Healthy, Inside and Out

If we’re going to talk about self-improvement, we’re going to have to mention the giant, rampaging elephant in the room.

Being in good health, both mentally and physically, is as important for confidence as water is for life. Without health, confidence is simply not possible. Because being healthy means you can trust yourself. You have faith in what your body and your mind can do, and you know they can face the challenges life throws at you.

But the waters start getting muddied when we look at what it means to actually be healthy.

The single biggest mistake people make is that they confuse being physically healthy with being attractive. People throw themselves into healthy lifestyles, exercising as much as possible and restricting their diets, all with the end goal of looking fit and healthy. Because at the end of the day we all know that being healthy is attractive, how could it not be? It’s the peak of biological success. We all want to be fit and healthy, and we’re all attracted to healthy people and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But somewhere along the line, we decided what healthy should look like, and if you don’t fit the mould, then you can’t be healthy right?

Except, that’s not how body types work. What a healthy weight range and muscle mass looks like on one person won’t be the same for everyone. And when we hold one look above the rest as the ultimate goal for fitness, we are inevitably dooming countless others to an endless striving to look healthy in an impossible way.

This is the biggest problem with the fitness industry. It puts way too much emphasis on how healthy you look, instead of how healthy you actually are. And the exact same thing is happening with our mental health.

There has been a growing appreciation for looking after our minds, something that should be considered a great step forward. But just like our physical health, it seems that how mentally healthy we look is more important than how healthy we actually are. Which is why we only share the parts of ourselves we want other people to see. The happiest, most stress free parts. Once again, the biggest barrier in our way is our fear of judgement from other people.

If we want to be truly healthy, we have to learn to see our health for what it really is, not what it looks like from the outside.

It’s time to let go of how great our body looks and our state of mind appears, and start focusing on how healthy we actually are, inside and out.

We all feel like we could be healthier, and we certainly all want to look healthier, but there’s a reason so many of us suffer with body issues and poor mental health. We’re once again comparing ourselves to the best of the best, the tiny minority who the world seems to agree is the perfect example of health, and that we should look exactly like they do. As Adler sums up beautifully when he asks, “‘Why so afraid of inadequacy?’ The answer can only be, ‘Because the individual has set for himself so high a goal of success.’”^{Note 1}

Trust In Your Body

Colin O’Brady looks like a pretty normal guy.

With a slim body and a friendly smile, he’s the kind of person you could imagine going on nature walks on the weekends, or maybe doing some cycling with a group of friends, but that’s about as far as you’d guess his adventurous side goes.

But Colin is not a normal guy. In fact, he’s about as far away from normal as anyone has ever been.

He’s a Pro Endurance Athlete, and he’s done some truly mind blowing things. He became the fastest person to complete what’s known as the Explorer’s Grand Slam. Basically you have to climb the highest mountains on each of Earth’s seven continents, and then make it to the North and South Poles as quickly as you can. It was 139 days of mountaineering and trekking through the harshest environments on the planet.

He was also the fastest person to complete the Three Poles Challenge, making it to the North Pole, South Pole, and the summit of Mount Everest, as well as the fastest person to do the 50 US High Points Challenge, where he climbed to the highest point of every state in America in just 21 days.

But his most daring feat was his record breaking crossing of Antarctica. Completely alone for 54 days straight in the most remote and hostile place any human has ever explored. One thing goes wrong out there and you probably won’t be making it home.

If all this still wasn’t impressive enough for you, before he started training for endurance sports, Colin suffered a horrific burn on both his legs while backpacking through the island of Koh Tao in Thailand, and was told that he would never be able to walk properly again. Obviously the doctor didn’t know who he was talking to, because after a gruelling year of physical rehab, Colin was training for triathlons, and the rest is history.

You’d never suspect you were looking at one of the fittest athletes in the world just from looking at Colin. And this is part of the problem when it comes to fitness, and health in general.

We need a better way to measure our health that doesn’t rely on looks alone, and the best candidate I’ve found for this is the amount of trust you have in what your body’s capable of.

