CHAPTER 4

TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF

Look After Your Physical AND Your Mental Health

First things first, let’s start with the body. No powertrick described in the book will work for you if you don’t take care of your physical health. It always amazes me to observe how many people engage in self-destructive activities on a daily basis, as if this will never catch up with them. Yes, you can make the argument that life must be enjoyed while we’re here, and go ahead and drink whisky and smoke cigarettes, digesting a greasy burger in front of the TV. You might even label it “living your best life”. I have news for you: this is not your best life!

Your body is the only vehicle you have and it really is a latest-model Ferrari. You might object that not all bodies are a supercar, but trust me: if you can walk, breathe and have all four of your limbs, your body is spaceship level. There are an infinite number of functions that your body performs for you without you even noticing it. It is the perfect machine for life on this planet and it needs to be appreciated and taken care of as much as possible. Dump the junk food, the binge drinking, the smoking or whichever other pollutants you expose yourself to and all the other bad habits. Move on a regular basis. Whether it’s just fast walking, a gym membership or a competitive sport, you must get your body to move every day. Bad health habits (and lack of good ones) are just not worth it, compared to the depreciating value of our primary asset – our physical self. Whatever the peak you want to conquer, a healthy and strong physical state should be the foundation of your endeavour.

As we are physical beings, our mental health depends on our physical health, as well as on our mental processes. Mental health has long been a taboo subject, and only now is it becoming more acceptable to speak about it. Yet mental disorders are as common as the flu.

There is no one definition of mental health. Wikipedia, for example, describes it as: “the level of psychological wellbeing or an absence of mental illness … the state of someone who is functioning at a satisfactory level of emotional and behavioural adjustment”. The problem here is that “satisfactory” is a very personal metric and what is acceptable for one person could be far from satisfactory for someone else.

The message I want to give you is that feeling mentally and emotionally bad is OK. It is OK not to feel good all the time. We live in a society that expects us to put a smile on our face and power bravely through whatever we have going on. Crying in public or revealing real-life problems on social media is considered highly embarrassing. Despite the progress made in terms of destigmatizing and normalizing the term “mental health”, it is still apparently way more socially acceptable for someone to have surgery for a physical disease than end up in a hospital for a mental issue.

Yet we should all treat our mental health with care, educating ourselves, maintaining our mental wellbeing and – most crucially – reaching out and asking for help if there’s a problem. If you had a persistent high fever, you wouldn’t hesitate in seeking medical aid. It should be the same for depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder and all the other mental illnesses. Being informed on the subject will not only help you to identify your own symptoms, it will also put you in a position to support others. Someone suffering from a mental disorder is not always in the state to self-diagnose.

Good mental hygiene can be learned, just as we learn to shower, brush our teeth, eat well and exercise. In the 19th century, the development of germ theory and social changes resulting from the Industrial Revolution brought greatly improved hygienic and sanitation practices to the developed world, profoundly inhibiting the spread of disease and promoting physical health. A similar revolution is now happening in the mental health domain, with a myriad of meditation apps available for download and mindfulness practices being taken up in homes, offices and schools across the world. And it’s a revolution that is only just beginning.

Your physical and mental health are the foundation for your life and success. You can’t empower yourself or anyone else if your health is unravelling. You simply won’t have the strength and attention for anything other than your health issues. Finding out about how to take care of your wellbeing and then actually putting that into practice is crucial for your self-empowerment. You can use the powertricks in this chapter to help you build and maintain a lifestyle that maximizes your mental and physical wellbeing.

Recalibrate and Rebalance

For starters, you can get rid of your FOMO – the so-called “Fear Of Missing Out”. We live in a world saturated with over-stimulation. We feel pressured to get the newest phone as soon as it comes out, go to the latest restaurant opening and all the other events just because “everyone else is going”, to find the money to buy the season’s latest hyped-out trend. But we’re just following the crowd and the experience itself means nothing.

Just like a phone or a computer needs to get recharged, so do our mental and physical energies. It’s fundamental to be able to recalibrate and rebalance our energies: healthy downtime is precious.

