226: Finding the Energy for Optimal Performance with Cate Stillman

Pete Mockaitis
Cate, thanks so much for joining us here on the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, I’m psyched, Pete.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes. Me, too. Well, I had so much fun meeting you at Podcast Movement and I was really impressed with a lot of the wisdom that you have to share. Well, maybe you can orient us first and foremost, what is – if can say the word right – Ayurveda and how can that be helpful for professionals?

Cate Stillman
Yeah, so Ayurveda, it’s the healing tradition that comes from India that co-evolves with yoga, so if you think of yoga and Ayurveda as different sides of the same coin, that’s how it’s often described. So, yoga is the path of enlightenment and yoga is the how do you have a healthy enough body so that you can have higher pursuits like enlightenment, how do you optimize your physiology not just on the physical level but mental and emotional.

Because anyone who’s ever been, you know, who’s ever attempted a meditation practice knows that like if you’re in physical pain, you can’t meditate. And if you’re also in a lot of like mental and emotional turmoil there’s not a lot that you can do in terms of these deeper, higher pursuits that yoga is really all about. And so the Ayurveda is always the backdrop, the backbone. How do you optimize your health so you could get on the bigger and better things in life?

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, certainly. Yes. And I don’t know how high this pursuit is in the grand scheme of your yoga healer life but here we’re thinking about when it comes to, I know I’ve experienced it, in terms of just how much energy you have to bring to a given day makes a world of difference in terms of how much productivity and fun you’re having during the course of just rocking and rolling in the course of just taking care of business productively.

And so, I am passionate and fascinated to learn more about more energy and how to get it and apply it and make it work so optimal performance unfolds, and your practice is just exploding over there so it all seems to add up that you figured out a thing or two that is certainly applicable for professionals who would like to bring more energy into their work lives each day. How would you start us off toward that goal?

Cate Stillman
Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of place. So, in my work with Ayurveda, so Ayurveda actually means the science of life, and it just comes from observing the laws of the universe, observing our place in the cosmos and how, in many ways, like our physiology, our bodies, our minds, in many ways, there’s something we inherit, right? Like you didn’t design your body, the one that you came in with, the one like your mother birth you.

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say sculpted it to a specimen.

Cate Stillman
You said sculpted it, exactly. Whoever sculpted it. But you did not have to design the operating system, right? And so there’s like, “Well, who did? Or what did? Or what forces did design the operating system of the human physiology?” And as soon as you start asking these questions we start getting actually kind of more interested in the past in order to optimize our future.

So, if we start to understand like, “Oh, well, we’re smart monkeys, we’re primates. Monkeys are diurnal, they’re not nocturnal.” Right? And we start to understand that we have had certain rhythms as a species which involved eating during the day and sleeping at night. We start to understand like we like our food to be colorful because we use our eyes to sense much more so than, in many ways, our sense of smell. Whereas like your dog can eat in the dark. Like you might find that you do not like eating in the dark, right? So, these little things.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right.

Cate Stillman
Try it. Seriously. Like prepare an amazing gourmet meal and then turn the lights out and see your level of enjoyment.

Pete Mockaitis
You know it sounds funny that never came clearly to me. I guess I had some popcorn recently at night and it wasn’t amazing but I was very hungry so I appreciated it.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, but if you’re going to go to a five-star hotel restaurant, like you’ll notice, like you enjoy. If you’ve eaten like really good Japanese food you’ll notice there’s like a lot of attention to the aesthetic.

Pete Mockaitis
Right.

Cate Stillman
And this is part of being a human being. We have really well-developed eyes for color and our digestion is such that it’s been optimized to digest food during the day and our sleep patterns are optimized for darkness.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, I’m with you there. So, there’s some fundamental principles that have deep ancient roots and they show up in our lived experience. So, I’d love it if we could zoom into some of these particular elements so let’s start with sleep and doing it well, making the most of it so that it is super refreshing, energizing and good to go. So, your first pro tip seem to be sleep at night, so that’s a good start.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, it is but like harder done than said, right? Because what happens is most people, if we really look at like the typical working professional, often you’re eating your largest meal at the end of the day which means your body is not optimized to go to sleep when it should be because you’re digesting food. So, again, you’re like kind of mixed up. Digestion happens and sleep happens at night so we start to see how much our sleep is tied to our eating.

