Practical Genius (23 page)

David Rowan adds, “We’re drowning in information, and it’s hurting our ability to concentrate. You have to be very disciplined to switch off completely at least once a day. Shutting down allows you to think at a deeper level and provides stillness for this kind of dedicated thinking time. It is then your brain does what it was built to do and magic happens.”

On this advice, I began shutting down for a minimum of thirty minutes at the end of every day. This was a tricky one for me to master, but I have to admit, the clearing in my head was kind of amazing and allowed for a kind of authentic engagement with my own
thoughts and with my family in a way I had not experienced before. Hint: you need to get everyone behind the shutting-down program. No phone calls, no television, no computer or handhelds. If you’re alone, no prob. But tricking a five-year-old into turning off his favorite show so Mommy can shut down isn’t easy. So choose your shutdown time wisely, and get buy-in from your crew. I guarantee that you will all feel the difference.

Don’t worry. I’m not going to try to boss you into eating tofu and birdseed. I am going to boss you into making conscious, genius choices about what you consume, knowing that it makes a difference in the way you work, play, relate to others, sleep, and otherwise attempt to gain pleasure from your life. What you eat and how you use your body aren’t about your weight or your waistline; they’re about how they give both your head and your heart what they need to produce your genius.

One of the best ways I have discovered to assess the importance of the content of what we eat is to measure the success of those around me in relationship to their diets. Sometimes I quietly observe the behavior of others, and sometimes I just ask! I’m intensely curious about what fuels each person’s genius, and when I see people who are clearly operating in the zone, right at their other G-spot, I try to find out what’s on their plate. From a whole range of genius clients, community members, friends, educators, thought leaders, business associates, and all of my genius crew I have learned a common denominator—they eat purposefully.

Wanting to test this theory out in my own life, I began to try to isolate and identify the foods and drinks that really make a difference in
my energy, alertness, and engagement. I turned myself into a little lab rat, focused on what each meal and the variety of foods I tended to eat at those meals was actually doing for me. Over time, I discovered that some foods were really putting something in the bank for me—berries in the morning, for example. Nutrition-minded people have been talking about the antioxidant benefits of blueberries and other berries for a while now, and I heard them. But the difference between eating a fistful of blueberries at some point in the day and eating a bowl of blueberries first thing in the morning was noticeable for me. Along with a cup of super green matcha tea, I found I was wonderfully alert, but not in a molto-grande-double-espresso kind of way, more like a just-woke-up-from-the-world’s-nicest-nap kind of way. Buddhist monks drink this tea when preparing for twelve-hour meditation sessions, and now I know why. I feel crisp, fed but not weighed down, and ready to get to the smart part of my day. The whole-wheat bagel or bowl of granola or egg-white omelette I had been eating for breakfast for the previous few years probably wasn’t hurting me, but they definitely weren’t helping me either.

I went through this kind of trial-and-error, remove-and-replace process across most of the foods and drinks I consumed regularly and landed on a pretty tight combination of things that I can count on juicing my genius jets and giving me the energy and mental resources I need throughout the day. For me, it’s food like wild salmon, with all those great omega-3 essential fatty acids that are essential for brain function. Or avocados. Like any good Puerto Rican, I love avocados. But I recently discovered that they love me right back, their unsaturated fat contributing to healthy blood flow to the brain and potassium supporting mental function and nerve impulses. It doesn’t hurt that I have an awesome hundred-year-old avocado tree in my backyard!

My day is also punctuated with nuts and seeds such as walnuts, almonds, cashews, peanuts, sunflower seeds, sesame seeds, and yes,
a little flaxseed that I mix into things here and there. Beans have replaced rice and pasta most of the time, too. And though what feeds a genius truly varies from one to the next, I will go out on a limb and speak for all of us in saying “Genius loves chocolate.” Especially really good, really dark chocolate. If you disagree, I don’t mind—it’s more chocolate for me.

I have a friend who was a lifelong Pop Tarts or Cap’n Crunch for breakfast type, and she had reached a point where she really wanted to replace the eating habits that were holding her back with habits that would boost her genius. Now, there’s a reason she’s a Pop Tart girl; she’s fun and funny, and of course she’s eating Pop Tarts, right? Still, how to help her find the way to feed her genius? She thought back to breakfasts she’d loved as a child—in particular, toast with peanut butter and Fluffernutter, of course. She decided to experiment with a genius version of that breakfast, with crunchy toasted sprouted grain bread slathered with a natural (but good-tasting) peanut butter,
sans
the marshmallow Fluff. At first she whined, “It’s not the same.” But eventually she started to feel the difference between her old genius-busting breakfast habits and this new approach, and she started loving her new peanut butter toast. There is nothing like landing on the combination of foods that lift you rather than hold you back to motivate you to keep testing, trying, moving foods around to see whether they work better early in the day or later, or just moving them out altogether.

On the subject of genius busters, there’s one thing we do have in common: the high levels of refined sugar, white flour, trans fats, salt, and a bunch of terrifying additives we’ve consumed over the years that are now hiding out in every nook and cranny of our bodies, like those creepy sand guys in
Star Wars
, hurt us
all
. They combine to accumulate in our systems and drag us down, slowing our minds, our reflexes, and our muscle recovery, thickening our bodies, and wrecking our sleep. If you want to know what is making you feel bad
on any given day, there’s a decent chance it’s that crap. For me, the real genius busters are alcohol, artificial sweeteners, caffeine, sugary beverages, greasy or processed foods, and the granddaddy of genius-busting grub: white bread.

