Do you feel like you have brain fog and is it hard to get up in the morning to do what you do?

Or do you need that afternoon nap a lot so you can get through the day? As coaches, we not only have businesses to run, but we also have clients and students to take care of which is why I brought in an amazing expert, Tanessa Shears, to talk about how to optimize your body & brain so you can show up at your desk full of energy, sharp & focussed.

Tanessa Shears is an experienced health consultant who specializes in helping high achieving entrepreneurs completely overhaul their health so they can achieve massive breakthroughs in their personal and professional lives. She rolls up her sleeves and gets elbows deep with her clients as she guides them to work through all of it, piece by piece.     

What makes Tanessa’s clients so successful? She understands that creating a plan and following it is only PART of the solution. She teaches her clients how to manage the stress & mind drama that comes with taking back control. She loves exploring what ELSE is possible for your business when you fully optimize your health, elevate your focus and REALLY go to work

After Tanessa discovered how powerful proper sleep recovery and targeted nutrition were to creating the clarity, energy and focus to grow her own business, she developed her signature Becoming Limitless Program that she teaches to her clients. With these skills, she has completely transformed her life and is continuously living in breakthrough. 

In just 7 years, Tanessa graduated from Simon Fraser University on the President's Honour Roll, grew her business to 6 figures within two years, completely overhauled her diet and dropped 15lbs, bought her first dream home before 25 and her first rental property by 28. She found the love of her life, whom she married in 2019, and now is the proud Mom to a beautiful baby girl. While planning a wedding and enjoying her pregnancy, Tanessa & her husband started an e-commerce business together to create freedom and fun.   

She's no stranger to setting BIG goals. She’s been there herself and figured it out - that’s why she created her cutting edge program based in modern science for entrepreneurs looking to take their business to the next level and get the most out of every single day.

Tanessa’s Certifications

BCAK Registered Kinesiologist

BSc. Biomedical Physiology & Kinesiology

Certified Sleep Science Coach

SFU Certificate in Health & Fitness Studies

SFU Extended Coursework in Applied Human Nutrition

Certified Precision Nutrition Coach

BCRPA Personal Trainer, Cycling Instructor, Group Fitness & Aquafitness

Tanessa’s Links:

Instagram: instagram.com/tanessashears 

Website: tanessashears.com

Freebie: tanessashears.com/energy

Podcast: tanessashears.com/podcast

Products mentioned:

Standing desk link: https://amzn.to/3GgZUNW

Stand desk foot mat: https://amzn.to/30KEybi

House sandals: https://amzn.to/3G7X6m2

Oura Ring: https://ouraring.com/

Episode Transcript:

[00:00:00] Lindsay: Tanessa thank you so much for being on the book, your gym claims podcast. I'm really excited to have you on. 

[00:00:46] Tanessa: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm looking forward to our talk to, okay. Oh 

[00:00:50] Lindsay: my gosh. Yes. We already had a great conversation and lots of laughing.

[00:00:54] So I think we're ready to go. Why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and tell everyone what you do. 

[00:00:59] Tanessa: Yeah. My name is Tanessa Shears and I am a health consultant, but I work specifically with entrepreneurs because we are a very special breed. We love our word. And we love to get involved with our clients and we love, you know, to make our content and stuff like that.

[00:01:16] But when my clients come to me, it's usually at the point that they have been diving into their business so much to the point that when they hit their first milestone or they, you know, they look up to breathe. They're like, oh my gosh, I have. Exercised in forever. And I w what is sleep anymore? And I don't eat well anymore.

[00:01:34] And they find that their health has taken a back seat, and they're just not enjoying their life the way they want. And the way that this always presents is they're just like, I am exhausted all the time. I wake up tired. I hit, you know, that drain period about 2:00 PM in the afternoon. And then I just crush under the couch.

