Latest / Spacious Success / 037 | Majoring in the Majors

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037 | Majoring in the Majors · Spacious Success

0:05
Hi, I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro-performance scientist, speaker, and executive coach who learned the hard way that chasing success can come at a cost.
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After burnout landed me in hospital, I made it my mission to help ambitious women who are done trading their health and happiness for high performance.
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On Spacious Success...
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I share science-backed strategies and real stories to help you flourish as a female at work and beyond so you can stop paying the success tax.
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Hi, it's Dr. Christy and welcome back to Spacious Success.
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Today I want to tell you or invite you to consider stop trying to major in the minors.
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That's it.
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That's the whole idea for today's episode.
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And I want to spend the next little while making sure that you actually believe it, because I don't think most of us do.
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Not really.
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Even when we often nod and say that we agree with that statement.
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A coaching client of mine who's a senior leader who was genuinely brilliant and is brilliant at her job sat down on a coaching call with me a little while ago and she asked me a very specific question.
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She wanted to know what was the one thing, what was the one single move that would fix her focus because she felt like she was operating at half the capacity and she needed her fractured focus back.
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She was looking for a silver bullet.
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a one-off protocol.
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And so I asked her a few questions of my own.
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It turned out that she thought she'd been averaging about five hours of sleep per night for six weeks straight.
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Her wearable device, and this is why I love wearable devices, because they don't lie, confirmed that she was actually averaging far less than five hours worth of sleep.
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And what she wanted from me wasn't more sleep.
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She wanted focus.
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And she thought that the cold plunge protocol or the nootropic stack that she'd heard about on TikTok or the productivity practice that everyone in her circle was suddenly using, the Pomodoro technique, was going to serve her.
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This is not what she needed.
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She described her days to me and we unpacked them.
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She was waking up already tired, reading the same paragraph of a board paper three times before it landed and was processed.
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She was snapping at her assistant over something really minor and then feeling terrible about it afterwards.
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She was coming home to her partner and getting agitated by every small thing that he did.
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especially his loud chewing.
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And if you know, you know.
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Every symptom that she listed is exactly what five or less hours of sleep will do to a brain.
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None of it needed a magical diagnosis.
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None of it needed a hack to solve it.
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What she was asking for was not moves that would improve her sleep.
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No.
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The cold plunge might spike her alertness for 20 minutes afterwards, and the nootropic stack that she'd heard about might tweak some of her neurotransmitter availability, but she was tweaking the margins.
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The productivity technique might organize her calendar better, but none of them were going to manufacture the rest that her focus needed.
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They're all sitting on top of the same four-hour sleep foundation.
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And no matter how sophisticated the hack or the protocol looked or sounded, they wouldn't have solved it.
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Now, it would have been easier, honestly, to just give her something new.
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A protocol that has a start date.
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A protocol we like because it feels like we're taking concrete action.
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It feels like we've got a really simple solution to perhaps a complex problem.
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And telling someone to simply sleep more or to try and improve the quality of their sleep makes her feel like I'm not talking seriously about the problem she presented.
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But I am taking it seriously, and that's exactly why I said it.
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And I'll admit, she was frustrated with me when I suggested it.
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I told her that to fix her focus, we had to address her sleep before we touched anything else.
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It wasn't more sophisticated than that.
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And I could feel over the video...
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the Zoom call, how underwhelming that answer felt for her.
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She'd come prepared for something with a name, a protocol.
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And instead, she got the same advice that perhaps her grandmother would have given her.
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But this time it was delivered by someone with a PhD and she might have considered it.
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That drive to add rather than subtract isn't random either.
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I see so many ambitious women who are trained from a very young age that more effort, more output, more optimization is what sets us apart.
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It's what makes us go to the next level.
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So when something isn't working...
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Our natural instinct is to really do less.
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It's to do something more, do something different.
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But here's what I have noticed.
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When I've coached ambitious women for years now, almost none of them come to me asking how to...
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move more, eat properly, regulate their stress or invest in their relationships, they come talking about the next layer instead.
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The supplement, the wearable, the morning routine that some founder swears by.
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They're looking for the edge, the 1% increments, the tweaks, the hacks, the simple looking protocols.
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Yeah.
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I don't just hear this in coaching calls.
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I hear it in the Q&A sessions after keynotes and in the DMs after a podcast.
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People often describe feeling flat, foggy, or off their game.
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And the question is, what am I skipping?
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What could I add?
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What should I do next?
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The cold plunge, the mouth taping, the sauna, the red light, the creatine, the protein.
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And I genuinely do understand the appeal.
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I genuinely do.
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These things feel like progress.
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They're new, they're specific, they come with an app, a dashboard, a sense that you're doing something concrete about your problem.
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But the basics don't feel like basics in the same way because we've all heard them before and we know them.
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Sleep more, move more, eat real food, regulate your stress, invest in your relationships.
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None of that is news to anyone.
