Announcer:

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Introduction by host Matt Feret [01:12]

Matt Feret:

Hello everyone. This is Matt Feret, author of Prepare for Medicare and Prepare for Social Security Insiders, guidebooks, and online course training series. Welcome to another episode of The Matt Feret Show, where I interview insiders and experts to help light a path to successful living in midlife retirement and beyond. Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick Bolhuis:

Thanks, Matt. Appreciate you having me here today.

Matt Feret:

I'm really thrilled you're here. It's a really cool topic. Tell everybody what you do, how long you've been doing it, and how you help people.

Nick Bolhuis:

I have been in the space for going on seventeen years. We help people to manage stress and perform better under pressure. These days I primarily work with high functioning folks, whether they're in the athletic space or the corporate space, or parents that are just trying to raise their kids or take care of their families. We all deal with stress every day, and it's about teaching them the ability to perform at our best, even when the cards are stacked against us. I come from a clinical background. I got my start working with kids with ADHD, anxiety, and academic issues. It morphed into working with adults with sleep issues, anxiety, memory loss in our elderly patients. So, it's been an interesting journey these last seventeen years.

Matt Feret:

So, you said stress, sleep issues, and crippling high performance stress. Help me narrow that in a little.

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, it can be pretty all encompassing, right? It's really saying, “Okay, am I performing at my best regardless of what's going on around me?” Take an athletics, for example, pressure situation. You may have thousands or millions of people watching you. You may have a large contract you're trying to live up to. There's pressure involved with that. So, what is the athlete doing to prepare themselves to perform at their best, and then when they're in competition, what can they be thinking about doing? Breathing to continue to perform optimally, physically, and mentally as well, because stress can take its toll on us physically, but also mentally. And it's not just athletes that deal with stress. I have a family. I have two children. I have a wife, I have a mortgage. I have a business that I'm helping to run. We all deal with stress every day. It all manifests in different ways. So it's helping to equip our clients with tools and resources to help them to continue to function even when the environment around them is out of their control.

Matt Feret:

I can't put myself in the shoes of somebody who's on a field or on TV in a very high-pressure moment. We might be jealous of their income or prestige; we think they can handle it, but that's not true. I mean, they're still human, and they're still going to be reacting in the way that you or I might react, which is, “Oh my God, there's 25 million people watching me.”

Nick Bolhuis:

You hit the nail on the head. What I've learned over the years, Matt, is they are normal people just like you and me. They live their lives on TV in many cases, but they still have to go home to the same things that we deal with. They've got a family they're raising, they've got relationship issues, business interests that they're dealing with, but it's magnified. Yes, a lot of money helps. In some cases it doesn't hurt, but we're all humans. We're all trying to figure this thing out and deal with the life stress. We will oftentimes ask athletes for a quote for our website, we say, “Hey, after you've gone through our program, worked with us, can you just give us a quote?” And this one professional golfer said, and I'm paraphrasing, but he said, “Do this for your game. Do it for your life.” And it's like, oh, okay. If that wasn't a more true statement to make. If you're taking care of yourself physically and mentally, I think that will then translate over to his game. If he's just working with us to help his golf game, yeah, he will hopefully get benefit, but if he really views it as we're working to help him be a better version of himself, then that's going to permeate throughout not only his golf game, but relationships and life and all of those things.

Introduction to Stress Management by expert Nick Bolhuis [06:20]

Matt Feret:

Are there places you have to start when you're talking about stress management that aren't necessarily as known? What I'm thinking of is, let's say that golfer is playing in the PGA championship and it's a high-pressure situation. There's a lot of money on the line. He's practiced a whole lot. He is got to get there. He is going to be doing camera interview stuff that you or I don't normally do on a day-to-day basis. And my feeling is that it’s not just about prepping for the PGA championship. There probably is a foundation underneath that which has to be set before you can even get to the level of handling high pressure situations. Is that true?