But if we’re eating our larger meal in the middle of the day, which takes some physiological retraining to do, and often we start to realize at that point, like, “Oh, my habits, my food habits and my sleeping habits, they’re not actually my own. They’re cultural, they’re familial. My habits are really tied to the people I live with and the people I work with.”

The more we start to really understand what’s going on behind the scenes of why doing what seems best for the body to give us the most energy and the most focus is really, really hard for us to do, and the more we get clear on that, it’s just like anyone here who is a project manager. And it’s like the more you understand the problems you’re trying to solve for in your project the better it’s all going to turn out.

So, that’s kind of part of that research phase. Like what time of day does your typical listener eat dinner?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, I’ve had a number of conversations, a number of survey questions with listeners, and email exchanges and we just never went there specifically.

Cate Stillman
Just a guess. You’ve worked with these people.

Pete Mockaitis
I eat dinner at 7:15 p.m.

Cate Stillman
Right. So, let’s use you. You’re eating dinner at 7:15. Is it the meal of the day that’s the highest in calories or content?

Pete Mockaitis
You know, often it is. I’d say sometimes even third, sometimes the dinner is taking the cake.

Cate Stillman
Okay. Great. So, we’ll take that example. Usually if it’s protein-laden that it’s just heavier, it usually has, you know, just requires more digestive power. So, then you’re looking at least a three-hour window to digest that meal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
But if we look at how our bodies are optimized for focus and rest, we actually want to be lights out by 10:00, we want to be unwinding, especially if you’re using a computer during the day, we’re going to need some unwinding time, some unplugging, some reconnecting into natural rhythms, into actually, like, “Oh, it’s dark out. Okay, I’ve got to let my eyes attune to natural lights because that’ll help me make realize that my physiology is tired.”

So, often what that means is unplugging and that usually isn’t done with football or Netflix. It’s done by actually either being outside spending time in nature which gets more harder the more we’re getting into winter and whatnot. But if we’re actually attuned to that and we’re eating dinner earlier, so we’re now like rewiring our schedule. Dinner is either easier to digest, so it’s lighter, or it’s earlier, we got kind of two choices there. Because you could still eat at 7:15 but you could just have a bowl of soup.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
And then that wouldn’t take three hours to digest.

Pete Mockaitis
Understood.

Cate Stillman
And most modern adults that work in offices are not struggling with being underweight.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, that’s true. At least in the U.S., yeah.

Cate Stillman
Well, not really, especially everywhere. That goes for Mexico, it’s all over India. They used to struggle with, you know what I mean. It’s global at this point. So, the deal is, I mean, yeah, there are certain more intelligent European countries that don’t struggle with this issue. But as soon as we’re wanting to up our energy and our focus we can start to really pay attention to having either an earlier or lighter dinner or an earlier and lighter dinner start to enable us to tune into our own fatigue.

And so then it’s much easier to go bed earlier, and that’s in my – I have a book called Body Thrive, and there’s ten habits. And the first habit is earlier or lighter dinner, and the second habit is early to bed. Because if you can dial those two things in, your focus the next day is going to be through the roof.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
And if you don’t then you’re going to feel the things like feeling behind already when the day begins, and some of the brain fog that’ll require a lot of caffeine that’ll set off your sleep patterns in the next 24 hours.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. I hear you. And so, then, thinking about the notion of eating lighter and/or earlier for the dinner, can you sort of lay out, is there any kind of compelling research or in your own clients’ experiences sort of what is the key? If we’re going to test this out at home what are some of the key indicator we’re looking for, like, “Whoa, that earlier lighter dinner worked,” versus, “Whoa, that later heavier dinner is messing me up”? What are kind of the indicators we should be on the lookout for?

