Ultimate Performance Archives

Most Important Meal for Improved Focus

Breakfast is most important meal for improved focus. It sets the stage for how your mind and body are going to perform throughout the day. Most people eat some form of grain based breakfast with little protein and almost no quality fats. Many people skip breakfast all together. Others go straight to energy drinks or other stimulants without even having a glass of water first. People in all these groups are doing themselves a huge disservice.

Let’s look at our processed grains and flour folks first. Eating a bagel, bowl of processed cereal, or muffin does almost nothing to get your day started right. You may feel satiated in the short term, but will find very quickly that you are either hungry or sluggish a couple of hours later. This mainly happens, because you have spiked then crashed your blood sugar all before 10am. Processed grains with little protein and no quality fats will almost always cause this to happen. Sugar is a nightmare for our brains, period. Sugar triggers a release of dopamine, the same neurotransmitter at the heart of all drugs of addiction. The release is not as strong as cocaine or heroine, but the premise is essentially the same. Eating sugar leads to loss of control, sugar cravings and increased tolerance to sugar.

Now, let’s look at our breakfast skippers. Upon waking your body goes about completing the many important processes it has been working on overnight. Many of these processes require water and some nutrition to be completed. By jumping in the shower and rushing out the door with nothing in your stomach, not even a glass of water, you are really shooting yourself in the foot. If you don’t feel foggy and tired as a result, it is likely only due to your body being juiced on stress hormones from the lack of food and water intake and will only last a short time. When your body is in this state, it is in survival mode and will conserve resources like it is starving. Additionally, the cascade of stress hormones will be followed by a nasty craving for carbs and sluggish cognition.

Finally, the energy drink or stimulants for breakfast group. These folks may be temporarily awake, but they are going to be chasing their tale trying to get their energy back all day long. Stimulants like caffeine when taken without the right balance of nutrients and fluids cause a pop in energy, then a sharp drop off into mid morning exhaustion. Your nervous system runs on electrolytes and vitamins. When you flood your system with stimulants without nutrition, you strip your body of these critical building blocks of energy.

So, what to do? What constitutes a focus and energy producing breakfast? Well, opinions certainly vary, but some themes are common amongst all prominent theories around a healthy, focus improving, and energy producing breakfast. In the Learn to Thrive with Adult ADHD video series, I brought in registered dietician and nutrition researcher Jae Berman to outline what healthy eating really is and how meal timing can be a game changer for energy and focus.

Check out these simple tips to start optimizing your breakfast.

One: Get rid of sugar! Gone, bye, adios. Refined sugars in either a cereal, juice, soda, or toaster waffles are a nightmare. They do nothing but crash your energy and highjack your metabolism.

Two: Eat some healthy fat in the morning. This may be nuts, avocados, grass fed butter, or even high quality dietary supplements containing refined MCT oils.

Three: Get some protein. Protein is the building block of skin, muscles, blood, and cartilage. If you are eating nuts in the morning, you are getting some protein and healthy fats at the same time.

Four: Dial back or cut out flour and processed grains. Your body treats bagels, croissants, breads, etc. as a sugar and will lead to a crash and possibly an addictive cycle.

My daily breakfast tends to be comprised of a glass of water, then coffee with highly refined MCT oil in it (I prefer Brain Octane Oil by Bulletproof. You can find it here.), along side a shake made with spinach, blueberries, cashew butter, and a high quality protein powder. If I eat this breakfast, I have energy and focus. If I fall off and eat waffles, a bagel, or a bowl of refined cereal, I will be tired and almost shaking in about 1-2 hours.

I help people reach optimal focus and performance in their lives all day. In order to do so, I need to be on my game also. Shouldn’t you? Start with the right breakfast to turn up your focus and energy.

Climbing for Focus

By Phil-boissiere 6th April

Unless you live under a rock (no pun intended), you are aware that rock climbing is often a solitary activity. Although there may be someone holding a safety line for the climber, it is essentially the climber using their skills alone against the mountain.

