The Revenge of The Nerds
If you’re anything like me, you’ll have been struck by the transformation of former tech-nerds such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg:
What turned these former nerds into gym-bros and walking advertisements for testosterone optimisation?
I’m going out on a limb to suggest that Bezos and Zuck pulled the health & fitness lever after becoming billionaires and realising that money didn’t solve all their problems. A rich nerd is still a nerd.
These guys were not naturals, they eventually realised that health was just as important as intellect or money. They figured it out. Nerds are good at that.
Bio-chemistry is upstream of everything
I was a nerd myself but I realised it would be a terrible fate to end up as an anxious finance nerd.
In some ways I was lucky; I got into the good habits of cycling, walking and running early (during childhood).
Later (in my 30s) I discovered that, when I got anxious, exercise could eliminate almost 100% of my anxiety. If I ran 10 miles, getting to sleep that night was <never> a problem.
Exercise is an essential part of removing anxiety. Doing some exercise is a non-negotiable necessity for good mental health.
Improving your health & fitness changes your bio-chemistry. Changing your bio-chemistry first changes how you feel and then what you do.
Bio-chemistry is upstream of everything.
The Arrogance of The Nerd
Now that I’ve confessed to being a nerd, I’m allowed to be honest about our blindspots, flaws and failings.
It is the arrogance of The Nerd to think that exercise is unimportant and a lower value activity than debating The News, politics and other forms of intellekshual time-wasting.
It is the arrogance of The Nerd to think that they can neglect their body and yet their brain will be able to fire on all cylinders.
The Nerd prides themself on being logical and analytical. They think they can figure everything out with their pre-frontal cortex (the least powerful part of the brain).
The Nerd is prone to over-thinking. The Nerd is prone to perfectionism (an excellent way to disguise procrastination). The Nerd is very skilled at fooling themselves.
The Nerd sees exercise as a low IQ activity. When The Nerd thinks of exercise he things of idiot body builders, pumped on steroids and barely able to run.
The Nerd is uncomfortable in the gym, they would rather be in the university library or in the lab. I’ll say it again: I know this because I have been that nerdy guy.
The Nerd thinks that because depression is treated by doctors, drugs and therapists the problem exists solely in the mind and can only be treated with drugs or therapy.
The Nerd ignores the wider biological system and misses the links between their anxiety and their processed food diet, sugar, lack of exercise and lack of sunlight exposure.
The saving grace of The Nerd is that they keep learning. Eventually they will figure it out.
Work-related stress can kill you
The Nerd is compliant and can be trained to be an effective white-collar worker and plough-horse.
I will often see people works harder for their employer than they will for themselves. This is admirable…but only up to a point.
Don’t treat yourself worse than a workhorse you rely upon for survival. You wouldn’t work a horse to death, leave it in the barn months without exercising, or feed it poisoned food. Yet people do that to themselves every day.
Workaholism can eventually kill you. It is entirely possible for high-performing, high IQ to think themselves ill through work-related stress.
I know this because I did it myself (more than once). I have seen it many times in coaching clients.
"Society has not fully woken up to the frequency with which people unconsciously think themselves ill…On any average day perhaps as many as a third of people who go to see their general practitioner have symptoms that are deemed medically unexplained"
Source: It’s All In Your Head
If you live your life in a state of deadline-fuelled adrenaline, you will deplete your baseline dopamine (the body converts dopamine into adrenaline). This is the pathway by which burnout operates.
The flipside of this is that it’s absolutely possible to make yourself well with lifestyle interventions.
For example: it is entirely possible to cure depression and anxiety with lifestyle changes (and without drugs).
The problem with money nerds
The correct place for money is in the background working for you.
You work hard at your job. The salary comes in. The credit card automatically pays itself in full via automatic withdrawal each month. Automatic investment transfers do their thing, and we sweep the surplus to additional investments whenever the bank account gets above say £3,000.
It’s all on auto-pilot and there should be no drama in your financial life. Congratulations. That odd, slightly bored feeling you have is the feeling of becoming rich.
What to do next? The incorrect thing would be to obsess over ever-more esoteric details of macro-economics, Sharpe ratios and complex financial products.
To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And to a FIRE-seeker with a target number, everything looks like a money problem. Again, this is not a criticism…I have made this mistake myself.
There comes a point where the correct thing to do is to focus on your health.
Health is more than the absence of illness
The young can get away with taking their health for granted. But in your 30s, 40s and 50s, the game changes and you really should be moving health up your list of priorities.
Most people just assume that they’re healthy.
People think they are healthy because they haven’t had a heart attack recently. People think they are healthy because they are not obese. You can fit through doorways, so what’s the problem?
The problem is that a man will never feel great unless their testosterone and dopamine systems are firing on all cylinders.
You need to optimise both systems (testosterone and dopamine) for maximum drive, energy, libido and general mojo.
The Nerd has read The Guardian and, as a result of repeated exposure to this toxin, may be suspicious even of the word testosterone. The problem is that men with low testosterone levels have no energy or vitality, have underlying anxiety for no apparent reason and their mental and physical performance are meh, not great.
