Science-Based Strategies to Prevent Burnout & Boost Performance with Erik Korem

0:01Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire. are brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Billion Dollar Moves. Today, we'll be breaking down science-based strategies to prevent burnout and boost performance. To drop these value bombs, I are brought to Eric Karem and to EO Fire Studios. Dr. Eric is the founder and CEO of AIM7. He pioneered sports science and athlete wearables in America. Eric's work in the NFL, NCAA, and Olympic athletes is legendary. And today, FarNation, we're going to talk about the gateway to growth.

0:41We're going to talk about adaptive capacity. We're going to talk about the five pillars to build adaptive capacity and so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Eric and our sponsors. The Gold Digger Podcast, hosted by Jenna Kuchar, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more. One of my favorite recent episodes is titled, How I've Built an Unmatched Team Culture, an insanely important topic for all business owners to dive into.

1:15Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Wondering how to leverage a virtual assistant to save you time and money all while growing your business? Get Belay's ultimate guide to working with a virtual assistant today. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get started. Eric, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. What's up, Fire Nation? Excited to be here today. Yeah, I would lean back on my years being an elite sport. When I worked in pro football and the NFL and college sports, a lot of times I would work with people that would come into new positions where they're taking over a new organization.

2:04And their default response was, I'm going to do exactly what I did at the previous place. And I never really saw that turn out very well. And the reason for that is when you copy the model, you copy the errors. Now, there's principles that can be applied to any situation, but there's different talent, different constraints, different environmental factors. And I think the same thing translates to business, is you may have worked at one software company in fintech, but you go to another one, there may have been principles to how you develop products. But every situation is complex, multidimensional, and relative, and you have to see the situation for what it is.

2:48I love that phrase. When you copy the model, you copy the errors. Great takeaway from that. And Fire Nation, we're talking about science-based strategies to prevent burnout and boost performance. I've already given you the amazing introduction of Eric and all that he's done and accomplished over his years. But I do want to talk about your origin story, Eric, because it led you to where you are today, which is incredibly impressive. So take us through that journey. Yeah. So I spent about 16 years in the NFL and working in college football. And I started as a human performance coach. And then in 2011, I had the unique opportunity.

3:30I was at Florida State University, which is a premier football organization. And I was promoted to essentially the GM of the team. So I'm running a$300 million organization at 30. and I asked the coach, the head football coach, I'm like, hey, look, I'll do the job if you let me give myself the title of the director of sports science. And he's like, you can call yourself whatever you want. That job didn't exist at that time here in the US. And what he didn't know is that I wanted to bring what was going on in other countries to the US. So I went to Australia for a month and I learned about the emerging world of sports science and athlete tracking.

4:06And I brought back tracking technology where for the first time ever we were able to track our football players in games and you know stadiums of 80 to 100 ,000 people and in practice and quantify what was happening these devices connected to GPS satellites and we had millions of data points and it was overwhelming and I ended up actually hiring a NASA propulsion engineer engineer to help me organize and derive meaning from the data and And when we did, we were able to turn that data into actionable recommendations to improve performance and reduce injuries. And our team had an 88 % reduction in injury the next year.

4:46And we went from a 9-win team to a 12-win team and won the championship. And then the NFL flew in after that season. I was like, all right, what the heck is going on here? And it literally opened a multi-billion dollar market for sports wearables and data. Fast forward a little bit of time. I was able to, during that time, also work with world-class sprinters, including several Olympic gold medalists. And I noticed that whether you were an elite sprinter or a football player, it didn't matter. You were able to adapt to tremendous amounts of physical and mental stress and thrive. So I was at the University of Kentucky at the time running performance for the football program.

5:23And I got a PhD studying how sleep impacts our brain's ability to adapt to stress. And we did some really cool research there, understanding how to build the capacity to adapt to more stress with less cost. Because the idea that you can manage stress is a fallacy. It just doesn't happen. You can't predict or manage the markets. You can't manage the way people respond to you. What you can do is build the capacity to adapt to more with less cost. And so that's where this whole thing began. And then I'd say a few years ago, we'll probably talk about this later, I left sports and started a company called AIM7, where we're teaching people how to do this by leveraging their wearable data.

