Ep.78 Top 4 habits you should prioritize on your busiest work days

EP 78 of The Hormone Helper Podcast: Ep.78 Top 4 habits you should prioritize on your busiest work days

Summary
In this episode, Andrew Costa shares the top four habits that should be done every day, especially on busy work days. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining health and fitness even during busy periods. Andrew explains the concept of habit stacking and how it can help make habits easier to maintain. The four habits he recommends are: going to bed at the same time every day, meal prep and cooking, setting alarms for meals and workouts, and assessing your schedule at the end of each week. By implementing these habits, individuals can prioritize their health and well-being even in a busy schedule.

Transcript

0:39

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. And in this episode, I want to share with you the top four habits that you should be doing every single day, especially on your busiest work days. So now for the most part, I would say that there's always going to be periods of time in the year when anyone's going to have the time to make health and fitness a priority. Usually the priority aspect shows up as the kind of October to December holiday lull and that's really as business and as work winds down and people start planning kind of for their new year's quarter. You're also going to have a couple of months during the year where you might have back to school if you've got kids where there's kind of like first three months of school tend to really be focused on getting the kids in the routine and then it frees up your time to kind of focus on yourself. I bring that up because regardless of what time of year, or what season of your work period. It is safe to say that it's very easy to maintain a workout schedule and maintain shopping and meal prep for food, as well as kind of a decent sleep routine when you've got nothing going on in your life. But let's be real. When is nothing going on in life? Like personally, I always have stuff going on. I always have my calendar being filled up. So when is life going to give you the opportunity longer than one or two months at most? to sit down and give you the space enough for you not to have something on your schedule. I don't know about you, but for me, I find that when I don't have anything going on, it's actually a bad thing because it means that I'm either in a state of not growing or that I'm not seeking new opportunities for me to grow and for me to help others. Now a life of excitement, a life where you are growing and challenging yourself, where you're making new strides and you're making progress consistently, that typically ends up being a busy life. And trust me, when I say this, I dislike using the word busy because I feel that there are many people who are guilty of kind of doing busy work to just feel like they're doing something rather than actually focusing on what's going to make them happy. But being truly busy means that most of your free time is going to be taken up. It means that you're going to have to be more selective that you're going to have to say the word. know to more things, as well as you're going to have to have a certain level of discipline to make sure that you continue to get done every single thing that you've got planned in your routine, in your schedule. Now, here's the thing. Failing at your busy work means you might end up missing meetings. It might mean that you're going to be showing up late to sports games and practices. It means maybe having to cut your workout short for a call or not having enough time to go pack your meals in which you've got to eat and buy stuff on the fly. Now the key to this, and here's the key to why I'm doing this podcast today, you can design your life routine as well as design the system around your work and your kids. So you can still put yourself first while having a crazy busy schedule in life. Now this system of habits, it needs to be something that you build the now, but that's going to be able to continue to last regardless of how busy life gets. So I'll give you an example. From me, even on my busiest days, I'm able to get my workout in without stressing over time. I have 10 minutes of journaling that I present every single morning. I've got two times per week in which I shop for fresh food and I prep my meals for the week. And I have my four times a day blocked in where I actually sit down, I eat and I'm present with my meals, which helps improve my digestion. Another thing from a sleep perspective, my sleep is also a part of this non-negotiable. where I make sure to get a minimum of seven hours every single night. So with all of these non -negotiables in place, it can seem for some people, maybe even for you, that it sounds like I'm doing a lot. That this is gonna take a lot of time, that it's a lot of work, that it's a lot of decisions in the moment, and really a lot of focus to make sure that this happens on time every single time. And this is where the aspect of like, how can I do this consistently without feeling just the busy -ness and making sure that it's of course sustainable. So the reality is, is it's actually way simpler than we tend to think. So I'm going to show you now how we do this, just like the way I show our Vantage program clients in my coaching program. To start, any good sustainable routine needs habits. A habit... A true habit is something that's settled or regular tendency or practice that you have that becomes really hard to give up. I put this definition there because a lot of people tend to have routines, but they don't actually have real habits. A true habit is something that's developing a tendency or a practice that's almost impossible to give up. Once you have a key set of habits in place, you must then start something that I call habit stacking. And this is where we then start to combine our existing habits with new ones. So that way together, they become so strong and natural that you're not going to be able to separate them again. Now with foundational habits and habit stacking, it means that your routine for