Scientists still haven’t found out what exactly happens to our brain while we sleep, but we all agree on the importance of good-quality sleep. I’m reminding you again how crucial good sleep is to wellbeing – quality as well as quantity. It’s been proven that the correct amount of REM and deep and light sleep is fundamental for the brain’s functions and has a direct impact on memory and focus. Sleep induces all sorts of bodily processes to repair and regenerate. Mood regulation and our quality of life directly depend on it. Just think about times you didn’t get enough sleep and became grumpy about the smallest issues. Or worse, clumsy and forgetful. If I don’t sleep enough, I can’t even fake a smile to my neighbour in the elevator.

If you aren’t sleeping enough (the quantity needed varies from person to person, but seven or eight hours should be enough), or your sleep is shallow or interrupted, I’d recommend you look into relaxation techniques as well as try to discover what is making you stressed and raising your cortisol levels (one of the main reasons for bad sleep). If you can, get a black-out screen for your bedroom window, ensure noise levels are low (or wear earplugs) and keep the room at a comfortable temperature. Minimize blue light exposure for at least six hours before sleep, and remember that blue light comes just from electric lighting as well as from your devices. Invest in a pair of blue-blocking glasses if you must. Then try to go to bed and wake up roughly at the same time every day, even at the weekends and on your days off, to help train your body in regulating its sleep.

I travel a lot and consequently have to deal with severe jet-lag way more often that I would like to. I also get a lot of stress from urgent situations at work. So I’ve developed my own methods to help myself get some good rest.

#POWERTRICK: RELAX INTO SLEEP

Good sleep depends on relaxation – mental and physical. To relax yourself physically, avoid eating a heavy evening meal or looking at screens just before bedtime. Turn down the lights and try a few minutes of stretching or yoga. Then, lying in bed, consciously slow your breathing to long, even and very deep breaths. Do at least ten inhales and exhales of this kind. Afterwards, breathing normally, tense your muscle groups one by one through your body, imagining all your energy and stress going into that area. Start with the feet – tense forcefully, then relax. Then up to your calves, thighs, buttocks, belly, shoulders, arms, hands and, eventually, face. Remember at the end to unfurrow your brows, loosen your lips and tongue, and relax your jaw. This will ease up all of the accumulated tension in your body and help you release the stress of the day.

If you’re not yet drifting off to sleep, it’s time for some mental relaxation. Try one of the many guided meditations available free to download online, or simply imagine yourself in an incredibly relaxing situation. Let’s say you are lying in a canoe as it drifts slowly down a river on a summer day, or if you prefer you could be reclining in a very soft and warm hammock strung between two trees on a warm, peaceful evening. It’s getting dark and very cosy.

Even if these techniques fail, the worst thing you can do is beat yourself up for not being able to sleep, so don’t. Just pick up a good book, and enjoy your reading until you start feeling drowsy.

As important as good sleep is, it’s just part of the equation of what recalibrating and rebalancing means to me. As a bit of a workaholic and productivity fanatic I tend to feel extremely guilty if I spend an entire day without having progressed something. However, I have learned to listen more closely to my needs and to accept that I need daytime downtime to function at my best.

For me, positive downtime could be anything: a fun conversation, a walk in the park, dancing to my favourite song or a dinner and night out. Anything that takes your mind and body away from your work routine counts as downtime, with the only proviso being that it has to make you feel good – that’s essential. It’s key that your downtime activities have a genuinely positive effect on you. It’s so much easier to slip into binge-watching a reality show (yes, I’ve done that many times!) than to devote ten minutes to a breathing exercise or deliberately reconnecting to nature, yet you know as well as I do what will ultimately make you feel better.

#POWERTRICK: USE YOUR DOWNTIME TO BOOST YOUR WELLBEING

Here are some suggestions for downtime activities to make you feel great:

• Technology-free activities: be it a ping-pong challenge, a yoga class or just learning how to go to the supermarket or for a walk without your phone (see Chapter 8 for how to become digitally dominant, not dominated).

