I borrowed the phrase “be a good animal” from John Carlton. This pretty much sums up what he means:
Eat better (and less often), treat sleep as a sacred necessity for advanced living, get your butt into the gym or onto the tennis court (or just on a trail), allow for quality “ponder” time (or uninterrupted meditation), and plan (and enjoy) life with gusto.
Why is this important to your inner game? Because your level of health and wellness has a tremendous effect on your mood and thoughts.
At a very basic level, we’re all primates. There’s more to us than that obviously, but if we forget that fact, we can create a lot of problems for ourselves. While the human body is resilient, if you ignore or violate basic human needs for an extended period of time, it’s inevitable that our mental, physical and emotional machinery will break down or malfunction.
This all became very clear to me after I moved out of the house I owned with my ex-wife and started getting my life back together. Prior to that, I was doing everything wrong: staying up late, getting up early, drinking coffee all day for energy, alcohol at night to wind down, eating junk food, not getting any exercise and spending most of my time watching Netflix or porn.
The result? I was depressed and miserable almost all the time.
After about a week of getting a decent amount of sleep, I started feeling better. This led me to start exercising again and eating better as well. After a few weeks, I even went out by myself to play open mic night at a bar which is something I had talked about doing for about two years. I also got an email address from a cute hostess at a restaurant who I’d been checking out for months but didn’t have the guts to approach. 
The change in how I felt about myself and life was very dramatic.
Last week I had to pull an all nighter to get some work done, and the lack of sleep sent me spiraling right back to where I was before – I was all depressed and whining about how I suck at this pick up thing, and why can’t I make myself do it, etc. After I got caught up on sleep and got some sunshine and exercise, I was back to normal. It will probably take awhile for me to develop resilience so getting off track won’t screw me up as much, but the message was clear:
Be a good animal first, then work on any remaining inner game issues.
Based on my experience, I’d recommend putting them in this order:
- Sleep
- Diet
- Exercise
- Margin (“ponder time”)
- Play
Get Sufficient and Quality Sleep
You’re body goes into maintenance mode while you sleep, so if you don’t get enough, you’re shortchanging your natural repair process. It also destroys the little willpower you have which means you won’t be able to overcome obstacles like approach anxiety. Like Vince Lombardi said “Fatigue makes cowards of us all.”
Aim for 7 – 8 hours per night, and don’t drink alcohol within a few hours of going to sleep. I’d also stop the caffeine at least six hours before bedtime, but it’s probably safer cut yourself off at noon.
Turn off the TV and computer about an hour before bedtime. It’s so easy to keep yourself up later than you wanted to if you don’t unplug. I can’t count the number of times I stayed up an extra couple of hours with pointless web browsing or getting caught up in a show I really don’t care about.
A good way to tell if you’re getting enough sleep is to wake up occasionally without an alarm. If you sleep for a long time, that is a good sign that you are probably sleep deprived.
Clean up your Diet
Food can have both short term and long term effects on your health and mood.
Short term, the wrong food can make you tired and lethargic which immediately reduces your effectiveness with anything you need or wanted to do afterward. They’ve also done studies that link diet changes to improvements and deterioration in the behavior of children. It would make sense that diet influences our behavior too.
Long term, the wrong foods leads to weight gain and illness. How successful do you think fat, sick guys are with the ladies? I’m guessing not very…
Tom Venuto (a drug-free bodybuilder) has some good thought on diet and nutrition. The first is to think of food as fuel. Our bodies run on food like a car runs on gasoline. If you put bad gas in a car, it doesn’t work as well (or at all). Try to eat for maximum nutrients and energy.
A simple guideline is to choose foods as close to the way they are found in nature as much as possible. Using that guideline, an apple is great, because it’s just like it comes off the tree. Apple sauce is a little lower on the scale, and apple pie lower still.
Try paying attention to how you feel after eating. If you feel good and alert, then you’re on the right track. If you feel sluggish, then you probably ate something you shouldn’t have.
Get off Your Butt
I don’t know who said it, but raising your heart rate is one of the best sources of emotional renewal (if you know, please mention it in the comments).
That means if you’re feeling down, moving around is a much better option than trying to medicate with comfort food or drugs.
A girl stood me up for a date recently, and I was disappointed because I was really looking forward to it. After I went outside for a swim, I felt a lot better. Sunshine, fresh air and moving around does wonders!
This doesn’t have to be anything extreme like a ten mile run or lifting weights for two hours. Simply consciously moving your body should do the trick. Go for a walk, or do some body weight squats or pushups for example.
Create Space in Your Day (aka Margin or “ponder time”)
Humans have limits. It’s not popular to admit that, but it’s true. The consequences of ignoring that are stress and burnout. You also miss out on opportunities that just come along – like the cute girl at Starbucks in the morning on your way to work…
Step 1) Give yourself more time to get where your going. I use 20% as a guideline. So if you think it will take an hour to get somewhere, give yourself an hour and 12 minutes. A lot of the stress caused by driving and commuting comes from not giving yourself enough time. Arriving at work stressed out is bad enough, but starting a date by apologizing for being late kind of sets a bad tone. It’s better to get there early and be relaxed and confident.
The extra time also let’s you approach the cute girl at the coffee shop on your way to work. I can’t tell you how many of those opportunities I’ve passed up because I was already running late…
Step 2) Don’t work so much. Brad P wrote a post in the Month 1 Section of the 30/30 Forum titled “Do you work too much?” The main point was that spending too much time working makes it difficult to create a lifestyle that is personally rewarding and attractive to women. He recommends 30 hours as a good amount of time to pay your bills and still work on your identity and game.
If you need more than 40 hours per week to do your job, then you’re probably doing something wrong. At least that was the case for me. I worked long hours and looked really busy, but, honestly, I wasted a lot of time on constantly switching tasks, compulsive web browsing and checking email.
Part of the problem is not having a compelling reason to stop working. If you’ve done some work on your identity and have some exciting things going on, then you’ll be more motivated to stop working and get to them. If you’re only going home to watch TV, then what’s the point of being efficient at work?
There are some good books on time management (like Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
Figure out what is important, do it, and then go home. And now that you are spending all your time working, you have time to
Play!
Playing and having fun is important for two reasons: it massively improves the quality of your life, and it makes you more attractive to women.
If someone asks what you do for fun, and you can’t think of anything (other than video games), then you have a problem.
The 30/30 Month One exercises are great for addressing this category. What are you dreams? What hobbies would you like to pursue? What can you do right now to start working on those?
Closing Thoughts
As I read this post, it occurred to me that none of this is rocket science – we’re all meant to function this way.
For some reason though, it’s really easy to get off track, so if you find yourself struggling with something more than you should be, take a minute to ask yourself if your being a good animal. If the answer is “no,” then fix that first.
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