yourself isn't going to change. So even if something attempts to sabotage your schedule or shows up out of nowhere to try and take that time away from you, you'll still have that time. It won't change. And this is what allows you to develop. consistency in your life. Now, the key with this though, is that you need habits at a basic level, like something so simple that there was no way that you can avoid it or mess it up. So think of a good habit, like a simple machine, something like a, the seesaw. I don't know. Machine machines, not a seesaw, but seesaws are simple. Okay. They serve a purpose. It's easy to use and it's damn near impossible to use it any other way than sitting on it. It has only one moving part, which means it's also going to be damn near impossible to screw up or to break. A habit, especially one that you're putting into your routine should be this unbreakable. And most importantly, like a seesaw, a habit must also be rewarding or fun. If we don't feel good while attempting a new habit, or we don't feel good after the habit is done, then we're probably gonna have a hell of a time trying to keep this habit in our lives. And this is where most people make the mistake. Their habit, holy, is either way too complicated or the habit is simple, but they can't stand it. And so they don't wanna use the seesaw anymore. Now an example of this, I've actually had a couple over the span of this week, is I had a client. who before working with me, so he shared that he could never make his 4 a .m. workouts. He was like, I want to do 4 a .m. 4 a .m. seems to be the only time. So he was dead set on doing workouts at four. He would try for a week. He'd feel hungry and weak during the workout. He was super tired and always had to cut it short because he wasn't able to wake up on time and he will always cut it late. And naturally, none of those things. Made him feel good. And in looking at this attempt of kind of making working out at 4 a .m. A habit his workout habit had a lot of moving parts to it. It required him to go to bed early gear one required him to wake up get dressed and eat before a session gear two Then go down to his condo gym and train gear three and finally go back up to his unit get showered and get ready for the day Which is gear four all of this, of course? He's got to be out at a certain cutoff time because of work, which is gear five with five conditions to just make a habit, like creating a workout, a success. I'm sure you can imagine what his chances were of making them all. So that explains why he always felt like they failed and why he felt bad about his training and wasn't able to make his workouts a stick. So not only did he not feel good during the process, he also didn't enjoy the training. because he disliked morning workouts. So he also didn't get that hit of dopamine from a successful workout that most people would tend to get. So for him and for you listening, this type of habit is never gonna be successful in your routine. Now I'm not saying you can't change all of the above gears we talked about one through five to make it work. Of course you can. But the chances of starting with all five of these gears, consistently every time is just unnecessarily hard. And we can do it. We can build a habit or routine at first and start with just one gear and work the right way. So this is usually why most people's habits around something like food don't stick either. When it comes to a habit around food, they tend to overcomplicate and add excessive steps into food. And this is where the task becomes so overwhelming and time consuming that. It doesn't make sense to cook food or to prep anymore. So I have it like food, especially day to day should be fast ways and routine. So for routine, like food, especially when it comes to recipes, man, I always laugh at those recipes you see in food magazines that have like 47 ingredients that you need an hour. And it's like, you need to basically cook this an entire hour and then 30 minutes to get all these ingredients just for one meal. This is maybe great, like a once a week, sure, but it makes no sense to make something like this as a habit. If you're already struggling to eat healthy and to eat regular meals. So from the food perspective, creating a habit in which you're only shopping for 90 minutes in the week. And I'll share the one of the main four later on is, is kind of that, that meal prep perspective. It creates a separation. that allows you to say, hey, I have my food. I know it's done. I'm feeling confident about this. I can eat the regular meals, but it's not so complicated that I need an entire chef's worth of pantry for me to be able to cook at. Now from a place of habits, although I've told you the example around workouts, example around food, there's always habits around making sure that your routines stick. So like I have a habit of once per week looking at my calendar, to see what I actually accomplished on the days versus what I'm blocked in. So this 15 minute habit allows me to understand how I'm actually spending my time, as well as give me a more realistic view of how long I need for certain parts of my day. This is a great habit for me because I like structure and I actually recommend that everyone does it as well because when you book something into your routine, but you don't accomplish it, you actually develop a negative habit, which is a bad habit of not doing everything. that you'd say that you do on that day or on your schedule. This can be especially dangerous habit because it shows your mind that what you plan doesn't really have to happen when in fact you actually want it to happen. Cause after all, why the heck would you put it in your schedule if you didn't want to make it happen in the first place? Right? So from these examples, here's what this means. It means that you need a combination of habits that make actions happen. like workouts and meals, but you also need habits to make sure that you're sticking to your routine, kind of like a self check so that way your routine doesn't fall apart. Now at this point, we're ready to dive into the top four habits that I think that