If you can trust your body to run the London marathon for instance, you can be pretty damn confident that your body’s more capable than the average person, probably by a large margin.

If you can trust your body to lift weights heavier than you are, you can be confident that your body is capable of feats of strength well beyond the norm.

If you can trust your body to bend into the “destroyer of the universe” yoga pose (look it up), you can be confident that your body’s capable of moving in ways that most people will never be able to.

This shift is how we can stop obsessing over how our bodies look, and focus instead on what our bodies can actually do. It’s a much healthier and sustainable way to improve our physical fitness.

This doesn’t mean we all need to be athletes, but learning what your body’s capable of and watching it improve over time is an experience that no one should miss out on. And it’s a big step on the road to feeling good about yourself.

But as important as it is to have a healthy, capable body, it pales in comparison to having a healthy and capable mind.

Our Most Neglected Asset

It’s a terrible mistake to think of your brain as a static thing, unable to change.

We all accept that we can make our bodies stronger with exercise, and healthier with diet, rest, and relaxation. Yet we can’t seem to grasp the idea that our minds work in the exact same way.

Your brain is malleable. It can grow and change at any point in your life, simply by using it in new ways. And just like your body, what you do with it can make it stronger and healthier, or weaker and sicker.

If you’ve ever doubted the extraordinary power your brain has to change itself, then you’re going to want to strap yourself in for this next story.

It’s about a young woman named Jody Miller, who went on BBC News in 2017 to tell the world about how she ended up with only half a brain.

Jody started having severe seizures while she was still a toddler, and her parents noticed how she would always collapse to her left whenever they happened. She was diagnosed with Rasmussen’s Encephalitis, a rare inflammatory neurological disease that was destroying the right hemisphere of her brain. As a last resort to save Jody’s life, she was given a hemispherectomy. The entire right side of her brain was surgically removed.

What sort of limitations do you think a grown-up Jody has to live with, with literally 50% less brain than everyone else?

Well, as it turns out, practically none. Jody went to college, is happily married, and lives a totally normal life. The only sign that she was ever unwell is that she has slightly restricted movement in her left arm and leg.

Jody is a testament to the neuroplasticity of our brains. Since she was so young when her seizures began, her left hemisphere started taking over the responsibilities that the other hemisphere no longer could. After the operation, her left hemisphere just carried on doing what it was doing, reorganising itself to give Jody a fully functioning brain all on its own.

As an adult, you wouldn’t be able to adapt as impressively as Jody if you suddenly lost half your brain, but neuroplasticity doesn’t end with childhood. We build new neural pathways every time we try something for the first time, or push ourselves to do something better than we ever have before. We are constantly changing our brains, whether we realise it or not.

It also takes just as much effort and commitment as physical health to get your mental health in peak condition. We all understand the impact that exercise has on our bodies, and most of us still don’t put in the effort to be physically fit. But being mentally fit should be a higher priority, and it should be hard to find someone not putting in the effort to make their brains stronger and healthier.

Yet, we are a society overflowing with weak and sickly brains.

Our brain is our most valuable asset. And we are treating it like trash.

If you truly intend to become a confident person, you need to take your mental fitness seriously. This means more than just having an average brain. It means going further beyond, and training your mind to be as strong and healthy as possible. It’s the difference between a person who would struggle to jog for more than a few minutes, and a person who could run a marathon.

Your brain is capable of this level of improvement, and there is no better guarantee of confidence than reaching it. And just like physical fitness, there are lots of different ways to do it. You can find the way that works best for you, and most importantly, the way you enjoy the most.

I’ve tried many different forms of exercise, like running, swimming, surfing, yoga, callisthenics, martial arts, and team sports, but what worked best for me and gave me the level of physical fitness that I wanted was weightlifting.

I’ve also tried many different ways to improve my mental fitness. Reading, writing, hiking, ice baths, lucid dreaming, computer programming, and learning a musical instrument have all been attempts to make my brain stronger, and each of them have worked in their own way. But for me, nothing has come close to the improvements I’ve gained through meditation.

