Good Life Project - The Downside of Yes. Eat When You Rise (another reason).

Starting point is 00:00:00 So one of the conversations that I've heard kind of bouncing around with a fair number of people, probably for the last few years, is getting on the yes train, is a year of yes, saying yes to everything. I kind of feel like that might actually be the absolute wrong call. And I'm going to share why in today's Good Life Project update, along with that with our science update, our Good Life Science update. Some really interesting additional evidence piling on about why it may make a lot more sense to have a real breakfast. So I want to talk to you about what yes does to you and what no does to you and to me. I'm not outside of this conversation. But I need to just share a word or two about something else before I do that. As I sit here and record this, it is the middle of the week after a Sunday,

Starting point is 00:01:03 the largest mass shooting in the history of the United States in Las Vegas. And in a few hours, I'll be on a plane to Las Vegas to do some speaking and to share some space and some safety and some conversation around the idea of purpose. And when I think about it, when I think about what's happened, when I think about the bigger sweep of humanity these days. My heart goes out to everybody. My heart goes out to everybody who's been affected by this tragedy, as well as by the natural tragedies that have happened over the last few weeks. And I feel like the world is a place that is in need of openness

Starting point is 00:01:44 and oneness and love right now. And that's my intention. That's my wish. That is where I would love to see more of us coming from and where I will intend and commit to try and come from more as well. And at the same time, I'm also a realist. And I realized that love is not an alternative to or a reason not to also take action, to be an activist, to go out in the world and rally for and stand for the changes that we need to make societally in our laws so that we can all come to a place where we all feel safe in the world that we live in and embraced and heard and seen and respected and treated

Starting point is 00:02:35 with the dignity that is such an important part of a life well lived. I'm Jonathan Fields and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Starting point is 00:03:00 Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

Starting point is 00:03:13 It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So what about our topic for today? It's been kind of interesting.

Starting point is 00:03:45 I've had a lot of conversations with folks who have been really excited about the idea of saying yes to everything. Kind of setting yourself up and saying, okay, so for the next 30 days, or for the next month, or for the next... 30 days would be a month, wouldn't it? For the next six months, for the next year, my job is going to be to say yes to everything that comes my way that is not, you know, completely dangerous or something like that. But if it scares me, I say yes. If I don't know how it's going to end, I say yes. If it's something where I don't know how to do it, I say yes. If it's something where I feel incompetent or unskilled or unqualified in some way, I say yes. And that can be a really interesting thought and life experiment to run. It can be a really interesting way to live your life, to learn new things, to

Starting point is 00:04:40 do things that scare you and learn that you're actually okay, to accomplish big things, and also to open yourself to trajectories in life that, but for the fact that you said yes to something you never saw coming, would lead you down a path that was very different than anything you imagined, yet potentially profoundly rewarding. And saying yes to all sorts of things that bother you or scare you or, you know, in some way challenge your sense of comfort and ease can be a really powerful exercise. And of course, we're not talking about saying yes to things that would place you in genuine danger of life and limb or physical or emotional abuse.

Starting point is 00:05:29 Those are not things where you just try them on for size because somehow you have an opportunity to do it. What we're talking about more are things that are opportunities that in some way make you uncomfortable because they test your ego very often. They test your fear centers around your identity and your lack of competence in a particular area and experience. And so they expose you to uncertainty, they expose you to fear, and they expose you to risk of judgment.

Starting point is 00:06:07 And that's something that kind of terrifies all of us, and I think it's a good thing to say yes to things that might in some way let you dance with those. But, and there's a but here, I've also seen something else. That is this. It's actually, for most people, far easier to say yes to something you have not yet done than it is to say no or no more to something you have said yes to and begun to do and made a commitment to. And that causes a problem because we tend to be pretty uncomfortable actually with the notion of stopping things or quitting things. You know, there are entire books that are written about how and when to quit. And part of the reason for that is because once we raise our hand to say yes to something, there is a behavioral impulse that kicks in. It's called the consistency impulse. So if somebody says, hey, come and try this thing or, you know, do this thing with me and commit to

Starting point is 00:07:24 a project, it's only going to be a couple weeks or a couple months. And we say yes to that. Then our brain from that moment forward wants to be able to validate the statement, I'm the type of person who does X, X being the thing we said yes to. And then we will want to keep taking actions and making statements that are consistent with that first yes. Now, if the thing you're doing is something which is hard but could be incredibly rewarding and is really fiercely aligned and you keep doing more of it, you'll gain a level of competence and derive a certain amount of joy and maybe a new direction in life. Then that consistency impulse can which is that it also works to stop us from doing things that we should no longer be committing to. So it's great to try something.