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And to be fair to this coaching client and to all of us, and I have permission to share this, majoring in the minors isn't stupid.
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It's completely understandable.
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We live in a culture in the Western world that rewards the clever and the add-ons.
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It quietly ignores the boring, monotonous maintenance work that sits underneath all of this.
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Social media loves to sell us quick fixes and hacks.
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Nobody posts a carousel about eight hours of quality sleep.
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But plenty of people will post about the cold plunge or the sauna.
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Now, I'll admit I'm not immune to this either.
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But,
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I have a cupboard full of supplements that I have sampled once and forgotten about.
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And at least one mindfulness promotion app promo code that's sitting in a drawer from a conference show bag.
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It's far more interesting, palatable to try new things rather than keep doing the old basic things, doing the mundane and the simple things, even when I'm the person who researches and knows this professionally.
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But it is exactly the levers that do move the needle.
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Here's the thing I keep coming back to all of the time in coaching and speaking work.
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The basics work.
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If you actually work the basics, don't sample them for three days and abandon them looking for the next thing.
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Basic principles, the foundational habits worked properly, embedded into how you live.
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They shouldn't be sampled like a new trend and then thrown out.
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And so that's what I told this client.
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And it's the same thing I would encourage you to consider.
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Now, for many people, the habit that we need to start with is sleep.
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It's the clearest example, and it's the one that I actually gave her.
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Deep sleep is a critical component in the stages of sleep.
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It's where your body repairs itself.
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And we know from research that deep sleep is prioritized in the first half of the night while there's still a lot of sleep pressure.
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This is why we have less REM sleep where we dream in the first part of the night.
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And we tend to do more of that in the early hours of the morning.
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During deep sleep, also known as slow wave sleep, our body releases growth hormone.
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It floods our system.
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which helps us with tissue repair.
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It helps us to build muscle with bone maintenance at a cellular level.
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We also know that it helps to recalibrate our immune system.
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And this is why when we are sleep deprived, we tend to get more sick more easily.
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It is during this stage that our body temperature drops, often by around one to two degrees.
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And we'll see a slowing down of our heart rate.
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And this is where our brain runs its waste clearance process, flushing out all of the toxic proteins that it has potentially accumulated throughout every single one of our waking hours.
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We also know that neural energy stores that are depleted through the work we do like in the day, thinking, deciding,
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Feeling those neural supplies are converted, restocked and reshaped during deep sleep.
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It is during deep sleep that our brains undergo really important functions, that glymphatic brain clearing that I mentioned before, cleaning.
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Now, this is one of the evolutionary reasons why we sleep.
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There are a myriad of reasons why we sleep.
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But this system is most active during deep sleep.
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And the system clears metabolic waste during those first few hours of deep sleep compared to later on in the night or early in the morning.
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Now, let's be honest, without a deep clean, those neurotoxic toxins can build up and this can cause cognitive fatigue, mental sluggishness, brain fog that we often refer to.
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We know that not getting enough sleep or getting poor quality of sleep isn't just about feeling physiologically or psychologically tired or exhausted.
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A brain running on chronic sleep debt, particularly deep sleep, makes decisions worse.
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The prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for judgment and impulse control, is disproportionately affected by sleep loss.
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That's why you can't focus.
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That's why it is not just a productivity issue.
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This is a leadership issue for anyone that uses their brains to make decisions or calls.
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No small addition will substitute for that maintenance window.
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No supplement, not a morning routine, not a cold plunge, whatever you bolt on.
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on top of your four, five, three hours of sleep, is still sitting on top of that insufficient or poor quality of sleep.
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You cannot outperform your biological blueprint and your biology needs sleep.
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There are lots of other things beyond sleep.
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I often say there's five fundamentals that I come back to.
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Sleep, stress adaptability, movement, nutrition, and human connection.
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And if you've listened to episode two in this podcast, The Stress Superstorm, you already know what I mean by building stress adaptability.
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It isn't about eliminating stress.
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It's about our capacity to dance with stress, to recover from it properly rather than staying switched on.
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And if you listen to episode three on the biological power of connection, you know that isn't just a nice to have either.
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It's genuine and a measurable driver of our resilience and not something that we fit in when everything else gets handled, when our to-do list is triaged.
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None of these five are complicated.
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Movement doesn't mean training for a marathon or doing an F45 class necessarily.
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It means getting your body to move most days, whatever way you can sustain.
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Nutrition doesn't mean having to follow a strict eating protocol or regime.
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It means food that fuels you rather than food that's just convenient and
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And we now know that all of these things make a measurable and sustainable difference.
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None of these things require a subscription or a device, which, if I'm honest, might be part of why it's so easy to overlook.
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There's no industry that's built around telling you to sleep, move more or connect more.
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They're usually pretty much free.
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And this is the part why I talk about embodiment rather than just knowledge.
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You can know all of these fundamentals.