6:10So yeah, I'm obsessed, I guess you could say, with how to help people thrive under stress. Well, I love that. And I am actually a wearable guy myself. I literally do not go to sleep without my aura ring because when I wake up, I want to know exactly what my deep sleep, light sleep, REM, what my latency score was. I mean, it's something that I really have used to maximize the quality of my sleep and really hold myself accountable. And one thing that people do try to avoid so much in life, Eric, is stress. But you believe that stress is actually the gateway to growth. So I want to talk about your belief here and give us a real world example of how it helped you or maybe one of your customers, clients, someone you've worked with grow in their life.

7:00Yeah, I think it's, you first have to fundamentally understand what stress is. And so the body does not differentiate between physical or psychological stress. It turns on the same biological systems and without going down the rabbit hole. The autonomic nervous system is one of those systems that get turned on, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. So these systems are just switching on and off. Think about it like this. If you want to get physically fit, what do you do? You engage in exercise. Do you know what exercise is? It's a stress. The only way your body's going to gain a new level of fitness is you have to stress it and then needs to adapt.

7:45If you want to learn a new skill, you have to deliberately engage in the difficult practice of learning. It's agitating. It's hard. You get stressed. You know what that does? Creates plastic changes in our brain that are actually finalized during sleep. So stress is the only way that you improve. And so if we reframe it, like how many times even have you heard people say, I was in a difficult relationship and I came out on the other side what? Stronger. And so the key here is like stress isn't the enemy, it's the gateway to growth. Where people end up getting sick or having mental health problems is when they experience an acute stressor that exceeds their capacity to adapt to it.

8:31Or there's this long-term, low-grade fever of stress that eventually catches up to them. But if you understand how to build the capacity to adapt to stress, you can build the capacity to adapt to more so the same things don't have the same cost, and you can literally thrive under these difficult circumstances. There's a book that I love that really dives in a lot of these principles called Anti-Fragile by Nassim. Oh, yeah. Such a good book. Yeah, such a good book. and really dives into why it's so important to not be a fragile, breakable person and why so many people that have achieved so many amazing things in life come from incredibly difficult, challenging backgrounds and childhoods because they became anti-fragile as a result.

9:19And I really want to move into adaptive capacity because I don't think a lot of people understand what the fundamentals of adaptive capacity are. So can you talk us through that? Yeah, so adaptive capacity is essentially your ability, the capacity you have to adapt to stress. So your body, I'm going to give you two scientific terms, okay? The first one is this term called allostasis. And it's your body's desire to achieve stability through change. So your internal environment is always adjusting itself to achieve stability. But every time you encounter stress, it costs you something. That's called an allostatic load.

10:03So there's a cost to adaptation. So your body's trying to achieve stability. But every time you take on something, whether it's relationships or financial stress or work or physical, it costs you something. So every day, so every human being on the planet has a capacity for stress. You can think of it like your gas tank. And the gas in the tank is your adaptive reserve or your currency for adaptation. Now, the bigger the tank, the more stress you can take on. And that tank can grow in size. The way that you do that is you engage and there's basically five distinct pillars. The scientific literature is very clear that if you engage in these things at a specific threshold in each area, that it's going to improve your capacity to adapt to stress.

10:54It's going to improve your longevity. And you're going to be more productive. And it sounds quite simple, but there's nuance to these things. It's sleep, exercise, mental fitness, nutrition, and fostering healthy relationships. So we can go into any of these five things that you want. But those five things, if you're hitting the basic thresholds for thriving that are going to create the conditions for adaptation. So when you take on a stress, here's what happened. Let's say I take on a physical stress. I'm going to go lift weights. I go lift something that's heavy for me today. I get enough sleep.

