3 Ways Middle-Aged Men Can Improve Their Health, Wealth & Relationships

Welcome to Renegade Man?–?The newsletter for middle-aged men who want to create lives of strength, abundance and purpose.

I run training and development programmes for companies who want to improve their sales performance. However, all the sales success in the world is pointless if it comes at the cost of your physical, financial and spiritual health.

So, every week, you'll get practical ideas for improving your health, wealth and relationships.

Here are today's three...

1). Health –?Are you getting enough sleep?

Today, sleep is increasingly recognised as the best legal performance enhancer there is. Former UFC lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov famously recommended it between training sessions.

Meanwhile, the list of compulsive power-nappers includes everyone from Winston Churchill to Salvador Dali, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.

Most parents know the painful short-term effects of sleep deprivation, from confusion and brain-fog to debilitating fatigue. Yet, the long-term effects of sleep deprivation are less widely discussed.

Long-term sleep deprivation is linked to increased risks of chronic health problems such as heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, kidney disease, and obesity.

Getting between seven and nine hours of sleep is a core part of a healthy lifestyle. Sleep helps with brain health, memory formation, blood sugar regulation, hormone balance, mood, cognitive function and beyond.

If you want to improve the quality of your sleep, remember the 10-3-2-1-0 sleep routine. It gives you a reminder about when to stop or avoid activities that disrupt sleep quality.

• Cut out caffeine 10 hours before bed.
• Don’t eat or drink alcohol 3 hours before bed.
• Stop working 2 hours before bed.
• Get away from your screens 2 hours before bed.
• Hit the snooze button zero times.

If you regularly do all of the above and still want to improve your sleep quality further, melatonin (only available in the UK via prescription), magnesium and vitamin D are useful supplements. While valerian, passion flower and lemon balm are effective herbal sleep aids.

2). Wealth –?Are you getting enough sh*t done?

A big part of success in any area of life comes down to your ability to get sh*t done.

To finish the presentation, to write and send the email, or to compile and publish the data.

Whatever it is in your world, something that's done is always better than something perfect that's forever waiting to be completed.

You don't get rewarded for the ideas swimming around in your head or your noble intentions. You get rewarded for the actions you take:

• The phone calls you make
• The books you publish
• The workouts you complete

This was beautifully summed up in a post by Anthony Astbury from an interview with entrepreneur and motivational speaker Brad ???? Burton , who shared his 24-24-24?rule for combatting procrastination –?perhaps the biggest killer of action there is.

Next time you're facing a decision that is getting in the way of you taking action, assign it to one of the following categories...

• 24 seconds: Make a quick decision if you can.
• 24 minutes: Revisit it with a clear head.
• 24 hours: If you’re still stuck, it probably doesn’t matter—move on.

The result? Less stress, faster progress, and no more wasted energy.

You can listen to the whole interview with Brad ???? Burton on the Whole Man Academy podcast on Spotify or on YouTube.

3). Relationships –?Are you mastering your emotions?

At the centre of any helpful, healthy and positive relationship are emotions. Unfortunately, most people don't understand what emotions are, let alone why we have them.

Emotions are adaptive responses evolved to help us act in our best interests towards helpful needs or goals.

What most people call emotions are not simply feelings; that's just one component.

Emotions are a complex set of physiological and cognitive changes the body goes through to help us take useful actions.

From hormone production to cognition, attention, memory recall, immune function and digestion, emotions impact almost every area of our physiology. For example:

• Anger helps us stand up for ourselves when we feel we have been treated poorly
• Disgust helps us avoid sources of disease and contagion and boosts immune function
• Fear prepares us take physical action and primes the body to flea or fight
• Shame encourages us to avoid behaviours that result in loss of status
• Love and lust help with reproduction, mate-selection and long-term pair bonding
• Guilt encourages us to repair relationships with people we value

The challenge is these adaptive responses are not always ideal for the following reasons:

• Emotions are evolved to help us survive and reproduce - not to help us feel happy
• They're typically optimised for life in ancient hunter-gatherer tribes - not modern societies
• Emotions are not evolved for accuracy but for optimum safe-guarding*

Next time you're feeling a painful emotion, ask yourself: What is this emotion trying to tell me about my current circumstances? What is the action it's priming me to take?

The more you can understand your emotions, the more usefully they can serve you.

Onwards!

Who the hell am I?

I'm Tom and – together with my wife Dionne Mallens – I run Renegade RevOps, a sales training and consulting business. We help owners of engineering, manufacturing and industrial technology companies end the frustration of flaky sales pipelines and team members who simply aren't getting enough high-quality leads, opportunities and appointments.

I also wrote this book?– Lean & Mean for Life: Lose 10kg & Get Jacked in 90 Days – for middle-aged men committed to getting and staying in great shape.

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