Cate Stillman
Yeah, just the ones that you outlined in the beginning – energy and focus. The next day, do you have more energy? Are you more focused? You can also look at your stoke. Like, are you stoked? Do you get out of the bed in the morning, or are you like pressing snooze? Now, most working professionals are actually exhausted so you’re not starting from a neutral system. You’re starting from a system that’s already hyper-stimulated, hyper-caffeinated, overweight and exhausted. Really. I mean, and this is just the stats, right? We see autoimmune issues or people’s immune systems are falling apart, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
So it’s not like you’re going to feel energized and focused the next day because your body is probably going to start to go into a healing state in which you might actually get way more in touch with the nature reality in your physiology which might be this exhaustion, which might be this level of depletion, which you might just kind of have a “Come to Jesus” moment of like, “Wow, I’ve really got to make some changes.” And this is a few layers deep here.

But what’s cool is the body wants you to learn from yesterday and so you’re going to get a sense of like you’re going to either have slept better. Usually people just feel like, “Wow, I actually got deeper sleep because I wasn’t trying to digest food and sleep at the same time.”

Pete Mockaitis
And you’re saying you’ll kind of feel that in terms of like your first moments of, “Hey, I’m awake.” That’s kind of when you will be looking to observe and compare, or kind of like, you know…

Cate Stillman
Yeah, you know, you know. I mean, you know, when you wake up and you’re like, “I did not get the kind of sleep I wish I had gotten.” And you know when you’re like, “That was good. Give me some of that.”

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. All right. And you’re saying that it’s a pretty quick observation transformation that an earlier lighter dinner and an earlier to bedtime is going to dramatically increase the proportion of mornings that you say, “Oh, yeah, that was good.”

Cate Stillman
Yeah. I mean, you could also do the opposite. So, you can eat tonight, you can have seconds or you can have desert later, and you can run that experiment, too.

Pete Mockaitis
Cool.

Cate Stillman
And then the next morning if it’s like you can just notice. So, we’re always running experiments. We’re running experiments every single moment of every single day, right? We’re running our own physiological experiments. If you don’t feel great right now, if you don’t have a ton of energy, if you’re not stoked on your life, if you do a quick physical body scan and you’re like, “My flesh is not toned and lean,” like you’ve got to run some better experiments, dude, or dudette, right?

Like this is how the body works. It wants you to learn from yesterday. So, in ayurvedic medicine they say the number one cause of disease is they call it prajnaparadha. It means a failure of the intellect. It also translates to crimes. Crimes!

Pete Mockaitis
Crimes!

Cate Stillman
Crimes against wisdom. Which wisdom? Your own wisdom. So, you knew better and you still chose to have seconds. You knew better and you still chose to eat a heavy protein-laden meal after 4:00 p.m.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. All right. Crimes against wisdom. That is a phrase. That is a phrase.

Cate Stillman
The number one cause of disease. Meaning that you are designed to get smarter every day.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, crimes against wisdom, you know, so we got a couple of charges. I guess I’ve got some priors there. What are some other potential chargeable offenses that you see all the time and make a world of a difference when you’re running experiments in the reverse way?

Cate Stillman
I actually have a webinar on these two particular habits that kind of simplify things for people and make a world of difference, and that webinar is called Focus on Fit. And it’s this thing I ran on Focus on Fit Not Thin. If people can just focus on becoming more fit and the easiest way to do that is through like two main habits and it’s often not easy like most stuff that’s super simple. It’s not easy to actually make the changes and do it, but once you do it you’re like, “Oh, this makes sense. This works.”

And the first is intermittent exercise. So, you just start to increase the amount that you’re moving throughout the day. And everyone knows this, like most people are carrying fitbits that have any clue right now. And there’s a lot of good science that shows that like if you exercise once a day it’s just not as beneficial to your body as if you break that same amount of time and you intersperse it throughout the day.

And, of course, this makes sense because, as we go back to the beginning of the conversation, we’re supposed to be smart monkeys. And smart monkeys didn’t just like move and then sit on their butts for the rest of the day and then go to sleep and expect to sleep well. They did a little of this, and they exerted some effort, and then they sat down, and they harvested, and then they did this, right? And that’s how we’re designed. If anyone has ever spent time with children you’ll notice like it’s really hard to get them to sit still. What’s weird about adults is it’s hard to get them moving again.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. Well, so I’m intrigued with that assertion there, so if we’re going to do a 40-minute whatever workout, you’re saying you’re better off interspersing that into, I don’t know, let’s call it eight five-minute mini-workouts is superior to one full workout.