Nick Bolhuis:

Totally. When you look at athletes, a lot of times they'll talk about focusing on the outcome or the process, and if you're focused just on the outcome, you're setting yourself up for failure because only one person's going to win that thing. If you focus on the process that it's going to take to win that and all the things you need to do, not just showing up on Thursday and play lights out for four days and win that thing, you've got to be preparing all along the way. That's no different in life. If you just show up and you think you're going to make that sale to that new customer and you didn't do any prep work for it, good luck making that sale unless you're awesome. And I've really learned too how we talk to our clients about our process that they're going to engage with when they work with us. That's changed over time because ultimately, yeah, we are trying to rewire somebody's brain and how their brain is functioning, whether they're concerned about stress or sleep or memory or focus or whatever. If I lead the initial conversation talking about brainwave activity, theta waves and beta brainwaves, I'm going to lose everybody right away.

So, we've found that the foundation. If you talk about hierarchy, the foundation of every conversation we start with is breathing. It's something we all do every day, keeps us alive, but most of us take it for granted or we do it wrong. And we found that if we can spend five or ten minutes showing somebody how they're breathing right now, and then instructing them how to do it the right way, they feel that very quickly becomes a quick victory for them, and they feel the benefit of slowing their breathing down, breathing deeper, and now I've earned their trust and now we've started them on a path to improving their health down the road. We can talk about brainwaves, but we're not going to start there.

Matt Feret:

I definitely want to get into breathing because it is often overlooked and it keeps popping up in my brain as something that's really important, and it's almost one of these things that sounds too simple to be true, so I definitely want to get into that. Talk to me a little bit more about that overall stress management piece though. So elite athletes, they're using their bodies, they're working out, they've gotten a certain degree of success. What about elite professionals or people that are in high stress job situations?

Nick Bolhuis:

What I found is people want to be like athletes. You hear the old adage, “Athletes want to be rock stars. Rock stars want to be athletes.” Well, the average person, when they say, oh, wow, look at this athlete doing this. I want to train like that. So again, this is not just the high level corporate executive that you think about. It's the average person who just wants to be the best version of themselves. We can all learn how to handle stress better, and sometimes the thought process is, well, I need to go a million miles an hour. What's made me successful or gotten me to this point? But your body changes over time. As you age, hormones change and your metabolism changes. Just everything about our body changes. So, if we think that we can keep the same pace going when we're fifty or sixty that we were able to keep at twenty-five, probably not going to happen. You've got to take care of yourself a little bit differently as you age, because when you were twenty-five, yeah, you could go all day long, but you also probably didn't have the responsibilities that you do when you're fifty or sixty. There's just changes that happen in your life, both physically but also environmentally that make you need to think a little bit differently about how you care for yourself as you age.

Nick Bolhuis on How to Identify Stress [12:00]

Matt Feret:

You hear about stress when all of a sudden, your hair starts falling out or you've got blotches on your skin or something happens. There's physical evidence of or panic attacks. But I also have to imagine there's some underlying stress that is just kind of a base level and it's different for everybody. How do you know if you're stressed without getting to the point of hair, falling out, whatever you want to call it? Is there a way to be in tune with your body or a way to not be in tune with your body that people don't know about?

Nick Bolhuis:

That's actually a great question, Matt. I don't know if there's a one perfect answer for it, but I think about stress on a scale of 1 to 10. I want to keep it around a 5 for the most part, because you don't want to be like, a total space cadet. You need some level of vigilance or stress focus to get through your day. All stress is not bad. You need to be locked in a little bit, but I would rather be walking into a situation with a stress level of 5 than 8 or 9 because when that environment changes, I don't have much buffer or cushion if I'm already walking into it at a 9, but if I can walk into it at a 5, I'm going to be all right. I'm going to have ability to adapt.

Some people are just really in tune with that. They just know their body, they know their mind really well because they're pretty steady, so they know when it fluctuates a little bit. One of the interesting things that's really proliferated over the last few years is trackers. A lot of our athletes and clients will wear a WHOOP strap or an Oura ring like I wear. So they get some biometric data every morning when they wake up to kind of tell 'em, “Hey, how have you recovered? How was your sleep last night? What's your stress level today?” So I think these trackers have actually been really helpful to inform people where you are relative to where your body is normally on a few different things. The thing that is oftentimes missed with the trackers though, is the so what? And it's like, okay, great. It's telling me I'm stressed. My app is telling me I'm stressed, what do I do with it? And that's really where we come in. We have then the resources and the tools to say, okay, yeah, you're stressed. Here's what you're going to do about it. You don't have to be crippled even further knowing that you're stressed. We're going to give you resources to help you to deal with that.

