Ever wondered how your physical health can turbocharge your quest for success? Listen closely, as we dissect the intricate relationship between a robust body and the pursuit of our ambitions. Mike Volz and Andrew, here on the Positive Network podcast, are peeling back the veil on the underestimated superpower of sleep and its profound impact on rejuvenating not just the body, but also the mind. We're not shy about diving into the deep end of personal well-being, exploring practical ways to live chemical-free, and sharing strategies that prove a gym obsession isn't the only path to a strong, healthy life.
Strap in for a rollercoaster of revelations, from the hidden dangers of cutting corners on sleep to the sneaky chemicals invading our homes. Our personal journeys shed light on the hard-earned wisdom that chasing wealth at the expense of health is a perilous path. We're here to arm you with knowledge, from the science of sleep that's sculpting our brains nightly to the power moves for detoxifying your living space. Plus, we're tipping our hats to Matthew Walker, whose insights from "Why We Sleep" offer a bedrock for our sleep-savvy discussions.
But that's not where the conversation ends. We're breaking down the building blocks of a body built to last, emphasizing the significance of the right macronutrient balance, and lifting more than just our spirits. Discover how these tweaks can extend your prime years, amplify your presence with loved ones, and fortify your personal sovereignty. So, tune in, get inspired, and let's harness the dual engines of health and balance to power through life's challenges.
Join Mike and Andrew in the Positive Network as they embark on a journey to shift the world from fear to positivity, encouraging each listener to become a proactive agent of change and positivity.
Join the Movement
www.positivenetwork.info
https://www.youtube.com/@The_Positive_Network
Ever wondered how your physical health can turbocharge your quest for success? Listen closely, as we dissect the intricate relationship between a robust body and the pursuit of our ambitions. Mike Volz and Andrew, here on the Positive Network podcast, are peeling back the veil on the underestimated superpower of sleep and its profound impact on rejuvenating not just the body, but also the mind. We're not shy about diving into the deep end of personal well-being, exploring practical ways to live chemical-free, and sharing strategies that prove a gym obsession isn't the only path to a strong, healthy life.
Strap in for a rollercoaster of revelations, from the hidden dangers of cutting corners on sleep to the sneaky chemicals invading our homes. Our personal journeys shed light on the hard-earned wisdom that chasing wealth at the expense of health is a perilous path. We're here to arm you with knowledge, from the science of sleep that's sculpting our brains nightly to the power moves for detoxifying your living space. Plus, we're tipping our hats to Matthew Walker, whose insights from "Why We Sleep" offer a bedrock for our sleep-savvy discussions.
But that's not where the conversation ends. We're breaking down the building blocks of a body built to last, emphasizing the significance of the right macronutrient balance, and lifting more than just our spirits. Discover how these tweaks can extend your prime years, amplify your presence with loved ones, and fortify your personal sovereignty. So, tune in, get inspired, and let's harness the dual engines of health and balance to power through life's challenges.
Join Mike and Andrew in the Positive Network as they embark on a journey to shift the world from fear to positivity, encouraging each listener to become a proactive agent of change and positivity.
Join the Movement
www.positivenetwork.info
https://www.youtube.com/@The_Positive_Network
When we're looking at our body, the most important thing that we can do out of everything is getting eight hours of sleep every night. That's your number one priority. That's one of the things that gets sacrificed when you focus all in on business or all in on something Once you have sleep. There's other things you can do, but I'm not even going to bother because literally just focus on sleep as you're using your brain, it's building up this neurotoxic plaque in your brain, and what happens is when you're sleeping, it's doing a cleaning cycle.
Speaker 1:It's getting rid of that plaque, and that plaque actually kills neurons if it stays around too long. So you're literally making yourself permanently dumber. If you don't sleep, are you getting scared? Yet I guess it gets even worse. So then the next thing is the permanent damage that it can cause can actually be part of the brain that helps you fall asleep and stay asleep.
Speaker 2:In your personal life. Don't give up the things that make you feel good. Don't give up the things that keep your body healthy. Don't go all in on one of these 12 points of the sovereign life OS. You can achieve anything, but if you 100% commit to money, everything else is going to fail. And you want to do something that's pretty easy to improve your health, to improve the strength of your body over the long term. Start by dechemicalizing your home.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Positive Network. I'm your host, mike Volz. Hi and I'm Andrew. The Positive Network is your lighthouse in the dark, where we bring real world solutions to real world problems. Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Positive Network podcast. Today we're going to be diving into a topic that's at the very heart of what it means to be human Having a strong, healthy and sovereign body and the power that comes with that. You know this isn't a vanity trip. You know we're not worried about having a beach body or anything silly like that. This is about taking control of your life. A healthy body is the vessel to achieve your dreams, to achieve your goals. Having a strong, healthy body allows you to be truly sovereign and to take charge of your own destiny If your body is holding you back, you're missing out on a lot of things that we're going to get into today.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. We're so used to thinking of our bodies as sort of like separate from our minds and our spirits, but they're all connected. They're all you know. That's why the saying goes body, mind and spirit, because they're all, like, connected together, and if one is off, it's going to throw everything else off too. So when you invest in your own physical wellbeing, you're unlocking a much deeper level of personal power.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely you are. Yeah, and we're going to break down why having a strong body is so important, you know, and why it's so critical to the overall sovereignty. So today we're going to touch on things like sleep and the superpower of sleep. It's not just about the hours that you're logging while you're sleeping, but it's about how it fuels your brain and your mood. We're also going to talk about having a clean home, and when I say clean home, I mean how to de-chemicalize your space and your products to support your body in a better way. And then your everyday strength. So forget the gym obsession. We're going to give you practical steps to have a strong and healthy body I clearly forgot the gym.