Cate Stillman
You’ll feel better. Yeah, you’ll have much more mental focus and energy and stimulation.

Pete Mockaitis
What about warming up? If it’s only five minutes, you know, a little bit harder if you warm up before the pump, you know, and all that.

Cate Stillman
Well, I mean, this is the thing about habits overtime, right? If you just start to look at like how sedentary are you actually, and then it’s so much more about upping the bar. So, say you normally workout for an hour in the morning, like what if you just do 20 minutes then, and then you look at having two other 20-minute breaks in your day where you’re moving. I think, at the end of the day, if you’re just like, “Did I have a better day?” and you just start there.

Well, what will actually usually happens to most people over time is that they still want to get in like a really, you know, as you’re getting more fit and you’re getting more focused and you’re getting more awake and you’re getting smarter, you’re stating to learn from yesterday and make tomorrow better, as you’re doing that, you’re like, “I want to work out more. I want to move my body more.” That’s what it always becomes.

Pete Mockaitis
It gets bubbling up.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, the same desire that was trained out of you when you’re five years old when you’re told to sit still. Now you’re un-training that pattern and you’re waking up to like movement. I’m an animal. I’m designed to move. There’s a whole category of diseases called the sedentary diseases and they’re really linked to the autoimmune diseases. This stuff is not a mystery. It’s not new. Everyone listening already knows it. We’re not saying anything new here. we already know that you feel better after a five-minute walk, so go take one, right?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
And that’s it. And once we start to get into that then it’s like, “Oh, I still want to go. I actually want to move more. I’m going to build more movement into my day not less.” So now I don’t have just 40 minutes to move my body. I may have more. I might decide, “Hey, you know what, this meeting, let’s go take this one around the block. Let’s go do a walk and talk.” And you just worked in another 30 minutes, so you’re not calling it exercise. You’re just bringing in more movement.

Like yesterday afternoon, I’ve been creating a bunch of videos, and I’ve been inside and my daughter came home. She was going to go to gymnastics. She had already been playing at the playground with her friends. I was the one who needed to get movement. I’m like, “Let’s go jump on the trampoline for 10 minutes.” She’s like, “Yes,” you know. But she didn’t need it. She was going to go to a three-hour gymnastics practice after just running around the block but I needed it so I can engineer my time with her so that it involves more movement.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s good.

Cate Stillman
When we start looking for times to exercise, we start finding time all over the place.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, examples, please.

Cate Stillman
Well, just say you’re walking to the bathroom, and normally you’re like hangout and chitchat on the way while you pass someone’s desk. It’s interesting. Can I use that three minutes to find somewhere to do a little bit of movement? And some of you might be like, “Oh, I can actually walk up three flights of stairs and walk back down three flights of stairs and go to the bathroom and go back to my desk. But I just actually got a little bit, I got my heartrate up, I’m not in a more peak state, my focus is going to increase, and I broke up the pattern.”

Pete Mockaitis
So, when you’re talking about movement, are you saying it doesn’t matter so much what you’re doing whether it’s walking or stairs or stretching?

Cate Stillman
The more diverse the better. Like, again, we’re so patterned. The typical person that works in a typical office building is incredibly limited in their movement. And we start to see there’s a massive evolution in culture that’s fighting against this. It’s really like there’s a pushback to this in terms of like Hiit workouts and Crossfit and primal movement or functional movement. There’s all this movement revolutions and these cool workout chains sprouting up across the West.

Because the ones who are waking up are like, “We’ve got to get out of our boxes. We’ve got to get out of just sleeping,” for, hopefully, eight hours at night, like waking up maybe doing a workout. Some people maybe not, even sitting down, drinking a cup of coffee, sitting in a car, going to the desk, sitting at a desk, right? And then going home, sitting to eat, and then sitting on the couch, and then going to bed. I mean, it’s crazy, right?