11:30I had a nutritious diet. I go to bed. A couple days later, I've adapted to that. Guess what? Now I can go lift something a little bit heavier. Over time, my body continues to adapt to those stressors, and I become stronger. Same thing with the cardiovascular system. Same thing with work stress. Yes. Remember the first time you got a job, you felt overwhelmed, it was difficult. After a couple weeks, you're like, eh, this is no big deal. You adapted to it. So what happens is if you consistently engage in these things over time, your capacity gets bigger and bigger and bigger. I do want to dive into these in Fire Nation.

12:06We're going to have some great conversations all around this when we get back from thanking our sponsors. I'm all about lifestyle freedom. I want to be able to do what I want, when I want, and there's no better time to kick your feet up poolside than the summertime. But to achieve this lifestyle freedom I speak of, you and your team need to work smarter, not harder. That's why we're so excited about HubSpot's integrated AI tech. It's helping teams of all types and sizes automate the more tedious parts of running a business. With AI-powered tools built into HubSpot CRM, you can pull reports, sift through loads of data to see what's working and what's not, and even craft content all in a flash.

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13:55It's packed with helpful content about how to leverage a virtual assistant to save you time and money all while growing your business. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get started. So Eric, we're back and you talked about these five pillars for building adaptive capacity. Let's talk about sleep right now. I love that. But it's what I studied for my doctoral degree. You know, there's a lot of amazing things that happen when we sleep at night. I'll kind of hit a couple highlights. One is restoration of your immune system. So during the day, these stress systems are turned on, right? So your cortisol level spikes in the morning, which is great.

14:40That actually helps you feel alert and energized. And these stress systems are turned on so that you're a good friend of mine, Dr. Alex Arbach. He's a director of wellness and development for the Toronto Raptors says that stress is your brain and body preparing you to do something effortful. Isn't that a unique way of looking at it? And your body turns on these systems so you can go do hard things. You can engage in difficult things. But during night, during sleep, those systems are downregulated. They're turned down. So cortisol goes down. And your immune system can now ramp up because you start healing yourself.

15:13and immunological memory is generated so that you can fight foreign invaders. Also, during sleep, specifically slow wave sleep or deep sleep, growth hormone is released, which helps regenerate your tissues. Also, I don't know if you know this, but during REM sleep, there's actually a blocking what's called the corticospinal pathways, and you're basically in a state of paralysis, so your muscle tissues can completely relax. For us men, most of our testosterone is released during later stages of REM sleep. And just sleeping like five hours or less a night will age you almost a decade in the terms of testosterone in just one week.

15:53Because about after the age of 30, we lose 1 % to 2 % of our testosterone per year. And about 15 % of the US working population experience this right now. In addition to our hormones, also regulating things like our hunger hormones, leptin and ghrelin, our brain literally detoxifies itself during sleep. About 15 years ago, we found that our brain has this unique system called the glymphatic system. It's not a lymph system. It's a glymphatic system. And when you sleep, cerebral spinal fluid goes into your brain and kind of mixes around and it sucks out all this metabolic waste products and drains them out of your brain, of which one of them is called amyloid beta.

16:33And it's associated with things like Alzheimer's disease and dementia. this is one of the reasons why we believe now that when you get a really good night of sleep how your brain is clear you don't have a foggy brain it's because literally you don't have crap stuck in your brain anymore and also why as we're seeing a decrease in the average sleep duration of people around the globe we're seeing an increase in neurodegenerative diseases and then i would say last for people that are listening to this show that are striving out there to build something that's substantial, learning and memory consolidation is finalized during sleep.

17:12So during the day, you engage in difficult tasks, you're learning new skills, and those neurons in your brain are actually marked with different neurotransmitters. And when you go to sleep at night, there's these two scientists, Tononi and Sorelli, that found this. They call it synaptic homeostasis, where those neuronal connections actually strengthen and actually get bigger, and other ones are selectively weakened. So our brain is actually expanding and contracting at night. So the use it or lose it thought is actually pretty true. So when we engage in difficult tasks of learning, all that is finalized when you go to bed at night.