Speaker 1:You forgot the gym. I forgot the gym. That's okay actually this is a good point is that, out of all the sovereign you know, life os's. You're going to be better and worse at some of them. Body is definitely one of my lesser ones, because there's well, there's so many different things I've got going on in my life and it's not something I've been able to put in as much time into, although I'd like to.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's that's the thing with the sovereign life OS and all of the different points that you can pursue. You're going to be really strong in some already, and some you're going to have barely scratched the surface, and that's going to be a unique puzzle to each individual. So you start where you're at and do what you're capable of and don't feel bad about it. We'll talk about a little bit about that today. So if you're ready to take ownership of your sovereign body and everything that comes with it, let's dive in.
Speaker 1:Cool. So the first thing we're going to be talking about today is sleep. Sleep is actually probably the most important thing I think you could do, the single most important thing you can do for your health, because if you don't sleep, then your life is basically over, like you're not going to have a good time if you're not sleeping. Yes, yeah, you'd be going insane, so anyway. So you basically need sleep, but it boils down to like more than just okay, you need it, but what is it actually doing for you? And like, uh, how can you optimize it? And stuff like that. But the core things here are if you don't sleep, did you know that you can't learn? Like a lot of your learning happens in your sleep. So basically the time that you're awake is sort of like you're recording a memory card right, okay.
Speaker 1:It's almost like you hit record on a DSLR and you're recording your day. That gets stored in the hippocampus and then, through your sleeping time, it's offloading the data and then uploading it to what you could call your hard drive.
Speaker 2:So you're saying that your retention of the information you receive during a poor sleep day won't stick with you, so you can learn something, but it's not being recorded properly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and the other thing too, is that in the REM parts of our sleep it's showing this is coming from. It's called the book why we Sleep by Matthew Walker the book why we Sleep by Matthew Walker. It's basically saying that as you're in REM sleep, it takes the long-term memories you've created and then creates an index where it tags all the different things you've learned and then cross-references them with all the other data to integrate it into your total long-term memory. And you actually, even three or four days after you've learned something, your brain is still processing it. So even if you miss sleep, like three days later, you could actually impact learning or studying that you're having days before that.
Speaker 2:So you're impacting the new connections it might be making from the learnings that you had days ago Exactly Wow, I didn't know that, yeah.
Speaker 1:So to all those college students out there get some sleep. Get some sleep. Yeah, you need it. Another interesting thing from that book is did you know that eight hours a day is actually required to have full capacity? I have heard that yeah.
Speaker 1:If you're at seven hours they did tests with again. This is coming from the same book. It's a fantastic book. If you want to learn about sleep is why we Sleep, by Matthew Walker, and they were saying that seven hours of sleep each day for over a week in inhibited enough to not be able to pass a. Like a road test, if you're pulled over, you'd be equivalently illegally drunk. Oh, wow, yes I drive.
Speaker 2:I drive illegally, sleepless all the time.
Speaker 1:If you get less than four hours sleep in a night, you're at a seven. I think it was a seven times higher chance to get into a car accident 700% increase in car accident Wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I can see that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, anyway. So that just gives you a little bit of insight into how critical sleep is for making decisions. But that's only kind of scratching the surface, because it gets worse. So if you don't sleep as you're using your brain, it's building up this neurotoxic plaque in your brain and what happens is when you're sleeping it's doing a cleaning cycle.
Speaker 1:It's getting rid of that plaque, and that plaque actually kills neurons if it stays around too long. So you're literally making yourself permanently dumber. If you don't sleep, are you getting scared? Yet I guess it gets even worse. So then the next thing is the permanent damage that it can cause can actually be part of the brain that helps you fall asleep and stay asleep. So there's people who are like older, in their 80s or whatever, who can only sleep for like four hours a night, and it's not because they don't need eight hours, it's because their body has lost the ability to even keep them asleep that long. No way, yes, so they're chronically lacking sleep. Another thing is, during the day, your chance of having a heart attack. If you haven't slept the night before, even just one hour increases your chance of a heart attack increases.
Speaker 2:Blood pressure causes you obviously to make really bad decisions and then stops you from enjoying life. I read a report speaking of the heart attack. I read a report that there's a measured spike in heart attacks during daylight savings time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's related Yep, wow, yeah, so even just an hour off can really dramatically affect, you know, if you stayed alive that day or not.
Speaker 2:potentially, I have also read that the you know. You said the damage is permanent. It's irreversible. Like you, literally take years off of your life with extended periods of not sleeping.
Speaker 1:Yeah, not only years off your life, but enjoyment and happiness. And when you make poor decisions, you're actually, you know, let's say you make a bad decision and you do something irreversible, like, let's say, you're driving and you hit some kid on a like a street by accident, but because you just made a bad decision due to lack of sleep, then well, your life is screwed up from that point on. Yeah, you're either going to live with the guilt and you know, whatever happens out of that situation, it's not going to be good.