At its core, everything that’s good for the mind is a form of meditation. Once you’ve stripped back all the other layers, what you’re left with is a meditative state.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow^{Note 2} is the perfect instruction manual for bringing meditation into everyday life. The flow state is simple, it’s that feeling you get when you lose track of time because you’re so focused on whatever it is you’re doing. And I literally mean anything, from meditating to jumping out of a plane. As long as you’re focused entirely on what you’re experiencing, you’re in flow.

Many people think back to their childhood and long for the feeling of being fully engaged with life, the way only children seem to be able to. Flow comes naturally to kids, but it doesn’t just disappear. We can still spend most of our time in flow, most of us just choose not to.

Take all my other examples. Reading is good for the mind because being engaged in a book causes you to develop sustained attention in what you’re doing… so does writing, hiking, sitting in a freezing ice bath, lucid dreaming, writing code, and playing music. They are all wildly different activities, but at their core they are just ways for you to focus your attention on one single thing for a long period of time.

Which is exactly what meditation trains you to do.

So I decided to cut out the middleman and just make meditation my main brain training activity.

Whether that’s a good strategy for you as well, is something only you can decide.

Do it Yourself

One of the best things about improving your mental fitness is that it can be done for free and all on your own.

I’m going to walk you through exactly what sort of training your brain goes through while learning to meditate. I’ll also explain how you can achieve the same effects using other activities. As meditation is the core “exercise” behind every single type of brain training, you can easily substitute it for your favourite method.

Meditation is not complicated. There are two things you need to get better at, and the better you get the stronger and healthier your brain becomes. They are attention and awareness, and they have an extraordinary ability to combine in a powerful state of mind known as “mindfulness”.^{Note 3}

What you call it doesn’t really matter, the important thing is that this state of mind is very much real and widely studied, and it has positive effects on pretty much every single aspect of your life, from your mental and physical health, to your relationships, career, aspirations, and most definitely, your confidence.

So when we talk about training your brain by improving your attention and awareness, it’s similar to training your body by improving your strength and flexibility. Different parts of the same whole, that come together to make you mentally (or physically) fitter.

In meditation, the goal is to sit down and maintain your attention on the “meditative object”, which is usually the breath, but it can be anything really. And while you keep your attention on your breath, you work on expanding your peripheral awareness. This awareness is like the things you notice in the edges of your vision. You know it’s there but it’s blurry, out of focus, and not the thing you’re actually paying attention to. In meditation, this is all the things happening in the background of your mind while you focus on your meditative object. Sounds from outside the room, sensations in your body, and thoughts popping up in your head, are all examples of things you need to be aware of, without ever letting them take your attention.

A well trained brain can be aware of everything around them and within their minds, while never once losing their attention on their breath. This is what true mindfulness is. Total awareness, and perfect attention. And it is a truly beautiful thing to experience.

So for those of you wondering how you can do this without having to sit and meditate every day (it’s not for everyone, and that’s okay), let’s explore how you can achieve the same level of attention and awareness using other activities.

Let’s use three different examples, one physical, one mental, and one sensory.

For the physical one we’ll choose playing football, the mental one can be learning piano, and the sensory one can be going to a day spa. You’ll see how all of these can be used to train your brain by improving your ability to pay attention and expand your awareness. They can all essentially be meditation, with a few extra steps and props.

Imagine yourself on the football field. The ball is at your feet and you’re surrounded by teammates and opponents. Your attention is going to have to be locked onto the ball itself, that’s the only way you’re going to be able to get it up the field and into the goal. Lose this attention and you’ll lose the ball. But ignore everyone else and you’ll lose it even faster. You need to hold the other players in your awareness at all times. Who’s near you? Are they a teammate or opponent? What position are they in and what can you do about it?

As you make your way up the field, you’re in a state of perfect attention on the ball at your feet, and total awareness of everyone else around you. The more time you spend in this state, the better your brain will get at doing it, and the better you’ll play.