Matt Feret:

Can you give an example of someone you or your firm have worked with that from all outward appearances, everything seemed fine or they’re high functioning, and then they got in there and you were like, man or woman, you really need help. Maybe you don't know how badly you've got it or how much extra potential you've got if you handle this stuff better.

Nick Bolhuis:

We do work with some pretty well-known folks in the athletic realm. I actually enjoy working with the up and comers who they're trying to do anything they can to get to that top level, and oftentimes we'll be sitting down with them and they're like, yeah, I saw that Jordan Spieth works with you, or Kirk Cousins or whoever, and yeah, I want to do that. So you start to talk with 'em and you find out, oh, wow, yeah, there's a lot of baggage there that you're dealing with. So I go back to the quote from that golfer, it's like golf or football was the hook for you to reach out to us to get benefit, but we're actually going to really change your life. This is the conversation I've had with parents over the years too, with a high school kid, let's say, who's struggling academically, they can't focus, and so the parents are like, “Hey, we should investigate this program because it's going to help you focus better on the basketball court.”

We won't even talk about the fact that the focus is going to improve in the classroom as well. So it's oftentimes that sport is the hook, but to your point, when you get under the hood a little bit, you find out there's a whole lot more going on, and we're just fortunate to have that social proof in the athletic realm to help to de-stigmatize some of those conversations then. And it's almost an afterthought that we're going to help you deal with the anxiety or stress that you feel at home or work, and we just focus on, oh, you just don't want to get so stressed on the golf course and you're playing in your Tuesday evening round with your buddies, if that makes sense.

Matt Feret:

It does. Do you find any commonalities between a guy like me that shoots 150 on the weekends, but also has a high stress normal existence, and the elite athlete? Do you find some commonalities that everybody deals with where you can start at that ground zero and build from there?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, well, that's the cool thing. When we look at a brain, every brain is unique. So it's kind of like a fingerprint. When I look at Matt's brain, that is your brain. The electrical activity in your brain is unique to you. So that is one of the coolest parts of my job when I get to sit down with somebody and walk them through their brain map, because that's probably the first time for 99.9% of the people I'll meet with if they've ever looked at their brain. So while I may have done it thousands of times, this is the first time for them. So I really try to bring that excitement and that energy because it's a really cool experience. So no, there's no two brains that are like, yeah, there's some patterns depending on their lifestyle, their line of work. You might see that. I will say the common thread, and again, I'll go back to what we talked about a few minutes ago.

Most people are very poor breathers when we come out of the womb, if you look at a little baby laying in a crib, you'll watch their belly move up and down slowly when they breathe, they're using their diaphragm. That's how we're supposed to breathe. But as we age, we tend to tighten up. Some of it's our posture sitting in chairs all day long. We kind of get leaning forward, and then our muscles and our ribs, they all tighten up. So we start to breathe up in our chest. If you tell somebody, Hey, take a deep breath, relax, you'll see this. They move their shoulders up and down. It's like, oh, no, no, that's not what we mean. So that's again why we focus so much on that, because most people are doing it wrong. When we show them how to do it right, they see benefit very quickly.

Nick Bolhuis on Breathing Techniques to Reduce Stress [19:30]

Matt Feret:

I was a choir kid all the way through college. So I remember being instructed to breathe from your diaphragm. They used to put their fist kind of right by their stomach. And even though I tried it a bunch and was instructed to do it, I don't think I ever did it right. So go back to the baby-belly breathing. How are we supposed to be breathing?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, so engaging the diaphragm. So breathing deeper allows us to breathe slower. You're getting more oxygen with each breath. So every breath you take, your heart has to do a certain amount of work. So the more breath you take, the more your heart has to work, and that causes stress on the system. It burns energy and those types of things. So as we teach people to engage the diaphragm, you breathe slower, you're reducing the workload on the heart, which improves what is called heart rate variability. And this is a huge metric now that people are using to look at overall health. So basically, the greater the variability of your heart, the greater the elasticity, the more flexible your heart is. So as we age, our heart rate variability naturally decreases. Our heart becomes more rigid. They've also found people that deal with depression and anxiety, they have lower heart rate variability.