Speaker 2:Wow. So I kind of look at this like when you go to sleep, it's like defragging the hard drive on your computer, it's like resetting things. You're like you say you're moving that plaque out of the brain, you're cleaning things up. You know, I'm getting six hours of sleep, you know, with a young kid who's teething right now, my wife even less, and it definitely affects us in a big way, especially with our productivity. Um, I'm a little sad that I'm losing intelligence, because that's something that is very important to me is having a, you know, a clean body. You know clean food. Make sure my brain's functioning optimally. And I've just been letting the sleep thing slip, because you know when, when your kids go to bed at night, it's eight or nine o'clock. Oh, my goodness, I have my first hour, two hours of free time. I don't want to waste this. So then you're, you know, in bed at 11, maybe 1130, and then you're up at six.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right. So the deal too. Yeah, I think this is something that I'm going to need to address right away and get very serious about. Yeah, it's actually the number one thing. I would say that if you're not getting your eight hours of sleep, you could be massively improving your life by just getting it consistently Right?
Speaker 2:No, it's interesting. So, uh, we're working right now with three-time Miss Olympia, uh, whitney, uh, who she? She's challenged us to all in this amazing program to strengthen our bodies through food and movement and through some coaching with her. She's said several times she's like if you're not sleeping, none of this really matters. So she's been trying to back me up to do your very best with sleep and you know the rest. Just try to enact as much of it as you can, but the sleep will really undermine the entire healing process of your body yeah, yeah, there's a guy online, uh, brian johnson you heard of him.
Speaker 1:I have yeah, so he's been getting consistent 100 perfect sleep scores for, I believe, like maybe a year or something like that, straight. Yeah, that's what he also preaches to. His sleep is the number one goal in his life.
Speaker 2:It, it supersedes every other thing what can people do to improve their sleep? There's so many different reasons people might not be able to sleep. They might be on shift work, they might have young kids, they might be, you know, up late studying. They might be out partying, drinking alcohol, which is a whole other topic, yeah, but as far as sleep goes like, should people be changing their mindset about it first, or are there some practical steps they can take?
Speaker 1:I think firstly is make a list between the things that are keeping you from sleeping, that are within your control to change, and ones that aren't so. For example, a teething baby. What are you going to do about that? You can't do anything, unless you're willing to just not do anything with your kid, which would be very bad. You're going to have to do something. So those things are not negotiable. You're still going to have to do them. If you do have the potential resources and it makes sense, you could maybe hire someone to look after them during the night. That might be one solution if it's really impacting your sleep a lot. The other thing is the other stuff that doesn't need to be there that's impacting your sleep. I guess have an honest conversation with yourself about what are those things that you could give up to get the sleep that your body requires.
Speaker 2:So maybe people could combine the time auditing practice from the sovereign time point with things that you're doing, things you're committed to, things that are taking up your time, that are taking away from your sleep. That might be a prioritization of eliminating time wasters or time thieves. Because now we're talking about your mental health. We're talking about your intelligence, we're talking about your body's ability to repair itself, and so that time auditing process that gets even more important now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's one of those things where you know we talk. In that episode we talked about compounding time.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:When you're sleeping consistently, you're able to compound good decisions to possibly free up more time in your life to actually have that good sleep. Yeah, but like I said, when you have young kids that's something that it's not really negotiable. But that doesn't mean that you shouldn't still try to get the eight hours of sleep in some other creative way if possible.
Speaker 2:And and also to own. To acknowledge in my wife and I have felt this when you don't have sleep, you get into a state of frustration, a state of confusion, and you literally might not be able to go to sleep at eight or nine o'clock at night because you're frustrated. You're so frustrated that you're so tired that you can't sleep and you get into this loop.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So there's significant challenges to this, but it's important to find ways to help each other out, so try having a nap during the day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, napping is super critical. If you're feeling tired enough to go to sleep and you can somehow swing it, then definitely do it. The other things, too there's. Now I can't say that this is 100% sure, because I don't want to mislead anyone if I'm incorrect, but I do also feel pretty strongly about this and I've had personal success with this myself is, on the days where I don't get sleep, what I do is I take NAC, which an acetylcysteine with uh, glutathione, uh with glycine, which are both precursors to glutathione, which is an antioxidant. That's very powerful. Okay, melatonin, by the way, is the body's most powerful antioxidant, and melatonin is actually one of the things that helps clean the brain. Now, again, I'm not a brain scientist, so I could be saying something a little bit wrong, but what happens is they've done studies with mice where sleep deprives them, so they basically I think they had them on some shaking platform that would like put water on them so they could never sleep.
Speaker 1:Waterboard the sounds horrible actually when I think about it. But, um, so they had these mice that didn't get any sleep. They had mice that did have sleep, and then they put the mice that did have sleep into two groups, or sorry, the mice that didn't have sleep, into two groups one they gave a knack to and the others they didn't, and then they put them up against mice that did that were fully rested and they're good to go, okay. Then they put them in a maze, the the mice that could actually, um, have sleep. They did. You know, that was the baseline. The mice that didn't have sleep were way worse. I think it was like 70% slower getting through the maze, and the ones that took NAC were the same as the ones that had sleep.
Speaker 2:Interesting. Now. You talked about melatonin being one of the things that helps with sleep, and I just want to caution the listeners out there. There's a lot of melatonin supplements out there. Be very careful about taking melatonin on a continual basis over a long period of time. It can cause imbalances in the body and then it can affect your body's ability to naturally produce it. So do your own critical thinking, research what Andrew just said about NAC go out and read some stuff, get some opinions, but be careful about just taking a straight up melatonin supplement.
Speaker 1:We've had some some issues with that in our family in the past, so yeah, and also you can easily overdose, because they sell like five milligrams, ten milligrams, but you, I think the the most that you really need is something like 0.3 milligrams to get the effect, and that's you should really only take it if there's no other option. Yes, like it's a last resort. I'm not saying go take melatonin. What I'm saying is that when your body naturally releases the melatonin that protects, uh, that is an antioxidant. I don't know if you know this too, but when you're out in the sun, did you know your body's making melatonin from the, the red light that's coming into your body from it?
