SUMMARY

INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES

FULL TRANSCRIPT

[The following is the full transcript of this episode of The Brendon Show. Please note that this episode, like all TBS episodes, features Brendon speaking extemporaneously–he is unscripted and unedited. Filmed in one take, The Brendon Show has become one of the most viewed unscripted, direct-to-camera self-help series in the history of YouTube. It has also been the #1 Podcast in all of iTunes and is regularly in the top podcasts in Self-Help and Health categories around the globe. Subscribe to the free motivational podcast on iTunes or Stitcher.)

Take your M.E.D.S. It’s an acronym. Take your M.E.D.S, M-E-D. So if you’ve been with us over the years, we taught this M.E.D.S. You got to get your M.E.D.S, right? What do your M.E.D.S stand for? Meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep, right? M.E.D.S, meditation, exercise, diet and sleep.

1. Meditate

I really believe if you don’t yet have a meditation practice, it will change your life forever. If you already have one, get more disciplined on it. Do it better. Be more consistent about it. Some of you know, I teach something called the release meditation technique. You can learn how to do it on YouTube, just type in “release meditation technique”. My video should pop up. I think two million people have learned how to do it from that video alone. So I got to guess, you know, a couple million people around the world have learned how to do that. And all it is is a meditation technique that has a little bit of a goal to it. And that goal is to release the thoughts of mind and release the tension in the body. And so to do that, we just find a comfortable sitting position or lying position. We close our eyes and we repeat the mantra “release”. As in release, release, release, release. I tend to repeat it out loud, saying the word release as a command to myself, “Release the tension, Brendon.”

I’ll say the word “release” usually out loud about 10 times, and then I’ll go internally with the mantra, just repeating it in my mind over and over and over again for 10 to 20 minutes every single day. Now, during that 10 to 20 minutes, does my mantra get broken? Of course! I’ll be thinking of the word release over and over on a rhythm. And then, of course, I’ll be like, “Oh, I got to do that thing. Oh, I’ve got this thing going on. Oh, I’m feeling this emotion or these thoughts coming in.” And as soon as that happens, I recognize it, I catch myself and I’m like, “Oh, got it. OK, right now I’m not thinking.” I then return to release, return to release, release, release, release. That’s my meditation practice. It’s not too dissimilar to transformational meditation for those who are transcendental. It’s not too different from most meditations that have a mantra. And the idea of the mantra or the repetitive statements or sounds is that it helps you focus on something that’s not your thoughts. All I want to do is make sure I added physical work to it and a specific goal which is releasing the thought, releasing the tension, and that is so critical to decreasing stress. You already all know all the science behind meditation by now. If you don’t, where have you been in the last decade?

Meditation not only decreases daily stress, but it increases life satisfaction over a period of time, improves the quality of your relationships, helps decrease the amount of heart attacks, like it’s a real biological and medical tool to improve your health.

And I think it’s important that we all realize, “OK, let me get on that.” So if you’ve never done it before, please give it a try. Have it be a goal. Put it as a reminder in your app to do it over and over and over again. It will help.

2. Exercise

M.E.D.S, meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep. Let’s talk about exercise. Everyone always says, “You know, what should my morning routine be or what should my exercise be?” or whatever.

All I’m here to say is that at this stage of your life, if you have never chosen a 12-month period to get in the best health of your life, that’s the decision today, and that decision today will involve physical movement.

It will involve exercise. And you’ve got to find what’s the appropriate strategy for you at this stage, at this time, at this state of health that you have. And you got to practice it. Everyone’s got a different one at different stages of her life. 

I’m in my mid-40s now, so for me, it’s important. I’ve got to do a lot of H.I.I.T training and I lift heavier weights. I’m trying to do that because I am setting a strong structure for the future, activating hormones like testosterone for recovery, and trying to get to that place where I feel strong. And I spend a lot of time doing that. I like to do two H.I.I.T training sessions a week. And I do two longer cardio training sessions per week. That’s my two-by-four. That’s four times a week. And that’s perfect for me based on what I’m trying to do and how I want to feel in my life. 