This is why athletes at the top of their game in every sport in the world tend to have stronger minds than your average person. They may not realise it, but they’re training their brains alongside their bodies every time they use strong attention and awareness to win.

Now imagine you’re sitting at a piano and learning your favourite song. To play it properly, your attention needs to be on the sheet music in front of you so you know what chords and notes to hit next. But your awareness needs to stay on the keys themselves, so your fingers can move to the right places at the right times, and it also needs to be listening to the overall sound, so you know how well you’re actually playing. When you’re first starting out, this complex arrangement of attention and awareness is usually a complete mess. You’ll jump your attention from the sheet, to your fingers, to the sound, to the keys, and back again, with very little awareness of anything. But as you improve, you’ll start focusing your attention in one place, and expanding your awareness to look after all the other actions.

The pros can make it look like they’re in a sort of trance while playing. And in a sense they are. They have perfect attention on what they need to do next, and total awareness of where their hands are, the keys are, and the sound they’re making.

And finally, I want to demonstrate how even something simple and easy like a visit to a spa can be used to improve your brain. Imagine yourself sitting in a hot tub, or maybe a sauna, if that’s more your thing. The sensations you feel are way more intense than usual, as the heat seeps into your body right down to the bones. Your muscles relax and so does your mind. The more attention you give to the sensations, the better it feels. It may even start to take up all of your attention as you relax deeper and deeper into the feeling. But your awareness needs to remain switched on while you’re doing it. There’s a limit to how long you can safely be in such a warm environment, and you need to remain aware of how long you’ve been there, and to make sure you’re not about to fall asleep. You’ll also probably need to be aware of the other spa users coming and going around you.

Learning how to completely lose yourself in the sensations of something like a hot tub, while holding onto your awareness of time, your health, and others around you, fits the mould of meditation pretty darn well for such a passive and easy activity.

It’s important to understand that none of these examples is a guaranteed way to train your brain. You can play an entire game of football distracted, bored, or with bare minimum effort, and lose all the mental benefits. Same goes with playing the piano or enjoying the spa. Just as you can sit down to meditate but not actually try to work on your attention and awareness, you can get mental benefits out of pretty much any activity in the world, or you can waste that time instead.

It all comes down to how well you’re using those two powerful skills. I hope you’ve been paying attention, or that you’re at least aware of how important this all is.

Getting Help

I’ve compared mental and physical fitness with one another many times throughout this chapter, and this comparison is strongest when we look at how difficult it can be to achieve either.

And there really is no better solution for overcoming this difficulty than seeking out help.

There’s a reason personal trainers, gym apps, fitness influencers, and “workout buddies” are all a huge thing. Because getting physically fit is hard, and getting help from others, even if it’s just having a friend to go workout with, can make all the difference.

The exact same thing applies to mental fitness.

There’s a large number of mindfulness apps, meditation classes, social groups, and even personal coaching focused on teaching you what you need to know to train your brain, all just a quick google search away. If you’re struggling, getting help from others is the absolute best thing you can do.

There’s also an increasing number of people that are seeking out therapy.

One of my first jobs after uni was working with kids on the autistic spectrum, using Applied Behaviour Analysis therapy. These kids were incredible, but they had hard lives.

Not being able to focus properly, control their emotions, or even speak fluently, they needed help in all areas of their lives, including school, home life, and even with simple things like playing board games.

I’ll admit, when I first met them I completely underestimated what they were capable of. But it didn’t take them long to blow my expectations right out of the water.

One of them was only in first grade and had such a hard time controlling his emotions that when he got worked up he would tense his body so tightly that he shook from head to toe. Yet, he could read every children’s book he got his hands on, out loud, with better pronunciation than most adults.

Another would break down in fits of manic screaming, shouting, and laughing whenever things became too overwhelming, yet sit him in front of a piano and he would play perfect renditions of the hardest songs in classical music, including Mozart and Bach.

These incredible kids taught me just how much potential there is inside all of us, if we can just get the right help from the right people.

