Put on your headphones and and listen to this as you read today’s blog (bear with me…):
This was supposed to go out last week. Today it is July 21th. I got a little busy on Monday (starting a business is hard, raising three kids is harder, trying to get three d*&n stars on Polytopia while riding on Zwift, listening to a podcast, and organizing my to do list is even harder/dumber). Tuesday and Wednesday had meetings, visits to the kitchen to fix production issues, calls with suppliers, and of course, some high quality doom scrolling. Thursday felt like a good day, but this was supposed to go out on Monday, sending it on Thursday is kind of embarrassing, and Friday…. no one wants to read a blog about procrastination, from a sports nutrition company on a Friday….
So why have you been listening to this awful droning and what does it have to do with procrastination? Hacks. I’m convinced most “hacks” of them only work if you know you are doing a “hack” aka they are an amazing placebo effect. To test this, I buried this explanatory paragraph a few lines into the blog to see if this noise works.
Now I’m no “Hubermaniac” or anything (I say as I write this after early morning light exposure, delaying my caffeine intake, intermittent fasting, cycling between my sauna and my cold plunge, writing this at my standing desk, trying to grow a beard and buzz my head, and legally changing my name to Travis Huberman…), but when Andrew Huberman says to do something, this lemming jumps off a cliff. So, a friend sent me a link proclaiming that Hubie (that’s what his friends call him) had solved procrastination with “Binaural Beats”, I clicked with alacrity. The general premise is one sound frequency is played in one ear, a different frequency in another ear, and voila, by zapping your brain with this audio hum, cognition, focus and creativity increase and anxiety decreases (here’s the link to Dr. Hubie breaking it down). So how are you feeling? Have you read every word of this post? Are you in the zone? Or are you as distracted as ever? Now that you know your brain is being “hacked” have you started reading every word?
The fact is, I love “hacks” for both body and mind. It’s fun to think that you’ve found an evolutionary “backdoor” or a shortcut to performance, or maybe you just always wear the same lucky socks during each race. There is kind of a “hierarchy of needs” for athletic performance, and yes, of course, as we all now know, solid and consistent training, recovery, and nutritions (nudge, nudge, poke, poke, wink, wink) should be the base of that pyramid. But it sure is fun to play around with the “hacks”. I would love to hear your favorite hacks. Please send me a note. We’re hoping to start up a youtube channel in the coming weeks, and would love to try whatever your favorite hacks are (even if you’ve completely made them up). I’m about to go jump on Zwift and do a long ride, listening to only Binaural Beats. If this newsletter suddenly starts coming out hourly, you’ll know the hack worked ;).
See you all out there,
Travis