Speaker 2:light that's coming into your body from it. Yes, so the sun is a man. That could be a whole topic for sovereign body and the things that happen. I'll bring a very cool guest on to talk about that Cool.
Speaker 2:I'm excited We'll have a good conversation with him. Sounds awesome. The sun does amazing things for for that and uh and many other things. So I've started to incorporate naps in the last year and my naps are interesting.
Speaker 2:I always thought it was ridiculous when am I going to find an hour or two hours to have a nap? It's not possible in the pace of my life. But what I started working on is switching, uh, some practices of switching from sympathetic to parasympathetic. You know, fight or flight and and get into rest or relax, and I, through practice over time, I've been able to take a 20 to 30 minute nap where I feel my body making a shift. I'll let my wife know. Like I'm just going to go have a quick, you know, switch over here, I'll lay down and while the kids are screaming and playing, I literally fall asleep, snore. Sometimes 15, 20 minutes come right back out and it is a complete reset of a very foggy brain. It is the neatest thing and it took a while to do that. I think that's something we could expand on for the listeners again one day.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:But that's an. That's something I implemented right away, cause when you don't have the ability, for whatever reason, to have a full night's sleep, you've got to start doing some other practices to help out.
Speaker 1:And coffee, by the way, is not a good crutch to lean on some other practices to help out. And coffee by the way is not a good crutch to lean on. No, it's really not. I, uh, I went down that road and I regretted it immensely.
Speaker 2:I'm still down that road. It's my survival tool. I'm not letting go of it yet.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I could do a whole episode on why I quit coffee, like three years ago. I like cold turkey and haven't been back since and I'm super happy about it, and naps were a big part of being able to make that happen man.
Speaker 2:The other day I woke up with a very puzzled look on my face. I had fallen asleep on a crossword okay, I got one for you.
Speaker 1:so why do keyboards never sleep? Because they have two shifts, two chefs, okay.
Speaker 2:Well, let's move on to the next one. Next point, about having a strong body. So this is a neat one. It's de-chemicalizing your home, and I'm talking specifically about the products that you're putting on your body. And our journey started with this years ago when my wife got extremely ill. Now she had a bout of anaphylaxis and we almost lost her and, um, luckily, we, you know, we threw the baby in the truck and um threw her in the truck and we met an ambulance halfway to town. And luckily, we, you know, we threw the baby in the truck and threw her in the truck and we met an ambulance halfway to town. And they had said that if we hadn't, you know, popped to Benadryl in her mouth on the way out the door and met them halfway, cause they wouldn't allow us to go all the way to the hospital, they, they headed us off, but she wouldn't have made it, and so we were left it was.
Speaker 2:It was, it was crazy, and we were left with no answers. I mean, she had taken an Advil for a headache and her body blew up like a balloon. She had had previous like you know her. Her body would react and she'd get um. She would start, you know, swelling up, but it would stop, but this time it just went all the way. You would start, you know, swelling up, but it would stop, but this time it just went all the way.
Speaker 2:And for those that don't know, when you have sudden onset anaphylaxis, you have 20 to 30 minutes before your body kills itself. Essentially, your immune system goes into hyperactivity and it just attacks everything and that's it. So we got her to the ambulance. You know they shot her up with the EpiPen, they found a vein and got an IV and you know, we moved through that traumatic experience. But then we were left with questions like what is going on? Everything my wife ate after that and there were several repeat episodes everything she ate set her whole body off. Everything she would put on her skin would set her skin off, and so we had to eliminate everything, and so we, from foods to chemicals too. So we went through this entire process.
Speaker 2:We started reading the literature, getting into the books, and we really deep dove. What is in the products that we're putting in our bodies and on our bodies and it was crazy. The type of industrial chemicals that have been brought down to a safe level. If you know LDL levels, like there's levels of things that kill mice and rats at a certain amount and then probably won't affect you in a negative way. But when there's 10 personal care products, when there's five natural cleaners, when you're spraying air freshener scents in your home and you're breathing these in, when you're adding all these things together, they add up to a range of different negative health side effects for people and, with each human body being completely different and unique, people react differently. So there's no conformity to the result of this chemical intrusion of the body. Keep in mind humans are like cockroaches, like we survive a lot of stuff. Our bodies are amazing and resilient, but this stuff takes a toll over time.
Speaker 1:Yeah. There's a limit to everything.
Speaker 2:There, sure is. So, if this resonates with you and and you want to do something that's pretty easy to improve your health, to improve the strength of your body over the longterm, start by decchemicalizing your home, and this can be, like I said, air fresheners, air sprays, um, your laundry detergent, your cleaning products for your windows and floors, your dishwasher detergent and especially, the personal care products. So makeups, deodorants, the things that are going right on your skin. And what is the biggest organ on the body? The skin, the skin. Yeah, it's very permeable that that's something that I think the listener should really start thinking about is is go first for your personal care products toothpaste, like there's, there's some nasty stuff in toothpaste. We're talking industrial chemicals that have been oh, this is, this is safe for you and it'll improve the enamel on your teeth. Well, okay, sure, maybe it improves enamel on your teeth, but what is the sure? Maybe it improves enamel on your teeth, but what is the long-term impacts of, of having these chemicals go into your body?