And the workout might be going on a StairMaster, right? Or going on like a skate ski machine or something like that, or going on a bicycle where you’re still staying in the same front-facing when you’re playing. There’s no twisting in the spine happening, there’s no getting out of the box and doing like getting out and of like going onto just a much more exotic movement that starts to open a lot of different neural pathways in the brain and really increases different ways of thinking, different ways of problem solving, increases the level of focus.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Cate, now standing and moving, and we’re talking about movement, and I’m seated and I feel inadequate.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, and this is what starts to happen, is you start to like… in my house, I have two standing desks. This one has a little remote control. I rarely sit for more than 30 minutes.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, now, I’ve got my standing desk going. I’m standing. You’re an inspiration, Cate.

Cate Stillman
See, that’s what happens.

Pete Mockaitis
You are transforming lives as we speak.

Cate Stillman
As we speak. No, I mean, I just can’t sit for more than… I mean, I can if I’m going to like a business conference and I’m like acting like a normal human in a business conference, and I’m like. But even so at these business conferences, this is what happens, because I’m a CEO growing a company so there’s just the reality and I get it, you guys. I get the meetings and I get this and that.

But you start to be able to bend things to meet who you are and who you want to become next. So, at these business things, like there’s a break, I’m like, “Who’s with me?” Because anyone who knows me, they’re like, “I’m going to stick with her because I know I’ll feel better in 10 minutes.”

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Cate Stillman
“And I know she’s going to have fun because she’s naturally life-positive, full of energy, all a blast. I’m going to go hang out with her.” And I never have any idea what we’ll do. Sometimes we’ll just go for a walk around the building. Sometimes we’ll do handstands in the hallway. Like sometimes we’ll go and do like five minutes of like Hiit workouts and really primal movements.

Like so much of that stuff, as soon as we start to unbox ourselves from eating too heavy too late at night and waking up groggy and behind, and not having enough time for movement, as soon as we start to take the pressure off our system through eating a little earlier and lighter. For some of you, you know you don’t have to eat dinner, and you know, I’m talking to you, like skipping a meal is not going to kill you, right?

Our ancestors used to have like natural fasting times because they just didn’t have a ton of food covered all the time, right? Our ancestors used to have supper, which means as related to the word soup. It’s also related to the word supplemental. There’s two etymologies in that phrase. And, to me, that’s incredible, right? Like, “Oh, dinner used to be more or less a liquid medium. Huh, bring that back in.” Not cream-based medium but more water-based medium, right?

All of a sudden I’m eating an earlier lighter dinner, all of a sudden I’m naturally, because I’m not heavy and weighed down, and my body is not digesting, where I’m actually going to be attuned to that. I’m sleepy. I’m tired. I’m going to go to bed because my body is not wasting all this energy on digestion at night which it’s not suited for historically biologically in our circadian rhythms. I’m going to wake up and I’m going to have a surplus of energy that otherwise would’ve gone to digestion. Now I’m going to have energy enough to move and I’m going to be thinking differently.

Pete Mockaitis
I love how you laid out that cycle and that momentum that builds and grows in doing so. But I want to talk for just a bit about how do you start the cycle. Because I think, at some times, folks might say, “Hey, I even have a standing desk but, oh, I just feel too tired to stand up right now because I’m beat down or whatever.”

So, I guess, that’s kind of what I’m wondering. If folks say, “I am too tired to,” I don’t know, “go shopping and make a gourmet meal or take any number of the steps associated with literally steps around the block or up and down the stairs.” And so, I’d love for you to tackle that one head on. It’s like, “Okay, that sounds nice but I’m too tired to even get started.” What do you say?

Cate Stillman
Yeah, and this kind of ties into that second habit that I was going to mention with the intermittent movement is intermittent fasting. Actually what you need to do is less, it’s usually not more. Chances are your body needs less calories than you’re putting in. If you’re a typical American, or a typical Westerner, chances are you actually need less.

I was reading this blogpost on lazy people, I can’t remember which channel it’s published on, but how to quote from Bill Gates. I thought this was really fascinating. And he was talking about hiring and he was talking about people that are lazy and smart versus diligent and dumb. I think those were the exact words.

And how he’d much rather hire someone that was lazy and smart than someone that was diligent and dumb because, somehow, it’s like the hamster and the wheel. When you’re actually expending like all of this energy and you’re not getting anywhere, not a good way to do that. But if you can actually be super lazy and super fit in this amazing way.