For avid climbers, it is a welcome break from our ever connected world in which technology prevents us from being alone with our thoughts. It is crucial for our mental well being to have time to sit with our thoughts and to exercise finite focus on activities. Daniel Siegel of UCLA, the founder of the Mindsight Institute is huge proponent of combining physical activity with mental focus. Often times we fall victim to an overly stimulated mind that is void of rich processing of thought and regular clear focus. Obviously, this is something experienced more intensely by people with ADHD, making activities like rock climbing even more important. We know that exercise boosts focus by raising levels of dopamine and norepinephrine. However, when exercise is complex, like climbing, martial arts, or soccer, it also brings online the Cerebellum, further enhancing the positive effects on focus.

Climbing, much like surfing, becomes an important daily meditation for many people. With the advent of rock climbing gyms, you no longer need to let weather or distance from a rock face hold you back. Most climbers will tell you that being outside with nature is best and provides the most rewarding climbing, but that should not hold you back.

Get out there and find some solitude and focus.

Check out more from Dan Siegel and the Mindsight Institute here.

Hyperfocus and Flow, the Facts

By Phil-boissiere 10th March

Flow is defined as an optimal state of consciousness or optimal brain state, where decision making becomes automatic, intuition is heightened, performance increases, actions follow one another like a seamless pattern, time falls away, and breakthroughs in creative thought are made. Flow can be experienced by all people, and most will many times in their lifetime.

Hyperfocus is defined as a time of extreme focus on a particular task, in which time falls away, and the task at hand becomes the only point of attention. Hyperfocus is typically experienced by people with ADHD, predominantly due to a deficit in regulating focus and the depth of attention. However, people with ADHD will often speak about hyperfocus being helpful intermittently. What’s likely happening is that they are actually intermittently slipping into a flow state. Remember, all people can experience flow, so it is likely that those with ADHD are just mislabeling it as hyperfocus when it happens. Thus, they are left confused about why hyperfocus is helpful only some of the time. If people with ADHD are able to become more attuned and able to identify flow states vs hyperfocus states, then they may find the key to unlocking incredible performance.

Flow is a desired and highly valuable state that people try to trigger on purpose (it does also happen organically). People like Steven Kotler & Jamie Wheal of the Flow Genome Project work to help others harness flow for optimal performance.

In Learn to Thrive with Adult ADHD, host Phil Boissiere works to help people develop the likelihood that they will enter into flow and reduce the likelihood that they will slip into hyperfocus. Hyperfocus is typically uncontrollable and leads to extended focus to the point that it can harm productivity, such as spending 4 hours researching the history of the internet. Hyperfocus, although helpful in some situations, does not lead to expansive and creative thought that leads to creative, physical, or academic breakthroughs. Flow on the other hand, leads to exponential changes in performance and problem solving.

For more information on the Flow Genome Project click here. To read Steven Kotler’s groundbreaking book on flow The Rise of Superman click here.

Check out the trailer for The Rise of Superman, it speaks volumes!

Finding Happiness at Work

By Phil-boissiere 26th February

People spend an incredible amount of time at work, yet give very little thought to their own strengths and values in their relation to work. People are happiest in their work if three things are present:

Values: Does one’s work align with their values?
Excellence/Expertise: Are they an expert in what they do? Do they get to exercise expertise?
Joy: Does their work bring them joy.

When these factors are present day in and day out in someone’s work life, they are much more likely to be happy, fulfilled, and energized. Take me for example, I’m a therapist, a teacher, a trainer, and a coach. I listen and I talk for a living. I love it and it aligns extremely closely with my top strengths and my values. I go home at the end of the day happy, fulfilled, and thankful for the opportunities I have had to touch lives in a healthy and constructive way.

Very very often, when people are unhappy and unsatisfied in their work, they do not have the V.E.J. When I help these people make changes in their lives we take inventory of their strengths and values. Nine times out of ten, when they are unhappy, their top strengths are not being utilized and their work does not align with their values nor does it bring them joy.

In our video series Learn to Thrive with Adult ADHD, we ask people to take a step back and take inventory of your own V.E.J. in relation to their work. When people do so honestly, they tend to make better choices that allow them to blossom in their career.

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