everybody needs to make their whole routine stick. So let's just get right into it and let's go. Number one, let's fire right in. So habit number one, I want everyone and everyone should be doing this. You should be going to bed at the same time every single day. Notice how I didn't say go to bed and wake up at the same time every day. Remember we want to keep these habits super simple. I said go to bed at the same time every day. The reason why this is such a key foundational habit is because of something called your sleep wake cortisol cycle. Your hormone cortisol is the natural kickstart to your body's metabolism that's going to force you to wake up in the morning, be alert and then go throughout the day. If we are going to bed at different times, what it means is we are not training the body when we are supposed to wake up because our cortisol builds from when we go to sleep all the way until when we should wake up. So if you think about it, it's almost like filling a gas tank. If we left our car, our body on the charger and we let it fully charge, and we put it on the charger at the same time every day, it will naturally be full and wake up and turn on at the same time every day. So most people, when they are changing the times that they go to bed and they're trying to wake up at the same time, they're going to have a really hard time because their car may or may not be full. Their energy gas tank might not be fully replenished. Or it might actually be over replenished, in which case you might wake up feeling a little overtired. Cortisol cycle is key because if you're not going to bed and waking up at the same time, going to bed at the same time ensures you wake up at the same time. Waking up at the same time ensures you have the same amount of energy each morning. If you can control your energy level each morning, then you can plan your entire day around that energy level, even if the energy level is low. So if you're someone who relies on coffee or stimulants or you're trying to navigate your energy highs and energy lows, the first thing you should regulate is this habit. Regulate your sleep cycle. Make sure you're getting your seven hours and make sure that you're going to bed at the same time every single day. That's habit number one. Okay. Habit number two is you should be setting 90 minutes. prep and cook your food each and every week. So the way that I do this and the way that I teach our clients to do this in the Vantage program is very simple. You should have a 50 minute block for food and then you should have a separate block for the remainder of the 90 minutes for just cooking a second time. So what I mean by that is my 50 minute block is pick up the stuff from the grocery store, bring it home because the grocery store is literally five minutes from my house. pick up the stuff from the grocery store, bring it home, wash it while it's in the sink, then all you're going to do is when you pull it out of the sink, you rinse it, you dry it, you cut it, you cut it, even if you're not gonna cook it, you cut and chop everything so that way everything that goes into your fridge is always ready to be cooked. Because when doing that, And again, if you're only if you're being conscious and like we give our clients a plan and we say, hey, this is how much food you need for the whole week. If you're being conscious at the grocery store, you'll never prepare food and then throw it away. It'll always be enough for each and every single week. When you do that and the food is ready to be cooked, the remainder 20 minutes is just a matter of boiling and cooking the food, leaving something on a stove top. And then you've got food for three or four days. I always prep for a maximum of four days because I like food that's fresh. Anything past that I wouldn't really recommend. So the first bulk is a lot larger because we're doing the chopping of the vegetables. We're doing the travel to the grocery store and we keep it super simple. No more than even an hour tops to get this done. Make it a mission. I've got an hour and 10 minutes is for me to be able to do that grocery store. Now four days later, you have one 35 to 40 minute window, totaling that 90 minutes, in which your food is already chopped, washed, cut in the fridge. You're just putting it on the stove and you're spending 30 minutes cooking. By doing that, with your food being prepped every single week, you limit the amount of eating out, you limit the amount of eating on the fly. You'll be able to schedule your, which we'll talk about the scheduling in a second. You'll be able to schedule all of your meals and you're not going to have the tendency to overeat like most people do because all you have to eat is what is in the fridge and what you've already prepped. A fundamental habit of sticking to a consistent nutrition routine is preparing your meals. Don't worry necessarily about all of these recipes that have really high amount of ingredients. Stick to something that's simple during the week. Make sure that you prep your stuff Monday through Friday. And a lot of the times when people are prepping food, another thing as well is they're trying to prep every single meal when typically you don't need to prep every meal. Like you don't need to be prepping breakfast. If you work on going to bed at the same time every day and you can wake up at the same time every day, you'll never be late. So you can take 10 minutes to make breakfast. When it comes to lunch, prepare all of your lunches. And when it comes to dinner, once or twice a week, put something on a slow cooker. So you're only prepping the other one or two meals from a dinner perspective that you have through the week. You want to leverage the amount of time that you actually have by maximizing these windows. So in order to do that, we can't prep every single meal. Don't prep breakfast. That's really easy to cook in the moment. A lot of breakfast foods take like 10 minutes to 15 minutes or Do like an overnight oats. That is something that you can already pre-mix oats and then afterwards it's just easy for you to throw it on the cooktop. You want to leverage the amount of