The heart just isn't flexible anymore. It gets kind of stuck in this rigid pattern. One of the best ways to improve heart rate variability is through precision breath work, because the heart takes its cues, takes rhythms from how the lungs are operating, how we're breathing. The really cool thing then is that using MRI technologies over the last few years, they've been able to find that people that breathe well and have higher heart rate variability also then have better neurological functioning specifically in their prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that handles emotional response and executive functioning. So you think about people that have to make decisions all day long. Well, that's like everybody, right? People that maybe have a hard time controlling their emotions or have a high stress situations, if they're able to breathe properly, they can directly impact the parts of the brain that handle those things.

Matt Feret:

Alright, so you said breathe with your diaphragm, and I already told you that I got yelled at a bunch and I don't know that I know how to do it. So for anybody listening or watching this, can you walk me through some steps right now? How am I supposed to breathe? Am I supposed to stick my stomach out? Am I supposed to breathe deeply? You said don't touch my shoulders, walk me through it.

Nick Bolhuis:

And again, some people, they're taught posture. You want to stick your chest out, hold your stomach in all these things. Well, that's going to make it really difficult to breathe using your diaphragm that way. So there's a few different really simple tricks we'll use with people at the very beginning. Sometimes I'll just have them lay on the ground like you would having a baby on the crib, Hey, lay down and put your hand on your stomach and just slowly start to and exhale. Sometimes I'll have 'em put a book on their stomach so they can feel that and they can see that book rising. You just naturally start to use your diaphragm when you're laying down. So that's a really simple way just to get them to understand how the body typically works. What I find though, is I'm trying to build this into a routine for people.

I'll kind of joke with people, “Hey, you're going to breathe for the next 10 minutes whether you want to or not. Give me 10 minutes a day of doing it the right way because that carryover effect is going to help you a ton.” So when I'm teaching people how to breathe, I will actually, after we laid 'em on the ground there just to, that's more of a fun little exercise. It's actually pretty easy. The easiest position to be in is in a good sturdy chair. You've got the back behind. You can still have the hand on the stomach, and now your body's aligned properly to people to watch the shoulders, make sure there's not a lot of noise up in the shoulders as they're breathing and have them just practice, Hey, you've got a balloon in your stomach, and pretend that as you're inhaling, you're filling up that balloon with air, and as you exhale, you slowly push the air out of the balloon and we practice that, Hey, let's just do this for two or three minutes and let's get to five minutes and then ten minutes over time. It's all about muscle memory. It's no different than learning any other skill that requires muscle memory.

Matt Feret:

I'm supposed to use my nose or my mouth, or both.

Nick Bolhuis:

Well, that's the next question that people always run into next.

I'm not trying to overwhelm people at the beginning. Yes, the science would tell us nasal breathing is optimal. There's a whole lot of the reasons for that, why we want to do nasal breathing, but I'm really more concerned at the beginning for people about the physical respiration, the muscle control of that respiration. Once we tackle that, then we can start to talk about nasal versus mouth breathing and working with athletes. You've got people that have broken their nose or have deviated septums. They have physical limitations that don't allow them to nasal breathe very well. So I try to slowly work our way through the highlights of what needs to happen.

Matt Feret:

And so you said ten minutes a day is what you try to get people up to, I think, right?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yep, yep. That'd be ideal.

Matt Feret:

Morning, noon night, anytime?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, that's a great question. It depends on the person. What we've done with breathing, Matt, is we've gamified breathing is what we call it, because still at the end of the day, it's breathing. It's not the most exciting thing in the world. If you go through the list of all the health benefits, we've already listed several of them. But again, I just think about, hey, really truly, if you are breathing properly and you're doing this for an extended period of time, you've built it into your routine. You, you're impacting your neurological functioning. For some people, that alone is enough to get them to hook up and do ten minutes a day. They'll just do it because it's healthy for me. But for most of the people, we need some carrot. We need some reward if we're going to do something and build it into our routine.