Starting point is 00:08:34 And at a certain point, you'll get enough experience doing it where you'll start to be able to sort of ask yourself, you know, is this thing for me? Is it filling me or is it emptying me? Is it something where if I project myself out and even I see myself down the road doing more of this and getting better at it and enjoying it in some way, would it still be the thing that I would want to spend this amount of time doing? Because there is an opportunity cost for every yes in our lives. And that is that every yes closes the door to something else that we might be exploring. This is the basis of FOMO. And FOMO is the extreme other side of the automatic yes. It's basically after you've said yes to something, you immediately start just scanning the world for everything that you could have potentially said no to, even if you really have no interest in it. And then you freak out about you start to say yes to everything, that we start to go down the road. And when it becomes apparent that the thing we said yes to is not actually our thing

Starting point is 00:09:56 or something that we want to keep doing, we feel obligated. Partly because of the consistency principle, partly because in our society, we are taught that you finish what you start, regardless of the fact that it may be completely wrong for you. We're taught not to back out. We're called, quote, quitters when we do. And there's a certain amount of shame that goes along with that. And we don't want to face all of that. So what happens is we just keep doing it, not because we want to do it, not because it's adding something meaningful or joyful or connected to our lives, but because we're allowing that impulse to guide our continued participation. And we don't want to expose ourselves to the potential, what we perceive to be a potential backlash of people saying, oh, you quit. Or you're just telling yourself, your own self-talk that, oh, I'm a quitter. I couldn't stick it out. I didn't do it. So we stay in things that we should quit. We keep doing things that we have

Starting point is 00:11:06 no business continuing to do because they are not adding to our lives and they're taking up emotional, spiritual, cognitive bandwidth in our brains, our bodies, and our lives that will not allow us to then go out and say yes to something else that could be deeply fulfilling. So what am I saying here? I am not blanket against saying yes to a lot of things, even when you really don't know if it's the right answer. I think very often just making a decision whether it's yes or no is important. But if you choose to run some sort of experiment where you just make it the month or the year of yes, and it's yes to everything, here's my invitation. Add one other qualification to that choice, and that is this. If I choose to make this my month or year of yes, I also commit

Starting point is 00:12:09 to the process of being present in whatever it is that I'm doing and regularly checking in to see if this is giving me what I thought it might, feeling the way I hoped it would, and filling me on a level where I can continue to justify participation in it. And if the answer comes back no, extract yourself. Step out. Quit. about, quit. Because your continued participation at that point is now taking up the space that would allow you to say yes to something else that would potentially really move the needle in your good life. So that's what I'm thinking about around the idea of how I've heard a lot of people talk about yeses and a really important thing to add to that.

Starting point is 00:13:08 Not just commit to yes, but commit to quit when it's right. So, really excited for today's Good Life Science update because we're talking about some additional research around when you eat and what it does to you. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

Starting point is 00:13:42 whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised.

Starting point is 00:14:25 The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. with today's Good Life Science Update. So a few weeks back, I shared some kind of fascinating research. And it was around how eating at a particular time of day actually makes a really big difference. And that particular study was actually measuring weight loss. And what that study found was that if you front load your calories, meaning if you eat a, if your biggest meal of the day is breakfast, and then your next biggest is lunch, and you have a pretty tiny dinner, then you actually end up potentially losing substantially more weight than if you had the exact same number of total calories, but you reverse that meaning tiny or no breakfast,

Starting point is 00:15:07 decent-sized lunch, and your biggest meal was dinner. That was all about weight loss. But what's interesting is there seems to be kind of a growing library of research that's going on around eating and time of day and what that does to you. So today's study was actually reported in the Journal of American College of Cardiology. And similar to the study that I just referred to, which is in the prior update, they were looking at how eating, particularly breakfast, affects you. Whether if you had a substantial, a real breakfast versus kind of like a drive-by breakfast, you know, like grab a bar or something like that. Or essentially no breakfast. And what they were looking for here was to see how that would potentially affect heart health or how it was correlated with heart health. And what's interesting is there has been some research in the past that actually correlates eating earlier in I've seen published that actually took a look very specifically at eating a bigger breakfast and heart disease, and particularly within heart

Starting point is 00:16:31 disease, how eating a bigger breakfast may affect this thing called atherosclerosis, which is commonly known as hardening of the arteries, or we also have had it described as the process of having plaque build up on the inside of your arteries, making them more brittle and narrowing the inside of the artery walls, thereby leading to your heart have to pump harder to push the same volume of blood through narrower passages and leading to a higher likelihood of coronary incidence and stroke from the increased pressure potentially flaking off parts of that plaque and then having it lodged somewhere and cut off blood supply. So this particular study actually looked at eating a bigger breakfast and whether that has any effect on this thing, atherosclerosis,

Starting point is 00:17:25 which dramatically increases your risk of heart disease and stroke. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

Starting point is 00:17:50 The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th.

