© Nastassia Yakushevic | stock.adobe.com

This talk will be a little different than the talk about the birds and the bees. This talk is for young adults entering the world on their own. It might also be a good reset for adults struggling to find their place in the world. I have often reflected on my life in an effort to better understand how I arrived at my current station.

Healthy Choices

Physical health allows us to ideally have endurance. To be at our best we need endurance, because pushing through to the end is often when it counts the most. The great news is it doesn’t require hours in the gym. It only requires 30-45 minutes of your time three or four days per week. Surely you can spare two hours per week to increase your overall satisfaction with life.

Science has proven that exercise improves our brain function, increasing our cognitive skills, and helps with retention. The main reason I exercise is that I care about myself. For many years, I did nothing for exercise. I worked all of the time and had no idea how to manage stress. One Saturday morning my heart raced, my chest hurt, and I lost eyesight in one eye. At the time, our twin daughters were about four months old. My recently hired employee, who was living in our spare bedroom at the time, drove me to the hospital. They rushed me right in and hooked me up to the EKG. All of this was stress-induced. They wanted me to take medication and reduce my stress level. Instead, I put on running shoes and began to run regularly. Eventually I ran so much that I started running marathons. This year I have signed up for a Half-Ironman event.

Benefits of exercise:

• Makes you smarter.
• Helps you feel better about yourself.
• Increases your libido.
• Reduces risk of chronic disease (especially as you age because of stronger bones and muscles).
• Improves your sleep quality.

Nutrition

Nutrition is all about the fuel that allows your engine to run smoothly. I am no expert on nutrition, but I do know that everything in moderation is a great starting point. From ice cream to alcohol, the substances we put in our bodies play a huge role in how we feel. Many of us are living every day with food allergies that we are completely unaware of. These allergies affect our energy levels and our moods. A recommendation to all is to make minimal investment in seeing a nutritionist to better understand how foods are impacting your health. Remember, the diet industry is $66 billion according to Marketdata, LLC. Everyone seems to have an opinion on what is the best strategy. Some people are vegan, and some do the Paleo diet, but last I checked more of them were dying from the plan they chose. I choose not to eat sweets because the science indicates it contributes to brain health issues as we age. Otherwise, it is everything in moderation for me.

Mental Health

Mental health has been my most important lesson. It never occurred to me to think of the brain as a muscle (and it is) and exercise it. It took me 40+ years to realize I had a choice of how to respond in every situation. Example: I went to Purdue University and as a result have been a big fan of Purdue sports. This is especially the case when they play Indiana University. If they lost, I would get so angry I was ready to fight. How ridiculous was I being. I was raging mad about something I could not affect. Looking back now I am completely embarrassed about this completely irrational behavior. My lesson was to understand my emotions, recognize them and ask myself the best way to respond. Now when a driver cuts me off, I have a greater ability to avoid the anger or rage that wells up.

I might ask myself at the end of the day, am I going to remember this incident? The answer is no, so then I move on. The trigger for me to get control occurred when my twins were two years old. We were on the back porch one beautiful spring day. I had a glass of wine on the table. One of my daughters, Margo, kept messing with it even after I repeatedly requested her to leave it alone. As I was helping her sister with something, I heard a crash. It was the wine glass, shattered with wine everywhere. She had used her little golf club to push it off the table. I lost it, grabbed the golf club out of her hand and broke it over my knee. By this time, my wife who had been inside, slid the sliding door open and stared at me with tears in her eyes. That was my trigger or turning point. I began to study the brain and better understand that in every situation, I have the ability to control my response. I used meditation and trained myself to think before responding emotionally. Total game-changer for me.

If you take nothing else from this article, my hope is this point — the need for you to better understand your triggers so you respond in a way that does not compromise you. Here are some ways to enhance your brain function:

• Meditation — Best workout ever for your brain.
• Exercise — Cardiovascular health improves brain health.
• Journaling — This triggers the reticular activation system, which has proven particularly helpful in achieving goals. Struggling for words is a form of exercise for your brain. It is the mental equivalent of a workout. Journaling will also boost your self-confidence and increase your discipline. For me, it has been a wonderful tool in shaping my life and behavior.

My strategy for writing has varied over the years. It started with writing my goals down daily and what actions were necessary to achieve them. It then went to more of a day-to-day accounting of what I was up to and recording my thoughts. Now I focus on gratitude — writing a paragraph about someone I am grateful for having my life. If you want to separate yourself from the pack, you must do things differently. “Me too” is not a strategy for success that I have seen applied successfully. Nobody journals, few people meditate, and people are inherently lazy.

Do these three things and skip the rest of my recommendations and you will still rocket past your peers. Why? Because they are easy not to do and require discipline to execute.

MANA welcomes your comments on this article. Write to us at [email protected].