[00:00:00] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna. I'm your host. And on this podcast, I'm going to talk about how high performing women can regain peak physical energy and mental wellbeing today I thought for the first episode, it would be a really good idea to talk about kind of getting to peak performance. What is that? How do we get away from this kind of place of feeling burnt out, exhausted, overstretched, overwhelmed, Especially when you have a lot on and how do we move into peak performance and peak performance isn't Being athletic and I think that's probably an assumption even when I first heard the phrase peak performance I went to that same place I really do think it was about being fit and athletic and athletes are peak performers, but it really peak performance is about being our best and realizing our potential.

[00:00:48] So peak performance looks like our ability to handle day to day stresses, but not just bounce back from stress, but to really seek out challenges because they help us to stretch and grow and tap into more of our resources. It's about mental focus, mental concentration. It's about being able to work on a piece of work for a long time without getting distracted or disrupted.

[00:01:11] It's about handling our emotions. And regulating our emotions and understanding the emotions of others. And it also looks like having healthy and fulfilling relationships and making deep connections with others. So as you can see, peak mental performance is a lot more about our personal lives, our inner inner life, and how that reflects on our outer life than anything to do with just being fit.

[00:01:34] if you. I'm here today and you're feeling, well, I feel pretty overstretched. I feel pretty overwhelmed and exhausted, but it is because I have a lot on, right? And so one of the myths I want to dispel is reason why we feel the symptoms of burnout, or fatigue or chronic stress is rarely to do with just taking on too much work. That's a symptom as well, but we're looking at other factors [00:02:00] that start to break down or cause imbalances in our body, which aren't corrected.

[00:02:04] And so life is. We're always going to throw us challenges, we can't avoid that, but unless we have the proper kind of recovery plan in place, we eventually, our body will break down systems and hormones and will create deficiencies in the body. It starts to break down.

[00:02:22] And if we don't do anything to correct it, then eventually we hit to a place of burnout, right? And so, often, you know, I hear women say, Well, it's because I'm a business owner. It's because I'm juggling family and business and work. I have too many things on. And definitely having a packed schedule without any downtime is a problem.

[00:02:40] But we're really looking at, we can, shift ourselves into a higher state of performance, really operating from our best when we can improve our internal wellbeing. Okay. So when we can correct those imbalances that are controlling our energy, our mood, our memory, our concentration, right? We can influence that through diet lifestyle changes.

[00:03:05] So what does it matter to, even want to get to peak performance, right? And for me, it's a very natural state. I don't look at peak performance as something that we have to strive hard and work hard towards. It is a very natural state when we remove the barriers to peak performance, right? So many years ago, a psychologist, Abraham Maslow, he We talked about this innate drive in every person to become everything that we're capable of becoming, right?

[00:03:33] So there is an innate drive there. So we want to be our best. We want to do our best. We want to make a difference in the world because that brings us meaning and fulfillment. So this desire to reach our highest potential is there for everybody. And Abraham Maslow called it self actualization, right? That we have to pass through certain milestones to get there, right?

[00:03:51] And so physical health and well being was absolutely one of those milestones.

[00:03:55] burnout peak performance lives on a scale, right? So if we're looking at [00:04:00] peak performance on the continuum on the very lower end, we have severe anxiety and depression. normally people in this place aren't able to keep up with work and day to day responsibilities.

[00:04:09] Fortunately, most people do not, live in that place, but we tend to hover. A lot of people tend to hover in the middle zone. So, Not in the, the severe anxiety and depression, and not in peak performance either, but in this middle zone of over stress, anxiety and burnout. And so while we're not suffering the the severe stuff, we're not reaching our highest potential either.

[00:04:33] If you're, you know, like I said, it isn't innate driving us to want to be our best. If you're feeling now, Oh wow, I don't feel like that at all. Then there is things that you can do. But the first step is to really become aware of where you're kind of sitting at the moment.