time that you have. The idea of prepping is for you to be able to prepare everything you need so you can be proactive about the food. So habit number two is important because it really sets up your entire nutrition for the entire week. Because if you have food that's prepped, you're less likely to go eat out. You're less likely to go swing by a restaurant because you know that you have food there and you don't want to waste it. Now habit number three. This is huge. This is something I've been doing for ages. You should place an alarm before you're supposed to eat and before you're supposed to work out. The reason why I have an alarm 15 minutes before my meals is because we have hunger hormones called leptin and ghrelin. That gets signaled not just by our stomach being empty but also by visual cues of food and by time signals This is why if we eat breakfast lunch and dinner at the same time We will get hungry and full at the same time And our body becomes accustomed to using energy that way So i'm the type of person I got a busy work schedule if I don't plan My breakfast my lunch if I don't plan my break in which i'm going to be eating one of my meals then I'm going to work right through it because most people just tend to power through their entire day. And then by the time it hits that four o'clock or five o 'clock, they're absolutely starving. And that leads to overnight eating or to overeating later on in the day. So for us to regulate our hunger and our fullness cues, setting an alarm before we eat is a great way for us to be able to tell the body, Hey, This is the alarm for food. Your body goes, Oh, let me do a hunger check. And then you'll be able to feel, Oh, I am actually hungry because our body cannot process a hunger and fullness signal. If it's processing another signal like work, like sleep, like activity, it needs to focus on one signal at a time. So we want to make sure that by setting the alarms, we're allowing our body to recognize the hunger and fullness. Now, in terms of the alarm for the working out and the alarm for the bedtime, 15 minutes before bed, I've got my shut off window. The alarm for the workout is for me to start getting ready because getting ready, especially for people who have never done the workout routines before, getting ready could take like 20 minutes. And if you're blowing your workout time or you're having to cut your workout short, because you just haven't left enough time to be ready. The purpose of the alarm is for you to bring attention to it so you can make the conscious choice. Most people skip their workouts and skip training sessions because they're being reactive in the moment. They're like, shit, I'm 15 minutes late to work. I got to cut my workout short or, Oh crap, you know what? Uh, the kids games running behind. I thought I could sneak this in, but I'm making a decision last minute. I can't. So I'm going to skip it. And then you end up at the end of the week and you're like, Oh, my intention was to work out, but I was never able to make it work. Well, just like working out, you're going to have to make it work out for you. So the way that you make a workout workout for you is you're going to have to use that 15 minute alarm to put yourself conscious enough for you to make a decision. Hey, it's 15 minutes before my workout is supposed to start. I need to drop what I'm doing right now and get ready. So when my workout starts. I can be all in. It's the same thing from a sleep perspective. Most people get caught in the next episode, get caught in emails. They're just in the kind of stream of life and they're not recognizing what time it is. They're not being time conscious. So the timed message that 15 minutes or half an hour before bed is great for you to start winding down and then for you to take that time. Great habit. Now, habit number four, okay? This one I mentioned earlier in the episode, and this is assessing your schedule at the end of each week. I put it as the foundational habit, which is number four, because if you're not assessing your schedule, then you really have no idea what the hell is going on in your life. And I say this in the most loving way, your schedule and your time is energy and energy is the currency that you have. We spend so much time trying to work to make money, trying to raise our kids, trying to build a business, trying to build a relationship. If our only like resource in life is time, we need to be aware of where we're spending it and why we're spending it. So when I look at my calendar, I look at it on a Sunday and I plan it for the next week. It takes me 15 to 20 minutes because I'm dialed in at this point. where I look at my routine and I say, what did I have planned on each day? And did I get everything accomplished that I had planned each day? And I mark it down. Yes to Monday, yes to Tuesday, yes to Wednesday. I go through and I make sure that everything that I blocked in, I was able to achieve. If I didn't achieve something, then I write that on the list on the side. Now, Let's say you look at the end of the list and it's one thing and you're like, okay, the next thing is to ask yourself, why didn't I accomplish that? Did I overbook myself in the day? Was there something outside of my control that happened during that day? Or was it something that I was subconsciously avoiding because I didn't want to do it. So for example, one of the things that I cannot stand is emails. I hate emails. I like. voice messaging everybody. It's why I voice message our clients in the vantage program. They love it. And I love it too, because email back and forth nonsense to me. So of course I have to answer emails, but what I found was is every single time I put a block in my schedule to answer emails, I always avoided it. So at the end of the week, I saw three or four blocks that were pushed that I didn't complete of answer emails. And then I said, I have to do this different. I either have to assign it at a different time where I will get it done, or I have to find a way to remove more emails from my life. So that way I cannot have this huge overwhelm when actually doing that. So you know what I