What is the new most important word in or for your vocabulary? The word is Regeneration.
Everything in your life, actually, your very life depends on it.
One could argue that this is life.
In the dictionary, this is how it’s defined.
re·gen·er·a·tion
re jen r ray SH un/
noun
The action or process of regenerating or being regenerated, in particular, the formation of new animal or plant tissue.
Here’s what Wikipedia has to say.
But behind regeneration (not to be confused with generation, which is stimulation, not recuperation) is always energy, and a source of energy that is far more vast than the energy we are getting from food (not to diminish the importance of food energy for fuel, which is a core essential of lifestyle). And what’s key to this energy ‘regenerating,” like you experience in sleep, for example, is your lifestyle; the practices you engage in that promote and sustain the health and resiliency of your brain and body.
Which is why in a performance lifestyle, we don’t just talk about nutrition and fitness, we talk about energy, health, and performance and go way beyond the usual cast of characters to reveal the full complement of skills that enable a person to maintain sufficient levels of energy and health, so they can perform. Food and exercise are part of that, but only about 10% of the equation.
There are reasons why people eat poorly and don’t exercise and it usually has a lot to do with stress from two sources.
- Biological stress (endogenous)
- Life stress (exogenous )
These sources of stress go hand-in-hand, in a symbiotic way, but they are distinct, and you can’t deal with one properly unless you are also dealing with the other. It’s why reductionist health protocols are too limited when it comes to dealing with stress, especially those that do not illuminate a clear understanding of human energy, what it is and how to manage it as the key to healthy function and performance, ie. your success.
Too often today, when it comes to discussions about stress, energy, health, and performance, the focus is only on the biological; making sense of and sorting through all the biological systems and their function in order to deal with stress better, have more energy, better health etc. And this is important. So important indeed, this insight is often a strong guide to your lifestyle rituals, habits, and routines; the practices you engage in—i.e what, how, when, level of intensity, and how consistently.
When discussing the modern-day stress crisis, the plague of a 24/7 lifestyle, there are in fact many surprising sources of “invisible stressors” inside your body and ways to heal your stress response to enjoy a life of peace again, But if you are not also dealing with the exogenous stress in your life that is bearing down on your body, optimizing bodily systems not only doesn’t happen very well, they stay in a chronic state of stress.
Basically, things were out of whack in my life, and my body was taking the impact.
You’ll notice that I use the word “coping” above because how we cope with and “handle” exogenous stress, which affects the biological and our capacities, is either efficient or if dysfunctional, ineffecient, and this will consume energy in a significant way, crushing your performance and effectiveness. So understanding the biological function is important to guide your lifestyle decisions, to manage your energy, health, and performance, but dealing with external stress is often not a biological discussion.
Remember above I said there are two sources of stress (each made up of several sub-sources of course) and that they go hand in hand? Well, your lifestyle has to span both, else both your inner biological world (your brain and body) will suffer and your success in the world.
Performance Lifestyle® Training teaches you the full span of both the performance mindset and the lifestyle skillsets needed to do that, as human performance IS a lifestyle and nothing less. But what is the most important idea in that span of skills?
In a world that will keep you doing, training, consuming, working, thinking etc. virtually non-stop…
It’s Regeneration.
