Alchemy 365 Challenge: The Art of the Reset
by Mike Jones
You know how your Mac or PC needs to be reset or power cycled occasionally to run optimally? It’s running great for a while, lightning fast. Then you open your email. Then your internet. Then you add tabs. Then a few more apps, and things slow down a bit. Then, you have a very important Skype session, and you get the wheel of death. Your computer has more processing power than the entire mission control that sent us to the moon, but add enough apps and it’ll slow down to a snail’s pace. This is incidentally how my smoking hot wife, Andrea, operates her computer at all times – it runs about as fast as a Commodore 64.
I like this analogy for ourselves, in nearly all of our repetitive daily tasks that add up to shape how we approach this crazy world we live in. What do you eat for all the meals of your day and how are they prepared? How much sleep do you get and how do you prep to sleep? How much alcohol are you taking each week? How much are you reading currently? Are you exercising? There are a hundred considerations like this on a daily basis – all built around making daily habits that make you live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Once you commit to making a big change, like exercising or nutrition, many other things usually follow and things hum along nicely. Then you go out of town for a long weekend which throws you off. You don’t prepare any meals, so you eat out most of the week. You’re catching up on work so you get to bed a little later than you want but still get in a few episodes of Stranger Things, so your sleep is decreased. You don’t read a thing all week. Then you go to the state fair once with your kids and again on your birthday and didn’t hold back at all on the goodies. Going into the weekend you’re like, “I’ll clean it up on Monday” so you go crazy with rich food and drink. And so on. It’s time for a reset! (This is an actual snapshot of this past week).
I’m sure there’s no scientific data to back me up on this, but from experimenting on myself and hundreds of people, I believe a hard reset on a bunch of repetitive lifestyle factors a few times a year is the best way to steadily improve your overall lifestyle. Trying to make small changes one at a time certainly can work, but a big change to multiple areas of health makes a more immediate impact. The idea is to tighten things up in a few key areas like nutrition, sleep, exercise, stress management, and be extremely diligent for a set period of time. Once that period of time finishes, you “relax” a little bit but habits have been formed and your average lifestyle design is a little bit higher than it was previously. Do this over and over again and a few years later you’ll notice how much healthier and productive your daily habits are.
This philosophy is exactly what led to the design of Alchemy’s 365 Challenge. A hard reset of the body and mind to show you what things are like when you’re running your body and mind optimally, develop some habits that will carry you through the rest of the year, and raise your level of lifestyle optimization. Don’t believe it works? Give an honest try at a Challenge and prove me wrong.
Mike Jones is CEO of Union Fitness and Alchemy. In his spare time, he enjoys raw denim, long hair, and long boarding.