And part of it is you just start taking all the pressure off your physiology just by not basically not eating at the right times of day, eating too much food at the wrong times of day, putting way too much stimulation into your senses or garbage into your brain, however you want to say it, whether that’s football games or Netflix or the news or the little alerts on your iPhone, it’s putting too much in. Most people right now are taking way too much in.

So, it’s not a question of doing more, it’s a question of just simply not taking in so much.

So, when you just your specific yeses and then everything else is more or less a no, and the same thing it becomes true with taking the load off your system. So, you just say, “Okay, I know I’m going to eat our tonight. I’m going to order soup. I’m not going to watch anything when I go home. I’m not going to check my phone or my computer.”

Pete Mockaitis
But, Cate, I’ll be bored. What am I going to do?

Cate Stillman
Chances are you won’t. Chances are you really won’t. Chances are you’ll just feel like you’ll sit with it for a minute, you’ll be like, “I actually want to do this.” Or you might start to feel your own fatigue. All right? And maybe you need to take a shower, maybe you need to take a walk, maybe you just need to sit and pet your cat, or talk to your kid, right?

And you start to realize that like the bliss that you’ve been looking for is right there all along, and that’s why the habits of Ayurveda, the habits that I teach and it’s the backbone of my book and all that is like they’re the habits that lead to enlightened living, they’re the habits of bliss, they’re the habits of deep connectivity.

And you start to realize that like all of that sort of like external drive, that external stuff that really starts to fall away and you start to really fall in love with not just your life but really like each moment. And that level of fulfillment that comes with that, it actually gives you so much more drive and focus which is fascinating.

Like the more interconnected you get the more you get like where you can make a difference, where your life can matter, how you want to show up tomorrow, how you want to optimize your evening today so that you’re able to be somewhat clued in and present and optimized and focused for tomorrow.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, it sounds like a beautiful picture that you’re painting there and very, very appealing. And so, you’re saying it all starts with just subtracting, subtraction instead of addition in terms of making it happen.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, let’s avoid putting in too much. I mean, really, if we look at the diseases of modern culture, it’s not under-stimulation, it’s not under-fed, it can be under-nutrified but I wouldn’t even worry about that at first, you know. I would just start to reduce. Just allow more time and more space, so allowing more space and time for digestion to happen. And all of a sudden a lot of digestive issues just go away.

Yeah, I mean, I work literally with thousands of people and it’s fun to see the miracles that happen when people start to just simply take the load off.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that’s cool. That’s cool. Well, so I’m intrigued. We talked about bliss and talking a load off. You got a chapter in your book about self-massage. That sounds delightful and relaxing. How does one execute self-massage?

Cate Stillman
Yes, so self-massage, this is an interesting habit. It’s called abhyanga in Ayurveda language, and it’s a daily practice when you have children.

So, it’s interesting, it starts usually with a mother massaging the newborn. But what’s interesting about this, too, is that the new mother will be receiving massage. So, this is a habit that starts from day one and it goes through until a dying person leaves their body. It’s a daily habit in this system of medicine, and that, again, is based on awake living, it’s based on enlightened living.

It’s based also on radiant longevity. Not just living longer but being radiant in each stage of your life. And, to me, that’s fascinating. Like why the self-massage? This is something that we really don’t see in Western culture, this daily habit that starts the day a baby is born and doesn’t stop. And there’s times in life when we don’t do it on ourselves, we do it on others.

The newborn is receiving, the postpartum mother is receiving. They’re not doing it on themselves, they’re receiving it, and the dying are receiving it. Also, any healing phases, people are receiving it. Everyone else is just either giving it to themselves or giving it to other people. And there’s a few interesting things to this habit. To me, the biggest component of this habit is empowerment. You start to realize you have the power to heal with your hands.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so when you say self-massage, how do I even do that, in terms of putting my hands onto where, in order to make something happen?

Cate Stillman
Right, yeah. Well, I would say, first of all, like lower the bar and lower the expectations.
All you’re trying to do, and let’s just do this right now. So, if you’re driving don’t do this. Well, even if you’re driving and you could drive with one hand you can use the other hand.

Pete Mockaitis
Safety first.