Speaker 1:Interesting. Actually, I had there's a personal story there I was using a toothpaste obviously all my life and then I started getting this weird mouth thing where I was getting like this sore on my tongue and it would not go away. Like and everything I tried, I even got some medical grade stuff it wasn't going away. So after like a year of this, um, I just was like, well, let's try switching the toothpaste and like I'll just use like baking soda. One week later it was gone and I was like what, that's my toothpaste? This whole time I think that leads to where does someone even start when they're trying to do this? Because there's so many different things you could go down and just like a million different things that you could start with. But what do you think is a good place to start for people?
Speaker 2:Start small, Start with one thing. So pick a toothpaste or pick a deodorant or your shampoo or the soap that you're using on the on your body in the shower or bath, and start with that one thing. One nice little hack would be something like the think dirty app, so you can get that on Android or iPhone. You can go into the aisles in your grocery store or wherever you're getting those natural care products, turn the barcode around and scan it and it's going to give you a rating on a scale. I think it's one to five or one to 10. It's been a while since I've used it Um, cause, our home is completely turned over and it'll tell you on a scale of uh, on that scale of how dangerous that product is for you and what chemicals specifically it's referencing in. You know of how that would affect you.
Speaker 2:That's a great way to start out. So if you're just going to start by replacing your deodorant, you're also going to get a shock factor when you do this. So even if you go to the natural care or organic section, if they have one of personal care products, you're going to find not only are they almost all owned by one or two companies. If you look at you, get into the mega corp research, but almost all of them are dangerous. Even in the natural products one you'll find one or two or three products that have a very low chemical rating.
Speaker 2:That is a great place to start. So start small, say, okay, this is my new deodorant, this is my new toothpaste. Then move on to your shampoos, your conditioners, your body soap, Then what you're washing your clothes with. Start cleaning that up. Look up companies like Nelly's for laundry soap and just start with that process. One thing after another. The dryer sheets and these are a big culprit for the scents that are going into our body from air fresheners. If you have an old school, 80s air freshener that every five minutes it squirts something out and makes your home smell nice, please throw that as far away from your home as you can immediately.
Speaker 1:These little plug-in air fresheners Don't hit any passing cars. Don't hit children.
Speaker 2:Don't hit anybody. You don't hit children, don't hit anybody. You don't want chemicals on them either.
Speaker 1:Just kidding, yeah just I know, I know you're joking, I'm just super passionate about this.
Speaker 2:Like, start getting the chemicals off your body.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, what I really don't like is the air fresheners in people's cars.
Speaker 2:Oh, those give me a headache actually at this point I'm on business trips, it's probably 70, 80% of the Ubers that have these things clipped right into the air vent. Here's the other thing when you decchemicalize, when you get this stuff out of your home, out of your environment, if someone comes in to chat with you wearing heavy perfume, you will have a headache inside of 30 to 90 seconds. When you jump in an Uber with an air freshener, you get out with a headache, Whereas before you might've always felt just a little less optimal than you thought, but you were so inundated your body was just dealing with it. Once you're free of these things, you notice the effects, Similar to a food elimination diet, when you eliminate everything to find out what you may be allergic to.
Speaker 2:If that's something you have to do and you add one thing back in, you'd be like oh my goodness, that gives me heartburn. Oh my goodness, that makes my guts go crazy. Yeah Right, and you'll notice because you're you're adding that one thing back in. So when you de-chemicalize, is it's a stark realization of what these things were doing to you. There was just so much coming at you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's interesting we're having this conversation, because I feel like it's one of the things that is not talked about enough.
Speaker 2:No.
Speaker 1:When you think about improving your health, the first thing that comes to mind is like got to hit the gym six days a week kind of a thing. But it's like if you're laying on toxic deodorant and toothpaste and shampoo and bathing in cologne and a bunch of other stuff that's doing like negative harm. I'm saying this because of me, but before I used to think like, oh, you know, you know, you don't really anything on the skin, it's not that big of a deal. But then you're like, yeah, but there's patches that literally give you medication through your skin. Yeah, actually I also read that the you know the grocery receipts, like the receipts at stores. Yes, there's a coating on them that um gets absorbed into your skin and increases estrogen yeah, it's really not good for you and it's bad for you, yeah just even touch it.
Speaker 1:So it sounds like if I was going to summarize where you're saying that probably the biggest bang for your buck is look at everything that's touching your skin first, and then secondly, anything you're breathing in, and then those will be the core places that you want to get started with, and then, after that, then your household cleaners that are sort of proxy touching or smelling. You know, when you clean up a counter you're not necessarily like laying on it, like like full body, like skin to skin.
Speaker 1:You're like yes, absorb into me, Cause that's not, not, it's not going to happen. But that's what is happening to your shampoos those are going all over your skin and over your body so those are probably the first things to start looking into. Do you have a specific shampoo that you recommend to people?
Speaker 2:Yeah, do you have a specific shampoo that you recommend to people? Yeah, we've got a couple of them. I think what we would do is probably do a full episode on this and share some ideas and have some conversations around this. Cool Something to look forward to. Yeah, so we do a combination of two things.
Speaker 2:So this is another thing listeners can do is you can go out and buy some less chemical you know, dependent products from the store. You can also make a lot of this, right. You can make your own soap. You can make your own shampoo. So our shampoo and conditioner is actually in bars of soap, right, our body soap is in. So we have three bars of soap One's a conditioner, one's a shampoo and one is your, your body wash.