You might be a marathon runner. You might be somebody who loves cross-fit. You might be somebody who just likes to take a long walk each day. I don’t care what yours is, but you need to know what it is and you need to be consistent at it. And what most people do is they wait till January 1st. They put off their health until New Year’s. And I’m like, no, no, no. The time to have great health is heading into the holidays because when you head in the holidays, you deal with the stress better. You sleep better when traveling or dealing with family. And then when you do cheat on those big days of the holiday, you don’t feel as bad. You’re already in great health. And I really believe that doing that now also ensures if you do on January one, set that big idea, I mean, healthier. Guess what? It’s so much easier to glide back into than begin fresh. Right?

I want you to glide right back into it. If you’re going to prioritize it even more at the new year. Versus hope. So what’s the exercise routine for the next 90 days for yourself? Figure that out and try to create something that’s sustainable for you. Don’t be like, “I need to exercise every day for 90 days”, because that may or may not work. Sometimes you’ve got a brand new baby. You’re doing a launch, something that goes crazy on the house. I do believe everybody who’s capable of walking can take a 30 minute walk every day. And I hope that you do that. If anything, get outside for 30 minutes a day. Take a stroll. I promise you’ll feel better.

3. Diet

OK, the “D”. What does the “D” stand for? Diet. Now, this is to give my encouragement to many of you. I’m not going to propose. Don’t worry. I’m not here to propose a certain type of diet for you. I’m here to propose that you figure it out with a professional that you go for the first time in your life if you’ve never done it before. Give yourself the gift of spending 100 or 200 bucks and going to see a nutritionist so that you can figure out your body type, for your age, for what’s going on in your body with your hormones and your blood work. What should you be doing in your diet? People spend hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars on goofy things throughout the year, but they want to spend a couple of hundred bucks to figure out what their body is allergic to. What they’re low in terms of their body, are they low and B, vitamins, are they on D, are they low in iron? Because these things have a significant effect on your mindset.

You know, if you’re low in any given, you know, mineral, any given hormone, any given blood work, if you will, then what’s going to happen is that affects your productivity, that affects how you feel. And so many people, they’re exhausted because they’re not doing the things that would activate the more positive molecules in their brain. They’re not, you know, doing the things that would affect their estrogen or their testosterone in such a way that would enable them to heal recovery, fuel, energy. And they’re eating so many things that are poisoning their body. On a consistent basis, they can’t understand why they don’t feel well. They’re drinking so much alcohol or so much caffeine, that they’re poisoning their gut and now their gut is, you know, constantly in trouble. So now they’re constantly fatigued and they can’t figure it out. They do everything else, right. You know, they meditate. They walk. They journal. They eat well, but they’re doing things that are compromising their stomach. And as you always know, whatever you put in your stomach also goes to your brain. Right? It’s not the brain. The whole thing is connected, baby. It’s so critical. Meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep, the number one question I get all the time from high performers.

4. Sleep
You guys know I’m blessed to work with Olympians. I’m blessed to work with, you know, Fortune 50 CEOs, some of the most powerful influencers in the world. They’re all my high-performance coaching clients. And sleep comes up for all of them. A hundred percent of them, because there are certain times when you’re running at an intensity where your sleep gets compromised or you allow it to be compromised. So a couple of ideas here. My usual suggestion is most people just got to get a rhythm for when they go to bed when they get up. That’s 60 percent of the battle. When are you gonna go to bed? When do you get up? Create a rhythm for that. Stick to it. That’s 60 percent of the battle, really.

The winding down is another 20 percent of the battle. The wind-down what you do in the three hours before bed. So if you study my work before three to one sleep, which became famous on the Internet last year, three to one sleep, which is three hours before bed, no food. Two hours before bed. No work. One hour before bed, no screens. Tip three, two, one, sleep through hours before no food. Two hours before no work, one hour before no screens. If you’ll try that for 10 days, you’ll be like, oh, my God, Brian, I’ve come back to life because sleep is the foundation of exercise, of good choices, of productivity, of happiness. And those things are so easy. Get your routine down. Do three, two, four, three, two, one every night, then. Simple suggestions for most people. And this is from worldwide studies. It’s so simple. Make sure your room is completely dark. Drop the temperature down to around 68 degrees, or for some of you, even lower. And I know that might be cold. I might put on a blanket. Whoever cares. But if it’s crisper out, you sleep better. And I think that’s important, too. I’ll leave it at that. I’m asking you to do that this month so that you go into November and December, the holidays, the transition, the year strong, and capable of maintaining that discipline throughout the first part of next year. Get in the rhythm right now.