did? VA was an easy way to filter a lot of the emails and then of course, switching our clients to the voice message. So this is where you assess your schedule and you get to see whether or not it worked and why it worked there. If I go through an entire week and I accomplished everything that I said on my calendar, I'm like, Holy shit. I got to really take note of what I did this week because clearly I did it right. Because if you're hitting everything and you're accomplishing everything that you set out to and everything fell in place in a way that was sustainable, it wasn't hurried, it didn't feel rushed. Then there's something that you can learn from that week. It's very small. but it takes 15 to 20 minutes for you to assess what's right. So then when you build your schedule for the week following, it's going to be something that's more realistic. The more you do this, the further dial in you become to the point where your schedule becomes clockwork. My schedule is routine. Sure, different stuff happens all the time. Sure, emergencies happen all the time. But the way that I designed the schedule, Is I follow these steps when I'm doing it on Sunday. Number one is I block all of the time for myself. I block when I'm going to bed. I block my workouts every single morning. I block my breakfasts. I block my meals and I block a shit happens block, which is usually about 40 minutes a day. I leave an opening for shit to happen because guess what? Shit does happen. And when it does and you don't allot for any time for any change in your routine, guess what? You're going to find that you're going to be pushing back stuff like crazy. Typically that block gets filled once or twice a week. The rest of the week I can work on other stuff or maybe push something earlier that I had intended later on in the week. After doing my personal time, this is where I then go and I look at what are the non -negotiables, the negotiables of working with our clients, the negotiables of putting in our group coaching calls, the negotiables of making sure that I'm doing everything I need for our house or any anything that goes in there. I make sure that I put it in, but I'm conscious of my energy when I'm putting it in. I think a lot of times when people don't have a consistent schedule is not only are they not looking at it to see if it worked, but also when they're building a schedule, they're not putting all of the things that have the same energy beside each other. So like example, and you know, really I can just compare this to business because it's, it's kind of easiest, like answering emails, doing invoicing, doing billing, that's a certain energy. Like you don't need to have high energy to answer emails. You don't need to have high energy to send an invoice. All of that should be back to back. But when I'm on client calls or when I'm booking check -ins or success, uh, check-ins with our clients, I'm literally saying to myself like, where is my best energy? Because I want to deliver a thousand percent. I want to show up as the best version of coach that I can be. That's not at seven 30 at night. For me, that's at six AM to 1130. Normally in the mornings. And the reason why I build my schedule that way is because I have a high level of energy. I have high mental clarity. I can show up as the best coach. And so I book our calls. back -to -back in order for me to be able to keep that same energy and keep it transitioning through If you have something that has a similar energy or is kind of a similar style And you're just booking crap all over the place in your schedule, then you're gonna have a hell of a time energy wise Doing something that may require high energy when it's at a low energy part of your day and this is why habit number four is the last one because You have to assess your schedule at the end of each and every week. If you're not assessing it to make sure that your meal prep was in the right time, that your workouts were achieved, that you were able to do any process or habits in your routine, make them stick, then of course they're not going to stick for you. You're just going to find that you'll be booking your schedule at random. Now, from a foundational perspective, I say that these are the foundational four habits. because every single habit, at least from a health perspective, or even from like a routine and a routine management perspective, all comes down to these three. If you have piss poor sleep, say goodbye to your schedule. If you're hungry, say goodbye to your schedule. If you're not assessing your schedule to see if all of the times were right, you can say goodbye to a consistent schedule. And if you're not prepping your meals, well, guess what? You're going to have to be stopping tons of times. So again, you can say goodbye to your schedule. All of these habits are key and foundational for us to be able to make sure that they can be consistent. Okay. Now these habits, these habits are just some of the routines I teach and the next steps in terms of these habits would then be to create habits that stack onto these ones. Hence why I brought habits stacking up earlier. So anything that can naturally connect to these habits, you should absolutely do so as basically habit stacking is going to make them easier to do. And it's going to piggyback off of the same nerve firings in the brain as the original habit. This is key as to what makes the habit stacking piece so much easier. Because if you think of it like widening an already walked way, uh, walked way and already walked pathway in the forest, when we stack habits that are supposed to work together, There's less work with each other than there is for us to be able to make a new habit in the first place. So remember everybody, it's not just about forcing yourself to do something. That's not what a habit is. Okay? A habit is about finding the way to achieve the path of least resistance. So even when life gets hard, even when it gets busy, we can still take time to do the things that are important to us. Thanks for listening to this episode. That's all for now. Love you guys lots and hope to see you on the next podcast. Bye.