Cate Stillman
Exactly, safety first. But for everyone else, you have two hands, just go and do a pass. Just do a pass of your two hands. I have all my clothes on so I’m doing this fully clothed. I go to my thighs and my butt and my hips and my belly and my boobs and my shoulders and my arms, and I’m just checking in. And then my neck and my face and my scalp.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s nice.

Cate Stillman
And that’s it, yeah. And that’s it. So that took 10 seconds. So that would be a good starter level, right? Again, we don’t want to, ever, with habits make them so hard that they feel like they consume a lot of time or energy or raise the bar so that we don’t do it. We just want kind of get in the right relationship. And all of a sudden in that, you’re like, “Wow, this feels kind of good.”

Some people may have the experience of like, “I’m repulsed by myself,” and that happens. Say you’re carrying an extra hundred pounds and you do it, and you’re like, “I don’t want to touch parts of my body,” because that’s how distant we’ve become from ourselves. This practice is incredibly healing and incredibly intimate. It helps you move back into yourself.

So, to some degree, it can just get us in touch with reality. We just pass our hands over our body, and we’re like, “You know, I really don’t need to eat a bigger, heavier meal tonight. And that’s maybe not the best reward for the promotion I got at work. Like that might actually leave me not feeling as good tomorrow when I pass my hands over my body.”

So that’s one thing, is we’re getting a check-in, we’re getting another set of data, we’re getting more input in terms of, “Hey, what does my body… what does it need? What does it want next?” Right? Some of us might’ve done that and just felt like, “Oh, I need to get more touch. Like I need to actually schedule a massage with someone,” and that can be really important information because it’s like if you don’t get that, your immune system can break down over time. That’s a big deal.

Autoimmune disorders are horrible and they’re hard to recover from. So that can be a thing. But then another thing will start to happen. You start to discover, you’re just like, all of a sudden you put your elbows on your desk and you’re just rubbing your temples, and you start to rub your forehead, and you start to rub your scalp. And you find this point, you’re like, “Oh, that feels really good.” And you just do that for a moment, and then you go back to your work. But you may have actually just found a few acupressure points.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
And some of these points, like when you start to learn different things, you’re like, “Oh, this actually triggers that.” There’s ways that, say, you have insomnia at night because you’re drinking too much caffeine in the day, and you don’t know how to unplug from work, and you don’t have good boundaries in screen time, and then you’re eating a heavier, later dinner and all those things that we talked about, and you’re not sleeping well, and your mind is racing.

There’s points, and one is on top of the head, the crown of the head, and then another is about four finger-width behind that towards the back of the skull. When you rub that, it actually drops your nervous system down. Yes, if you place the base of your palm at your hairline and go all the way back to where your little finger touches and rub there, it’s a really good one for like diffusing more of like the alpha-beta busy mind brainwave state.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. There we go. Pro tip.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, pro tip. So, there’s a lot of power that comes when we start to take healing back into our own hands. And for those of us who are raising children, or who have elders living at home, when we start to actually take that power back into the household, that it doesn’t take a professional massage therapist to help heal with hands.

And I know, for being a mother, I have a nine-year old, you know, she’ll just come to me and be like, She’s a gymnast and so like last time she’s like, “There’s something going on with my thighs.” So, the first thing I’ll do is be like, “Great. Go take a steam shower and then I’ll give you a massage and we’ll just see what happens.” We’ll maybe break out some essential oils and get crazy. And see if the power of healing is in our own household, because she’s been raised in this habit.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s awesome. Well, Cate, tell me, is there anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and talk about some of your favorite things?

Cate Stillman
No, I’ll just let you lead from here.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Let’s do it. How about a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Cate Stillman
Well, today I’m definitely inspired by that lazy and smart, and really looking at that efficiency, right? I imagine like all people listening here, are really quite aware of how you can generate more work for yourselves.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Cate Stillman
Right? And the same thing is really true with your own health and fitness and wellness. It’s like, why are you making it hard? Whereas if you’re actually a little lazier, like what happens if you just don’t do dinner tonight? You know, people find that this is so surprising, they’re like, “Oh, my gosh, I have so much more time. Doesn’t have to be a gourmet meal.” What happens when it’s actually like when I start to lower my bar?