Starting point is 00:18:08 Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. And what they found was that, in fact, it does have a very significant relationship.

Starting point is 00:18:27 So in this study, the research was done in Madrid, and the investigators were looking at people who ate breakfast in three different ways. Three groups were one group, less than 5% of their entire intake for the entire day happened at breakfast. And essentially, this is usually somebody who just had a cup of coffee with maybe some cream in it or something, and that's where the calories came from. The other group was a group where between 5% and 20% of their calories were had at breakfast. It's kind of like a lighter, like that drive-by grab-and-go breakfast. And the third group was where people had 20% of their total calories at breakfast, which would be a more substantial breakfast.

Starting point is 00:19:10 What they found was out of about 4,000 participants or so, that around 3% entirely skipped breakfast or had that, you know, basically a cup of coffee and go. About 70% actually were the super light grab-and-go breakfast eaters. And another 30% or so were breakfast consumers. They actually had the fuller breakfast. And here's the really interesting news from the study. Those who had the fewest calories, you know, 5% or less for breakfast, essentially skipped

Starting point is 00:19:46 breakfast, not only had markers for higher disease risk, they also had, on average, bigger waist measurements, higher body mass index numbers, higher blood pressure, higher cholesterol, unhealthy cholesterol, and higher glucose levels, meaning exposure and risk for diabetes from this one association. And this was also associated with a much higher prevalence of what would be called in the study report, non-curinary and generalized atherosclerosis, meaning serious risk of heart disease and stroke. So it's a really interesting study because now we know that the time of day has a pretty major effect on your ability to lose and maintain weight. Then we also know that the time of day that you eat, especially really kind of front-loading your calories, having a real breakfast has a pretty major effect on all of your major disease risk

Starting point is 00:20:50 factors and risk of atherosclerosis and heart disease and stroke as well. So the evidence seems to really be piling up for eating your calories earlier. And that's kind of like a big eye-opening thing for me because I'm a grab-and-go person. At best, very often, I'm just not super hungry in the morning and I drink a cup of coffee first thing in the morning. And that actually very often holds me until lunch where I have my first meal. And also because intermittent fasting has become kind of a bigger craze these days. But the way that most people do it is they have a pretty substantial lunch and dinner to compress their eating window into eight hours. And then they don't eat from the end of dinner until lunch the next day, which according to the research that's mounting is

Starting point is 00:21:39 probably the exact opposite of what you want to be doing. Even if you were somebody who was going to intermittent fast in a limited time window, the research seems to be pointing more and more to the fact that you would get a lot more of the benefits that you're looking for if you made that eating window earlier in the day and made it, for example, breakfast and lunch, and then a much lighter dinner or even skip dinner if you're going to do that. So again, I am not a doctor or a qualified healthcare professional. I am not a doctor or a qualified healthcare professional. I am a sort of citizen scientist who geeks out on these things. And you always want to run these ideas with a qualified healthcare provider if you choose to make

Starting point is 00:22:16 changes in your lifestyle behavior. But I think it's really interesting to see the evidence that's mounting about how time of day affects our life, our health, our weight, our risk for disease. So something to think about. As always, for fellow science geeks like me, we will include a direct link to the fuller scientific study report so that you can dive into the methodology if you'd like to. And as we wrap up, I want to give a final shout out to our awesome sponsors and supporters. Zip Recruiter, RX Bar Kids, Movement Watches, Thrive Market. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Be sure to click on the subscribe button in whatever listening app you use so you'll never miss an

Starting point is 00:23:00 episode. You can also help us continue to grow and bring more people into the conversation by visiting our amazing sponsors who help make what we do possible. Most important, if something has really resonated, don't just spin it around in your head. Share it with others. Turn it into a conversation. When ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

Starting point is 00:23:50 whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Good Life Project - The Downside of Yes. Eat When You Rise (another reason).

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