I still think about them often. I hope they’re doing well, and still getting help.

This experience left me with nothing but respect for the benefits of working with a professional to improve your own mind. The worst thing that can happen, and I mean the absolute worst thing, is that you’ll learn a bit more about yourself. And the best thing that can happen is you’ll get the insight, tools, and support you need to completely revolutionise your life.

Seems like a pretty good ratio of risk to reward to me.

Just remember, other people can’t do it all for you. You still need to put in the work if you want to take your mental fitness seriously. Just as personal trainers and workout buddies are there to make it easier, but they can’t actually do the workout for you.

Only you can do that. So seek out as much help as you need, in any form that you need it, and get to work.

Don’t Forget to Breathe

There are three things at the top of the list when it comes to staying alive.

Breathing, drinking, and eating.

The gold medal goes to breathing of course. Hold your breath and tell me otherwise. Yet most of us have no idea how terrible we are at doing it.

You probably don’t even think about it. That’s the whole point of breathing. It’s automatic. It just takes care of itself. In, and out, over and over. How can anyone screw that up right?

Well, it turns out, very easily.

In James Nestor’s bestselling book Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, he explores the astonishing power that breathing has over our mind and body, and just how much damage we can do to ourselves when we’re not breathing properly.

The first and most important point he makes is that you should never, ever, breathe through your mouth.^{Note 4} After spending 10 days with silicone plugs shoved up his nose, James’ body was breaking down. His blood pressure skyrocketed, his pulse was too fast and body temperature too cold. His snoring kept him up at night, and he understandably felt like hell.

Our noses do much more for us than we realise. It’s not just a way to bring air into our lungs, it’s also a sophisticated cleaning system, preparing the air before we properly inhale it.

Breathing through your mouth is essentially using a backup system. It lets lots of air in, but it’s dirty, unprocessed, and often harmful. When we’re desperate for air, it’s normal to take a big gulp through our mouths because quantity is more important than quality when you’re on the verge of blacking out. But in every other situation, quality comes first.

Once you’re breathing through the right part of your body, the next thing to fix is how quickly and heavily you’re doing it.

Our lungs take oxygen in and attach it to our blood cells, which send it all over our body to feed every other cell we have. As far as jobs go, this is about as important as it gets. But carbon dioxide, the molecule we breathe out, has an equally important job, and very few people know about it.

It’s carbon dioxide that helps the oxygen detach from our red blood cells. Without it, no matter how deeply you breathe you’ll still end up dying from Hypoxia, also known as oxygen starvation, the thing that causes altitude sickness in mountain climbers. Carbon dioxide also helps our blood vessels dilate, making them open up so more blood can flow.

Heavy breathing drops our levels of carbon dioxide, and makes it harder for our blood to do its job. Breathing slowly on the other hand, leaves high levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide in our system, each molecule playing their vital role in keeping us alive and well.

If you’re wondering just how slowly you should be breathing, a good benchmark is around 5 or 6 seconds each for the inhale and the exhale.

Breathing through your nose and doing it slowly is about the easiest thing you can do and yet it’ll have a dramatic impact on your mental and physical health. If you want to take things even further, there are a huge variety of breathing exercises in mainstream yoga that you can find with a quick google search. They’ll help you with everything from managing anxiety, to running a half marathon above the Arctic Circle with no shoes or shirt like the “Iceman” Wim Hof.

Out of all the incredible things our bodies can do, the simple act of breathing is probably the most impressive and the least respected. It has the power to heal us and push us further than we ever thought possible, and it has the power to weaken us and ultimately end our lives.

Take some time to learn how you breathe and get a little better at it.

For those who want their last breath to be as far into the future as possible, knowing the right way to take it might just be the answer you’re looking for.

Time to Eat

Now that we’ve got breathing out of the way, it’s time to talk about the next most important thing we put into our bodies.

What we drink and eat matters, there’s just no way around that.

I’m not going to talk about what sort of food we should be eating, everyone already knows the difference between healthy food and junk food. But I do want to talk about something that took my health to a whole new level, and might just do the same for you.