Speaker 2:And if you don't want to make them, they're easy to find out. I mean, use AI while it hasn't turned against us and topic for our Sovereign Data episode coming up Use AI to just get recipes for making every single one of these products in a natural way. It's very easy and the ingredients are very simple. So we make about half of our stuff. We buy another quarter of it from people who are making the stuff locally. So they're doing what we would do, but we don't have the sovereign time freed up to make all of it, and then we buy about a quarter of it from sources. What you buy, you also have to keep looking at. We just found out that our deodorant was purchased by one of the big mega corps and it's now full of a bunch of stuff, and we didn't read the label. So that happened sometime in the last year.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I hate when that happens and you find a product you love and then it gets changed and you're like why Everything? Why did?
Speaker 2:you do this to me Flows to the top of mega corp. If, if a natural health product gets very popular, someone offers them a check, most founders will say, all right, I'm riding off into the sunset. And then, to make that product more profitable, they swap out with cheaper ingredients, chemical ingredients, they're just using the brand to get back into your home again. It's sad, but it's true. So you've got to be a little bit vigilant over time for the products you're purchasing. That's the way that we deal with it. It's a combination of things and it's based on our resources and time. You know it's funny. We're talking about having a strong body and we start with sleep right, and then we talk about pulling chemicals out of your home and most people are like, no, no, no, you go to the gym, let's get some muscles, let's get a six pack. Andrew and I might be rocking a one pack working on it.
Speaker 1:I can provide step-by-step instructions on getting a nice one pack.
Speaker 2:I've. I've been extremely healthy. Most of my life. I've been an athlete and a lot of that came naturally to me because I played sports my whole childhood. And then when I got into business and I got, you know, imbalanced and I was obsessed over sovereign money although I wasn't calling it that at that time I lost my health Right. So that kind of went backwards. So I want to get into that story a little bit. But people might be surprised that the third thing we're going to talk about is actually making your body stronger behind those other two, because those other two really are low hanging fruit that will improve your body immeasurably compared to this third point. This third point will also help, but remember, it's not about just getting a strong, strong physical body. It's about having an overall healthy body. But the third point is lift heavy shit and eat the right macronutrient combinations for your body to deal with that situation. Deal with that stress on your muscles, deal with that stress on your joints.
Speaker 1:So how are we talking here Like lift a car every couple of days At?
Speaker 2:least a car or two. You're going to Hulk those things.
Speaker 1:Rawr, throw it across the property.
Speaker 2:A lot of people are like well, I need, you know, high intensity, uh, cardio and need to run for an hour a day, and that works for some people but it doesn't work for others. So, however, you're going to do this, whether you're going to go to the gym and lift heavy weights, whether your your your job is physical and that can be enough for some people or you have some stuff around home, you know some free weights that you can lift, stress your muscles out, you know, at least three times a week. Uh, I learned from some very knowledgeable people on this that we'll share, uh share with everyone on the podcast. We'll have them on as guests. But lift heavy stuff and then eat enough protein for your body to do something about that stress on your body. So, as I've learned from Whitney and we'll have her on the show at some point your macronutrients play a huge role in combination with the movement of your body and lifting.
Speaker 2:I was blown away by how little protein I ate each day. I was eating about 40% of my required amount for the goals that I have, so it was way under protein and I thought I was doing good Like I have, you know, beef and we have um chicken, we have salmon and halibut uh, all from you know organic sources or we catch it ourself. But what happened was my my fat content was almost as high as my protein content. And now you do need fat, but you need a measurable amount more protein than fat. And when you eat what I thought was good protein sources, they a lot of them weren't lean enough. So I was getting I was literally getting full on a probably a balance of protein and fat and I needed that protein to be up a little bit higher.
Speaker 1:Yeah, right, cause if you have like a, like a steak, that's not just the protein, it's marbled with fat in there as well, and that's also what makes your eyes taste so dang good. It's so good.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but that fat it burns a lot slower. Yeah, Right, and that that protein is what you need for recovery and for for building up that muscle. It makes sense, so have a strong body. That's really important.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's almost like all these different points. They're kind of like intertwined with all the other points. Right, the body is important, but the body is also interconnected with the mind, and being able to maintain your body, that's like sovereign time. And even keeping your body safe, that's like sovereign time. And even you know, keeping your body safe, that's sovereign defense. So there's all these and sovereign food, you know feeding your body the right minerals and nutrients that it needs. They're all sort of intertwined.
Speaker 2:They very much are, yeah, and so when you think about the 12 points of the sovereign life operating system, the body has a lot of strong tie-ins with the other points. So, for example, sovereign defense so your ability to defend yourself in a physical way is tied in with your body. Your ability to remove yourself from a situation to run to defend yourself. These are all tied together.
Speaker 1:Sovereign time, as you had mentioned, your body from your sleep to not having chemicals in your body, to having a strong, fit body that gives you more access to time and here's how you can think of it is that you, yes, you're going to have the same 24 hours in a day, but how you experience them and how you experience that time is different. So you'll know, like if you had an all-nighter, that 24 hours that you have that day it's not high impact, it's not productive. But if you sleep and then you go in there, it's kind of like your force multiplier and the more you're rested up to obviously your full resting point, you don't need more than about eight, nine hours of sleep. After that it's oversleeping. But once you have that, then you're multiplying. You're making good decisions, you can move decisions, you can move quickly, you can do more.
Speaker 2:So it's as if you created a time machine where you created more value and a more condensed chunk of time than if you didn't sleep that well more presence with your children, like more productive hours in that day, and then also you can tag an extra five to 10 to 15 years onto the end of your life, years where you're not walking around in extreme pain or dealing with multiple health problems. So it's not just about living longer, it's about living longer in a state where you can participate in your life.