If you have any form of addiction, it will take you a minimum of 30 days of complete abstinence to achieve a reset of your dopamine system. So day 31 off booze or sugar or weed is actually only day 1 with a clean system.
Rome was not built in a day. Fixing your testosterone (and anything related to your hormonal system) takes a minimum of 3 months…so it’s best to get started right away.
It is not enough just to be skinny (or skinny-fat)
One of the most important predictors of future health outcomes is your body composition.
In the modern world, everyone struggles with their weight at some point in their life. But what matters is not the number on the scale, it’s body composition.
If you want to improve your energy, your libido and your ability to focus (as well as looking good) you should aim to lose fat if you are overweight (over ~15% body fat for men).
Fat affects our hormonal system and being overweight increases inflammatory markers. Being fat also reduces testosterone.
But it’s not enough just to be skinny. To be healthy, everyone needs some muscle. Muscle is healthy. Muscle boosts your base metabolic rate. Muscle is one of the keys to longevity. Muscle is a glucose sink. Muscle reduces insulin resistance.
Health systems are really sickness systems
Health systems in The West are patchy at best.
They’re good in parts. They’re efficient at distributing pharmaceuticals. They are usually good providers of emergency medicine. The best place to be after a car crash is in A&E (or ER if you prefer).
But they are not health services in any true sense of the word health.
Your doctor does not have the time, the training or the inclination to delve into your diet, exercise, work-related stress and other health inputs. To be fair, it’s not their job and they’re probably fed up of people lying to them about their “14 units of alcohol per week”.
My coaching service is a complement to (not a replacement for) medical advice. It’s obviously a good idea to consult with doctors. But you have to be your own health advocate and you have to be the Chief Medical Officer of your own life.
No one will be healthy by accident
60% of Americans and 45% of Brits will be obese by 2035. AJA Cortes shared this graph on twitter:
Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome.
People being obese creates jobs and generates billions of dollars in revenue for Big Pharma and medicine. Obese people are mega consumers.
No one in the future will be healthy by accident.
You will have to be intentional to be healthy. You will have to make it a priority.
Junk food is a consumer scam
Thanks to sugar, most people’s taste buds are wrecked. People’s hormones are wrecked. People’s dopamine systems are wrecked.
Processed foods account for roughly 70% of a person’s daily energy intake in the USA, 55% in the UK. Most people's breakfast is some combination of cereal, toast, jam, orange juice from concentrate (sugar water) or a "healthy" smoothie filled with toxic additives.
Their lunch and dinner is usually something pre-packaged or takeout, snacks that they might eat are "healthy" protein bar with like 60 ingredients in them out of which only 3 of them can be considered as foods.
Very few people eat whole (single-ingredient) foods these days. Processed foods have been chemically and mechanically processed. They have so many added chemicals in them and so little nutritional value that shouldn't even be called foods.
All processed foods are designed by big corporations whose goal is profit, they do not care about your health. Most processed foods are a bunch of waste products with added chemicals that make them smell and taste like food. So cut them out.
You (probably) have a behaviour problem
I now find myself doing health coaching (in addition to my main gigs of financial coaching and career coaching).
One of the things that held me back from starting on the health front was the misconception that I needed to have been to medical skool.
But we already know what works for health. Most of my health coaching clients have seen enough Huberman Lab podcasts to know what they <should> be doing.
I share my sources and provide coaching clients with books to read from the (sadly relatively few) high-integrity credentialled doctors, researchers and scientists who put honesty and results first and share their work publicly.
Here’s the key point: knowledge is irrelevant without action and following through on all of the foundational pillars of health:
cutting out addictive toxins (e.g. alcohol, sugar, porn, news)
sleep & circadian rhythm
eating mostly natural unprocessed food
resistance training + cardio + walking
time outdoors in nature and in sunlight
reducing work-related stress
social contact and relationships
There is a place for supplements and performance-enhancing drugs, but they should be thought of as “the last mile” of the journey.
My health coaching is based on The Aggregation of Marginal Gains. There will probably be some big wins / quick wins / easy wins in the early days but after that it’s a series of marginal improvements that are sustainable in the long term.
Any crash-course diet that is some variant of “get ready for the beach this summer!” is a recipe for failure. As is any diet that involves a specific end time where you go back to your old ways. A good diet has no exit plan because you change your eating habits forever.
So maybe you don’t have a lack of information or a knowledge problem.
It’s more likely that you have a <following-through-on-that-information> problem.
In other words, you have a behaviour gap between what you know you should do and what you actually do.
Closing that gap is the reason to get health coaching. A personal trainer can be good for accountability but most of them are not that bright nor well read. Most of them either don’t know or can’t afford to tell you that diet is ~75% of weight loss, exercise only ~25%.
I recently removed the limits on how much time I spend with clients on a monthly subscription. Ongoing clients get as much time as they need.
At some point before long, my diary will be full. But for now I am still open for new clients.
Please hit reply if you would be interested in discussing further.
Love to everyone
Barney
If you would like to talk about health coaching, you can set up an introductory call with me here.