One of the things that I have found with very productive, very healthy people is their diets are incredibly simple most of the time and then slightly outrageous some of the time. You know what I mean? Like, so they’ll go out and they’ll go to like a five-star sushi restaurant and like go big. But like for most of the time they’re keeping their parameters incredibly simple around their food or their nourishment, around their sleep, around their body movement so that they can live an incredibly ecstatic professional life.

Pete Mockaitis
Sounds good. Nice. And how about a favorite book?

Cate Stillman
Working with the Law by Raymond Holliwell. Have you read that one? It’s an old one. I learned about it from David Neagle who’s like a wealth coach. He helps people develop more wealth and he did this whole training I purchased with him on like wealth and abundance years ago. And I ended up some of that training again and again and again. He ended up quoting Raymond Holliwell again and again and again.

And, finally, I bought Raymond Holliwell’s book Working with the Law, and what’s really beautiful is it’s just based, just like Ayurveda, on observing the universe that we live in as a human being. And there’s so much in there just about relationships, and about thriving whether it’s in body, whether it’s mind, spirit, wealth, etcetera. It’s an old book. Not many people read it. Never hit the New York Time’s Bestseller list but Working with the Law, it’s good.

Pete Mockaitis
Thank you. And is there a particular nugget or teaching that you have, a Cate original that seems to super connect and resonate with folks you work with?

Cate Stillman
There’s so many. I often try to simplify our anatomy and physiology.

Pete Mockaitis
Did you coin the term pooping champion? That’s a simple phrase.

Cate Stillman
Yeah, we’re really big on that, pooping champion. Which brings me to, very accurately, your pie hole and your poop hole, and I’ve gotten a lot of flak on this from my Thrive, my newsletter list, it’s like, “Pie hole is so negative and it’s so derogatory.” I don’t mean it in a negative derogatory sense. I just mean like I like pie. There’s a certain that pie goes in, and there’s a certain hole that poop comes out.

Now, with your pie hole, you just want to start paying attention to like, “How many times a day are you inserting nuggets? And how many hours a day…?” And this is where a lot of the research with intermittent fasting I find really fascinating. It’s like if you just sort of tighten that up so you’re only eating two to three times a day as an adult, right?

And if you allow that time between supper and breakfast, or breaking the fast, to be at least 13 hours, like just that, you’ll start to have, you’ll start to be able to burn your own fat, you’re going to have a lot more leanness in your muscle, you’re going to feel better. When you do that self-massage, you’ll be like, “I am hot,” you know. Like you’re going to feel really good in yourself just because your body is actually burning fat instead of just storing fat because you’re not eating so frequently and your body is needing to use that what it’s getting.

So, I have a checklist, I’m just seeing this right now at yogahealer.com/superproductivity, that’s one word. And that’s where all of the habits are listed. So if they want, if that’s helpful, if you’re like, “I need to find out more besides earlier lighter dinner, early to bed,” that’s where those all are.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, cool. Thank you.

Cate Stillman
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
And I was just going to ask, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Cate Stillman
Yeah, I think just there. I think for this audience, like who are obviously into being focused, energetic and productive human beings, just yogahealer.com/superproductivity, and that’ll get you that checklist. On yogahealer.com is where I provide way too much content, so don’t go there because you’re already over-stimulated and you need to unplug and go to bed early and enjoy some deeper rest.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. That’s a nice… the next question was a call to action. Maybe it’s just that – don’t go to your website and get some more rest. Anything else you would…?

Cate Stillman
Don’t do that. Do the obvious. Have soup for dinner.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Cate Stillman
And, seriously, like be a cultural revolutionary and stop doing what everyone else is doing that’s leading to the pain gain. Like stop eating, as a reward for working hard, at night. Like just stop overloading your system and stop overloading your mind with just too much stimulation. Just give yourself a break today and enjoy the amazingness of your body and your mind because it’s the most sophisticated piece of technology we’ve ever discovered, and enjoy the people that are in your life because they’re there. And there’s so much magic when you take out all of that excess, and you start to live a little bit lighter and a little bit leaner and a little bit more spacious.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, this has been so enriching. Thank you for this. Please keep on doing what you’re doing, and making the world awesomely yoga-healed.

Cate Stillman
You bet, Pete.