So with breathing, we've gamified it. And when we have a device, and we can talk about it later, but it is called the intel belt, and what we do with breathing, it's a strap that you wear around your stomach and you interface with our app and you can see your breathing and you can see how your heart is functioning right in real time, and it teaches you how to breathe properly and you accumulate points. So just like we all know, hey, get 10,000 steps a day. It's a good healthy thing to do. We want you to get 10,000 points a day. So the better your breathing, the better your heart is responding, the quicker you will accumulate points. And so the way the algorithm is set up, you're going to get those 10,000 points somewhere between about ten and twelve minutes of training every day.

Now, a guy like me, I like to do it first thing in the morning. I wake up, I put sports center on so I can kind of hear highlights of the day. I put my belt on and I do my breathing. I know then that I'm walking into my day physically, mentally ready to go dialed in. A lot of our folks though, will practice it at night before bed. I fall asleep really quickly. I don't have any problem falling asleep. But for those people that they might lay in bed and their wheels are just spinning and they can't shut off, best time to be practicing your breathing is right before bed because it's naturally going to start to calm the nervous system down and help you to fall asleep at night. So it really kind of depends on you, and it depends on where you're best going to build this habit into your lifestyle.

Matt Feret:

So that's for everybody. That's normal day-to-day stuff, advice slash things you can work on. So what about those high stress moments when I'll just say you're trying to come down from 14 points and you've got 25 million people on Monday night football watching you, or you're going into a presentation in front of your boss's boss, or you've got family members coming over for Thanksgiving, some of whom might cause some scene. And when you're in that moment, I mean, I think I'm probably like everybody else, right? Stress goes up, heart rate goes up, things seem a little cinchy. I'm probably shallow breathing a little bit, just kind of in anticipation of what's going to happen when you're in the moment or you're approaching that moment. What do you coach people to do and what do you help people practice?

Nick Bolhuis:

Remember what you've practiced, it's no different than any other skill that you've learned. Again, sports is the easy analogy, but there's a reason why golfers go to the range and they hit thousands of golf balls from the time they're ten years old until their high school career, college and pro career. You get that muscle memory, you fall back on what you've learned. So just like that salesperson who's walking into that meeting or the person who's making the presentation of the bus, you've repped, you've practiced, you know what you're going to talk about. If you go into something and you just wing it, your likelihood of success isn't that great. That's why we're asking people, give us ten minutes a day of breathing so that when you are in that stressful situation and you're stress level's gone from a five and now it's pushing an eight or a nine and you don't want to get to ten, you have that skill because yeah, we can say to everybody, Hey, take a deep breath right now, but the person that's practiced it, they're going to get more out of that deep breath because they know how to do it the right way, and their body knows how to respond to that deep breath because it's practiced it so much.

All the systems within our body know what that cue means now, or the person who never really thinks about their breathing. Yeah, take a deep breath. Okay. Yeah, placebo effect. I think I'm more relaxed. They really didn't get as much out of it as the other person. So practice makes perfect.

Matt Feret:

Have you tracked, have you hooked people's brains up to see what happens when they're not breathing or not doing the things that you coach versus the things that you do coach and them actually doing them during time? Have you seen differences, not just in their facial expression or their furrowed brow, but have you seen brainwave activity that's different from a scientific standpoint? Have you seen the difference?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, I alluded to some of that before using even MRI technologies. You can look at the physical structure of a brain change for people that are doing breath work over time. There are more and more people that are really interested in how does our brain change in the moment when we're in certain situations. But then longitudinally over time as you implement practices and whether it be the biofeedback breathing or neurofeedback training, which we also do, which again is rewiring how the brain functions, it's remarkable to see and quantify that change in individuals. It's not just placebo effect. They're not just thinking they're doing better. There's a reason why they're firing and functioning more efficiently. The key is you have to be intentional about improving those things. We live in a society often where we want a quick fix. We want to either pop a pill or do the latest fad diet or fad exercise routine. That's usually just not how it works in life. You have to put in the time, you have to put in the effort to get benefit. So being able to quantify that benefit and show them, Hey, all that work you put in, yeah, you're feeling better, which is ultimately what you care about, but we can also show you how you're functioning better. That's a rewarding conversation for people to have to know, okay, yeah, I did that work and here's the benefit that I'm getting from it.

Matt Feret:

Yeah, brain map A versus brain map B, look at how your brain change. That's got to be, I dunno, it sounds really cool.

Nick Bolhuis:

They're pretty fun. Like I said, the first time you ever go over a brain with somebody, it's exciting. But then to be able to show them, Hey, yeah, you did all the work. You're the one that did the training dedicated to this work, and look at your payoff for it. Really cool, really cool conversations.

Nick Bolhuis on the Health Implications of Stress Management [32:51]

Matt Feret:

You mentioned earlier that things change as you age. When you're twenty-five, you can bounce back from a lot of things late night out, late nights out, very different in your mid-twenties than perhaps in your fifties or sixties, but also you're wiser and you've got a lot more experience in those times. We all know the physiological changes of aging, normal aging and ways to combat that. What do you see in terms of from where you sit, where is it important, when is it important? At what ages or stages is it important to really, if you have the interest to really hone in on this stuff to prep for later life or to maintain the same or similar degree of performance that you had in early career?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah. So I think back to a study we published, oh, I think about four years ago now, we looked at mild cognitive impairment. So these were folks pre dementia, but they're dealing with measurable memory loss and a really cool project that we did saw tremendous improvement in memory in these folks that we worked with primarily in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. But we looked back at lifestyle factors and a common thread for a lot of 'em was, I don't sleep well. Okay, well, is that a new thing or has it been going on for a while? I haven't slept well as long as I can remember. So I say that to show that we saw improvements in these people that had pretty significant memory concerns in their fifties, sixties, and seventies. We were able to help them improve their memory, improve their anxiety levels, depression, all these things.

So they weren't too old to see improvement. But I think back to man, if we had been able to work with them when they were in their twenties, in their thirties, and they were first starting to develop those sleep issues or those other stress related issues, could we have helped them not get to that MCI, the mild cognitive impairment level in their sixties and seventies? Could we have kept them stronger longer? They had been more proactive in their health. So I'm always going to lean more, Hey, the earlier you can start to take care of yourself, the better. But if you didn't know about these things or whatever, it's not too late. Even as you're starting to see more advanced symptoms develop,

Matt Feret:

That emphasis on sleep is really new. Everybody goes postmenopausal women. There's usually sleep issues during pre, mid and post. But also how many times have you heard older men say, I can't sleep past 4:30 AM regardless of the reason, the sleep piece of it, it sounds like it's a cornerstone of having your programs be as effective as they can be.

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah. If you go to our website, if you go to neuropeakpro.com, you'll see a lot of testimonials from folks, and again, it's a lot of professional athletes, but again, just want to remind your listeners, they're normal people too, dealing with the same stuff. People know who they are, they don't know who I am. But again, a lot of the same issues and a lot of people just talk about, “Hey, I noticed huge improvement in my sleep because they were regulating their nervous system. They were getting out of that fight or flight mode and allowing the body and the brain to function like it should.” And so that's crucial. You hear about athletes more and more. You mentioned, “Hey, everybody's talking about breathing these days.” Yeah, everybody's talking about breathing. They've been talking about sleep as well. That is so important too for us, is to make sure that we're doing everything we can to not only get enough quantity of sleep, whether it's seven hours, eight hours, whatever, but it's the quality of the sleep as well.

So yeah, you may have a job that doesn't allow you to get straight eight hours of sleep or you travel a lot. Okay, we get it. There's environmental factors there. However much sleep you do get, we want to make sure that the quality is good too, so that the brain body is repairing itself and regenerating like it should, because sometimes, especially in older folks, they sleep a lot. They're like, “Hey, I could sleep 16 hours a day.” Well, that's not good either. That's too much. That's an indicator that probably the quality of your rest isn't optimal, and if we can improve the quality of that sleep you're getting, you're probably going to need less sleep right there. So, it's a variety of different ways that you look at sleep to measure how good it is.

