#70 - How To Train Your Mind: Daily Recovery

“Applying daily recovery isn't only about wellness; this goes deeper. Daily recovery should be a blueprint for understanding your routine and habits. Over time you can make adjustments so that you can start and end your days to be at your best. Ultimately priming your self to be at your consistently.”

In this episode, we are exploring daily recovery. Prioritizing daily recovery for Erich has been striving for the better part of the year. As an engineer, he sees as ultimate quality problem. Companies spend a considerable amount of time and money on focusing on the qualities of their products and services. We've overlooked a significant component, the humans that make the products and services possible.

If people are recovery more effectively, we will see increases within the workforce. The effects of orienting in this new view go even deeper. For Erich, prioritizing recovery means you can show up more consistently in all aspects of your life. Maybe you want to be a better parent, coach, friend, partner, etc. You name it!

Think of recovery as your battery. The more recharged the battery, the more you can put it into each day.

There are four main categories:

Sleeping
Moving
Eating
Thinking

We can expand on these categories in much more detail at a later time. We are trying to lay out the high-level framework in looking at your habits and routines and how these major categories.

What Erich Covers in this episode:

What can track recovery?

As many of you know, Erich uses two wearables to track the quality of his sleep and strain. He has written about the basic functionalities of these wearables. https://feedingcuriosity.net/blog/wearables-whoop-oura If you're interested in getting more data about how your body is responding, this is a great place to start.

Thinking About Your Day

Erich breaks down a single day in four basic chunks; morning, afternoon, evening, and bedtime. What are your regular habits at each of these periods? When do you feel the most sluggish or unfocused?

Let's Talk Alcohol

Let's be upfront about this - Alcohol and Recovery don't mix, especially when close to the bed. We know this won't help me win any friends, but we want to be honest about this. You can't expect your body to recover well after drinking and that not mentioning another decision making that occurs when you have been drinking as well. As a final note, this not saying go sober. We want to bring awareness to what affects the body and know what those impacts will be both positive and negative.

More Resources:

Podcast No. 43: Alcohol’s Effect on Sleep, Recovery and Performance

The Four-Day Hangover

Changing Habits and Routines

One of the most effective ways we've found for changing habits is to make them two-week experiments. Make the change you want (working out at a specific time, new food to the diet, etc.) then stick to it for two weeks. Keep a journal or tell a close friend about the experience; this will keep you honest about your progress.

If you want to take this deeper, do a one week change followed by removing that change. This can help remove some of the placebo effects. By removing the new stimulus, we can have a better idea of how that change has been affecting us.

Closing

The idea of daily recovery is about bringing awareness to how you feel throughout the day. Rather getting bogged down and looking for the escape. We hope to put you in the driver seat of your day. By focusing on recovery, you can come to understand when you are at your best. We don't believe in short term motivation that's easy what hope is that you build a routine that works for you and continuously push in a direction that you want. This is what Erich has done for the last year, experimenting with his routine and what he inputs.

By turning those dials, he has opened new paths of exploration they were previously not known to him. So with that, you have entered into a foundational aspect of training your mind. Becoming aware of how you feel at the beginning and ending each day.

Here are some the experiments Erich has written about:

Rethinking Caffeine

30 Days of Headspace

Remember, think, question, and synthesize, wherever your curiosity takes you.

Book to read: