In Performance Lifestyle® Training, we talk about the stress of hidden lifestyle challenges frequently. They are the shadow side of the fundamentals of successful living: essentials skills (or habits) we all need to know if we’re going perform, look, and feel like a pro. That is someone who is proficient and skillful at navigating life so they can achieve even their most ambitious goals while living in balance with vibrant health and peace of mind.
A hidden lifestyle challenge is an underlying dynamic or stress in your life that causes compounding distress and distraction and takes your attention away from what is most important.
You know something is wrong, but you can’t quite put your finger on the cause or solve the problem, even though you are doing what all the popular books and usual authorities tell you to do, like eat less, exercise regularly, and get more sleep. You are suffering from a hidden lifestyle challenge.
Most of the challenges people suffer from are hidden, particularly for those of us who have a lot of responsibility and put out a great deal of personal energy. It is common for driven people to cope with stress in ways that create more stress, cover up the original causes of the stress, and struggle with performance addiction.
These challenges aren’t usually solved with popular tactics that focus on the symptoms. For example, the symptoms of fatigue, weight gain, and atrophy (deconditioning) are not solved by simply getting you to boost energy, lose weight, and build muscle. There are several lifestyle factors at play in each of these conditions, and it takes a lifestyle change to sustain improvements.
It’s no surprise that the health and fitness fields typically focus on specific issues; in particular, low energy, increased weight, and lack of muscle tone. These are easy to target symptoms of a lifestyle gone awry because you can see that there’s a problem when there are too little energy and muscle and too much weight. Yet, the root cause of the problem is hidden and almost always the result of a series of unresolved lifestyle challenges that conspire to produce undesired consequences.
Despite how much discussion surrounds eating, exercising, and sleeping, the source of such challenges is typically well hidden and confusing to untangle, especially if you or the person you are taking advice from is only competent in one or more of these common aspects of lifestyle.
We’ll focus on these three popular aspects of lifestyle for the purposes of helping you understand what it takes to resolve a hidden lifestyle challenge.
Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #1: The Stress of Fatigue
In our modern, fast-paced world, fatigue is a persistent challenge. You have so many demands on your time and energy that the busier you get, the less space you have, to take care of yourself, your body, and your life. This will no doubt result in fatigue.
Fatigue is caused by living over your edge. For starters, it’s spending more energy than your body is recuperating.
You work hard to squeeze in the latest health tips, you nap or meditate occasionally, and you strive to get to bed earlier. But you still aren’t waking up fresh each day and you are constantly tired.
This is no small matter. In fact, this is probably the biggest challenge you’ll face because everything else you do in life depends on having enough energy to do it well and sustain it. This includes living healthfully.
There are 3 types of stress.
- The biology of stress—think circadian rhythms, light, hormones, stress…
- The stress created by reacting to stressors in ways that create more stress—think lifestyle.
- The stressors we experience in our external world that we don’t control and or don’t know how to handle—think family, professional, social life etc.
The hidden lifestyle challenge resulting in increased stress is fatigue. In Performance Lifestyle training, it’s essential that you learn how to overcome fatigue and it’s misinterpretation by learning the biology of energy, how to stop coping with stress in ways that create more stress for sure, and optimize your lifestyle skills so that you can better handle stressors.
The primary solution for overcoming this hidden lifestyle challenge is learning how to regenerate your life force energy as an essential lifestyle skill.
Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #2: The Stress of Eating Nutrient-Poor Food
With the way food is marketed today, even a product that is rich in just one nutrient will often be branded as a healthy food. Many of us are eating up to 50% of foodstuffs that are man-made, with ingredients that are considered healthy or acceptable in food (culturally or economically). But they aren’t healthy.
On top of that, almost 40% of the “natural” foods we eat, we consume at levels that are too high (think animal products). These are natural foods that are rich in some nutrients but still nutrient poor.
If you have spent much of your life thinking you are eating healthy when you aren’t, the substandard nutrition in your diet could be causing issues with cravings, addictions, and overeating.
The hidden lifestyle challenge causing stress is eating a nutrient-poor diet. In Performance Lifestyle training, it is critical that you learn how to nourish your body so it can provide you with the energy you need to move through the day.
The primary solution for overcoming this hidden lifestyle challenge is learning how to eat nutrient-rich whole foods.
Hidden Lifestyle Challenge #3: The Stress of Being Busy but Physically Inactive
Your body manifests the stress you are enduring in your life in either a constructive way or a destructive way. This depends on the kind of stress you experience and how ready your body/brain is to adapt to the stress. But you can’t know your true condition until you apply stress to your physical body in a conditioning capacity.
In a performance lifestyle, there are few activities more important than being physically active. It is only when you are in a physical performance situation that you can understand your true condition and get accurate feedback.
If you are living a physically inactive life, you are not alone. Many people struggle to get enough exercise or overestimate how active they are. When you start conditioning your body, you’ll really begin up leveling your lifestyle.
The hidden lifestyle challenge causing stress is a lack of physical conditioning. In Performance Lifestyle training, it is important that you learn how to give your body the strength and power it needs to perform.
The primary solution for overcoming this hidden lifestyle challenge is learning how to activate and strengthen your body.
Keep in mind that physical activity is not solely responsible for strengthening your body. Without resolving Hidden Lifestyle Challenges #1 and #2, you’ll be exercising a fatigued body that isn’t fueled properly, and you won’t see the results you want. So this is why we’re giving rise to a whole new lifestyle, corner stoned by the understanding that regeneration and fueling an activated and strengthened body are fundamental skills for living in today’s performance culture.
Getting Started
There are twelve hidden lifestyle challenges that compound stress in our lives and prevent us from handling difficulties in an authentic, resilient, and renewable way. We offer corresponding lifestyle solutions to each challenge.
In Performance Lifestyle training, we address each essential solution in a lifestyle context and in a way that’s relevant, meaningful, and actionable. We also use the inspiration of athletics so you can relate to a segment of the population where lifestyle is directly linked to performance and success.