That something is fasting.

If you’ve never heard of it before, it just means eating nothing. It’s taking a break from eating, and even though it sounds like the opposite of healthy, studies have shown it has some remarkable impacts on our body and brain.

It’s been linked to improvements in everything from inflammation to cancer,^{Note 5} but the reason I do it is because of what it does inside our cells.

Fasting triggers a process called Autophagy, which literally means “self-eating”, but it’s not as terrifying as it sounds. Your cells are just doing some spring cleaning and home renovations, removing old and damaged parts (by digesting them) and building brand new ones.^{Note 6} It keeps our cells healthier for longer, which keeps us healthier for longer.

But it goes even further than that, right down into our cell’s nucleus. It’s been shown to trigger DNA repair by stimulating genes related to longevity.^{Note 7}

It seems our bodies have a built in way of making hunger a good thing. And it’s not too hard to come up with a reason why.

Periods of hunger are a normal part of life for pretty much every wild animal. Our ancestors would have regularly gone without any food, and still needed the energy to get out of bed and hunt. So our cells adapted, taking these opportunities to make the most out of the resources they have while they wait patiently for the next big meal to come along.

That big meal is an important part of the process by the way. Being malnourished is definitely not good for you. Neither is living on the brink of starvation. Fasting only works if you break it with large, healthy meals.

There are lots of ways to fit fasting into your life. I stopped eating breakfast a long time ago, which is a form of intermittent fasting. I also try to do a longer fast of around three days once or twice a year.

When I do eat, I feast. I don’t hold back and always eat until I feel satisfied. I also try to have as much variety in my meals as possible.

However you want to fit it into your life, I urge you to at least give it a try.

Nothing has made me feel as good, inside and out, as fasting has.

The Goldilocks Mistake

There is one final thing I can share with you that has helped me with my ongoing effort to be as healthy as I possibly can.

I’ve come to think of it as making the “Goldilocks” mistake, which is avoiding things that are either too hot or too cold.

At 6 foot 4 inches, I am quite a tall guy. I get it from my mother’s side, whose family has Nordic heritage. Naturally, I decided this makes me part Viking, at least that’s what I’ve been telling myself since my first big growth spurt. So, as you can imagine I was pretty interested when I heard of a method for maintaining optimal health called The Nordic Cycle.

Nordic cultures have been practising it for hundreds of years, and many claim it’s the secret to how they stay one of the healthiest societies in the world.

They start with a regular sauna session of about 20 minutes, and when they’re done, they head outside and jump straight into a frozen lake.

This can be repeated multiple times for the truly brave hearted. It’s extreme, no doubt about it, and I wouldn’t blame you for immediately thinking “nope, not for me”.

But there are much softer ways to do a Nordic Cycle, and the benefits are getting very hard to deny. I use a sauna or steam room followed by a cold shower, and repeat it 2 or 3 times. The heat has a powerful relaxation effect, causing your blood vessels to dilate, improving the blood flow to every muscle in your body. The exact opposite thing happens with the cold. Your blood vessels constrict, limiting inflammation in your limbs, and increasing the amount of blood circulating around your organs.

By alternating between heat and cold, you’re making your body better at pumping your own blood, and since it’s carrying all the oxygen and nutrients that you need to stay alive, this is a pretty important thing to be good at. Having good circulation is vital for good health.

Extreme temperatures also make your cells create things called Heat Shock Proteins, also known simply as stress proteins, since their job is to help us manage any stress we put our bodies through.^{Note 8} They act like little helpers for all the other proteins within our cells, making sure they’re in the right shape and doing the right things.^{Note 9}

As you can imagine, this is an extremely useful protein to have lots of.

Heat Shock Proteins have been linked to many other important functions for our health, but it’s a little too far out of this book’s wheelhouse to get into it. I’d recommend looking up some of the most recent research yourself if you’re interested, and start making the right choices when it comes to your body temperature.

It turns out too hot or too cold, was just right all along.