[00:04:46] You know, do you wake up with energy? Do you feel like you have energy all day long that you can work pretty solid? You can come home after work or after, working your business and you feel like you have a lot more energy to do everything you need to do. Or do you feel tired when you wake up? Do you feel like at 2 3pm you hit a wall and you're so tired and you're going for the coffee or the sugar. Do you find that at the end of the day you completely spent, there's nothing left in the tank for your family, for your loved ones. And you know, I see a lot of women who. feel guilty from that place, right? Because There's just not enough reserves there to be able to do all the things that they need to do in a day.

[00:05:26] Another one is, do you have energy to exercise? Are you sleeping well? Do you feel like you go to bed at night, you fall asleep pretty, pretty easily. You sleep right through and you wake up in the morning, you feel refreshed. Or, are you waking up multiple times a night? Are you finding it hard to fall back to sleep?

[00:05:41] Are you finding it hard to fall asleep to begin with? Are you going to bed later than 10pm? How do you handle stress? Do you catastrophize problems? Do you find that something goes wrong in your business or your family or your work, or someone says something to you in a meeting or in an email and instead of [00:06:00] being able to let it go you carry it around with you for like 24 hours?

[00:06:04] How are your moods? Do you feel like your motivation is quite low? That your passion in what you're doing is probably not as it was in the beginning of your career or business. So, these are all tell tale signs of kind of where we're sitting, right? So, at Peak Performance, we're really able to regulate our emotions, we're able to regulate our moods.

[00:06:24] you know, able to handle stress. In fact, we're looking for more challenges We kind of have energy on tap to do everything that we need to do and more. if you're in that middle zone, then the first thing that you want to look at is increasing capacity. So I look at when I work with people, I want to move them from this place of where they don't feel like they can even take another thing on in terms of not even taking care of their health, right?

[00:06:47] So for a lot of high performing women, they do value their health and their well being. but they've pushed themselves so much and ignored the warning signs that they're getting to a place now where it feels hard to add anything more to the schedule. There's no motivation, there's no desire, there's no energy and any little thing will kind of set you off.

[00:07:07] And so I've been in burnout. That's why I talk about burnout. I understand that place, but through making little changes through your day to day routines. You can increase your capacity to take more on. So what we want to do in that first step is increase the capacity to not have as much anxiety or not to get so overwhelmed or overstretched or overstressed so therefore you have the capacity to do more in terms of taking care of your personal wellbeing.

[00:07:37] the way that we do that is really initially is by reducing stress hormones in the body. Because again, I will see women that will say, yeah, but my life is really busy. My schedule is very hectic. I've got this going on that, blah, blah, et cetera. Right. And I understand, but what is also important to see is that the more vitality you have, the more [00:08:00] you can do.

[00:08:01] Okay, so energy creates energy. So it's not as if we have a finite amount of energy and then when we use it up on the tasks that we do each day, we don't have anything left at the end of the day. That's not how it works, right? Energy creates more energy when we increase our vitality. And that's the first part is really increasing the wellbeing, reducing stress hormones in the body, which is causing a lot of this effect to be really drained and really tired and anxious and overwhelmed.

[00:08:29] If we can reduce that. It increases your capacity to do more, okay, and feel a hell of a lot better. Okay. And so the way that we do that, so small changes, making sure that you're getting enough sleep, Now, when we go to sleep at night, our body goes into full recovery mode. when I look at athletes, I think, okay, these are people who put extreme stress on them.

[00:08:50] So it was physical stress. mental and emotional stress. Okay. Yet they are champions, right? And when you look at their schedule, they really focus and prioritize and master sleep because it's such a powerful recovery tool. When we go to sleep at night, you're sleeping, you're completely unaware of what's happening, but your body is really active in all this repair work that needs to happen while you're sleeping, right?

[00:09:18] So when we're sleeping, our body's fully relaxed and we go into this rest and repair mode and things are repaired overnight. Our brain processes our emotions overnight. So when we wake up, we often wake up feeling the problem that we went to bed with at nighttime seems a little bit clearer, Our brain detoxifies at nighttime, our body detoxifies.

[00:09:37] Our immune system is really active. Our hormones start to repair. So I often say that if I could put sleep into a capsule, it would be the most powerful remedy to heal almost anything in the body. Okay. But what happens is if we don't get enough deep sleep time, we are going to miss that repair work.