Speaker 1:Living stronger, stronger Living longer yeah. Not just longer, but stronger stronger, living longer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, not just longer, but stronger. There's the slogan um having and again we touched on this, but having a strong sovereign body allows you to contribute more to your children during the day yeah, be more present for them. Lift them up, lift them up.
Speaker 1:That's nice.
Speaker 2:Now you're 69 pounds now can't do that anymore, and also when we're talking about living longer, like when you you get to an older age, you get to experience more of your children if you have the body that will allow you to stick around. You get to experience more with your grandchildren yeah and that's. That's magical sovereign mind. There's also a tie in there. Your mental health, like the mind body connection, is huge.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those two points have a lot of of intermingling so, thinking of an analogy of all these points, it's like they're all organs in a body, right. So it's like you've got sovereign mind, sovereign body, sovereign time, sovereign defense. It's a lot like um, like your heart, your lungs, your liver, your, your kidneys, your stomach, your, your intestines, your brain. All of these things are interconnected. You can focus on improving one, but let's say you wanted to max out your brain. Well, that also will include maxing out other organs, like your lungs. If you're not breathing enough oxygen, your brain can't function, it doesn't get the right nutrients, it can't function. So of these um, organs are interconnected and dependent on each other. So if you want to min, max and get to the best levels of any of these organs, you have to bring all of them with you, all of them they're all interconnected and we've got a great visual that we've developed um and we'll throw it up on the social media sites.
Speaker 2:But we have the sovereign life 12 points in a circle, rather than like Maslow's pyramid of basic needs, which is a pyramid of your base needs, then your next level of needs and the next ones, and it doesn't really work like you can't just achieve the ones on the base of the pyramid, then you go up to the next one, because each individual is different and each individual's access to time, information, energy resources, money you know you have children, you don't All these things are different.
Speaker 2:And so in the circular version of this, in the Sovereign Life OS, you might have food over here, data over here, events over here, and when you develop one, then you bump over to this side, then you bump over here and then you're up over here and you're you're basically just going back and forth between these points and working on the ones that are the lowest hanging fruit for you According to your situation. No one can tell you how to develop your own personal sovereign life OS. You take in all the information and then you make your decisions. So let's, let's kind of circle back, because we talked about, you know, lifting, lifting heavy stuff and eating properly according to your goals. All of that information is out there and can be researched. There's so much stuff out there, so how would someone start this?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So obviously you want to start with a goal that you can actually hit, not something like incredibly difficult. That way you can build momentum and then, once you feel good about it, then you just kind of keep adding a little bit more at a time, because momentum is the thing that sort of drives you Don't rely solely on your motivation. So if you set this really intense reach goal, you're like oh, this is going to be amazing and I'm going to hit this thing really hard. You will only be able to keep that up as long as you can keep the motivational fire going.
Speaker 1:But that's always a short-term thing, whereas momentum is where you've integrated into your lifestyle. So it becomes a habit that naturally propels itself. Like why do you whip out your phone and look at Instagram? Well, it's a habit. It's not because you're motivated to look at Instagram, it's a natural compulsion. So that's what you want to do. Is you want to? You want to turn the goals that you have into compulsions and to lifestyle habits that propel that forward. And the best way to do that is to start small, because it takes very, very little amounts of motivation to do like oh, I need to do two minutes of this thing.
Speaker 2:And here's a really good point for everybody that I'm teaching my oldest daughter, who's five you're in competition with yourself, so be very honest about where you're at and just be comfortable with it. And you want to improve 1% a day? That's it against yourself. Don't look at, you know, the strongest man in the world or strongest woman in the world, like if I compared myself to Whitney, I mean, I'm not going to get to that fitness level. She is amazing. I compare myself to myself. I don't even compare myself to my best physical shape. When I was an active athlete it's two today. Conditions were different back then they were very different.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so so just keep that in mind. As a listener, you're in competition with yourself and you're doing better every day exactly, and so also part of this is to reduce the motive.
Speaker 1:Motivational workload, by the way, is I really think, um, you want to find things that are going to improve your life but that you also like. So one story that I heard was there's's this person who they couldn't stand going on treadmills but they were trying to train for like a marathon or whatever, and what they found was, if they just were out walking and running, they enjoyed the exploration, part of seeing different things, and what they hated about treadmills was seeing a static wall or static screen in front of them. So by changing the exercise to something they enjoyed, suddenly they had, you know, a lot of um, enjoyment in it, and that kept that lifestyle up for them. So look for something that you yourself can do that's going to achieve your goals, while you could also find a way to enjoy it if possible, and maybe throw a podcast on at the same time, so you're dual using yourself in time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, um, andrew, what's the difference between a poorly dressed man on a unicycle and a well-dressed man on a bicycle?
Speaker 1:I don't know what is it.
Speaker 2:A tire, all right, so a little bit of story time here. I have been on this journey of developing a sovereign body now for a couple of years. So when I first got into my career as a business person, it was completely imbalanced. All my obsession was on sovereign money. That's what I wanted to achieve and that came from some traumatic events financially in my life and I gained a lot of weight. So I typically am a 225, 230 pound man. I'm six foot four and I woke up years later after starting the journey in of this imbalance, at almost I think it was just over 330 pounds. I'd gained a hundred pounds in about 18 months.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:And it was really difficult emotionally, mentally, physically, um, all of these things. I was embarrassed to go out. I didn't want any of my old friends to see me. It was, it was. It was literally traumatic and I'd been in amazing shape my whole life. Just, you know genetics and you know playing sports. I started back on. You know doing things for myself, simplifying things and putting all these practices into place, stacking habits. And I'll never forget the advice my wife gave me one time when I was in the middle of a complaining session, before I developed my sovereign mind. She said Mike, you worked your ass off to gain a hundred pounds over a long period of time. You put in a lot of effort to get this overweight. What makes you think you don't have to put in a lot of effort and a lot of time? In the opposite direction?