• Meditation and breathing techniques: do them every day to benefit most (see page 97 for a basic meditation technique).

• Simple and positive human interaction: when was the last time you made someone else smile just because you paid them a genuine compliment? Helping somebody, making someone else happy or just listening to them are fast ways to increase oxytocin levels in your brain, and ultimately make you feel connected and happier. Even the most solitary and independent of us (and I definitely fall into this category) is still human and, as such, genetically encoded to be a social animal. Physical contact in the form of a hug boosts oxytocin too, creating positive feelings of trust, bonding and love. This will automatically relax you and reduce your stress levels.

• Connect with nature: be in a green and natural environment for at least two hours a week. While you’re there, try earthing, which means connecting your body to the earth, for example by going barefoot. This was recommended to me by my friend biohacker Tim Grey when I was suffering with an inexplicable and nasty allergic reaction. I literally just went to the nearest park, took off my shoes and stood there for half an hour getting funny looks from passers-by. I repeated it a few times – and it did make me feel better. The theory is that connecting directly to the ground allows negatively charged electrons from the earth’s surface to transfer into our bodies. These electrons neutralize positively charged ones that cause chronic inflammation and consequently improve the body’s immune response, blood flow and even your emotional state. Whether the science convinces you or not, the freedom of going shoeless for a while just feels really good.

• Get some natural sunlight: this is fundamental to rebalancing your body and mind. Safe sunlight exposure promotes vitamin D levels, boosting your immune system and mood (and if, like me, you live in a misty, overcast place where it gets pitch dark by 4 p.m. during the winter months, I highly recommend asking your doctor for a vitamin D supplement, although sadly nothing can substitute for the immune-boosting effect of direct sunlight on your skin).

• Take short breaks during a busy day: these have been proven to increase productivity, so long as they’re not just procrastination. See if your ten minutes off work were effective by evaluating how you feel afterwards. Is your body energized or as tired as before? Do you have more mental clarity, or more mental fog? Don’t waste the breaks scrolling through your social media feed – staring at the screen will tire your eyes, and unimportant information will clog your brain even further.

Electromagnetic field (EMF) radiation in excess isn’t healthy, so stay away from your devices and WiFi for a bit. Do something different. If you were sitting in front of a screen alone, recharge by standing up, moving, looking into the distance and engaging with people. On the other hand, if your work includes a lot of social interaction, a moment of solitude, silence and calm will do you good.

Cleanse Your Thoughts

Our digitally interdependent, constantly connected modern culture doesn’t allow spaces that are not filled with information, activity, entertainment or productive busyness. In our “living it up” world of compulsive hyperactivity, inactivity feels bland and insipid, so we fill our schedules and minds with endless work, activities and entertainment.

I realized that I was associating my self-worth with my daily productivity. A dull, empty moment would make me feel bad about myself. Even on holiday, I’d have to be doing something all the time: I wouldn’t ever dream of going somewhere without WiFi or a good phone connection. It would stress me more than relax me.

When it came to my downtime, I tended to fill my empty moments with entertainment – looking mindlessly at social media images, speaking for hours on the phone with some friend or watching TV shows. I ran away from those empty spaces in my life, those spaces in which you are truly left alone with yourself – without an internet connection or any devices to entertain you. I didn’t want to be left alone with my hyperactive and undisciplined mind. For some people empty moments like that would feel utterly boring, but for me it was even worse than that: they gave me existential anxiety. I didn’t really want the space and time to process my own fears, worries and deeper questions.

Of course, this was all in my subconscious. I thought I simply liked my mentally hyperactive lifestyle. That is, until the overstimulation started making me feel increasingly tired and I began to suffer from moments of mental fog and bad mood swings.

A bit of a sceptic by nature, I only reluctantly decided to try meditation when a very rational friend of mind, who built her successful business from the ground up, left for India to learn meditation for an entire year. She came back, sold her Porsche and her villa and decided to live simply and meditate for at least four hours a day, all of this while still growing her business and giving back to her community.