17:44So getting a good night's sleep is going to give you an edge on your competition. So those are like three big bucket items that happen during sleep that help you adapt to more stress. I am so obsessed with sleep, and you just made me feel a lot better for that obsession. And I'm going to go back and listen to this last section a couple times. And I hope you do as well, Fire Nation. Now, there's obviously four other pillars, and you're going to have to do a deep dive, Fire Nation, with Eric to find out some more details about that. But I want to move into AIM 7. Talk to us about that. Yeah, thank you so much.

18:21So if you kind of go back to my story with sports, you know, we had all this data that was coming off these devices, but it actually caused a lot of friction in the early days. my boss came to me after the first week and was like what are we going to do with this and i had no clue and it didn't really sit well with him and so that's when it may dawn i mean like data without insight a really actionable intelligence is completely useless well right now we've got 130 million americans that use wearables people all over the globe are using apple watches and fitbits and even or rings and to be quite honest most of it's just data like you mentioned earlier or my sleep phases or how long I slept.

19:00But what does that mean for me? So what AIM-7 does is we give you daily personalized recommendations for what we say is your mind, body, and recovery to help you look, feel, and perform better. We make it actionable for busy people. So for instance, for your body, we would give you the precise type, intensity, and duration of exercise that your body is ready to adapt to today. We have data that shows this dramatically improves fitness, reduces burnout and injuries. For mental fitness, we can assess your acute psychological state, and we literally push you in intervention in real time. Like, I'm stressed out.

19:36AIM-7 sends you a specific breathwork tool, or your mood is down. We'll send you a specific gratitude intervention. And then with sleep, we get really granular, John. It's like, you know what? Duration, onset, and consistency are the three most important behaviors to modify. We'll identify which one you need to focus on. And we have a masterclass library from the best in the world that will teach you how to improve each one of these areas. Then after a week, we analyze your data and we're like, hey, this is the one area you should focus on. And we provide you a very specific personalized goal to walk you to the place you want to get.

20:12So we meet people where you are on your journey and bring you to where you want to be. So whether you have an Apple Watch or a Garmin or an Aura, we're device agnostic, data agnostic. We suck it all in and we make it useful for you. Man, this is so up my alley. And Fire Nation, I hope that you're really treading in this direction as well, because there's so many amazing ways that we can improve our health, our wellness. And I love the phrase that the healthy person wants a thousand things. That's a great place to be. The unhealthy person wants one thing just to be healthy. And this is what we want Fire Nation to be and remain healthy.

20:50So Eric, give us where we can find out more about you. Share with Fire Nation a call to action. Yeah, absolutely. I'm on all the major social media platforms at Eric Corum, and you can go to aim7.com, A-I-M-7.com. And then we also have a podcast for busy professionals like you, where we take topics like cutting edge science, leadership life skills, and we deliver it into little 15, 20-minute episodes. So you don't have two hours to listen to these crazy long scientific episodes. We break it down into bite-sized information you can actually put into use, and it's called The Blueprint. The Blueprint, Fire Nation.

21:31Check that out. And you're the average Fire Nation of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with EK and JLD today, so keep up the heat. and for links to everything that we talked about, visit eofire.com, type Eric, that's Eric with a K, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Eric, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thank you so much. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Eric for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation's successful entrepreneurs accomplish big goals.

22:07That's why I created the Freedom Journal to guide you in accomplishing your number one goal in 100 days. And we're talking step by step. Visit thefreedomjournal.com. And I'll catch you there or on the flip side. The Gold Digger Podcast, hosted by Jenna Kuchar, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. The Gold Digger Podcast helps you discover your dream career with productivity tips, social strategies, business hacks, inspirational stories, and so much more. One of my favorite recent episodes is titled How I've Built an Unmatched Team Culture, an insanely important topic for all business owners to dive into.

22:41Listen to Gold Digger wherever you get your podcasts. Wondering how to leverage a virtual assistant to save you time and money all while growing your business? Get Belay's ultimate guide to working with a virtual assistant today. Just text FIRE, that's F-I-R-E, to 55123 to get started.