Matt Feret:

If the sleep piece is important. Do you suggest people go do sleep studies if they're waking up in the middle of the night? Or do you say try some other stuff before actually doing that?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, not going to dispense medical advice here to your folks.

Matt Feret:

Exactly. All disclaimers aside.

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, there, there's really practical things that most people can probably do before they need to get to the point of going for a sleep study. It's the sleep hygiene things. Hey, put an electronics away before bed, looking at what you're eating or drinking before bed. All of these lifestyle things that we really have complete control over that some of us just choose to neglect, and then we're like, well, I wonder why I'm not sleeping. Well, you probably shouldn't have two glasses of wine right before bed. It's probably just not helpful. So if you've done all of the healthy lifestyle things, you've done what you think is best and you're still struggling, then it's probably time to go to the primary care doctor and start to have a few more in-depth conversations. But I think most of the experts I work with and have talked with there is so much that we could be doing on our own from a lifestyle standpoint. If we do all those things, it's going to have a significantly positive impact on most of our lifestyles and sleep.

Matt Feret:

So we've talked a little bit about aging and brain health and what you need to be cognizant of. Are there any, I mean, I see lots of stuff out there on brain coaching or online platforms of doing mini IQ tests or heck crosswords. My father-in-Law does a crossword every morning, and I know he likes it, but I think he's also trying to keep his brain active. Are those things beneficial, not beneficial?

Nick Bolhuis:

All of the above, right? Again, I think back to our work with mild cognitive impairment. There wasn't just one silver bullet we fired. It was a holistic approach. It was looking at breathing, it was looking at neurofeedback, it was looking at diet supplementation, movement. Again, so much of what we struggle with, it's because we haven't made healthy lifestyle choices. So yeah, doing Sudoku or a crossword puzzle that's keeping you engaged mentally, so it's great do it, but movement is crucial as well. Probably more important than doing the crossword puzzle would be, Hey, can you get up and walk? Can you get up and move and walk around the neighborhood or wherever? People that move are going to be healthier, just flat out. So the last thing you ever want to do is retire at sixty-two and then go sit in the chair and watch TV. It's not going to be a great end. And then diet as well would be a close one. Behind that is make sure you're eating well to fuel the system to continue to operate at its best.

Nick Bolhuis on the Relationship Between Stress and Failure [40:51]

Matt Feret:

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about an F word failure. When you deal with your patients or the people you work with. You said it earlier, there's only going to be one winner of the PGA championship every year, which means everyone else failed to win. How do not only elite athletes, but executives or people in normal jobs, or even in family situations, when they prep and they breathe and they do everything that's right and they still fail, how does that impact your work with them? How does it impact their brain, and how do you keep going and try again?

Nick Bolhuis:

Oh, man, I love that question because this is something I deal with in our home with our kids. Maybe one of the best things I've learned with working with athletes is that failure is okay. I'll think back to conversations I've had with Bryson Debo, he's a professional golfer. Some of your listeners may have heard of very interesting guy. He's known as kind of being a tinkerer as a mad scientist, and he's tried so many different things, and he's like, Nick, I love failing because then I learn from that. I learn every time, okay, that's not the way to do it. And he'd referenced Thomas Edison, okay, he is got more patents than anybody, but he also failed how many times to make the light bulb. He's like, yeah, I just learned a hundred different ways to not make a light bulb. So I finally figured out how to make the light bulb.

So I think that is a huge differentiator between world-class athletes and the average person is being okay with failure, and if we could all learn that it's okay to fail as long as you're learning from it because it's going to make victory, make success even that much sweeter, we'd have a lot happier people because so many people are just afraid to fail in life for whatever reason, whether it's the shame or the guilt or whatever. As long as you're learning from it, that's okay. And that's how you will be the best version of yourself. I had that conversation with our daughter last night. She's fifteen. She's a swimmer in high school. She's pretty good, but been a rough season so far, not getting the times that she wants, and it's just, we had the failure talk last night, literally, Hey, remember the athletes? What are you learning from it? What are you learning from this season where you're not getting those accolades that you got last year? There's a reason for it. As long as you're learning from it, you're going to come out in the end. You just got to have that mindset, though.

Matt Feret:

That's great. You're doing that with your daughter, and I'm sure a lot of people listening and watching weren't raised like that.

Nick Bolhuis:

She's a not like me. And I'm like, okay, here's all the things I did wrong, and here's all my weaknesses, man. As a parent, you kind of get that second chance to help. And again, I am so incredibly blessed to work with some really interesting people and learn from them and hear a different perspective because yeah, I don't want to fail. I'm afraid of, I want to look good to my boss and my coworkers and all that, but if you can have that proper mindset, the mindset of the highly successful people, yeah, there's some things you maybe don't want to do. There's a cost to being highly successful, but if you can learn from them how they process things, there's a lot to be learned from folks that are at the highest level of whatever their career is.

Nick Bolhuis on Priorities and a High Achievement Lifestyle [45:03]

Matt Feret:

So handling failure, thank you for that. But I picked up on something you just said is what other lessons that you've learned in terms of resilience or performance or dedication have you learned from your elite athletes or your high-end executives that they got there and they've stayed there, that we can apply as mere mortals? Any other big lessons or takeaways that we can glean?

Nick Bolhuis:

Yeah, I kind of mentioned here a minute ago, there's a cost involved to some of this, and it's not a financial cost, it's a time cost in a lot of cases. I think to another, well-known golfer, we work with one of the best in the world. In talking to his trainer, said, yeah, he missed out on a lot of life because in high school, when other kids were going to the football game on Friday night or going to the dance, hanging out with their friends, he was on the range golfing. Yeah, he's one of the best in the world at it, but the cost was, he doesn't have the relationships, doesn't have that life experience that some people have. So I look at it as I want to be the very best at what I do in my line of work, but I also want to have those right priorities, and so am I willing to put in that time, am I willing to sacrifice certain things so that I can say I'm the world class, and that's what everybody has to kind of decide on their own, right?

It's what is going to make me the best version of myself? Do I want to be known as one of the best golfers ever? Okay, well, here's what you're going to have to do, and you can probably have to have some genetics and all these things, or, hey, the best version of Nick Bolhuis is this amount of time to this amount of time being a dad and a husband, and all of that. And I think if the sooner in life that you can figure out those priorities, the better of a life you're going to have, the better you're going to feel, the better you're going to function. And sometimes it takes us a lot longer than we'd like to. Most of us it does, but the ones that are fortunate enough to figure that out, it is a great thing.

Conclusion and Closing Message by Matt Feret [47:31]

Matt Feret:

Nick, this has been a heck of a lot of fun. What questions did I not ask about breathing and performance and lifestyle that I should have?

Nick Bolhuis:

Matt? I think, yeah, we've talked on a whole lot of different subjects. The thing I just want to impress upon people is you can take control of your health and your life regardless of your age. I know your audience tends to veer probably a little bit older than some of the audiences I talked to, but that's fine. It's never too late. Our bodies, our brains are created incredibly. It's amazing to just see how we're wired and to think that, wow, I've been struggling with something for years and years, even though I'm seventy-five years old. No, there are things that you can do today that are as simple as learning how to breathe better that will have a positive impact on your life. So I want that to be an encouragement to people is no matter who's listening to this, that there are things you can do to improve the quality of your life and your health. Very simple things, too.

Matt Feret:

Nick, thanks so much for being on the show.

Nick Bolhuis:

Thanks, Matt. And I'll leave with this too, if people want to learn more about what we do and how we could maybe help them. Everything we do is remote, so you can be anywhere in the world and train with us if they want to check out our website. It's neuropeakpro.com. Got a lot of great resources, programs to help people with and really had a fun time talking to you here today.

Matt Feret:

Yep, thanks. And I'll put all those links on the website and when we promo it and before and after the show, we'll tag all that stuff and put all that contact information out there. Thanks a lot.

Nick Bolhuis:

Thanks, Matt.

Matt Feret:

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