She introduced me to meditation and I fell in love with it. Practising even just ten minutes of mindful meditation a day helps clear and re-align your mind. It teaches you not to attach yourself to your thoughts or the results of your actions; instead, it lets you linger in those empty spaces. The incredible effects of meditation on the brain have been known in Eastern cultures for thousands of years and they are now being studied and proven by Western science. The only true way to see the benefit is to try it for yourself, and nowadays you can simply go online to YouTube or download one of the famous meditation apps.

Meditation is part of the wider practice of mindfulness, which is about living in a way in which we try to tune into what we’re sensing in the present moment, paying attention to our thoughts and feelings without judging or being overwhelmed by them. The mind can be trained just like the body can, but while we learn physical exercise and hygiene at school, in the West taking care of your mind is still seen as an optional extra not a necessity. I believe that with the hectic and mentally overloaded world we live in, daily meditative practice should be just like brushing your teeth. Daily mental hygiene, to clear up mental toxins.

Since I started regularly meditating, not only do I manage stress better, I’m also less afraid of those empty moments and allow myself not to rush to fill them with activities and entertainment. I just observe them, observe myself and learn.

#POWERTRICK: START A DAILY MEDITATION PRACTICE

Sometimes it may feel that there’s not enough time in a day, or that these practices simply aren’t for you, but if you commit to a month of ten-minutes-a-day meditation practice, the effort will undoubtedly yield positive results. There’s a wide range of different types of meditations and they are all absolutely worth looking into, but if you’re a beginner and want to follow my lead, here’s how I like to do it.

Sit with your back straight, or lie down, in a place where you know you will be undisturbed for at least a few minutes. Take a couple of deep, slow breaths in and out to relax. Then start focusing on your own breath, simply notice it. Notice how your body feels on the surface you’re sitting or lying on, how your clothes feel against your skin, any noises or smells, and any particular feelings within your body. In a totally non-judgemental way, just observe. And follow the rhythm of your breath – in and out. Thoughts will arise from time to time, and this is totally natural. Simply observe them, and let them go, just like clouds. Then return to your breath.

See Yourself as Lucky

Everyone who practises mindfulness will know this: feeling grateful is extremely powerful. Good luck attracts more good luck. Being grateful is a true shortcut to this and all it costs you is some focused thinking for a few minutes.

What do you feel grateful for? And if you think “nothing”, I invite you to think again. There must be even one tiny thing that brings you joy or without which you wouldn’t be able to go on. Can you breathe right now? Walk? Can you read this book and let it jump-start you on a journey of positive transformation? Is your desire for self-empowerment pushing you forward?

Any spiritual guru nowadays will repeat over and over again that a strong feeling of gratitude is the key to real happiness. And I’d add that a repeated daily practice of feeling sincere gratitude for what’s going right for you will not only make you feel happier, but will also lay the groundwork for a self-empowerment journey to success. Over time, a practice of gratitude will give you more control over yourself and eventually make you into a more balanced, resilient and empowered human.

#POWERTRICK: BE GRATEFUL

Point out to yourself, at least once a day, five or ten things that are going absolutely right and make you feel good in your life. Do you feel grateful that they are going well? If you still don’t feel too happy about them, imagine what it would be like if you didn’t have them.

The real powertrick with gratefulness is not just to name the five or ten things, but to truly experience a feeling of gratitude for each of them. How does it feel after you truly savour the gratefulness? Amazing – and it will only get better, for what we focus on, grows. And it’s only by focusing on the good, among all of the negatives, that the good will expand. Feelings of gratefulness will attract more reasons for which to be grateful, as you retrain your mind to see the positives. Try it every day for a month: just a few minutes of savouring true gratitude for anything you want.

Choose Healthy Relationships

Empowered people empower others. We tend to mirror each other’s minds and negative attitudes can be unlearned by observing and interacting with others, so surround yourself with positive people. Those who are really on your team genuinely want you to do well and being with them will bring joy, support, constructive advice (as opposed to criticism) and inspiration. Conversely, if you feel like your energy is going down after having a conversation with somebody, it is a wake-up call to think carefully about your relationship with this person.