Speaker 1:And it just hit me.
Speaker 2:I was like yeah, I had habits and I had things I was doing consistently to gain weight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if you want a one pack, you got to put in the work, you got to put in a lot of work to gain that much weight.
Speaker 2:You literally do's a lot of food, it's a lot of lack of care and yeah, and so that that was very, that was very powerful and I'm happy to say I'm 70 pounds headed back in the other direction. I got 30 35 more to go and it's been a lot of work and it will continue to be right. So what do?
Speaker 1:you like. What do you think was the underlying thing that you were kind of telling yourself that allowed that happened in the first place Because it started in the mind and then it manifested more into your body over time, right? So what do you think looking back was the thing.
Speaker 2:When I changed my entire life and my story about myself. I was incredibly uncomfortable. So when I went from working at a sawmill, I used to be a helicopter pilot and then I went and worked at a sawmill. Um after that, after my career had fallen apart in that area and a lot, of, a lot of personal hits, and when I transitioned into being a business person, I was so uncomfortable, I was so stressed out. You know when you, when you go hard at building businesses and it's not for the faint of heart we'll talk about this in the sovereign money episode but you put everything on the line all the time, especially if you're going big, and it overwhelmed me.
Speaker 2:And so stress, lack of sleep, drinking, beer, eating as a coping mechanism. It all came into my life, into my life, and I went from physical jobs to working anywhere from 12 and usually 16 to 18 hours a day, seven days a week for many, many years, taking two or three or four weekends off a year, and it was a it was complete imbalance. So that's what happened to me, and I didn't even realize I was doing it.
Speaker 1:It's a slippery slope and, especially if you're not experienced, you don't really know the pitfalls to watch out for and the traps. So actually, if you could and you could go back to your younger self before you're about to start that, what would be the advice that you'd give them?
Speaker 2:Balance and systems. So in your personal life, don't give up the things that make you feel good. Don't give up the things that keep your body healthy. Don't go all in on one of these 12 points of the sovereign life OS. You can achieve anything, but if you 100% commit to money, everything else is going to fail. It's going to break down. You're going to lose your relationships, you're not going to have a good relationship with your children. You're going to lose time. You may achieve wealth, but I promise you you'll spend every dollar of it trying not to die from the health impacts of letting your health slip, letting your mind and body slip. So balance and chill out. You've probably, depending on your age, got 20 to 60 more years on this planet. You will be amazed at what you can accomplish in just 10 years. But everybody's like I need this now, I need this now. I need this now. Slowly stack skills, enjoy life along the way and just relax and I was so obsessed.
Speaker 1:Where you're awesome, you can't just skip to success like it's a journey and you can't let that journey, um, wear you down because you didn't spread out the cost of it. You can't just front load all the costs and then skip to the awesome, because you're still gonna have those costs will come due and that's where it impacts your body and everything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so find mentors and read books. Yeah, you, yeah, so find mentors and read books. Yeah, you want to cut corners, find mentors and read books. You can't cut corners by being completely obsessed with just one or two things.
Speaker 1:Also, team members are huge, because if you're the one trying to do everything, my more successful projects are the ones where you know I had an amazing team supporting me, not the ones where I struck it out on my own and did everything myself, because there's just too many parts to building a business. Yes, you can't do everything by yourself. You cannot, absolutely not. Not long-term. At least, you can maybe try for a couple of weeks or months or whatever, but anything beyond that you're going to start doing a lot of damage to yourself.
Speaker 2:When you go into years of doing it as a one man or one woman army, you're, you run into trouble. So that's that's what I would tell my younger self.
Speaker 1:That's really good advice.
Speaker 2:Yeah, all right. So, um, yeah, start small, take time with things, sovereign time, um, keep everything in balance, but make sure you're focusing on your body. It's super important. Have patience and grace with yourself. Also, don't make excuses. So that's, that's the advice that I would give to the listeners. How about you, andrew? What one piece of advice would you give?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So my main takeaway that I'd like people to get is that when we're looking at our body, the most important thing that we can do out of everything is getting eight hours of sleep every night. That's your number one priority. That's one of the things that gets sacrificed when you focus all in on business or all in on something Once you have sleep. There's other things you can do, but I'm not even going to bother because literally just focus on sleep. That's already hard enough. So some of the things you can do look into why we Sleep by Matthew Walker, excellent book. It also has a sleep hygiene list.
Speaker 1:So some of the things you can do is your body temperature needs to be cooler when you're going to go to sleep by a few degrees. So don't blast the heat in your room. If you live in a hot climate, try to find ways to cool down if it's possible. If not, I don't know what to say. Good luck, sleep in the basement, move somewhere else. Yeah, sleep in the basement, dig a hole in the ground, just cover yourself, but anyways. So getting that eight hours of sleep is critical. And again, you can start by making a list of what are the things you can and can't control, and then start going through the ones that you can in order to free up that eight hours of sleep that you can do. Nice, yeah, all right.
Speaker 2:So thank you for tuning in to episode of the positive network podcast where we, as the people of this planet, stand up and take our power back to make a world that we are happy to live in.