I’m not preaching, I’m just telling you what we all know to be true. There’s a term from the early days of computing, GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. At the time, it meant that a computer, not knowing the difference between bad data input and good data input would process it regardless and produce bad data output. The same goes for what we’re talking about here. If you really mean to invest in your genius 100 percent, it’s going to take some housekeeping. Eat whatever you want, I mean it. Just eat what you know lifts you up and lets you access the very best of your perfect combination of assets and takes you to—and keeps you at—your other G-spot every day.

You know, in the same way time management is a hoax, so is exercise. Exercise is an external, self-imposed prescription for the body, whereas movement is a way of syncing up the body’s relationship with the world. Hmmmm... which would you choose?

Ironically, I came to this conclusion based on what I learned from a fitness guru named Michael Gonzalez-Wallace. Michael taught me about BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein that promotes the neuronal growth. Researchers and physiologists have known for a long time that aerobic exercise of any kind increases the production of BDNF and causes the new and preexisting neurons to branch out, join together, and communicate with one another in new ways. When our nerve connections get thicker, we’re able to speed up our reasoning processes related to all kinds of things, including problem solving, creativity, learning, memory, and higher thinking. That’s why sometimes even just chugging away on a treadmill in the morning, a new idea may occur to you or a solution to a problem that has been keeping you awake will present itself.

This information didn’t make me want to run to an aerobics class, despite my obsession with supporting genius. It was Michael’s story that got me.

“I played professional basketball in Spain for many years and as a player became obsessed with performance,” Michael told me. “Then I went off to college, studied economics, became a banker, and obsessed over performance in relations to numbers. From basketball to economics to banker, I then decided to become a certified professional trainer from the National Academy of Sports of Medicine and became obsessed with the human body.”

As a trainer and, frankly, an egghead, Michael quickly realized that his high-level executive clients became easily distracted by traditional exercise and became bored with the simplicity of movements during training sessions. Exploring what he had responded to in his own life,
he designed a program that allows his clients to multitask in a way that is similar to what happens when playing basketball, where your strategic mind and your body must engage simultaneously and almost continuously.

“For example, instead of having my clients just do bicep curls, I have them combine a right-arm biceps curl with a left-leg lift, forcing the mind and body to work together to accomplish the movement, coordinating left and right and adding balance to the mix, which provokes the brain. By adding balance and coordination with each strength training movement, they became sharper and stronger. Most interesting, though, was that my clients reported to me that they were becoming more focused outside of the gym.

“After seeing the change with my clients, I reached out to neuroscientist Dr. John H. Martin and he explained that by adding complex moves, balance, and strength training together, I was actually accessing the section of the brain’s cerebellum, which is the main headquarters for balance, coordination, and intentional movement. This kind of multitasking—having the brain and body work together for the same goal—represents the connection between motor skills and learning, sharpening your mind, and very effectively and efficiently toning your body simultaneously.” By figuring out how to activate the cerebellum when the body is in motion, Michael created what I absolutely believe is a practical genius way to think about our bodies—asking the mind to work along with the body to activate the best we’ve got, the good stuff, the top-shelf bottles at the Oak Bar.

I loved learning how different kinds of movement trigger different kinds of brain activity. Michael explained, “Gina, what happens when you add additional weight to your body, whether it’s holding water bottles or dumbbells, is, your brain goes into this wonderfully productive, complex active mode, trying to figure out what do with the extra weight.” Knowing the outcome, if you think about what’s possible every time this happens, you’d be brain/body multitasking all day long!

Like life—and genius—I think it’s being conscious of the combinations of things—the assets, the vocabulary, the people, the chemistry—that can make us astound ourselves. But you have to be committed to the experimentation this requires, the testing, testing, testing that proves theories and illuminates truths and gives you your Madame Curie moment of genius. To be honest, I love this part. I love playing with what’s possible, tinkering with the potential of every single thing. Don’t forget that genius is always experimenting.

We treat sleep like a bodily function, like burping or pooping. It’s
so
not a bodily function. It’s as spiritual and critical a state of mind and function of genius as I can think of. I once heard Arianna Huffington say that the way to achieve success was to literally “sleep your way to the top.” We all deeply need good-quality sleep and are really missing the potential it can unleash. Arianna learned this simple lesson the hard way after collapsing in her office from exhaustion and breaking a cheekbone.

This isn’t about the XX number of hours of sleep you need and REMs and every other clinical thing there is to say about sleep. I’m sure you already know what your optimum sleep margins are—when it’s best for you to go to bed, when to get up—yet you probably fight the margins at both ends, all the time. Believe me, I did that for a long time. I’m a natural night owl, yet I know that I get more out of my whole being when I fall into sleep somewhere between ten and eleven at night and get up at six, to get my time alone in the morning before the day breaks loose. I’ve learned that the lack of the amount of sleep and the correct margins of sleep for your mind and body are critical to my practical genius. All-nighters are for teenagers and club kids. Acknowledge your nature as a creature on the planet—you’re a morning person, you’re a night person—but identify and honor your optimum margins if you want to realize the full potential of every day.