Over-Exertion is the #1 Cause of Poor Performance, Poor Health and Disease

By John Allen Mollenhauer, Performance Lifestyle® Coach JAM
FOR ME, overexertion STARTED EARLY  I began working as an entrepreneur at the age of 9. I grew up in a modest, middle-income family, and my parents were pretty frugal. So, I enjoyed the freedom of having my own money. I never thought I would be anything but an entrepreneur and a business owner.  By age 19, while going to college, I had not only been running a small business for a decade while going to school, playing three sports, and “growing up,” I had already bought my first gym (open 19 hours per day) and then, by 21, co-founded what would become a chain of gyms. I was a driven achiever, applauded and rewarded for it, but while my friends were just getting started after college, I was facing what felt like a midlife crisis— tiredness, and fatigue.

I just couldn’t wrap my head around what “it” was that was driving me so hard for so long. And, on being tired, I thought something was wrong with me. Let’s just say I didn’t yet have the mindset I have today around human performance.  

Fatigue was considered an excuse in the ’80s and ’90s, and still is, but it’s not. 

When I turned to personal development to sort out what was happening, all I heard was to push through the “excuse” of fatigue with “mental toughness” in one form or another. So, I did. Then the Internet hit, and before I knew it, I had access to more information and opportunity than ever before in my history, maybe ever in history for everyone, and that set up a major dilemma--the busier I got, the less time I had to take care of myself, my body, and my life.

As a result, I started living with persistent performance (energy) anxiety because I was always engaged in working, learning and socializing, etc., but in retrospect, I never stopped to regenerate.  My sleep was limited, and I was afraid to stop, let alone rest. I thought I had to keep up and keep going.  Meanwhile, my energy debt persisted and compounded. I was crushing it on the outside, but on the inside, I was getting crushed by excess stress and fatigue.  With so much going on, I was barely hanging on, and it started affecting my health, success, relationships, and well-being.
By 31, when the 2000 market crashed, I was crashing, signaling I had to correct course. So, I started thinking about a new way to achieve my goals without burning out or trading my health for success. 

Can you relate with such a pattern?  Can you think about periods in your life where you started to downward spiral but didn’t know why?
 
I started thinking about a new approach to achieving goals.

Initially this was not about living “healthy” for me. I was already pretty adept at nutrition, and fitness at the time. Being healthy was the given, not my goal, but over time I realized that if I was living out balance—overexerted, under-recuperated, and fatigued, how healthy was I really living? So that was something, probably the primary thing, I needed to correct in a new approach to achieving my business and life goals. I needed to stop overexerting so that I didn’t feel tired most of the time. I wanted to make better lifestyle and business decisions, achieve my higher-level goals, and have a better quality of life. 

And that’s when it hit me: Your lifestyle is how you achieve your goals. 
 
If I wanted things to change, if you want things to change, I/You would need to know the fundamentals of energy and how to manage it better, health and how to improve it and, ultimately, performance and how to optimize it. I wanted to bridge the gap between staying energetic and healthy and being successful at higher levels. And that’s when I started studying the lifestyles of healthy, high-achieving people who were thriving. 

DISCOVERING PERFORMANCE LIFESTYLE

From that point forward I set out to develop a solution addressing all the essential aspects of lifestyle; to leave behind the old ways of achieving my goals that were tiring, burning me out, and leaving me feeling worn out… and learn scientifically sound and practical (no-nonsense) new ways that could all be integrated into one approach. And that’s when it all began to change.

I was searching the Internet for insights into human performance, and I discovered an idea in elite athletics called “Performance Lifestyle,” a support service that enabled athletes to sustain their training and win in their sport by getting free of the distractions holding them back. It was an amazing discovery, it wasn’t yet defined, and I immediately knew this was the concept I was looking for. Around the same time, I discovered a book called “Performance Addiction,” the dangerous new syndrome, and how to stop it from ruining your life. If I was going to improve my life performance, and potentially help others do the same, it sounded like something I needed to know about. When I read it, I realized I had finally figured out what “it” was that had been driving me so hard for so many years and why. It is the only addiction you’ll ever be rewarded and applauded for yet can ruin your life!

I called the author, a Harvard Psychologist, and ultimately co-authored a book on the subject with him and a Superbowl MVP (who wrote the forward) as part of my recovery from this insidious addiction to thoughts. The book is called The Curse of the Capable, the Hidden Challenge to a Balanced and Healthy High Achieving Life.  That I was “driven or ambitious” was never the problem. I still am today. The problem was that I was not yet spirit-driven; I was psychologically driven (some might say egoically) and achieving my goals for the wrong reasons in comparison to others. I did not understand the fundamentals of human performance; I wasn’t managing my energy and didn’t have the lifestyle or support I needed for success without distress. And all of that needed to change. 

THE ANTITHESIS OF THE PERFORMANCE ADDICTED LIFE.

It would take another ten years and nearly $3,000,000 in accountable costs overall to get free of performance addiction, wake up and change the story; and to define, and learn how to manage my energy, like the pros do, in a “performance lifestyle” I could call my own. That process started with a mindset shift away from endlessly grinding and overachieving and eliminating the ambivalence I had about the situation and circumstances that I coped with for decades. And now learning a performance lifestyle mindset and the skill sets of healthy high achievers who thrive.
 
And as I shared my story and the discoveries that were helping me, more and more men and leading women started showing up.  Men, for example, who were driven at the highest levels started to raise their hands. They wanted to overcome their mounting fatigue and were done numbing themselves.
They didn’t want to go solo through all the male default inertia, the path of least resistance, never complaining or explaining while going through all the physical and psychological pain that debits their joy and longevity and more.  They felt, precisely like I did, wanted to learn the new way and didn’t want it to take decades!

The PERFORMANCE LIFESTYLE For Everyday Achievers, Was Born.
 
If you want to change, to have more energy, better health, and higher performance so you can succeed at higher levels and sustain it, stop for a second and think that it might not be your motivation, attitude, or outlook alone. It may be your lifestyle.

Check out the 5 Achiever Types, and determine how you’re achieving your goals right now. Your approach may be working against you, not for you.
 
Today my company, Performance Lifestyle Inc., is dedicated to training and coaching Men and leading women entrepreneurs, business owners, and professionals to go beyond being grinders, overachievers, and high achievers who are prone to tiring out, burning out, and feeling worn out, and become Healthy High Achievers Who Thrive.
 
We help our clients live their true potential, regenerate, and restore their bodies and learn how to manage their energy like the pros do at the core of developing a Performance Lifestyle they can call their own. 

Our experience as the founders of REGENUS CENTERS enables us to help our clients unlock their bodies’ resilience to bounce back from stress, pain, and fatigue with proactive retail, on-site, and at-home recovery solutions that dramatically improve health and performance.