Emotional contagion is real. Have you ever noticed that if someone’s smiling at you, it’s hard not to reciprocate? Emotions can be shared through mimicry and synchronization of the tone of voice, movements and facial expressions. Most of these reactions are so subtle and automatic that we barely notice them or recognize them. But it is crucial to learn the difference between genuine connection and unhealthy attachment. Connection gives you power and nurtures you; attachment drains your energy.

Relationships should foster positive and constructive exchanges between people. If somebody is chipping away at your self-confidence, constantly criticizing you or picking fights, they will surely hold you back in your journey to empowerment. Even if this person is not negative toward you, just always in a bad mood, complaining and not trying to improve their own life situation, over time this will impact on your mood and energy.

#POWERTRICK: FIGURE OUT WHO IS GOOD FOR YOU – AND WHO ISN’T

Make a mental list of the people who bring you up in your life and make you feel better by just being around; and also of those who, one way or another, always bring you down. Then consider how you can manage the people who always seem to have a negative impact on you. Can you set some well-defined boundaries? Do you need to remove some of the people on this list from your life and learn to be more selective about who you form bonds and friendship with?

Do Selfless Work

Empowered people empower others. If you think that a successful life comes from thinking only about yourself, you are wrong. Nothing empowers you faster and brings you greater success than selfless work. Serving others, directly or indirectly – whether with advice, money or any other type of help – will bring you sincere happiness. It will also allow you to reach bigger numbers of people faster.

We are social animals and only by being of use to others can we truly fulfil our purpose – whatever that might be. Focus on improving other people’s lives without calculating what you will get back from it. A simple focus on being genuinely useful to others will bring you success as an automatic byproduct. And it will be a fulfilling and lasting type of success, not one that you will be scared of losing overnight and have to defend and fight for. So don’t forget to help others in whatever way you can.

Let’s imagine that your goal is to fulfil your childhood dream of being a successful entrepreneur. Thinking about how your product will solve a problem and improve people’s lives, instead of focusing only on sales totals and your profit margins, will in the long run bring you more success and longevity as a business. Forget about burning through your competition to be an overnight success. Cutting corners, using people and malpractice will always eventually have a high cost. There’s no such thing in life as a free ride. See it as a simple equation: whatever you put in, you will get out – in the long term.

Even just being a good example to others, by leading an empowered and positive life, is a way to give back. Inspire people to improve their lives by improving your life first. Any new lesson I learn, I always share with the people close to me as well as with my followers. And I try to be a plus in my friends’ and family’s lives, by thinking about what they might need.

Being useful to others is not only fulfilling and emotionally healthy. It will give you a good reputation, mean people want to help you in return and open new doors for you – to name just a few of the side effects that will appear when you least expect them. You just need to shift the focus from yourself to others. “When selfish happiness is the only goal in life, life soon becomes goalless,” wrote the French essayist Romain Rolland. Don’t be stingy with your energy and time for the people who need it.

Take Care of Yourself: Action Points

• Look after your physical AND your mental health: your physical and mental health are the foundations for your success, so take care of yourself

• Recalibrate and rebalance: ditch the FOMO, get some quality sleep and give yourself some positive downtime

• Relax into sleep: try a couple of great physical and mental relaxation tricks

• Use your downtime to boost your wellbeing: choose the activities that make you feel great, from breathing exercises to going barefoot in nature to some simple human interaction

• Cleanse your thoughts: embrace the empty spaces in your life instead of running away from them

• Start up a daily meditation practice: just ten minutes a day spent watching your breath will make you feel calmer, more present and less anxious

• See yourself as lucky: let your good luck attract more

• Be grateful: savour a genuine feeling of gratitude for all that’s going well in your life

• Choose healthy relationships: emotional contagion is real so surround yourself with positive people

• Figure out who is good for you – and who isn’t: appreciate the people who have your back and set boundaries with those who don’t, or consider cutting them out your life completely

• Do selfless work: genuinely striving to help others will help you on your way, too