you can actually move side to side, front and back.

And actually it goes 360.

So you can rotate or you can actually pivot in every different direction.

It's made a huge difference in my productivity throughout the day.

After getting the Core Chair I actually work longer because I don't feel as

uncomfortable, but you still have to make sure that you use the Core Chair for what

it's intended, which is active sitting.

So you can move around while you're sitting, but still get up and do some

movement breaks throughout your day.

So, you're interested in learning more about the Core Chair, I'll put a link

down in the show notes here as well.

The final point I wanna make is about setting boundaries.

This is a combination between mental health and physical health.

Sometimes we find that we work a lot, especially during the pandemic, when

everybody was working from home, we were working a lot longer hours and

the boundaries between what was work and what was life totally got blurred.

And so what I wanna recommend to you, and I wanna suggest is that you think

about setting and end time for your day.

You might start your work day at eight.

But do you have an end time?

It's really hard for us to work eight hours straight at

deep work and intense focus.

If you think about athletes, they don't go from morning to night and just nonstop.

They take breaks they rest their bodies.

In fact, I recently learned that Roger Federer, a professional tennis

player, one of the best tennis players in the world prefers to sleep

11 hours a day, which is amazing.

That just blew my mind to hear that that's how much rest he likes to get.

Some football players also try to get 10, 11, 12 hours of rest in a day.

Setting your end time can really help make a big difference in how much

you exercise during the day, how much time you spend with your family and

just generally enjoy life a lot more.

By simply committing to an end time, I'm sure you'll see a big difference as well.

Now to recap, three points was the first was meditation.

You don't have to meditate for a long time and start slow, start

small and just increase it.

Maybe every week you increase it by a minute, maybe increase it by five

minutes, whatever works for you do that.

The second is include movement in addition to exercise throughout your

day, getting a Core Chair or something similar to that can help, but make

sure that you're also moving around.

And the third and final point is setting boundaries.

If you've got your boundries, make sure that people know about it, make

sure that people respect that your coworkers, your family respect those

boundaries and you let them know that this is why you're doing it because in

the end it actually benefits everyone.

I hope this episode has been helpful for you.

I really enjoyed putting this together.

In our next episode, we're gonna be talking about self worth versus net worth.

It's a conversation that I've had with people and it's an eye opener.

So I look forward to seeing you then.