[00:09:54] We're going to miss the processing of emotions and the detoxifying of the brain and all the good [00:10:00] stuff that happens, right? So to bed and you're going to bed at like 12 PM, but you're waking up at, you know, seven or 8 AM, that is missing the deep sleep time. So getting to bed. By 10 p. m. winding down half an hour before in order to create a good kind of rest so you can fall asleep naturally and easily and sleep through the night.

[00:10:22] So number one, getting to bed before 10 p. m. and making sure that you have eight hours of sleep. The second thing to increase your capacity, so reducing the anxiety, the overwhelm, the brain fog, the exhaustion is to look at your diet. When we're stressed, it's pretty common to go for foods and beverages and things that will give you a quick So, sugar, caffeine, processed foods, eating out, alcohol, all of these things are a go to to self soothe when we're stressed, okay, I will admit it, me too, but there are some little things that you can do that don't. Again, help to reduce the stress hormones. If we can do that, if your stress hormones can come down, even though your life is busy, your body will start to repair itself and you'll start to have more energy, feel more clearer, feel like you're more on top of things, sleep better, make better choices with food.

[00:11:19] And everything becomes easier and you start working up to, you know, this higher potential, this kind of peak performance. So the first thing would be I always recommend is never have caffeine on an empty stomach. Don't wake up and go for your coffee first thing. Have your breakfast first. Okay? Because the caffeine is going to on an empty stomach on a fasting Blood glucose level, caffeine is going to stimulate more stress hormones.

[00:11:46] So everything that we want to do here in the initial stages is bring those stress hormones down. and minimize sugar, sugary and processed foods. The best you can in the beginning, right? So cut out the obvious sugars, which do give [00:12:00] you that initial kind of pep me up, but they basically send you on this rollercoaster all day.

[00:12:05] So sugar sends you high, then drops you down really low because your glucose levels drop. Then you go for something else, then it goes back up and then it drops you back down. And so you're kind of on this rollercoaster all day long, And we can avoid that by making sure that one, you don't have coffee on an empty stomach and the best you can cut out of your sugars.

[00:12:24] The third big thing. Okay. So we're looking at. lifestyle. We're looking at diet, but we're also looking at what's going on up here because this is actually one of the biggest triggers for burnout and anxiety and overwhelming and uh, you know, brain fog, all of those symptoms that we feel as we're heading into burnout.

[00:12:41] And the tip that I'd give you here is escape the thought traps. Okay? There are things that you will find that you overthink, right? So overthinking, we have too many kind of thoughts in our head, right? and it causes anxiety and it causes overwhelm, but it changes our hormonal balance.

[00:13:00] It changes the chemistry in our brain. And so once we have high levels of cortisol from overthinking, right? And it could be that you've catastrophized the problem. What ends up happening is that cortisol in our brain causes us to just zone in. It gives us tunnel vision. So we zone in on a problem. That's all we can focus on, right?

[00:13:19] And we blow it up when we make it. you know, 200 times worse than what it is, or we just can't let things go. And it means it's going to release constant drip, drip, drip of cortisol throughout the day and even night if it's keeping you up at nighttime, right?

[00:13:34] So those are my three tips. to get started. Because if you're feeling in that kind of middle zone of this exhaustion, overwhelm, anxiety, burnout, constant stress, there are things that you want to be, you want to be better in your business. Maybe you want to be a better mother. Maybe you want to be able to have that work life balance a little bit more fine tuned.

[00:13:53] You want to feel like you're achieving in life. Maybe you want to do other things, right? And you really need to have that. [00:14:00] Energy on tap and the ability to handle change and regulate your emotions. And these are the three tips that will start to increase capacity to their next step is optimize your performance.

[00:14:11] so guys, I hope this was a helpful first episode into, you know, getting out of this kind of burnout exhaustion state into peak performance and how it's a natural state for everybody, we can all be in this state, right? We just want to remove some of these blocks to peak performance. So let me know which tip you are going to try first. 

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