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You can appreciate that those basics work.
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But most ambitious women that I meet already do know this intellectually.
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Knowing isn't the gap.
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Living and implementing them consistently when nothing about them feels urgent, exciting.
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That's the actual gap.
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Here's the pattern across all five.
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If I'm honest, none of them are really exciting.
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None of them will ever trend.
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None of them are TikTok worthy.
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Yet they're exactly the first thing to get skipped the moment something shinier turns up.
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There's a simple psychological reason that the miners win our attention so easily.
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Novelty.
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Our brain is wired for novelty.
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Our brain looks for something new, interesting, different.
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And repetition does not do that.
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A new supplement gives you a small hit of maybe this is the answer.
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Week four of consistent sleep doesn't feel like anything special because by week four, it's just become maybe and hopefully how you live.
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That's not a flaw.
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It's just how our attention and our brains work.
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And there's a cost to the stacking itself beyond the fatigue that we were trying to fix in the first place.
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The more things you add, the more regimented you become, the more you try to optimize and manage every part of your life, the more mental bandwidth goes into managing, tracking, dosages, remembering, forming new habits, which becomes its own mental load layered on top of everything else.
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Five supplements, three apps on top of five hours of sleep isn't optimization.
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It's just more to manage while you're running on empty.
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I think there's a real mechanism behind why this doesn't work.
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A fundamental you work for three days and then abandon doesn't get the chance to compound.
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Your body doesn't bank partial credits for a good sleep week followed by three bad nights.
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It has to be embedded, consistent, boring, ongoing to actually change the system underneath it.
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Sampled, done one off, it's just noise.
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Embedded is the whole game.
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It's where things will consistently change.
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So here's what I want you to do with this.
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And it's deliberately unglamorous, simple, which is really the point of today's episode.
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First, the weakest link audit.
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What's your ignition habit?
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I call ignition habits the habits that will have the biggest downstream ripple effect on your performance and well-being.
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And the reason I picked sleep as an example today is that for most people, having a consistent sleep and wake time or establishing an evening power down ritual becomes their ignition habit.
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Because sleep does not impact your performance and well-being.
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It dictates your performance and well-being.
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Look honestly at the basics that will sustain performance and well-being.
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Sleep, stress adaptability, movement, nutrition, connection.
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Which one is generally your weakest link right now?
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Not the one you feel guiltiest about.
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The one that you think you're actually furthest from where it really needs to be.
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Pick that one and commit to it just for two weeks before you try and add anything new.
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And consider what can you subtract rather than what can you add to implement that habit.
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It's usually the one quick hint that you need to pick is the one you give the most elaborate justification for skipping, I should say.
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If you've got a very good reason why you don't sleep or you don't move or you don't call your friends back, it doesn't apply to you right now.
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in the direction of your answer.
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Second is what I call the gate question.
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Before you buy the next supplement, download the next app, book in for your next sauna or cold plunge, ask yourself one question.
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Have I actually worked the basic that this is meant to replace and have I done this consistently for at least two weeks?
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If the honest answer is no, you have to answer.
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Save the money, do the boring thing instead.
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I use a version of this question myself more often that I would probably like to admit.
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Standing in front of a shelf of supplements, I've already half forgotten that I probably own at home.
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This isn't about being perfect at any of these things forever.
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Optimization isn't about doing everything and all the tiny things.
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It's about looking at what are the macro, simple, basic things that you can implement before you reach for anything new.
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That's it.
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You don't have to buy anything new.
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You don't have to add more protocols.
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You don't have to add more strategies.
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These things don't always feel sophisticated.
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That's deliberate too.
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Sophistication was never the thing that was missing.
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So the basics, yes, they might be boring, but they're boring because they work.
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They're boring because they work slowly, quietly, without a lot of fanfare, without a launch or a highlight reel.
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That's just what real change looks like most of the time.
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This doesn't require more willpower than you already have.
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It requires going back to living and working in harmony with your human operating system, your HOS.
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So this week's power-up is to name what's your weakest fundamental principle.
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Name it out loud and commit to it for the next two weeks.
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You don't need a new system, a hack, or a protocol.
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You just need to run the basics because the basics work.
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If you work the basics.
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In our next episode, we have an interview with a female business owner who is doing incredible things.
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I look forward to sharing this episode and her insights with you.
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I'm Dr. Christy Goodwin, a neuro performance scientist, speaker, author and executive coach.
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Thank you for listening to today's Spacious Success episode.
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If today's episode, you realize that you know what fundamentals that you've been avoiding, dodging, ignoring, and you want real science-backed structural changes to embed rather than just white-knuckling it and throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, that's exactly what my coaching programs are built for.
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Reach out at drchristigoodwin.com forward slash coaching to look at the one-on-one and group coaching programs that I offer.
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I'd love to be able to support you with real science-backed solutions where we use biometric data from a wearable device to track what works for your human operating system.
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Thank you for listening.