[00:01:52] I watch Netflix and I'm scrolling my phone at the same time. I feel this sense of brain fog and the worst part about the brain fog is not only does it just feel terrible, but you're kind of losing your mojo, you know, your inspiration, your creativity, and everything starts feeling so much harder than it used to.

[00:02:11] So what I love to do is really teach clients how to optimize how their brain works and how it performs in their business with a fun little thing called biohacking that we can talk about. My job is to basically get your brain back up to working at a hundred percent peak performance. And I do that by optimizing our health, our movement, our food, our especially our sleep and how we deal with dress.

[00:02:35] Lindsay: Amazing. No one talks about this. They all talk about business and do the work. And then what are you supposed to do when you walk away from your office? Are you supposed to just lay around and do nothing and procrastinating? Getting yourself healthy again. Cause I think that happens a lot when you're just starting.

[00:02:53] Cause you're just in it so deep. And then like you said, when we look up to breathe, it does feel like we haven't looked up to breathe or even sometimes I catch myself, I haven't taken a deep breath in forever and like, wow, well, how long have I been. Shallow breathing, things like that. But when I think this audience is a lot of, a lot of them are probably just starting.

[00:03:15] So they're in like the deep, the thick of it, right. They're working really hard, getting everything set up because it is a lot of work to get everything going. And. Put their workouts on the back burner. They're just like wandering to the kitchen and grabbing random food and snacks and stuff like that.

[00:03:32] And no one talks about how this plays a huge part into your performance as a coach. So let's dive into some symptoms of. Brain fog and not working at your prime level. What are some symptoms that we can catch right now? 

[00:03:49] Tanessa: Yeah. You know, what's interesting if you walked into your doctor's office and we're like, all of these things are happening, the brain fog is not exactly like a diagnosis.

[00:03:57] They'd give you, but like you said, it's a collection of symptoms. So think of things like all of a sudden you're forgetting really simple things like your go to write an email on your phone. Oh, who am I? What's the name of the person I'm writing the email to really simple things. And you notice that start happening or you wake up with low energy and your head just feels thick and heavy at the front.

[00:04:18] And there's just this overall sense of fatigue. You can't shake you, you feel like you're confused easily. And one of the biggest ways it shows up is just in our inability to focus and concentrate. Like we are distracted every time a ping goes off on one of our devices, or we get a message that comes in and we have hard, a hard time staying in that deep work state and just feel like we're always surface working because we can't keep our attention.

[00:04:44] Focus. And it basically just feels like there's a lot of clunky or cloudy thinking. And the analogy that I really love to use when you can tell, if you have brain fog is like, let's say you walked into the apple store and you were going to go and get the highest performing computer. And like, I don't know about spectrum laptop on computers, but let's just say.

[00:05:04] Graphic cards, the best screen resolution. You wanted the best memory and you've got all of these amazing things and you took your supercomputer home. You sat it on your desk and all you did was browse the internet. That is what I like to think of as our brain and how we use it. We use it in such a way in which it's just its base function.

[00:05:26] And I think. When we start neglecting our health at the expense of our business, we forget that we have this super computer and we lose touch with how good it's supposed to perform, how quick it's supposed to feel, how sharp and clear and focused we're supposed to feel because that brain fog sets in.

[00:05:42] And it's the equivalent of using a supercomputer to browse. 

[00:05:46] Lindsay: That's a fantastic analogy. And sometimes we think that brain fog is a part of just who we are. For me, I always say it's really hard for me to focus. I need to do certain things in order to allow Lindsay to get something done. And my husband.

[00:06:00] As famously calling me sidetrack and McGee over here, because I guess I tracked it very easily. So you kind of feel like it's a part of you, right? I, I can't concentrate unless the environment is perfect or whatever it is. And so we think that that's a part of our personality. So is it a part of who we are or is it something that we can actually fit?

[00:06:22] Oh, it's a hundred 

[00:06:23] Tanessa: percent something we can fix. And I find that that is one of the things in the entrepreneurial community. I mean, we look around everyone. We talk to is tired. Everyone wakes up dreading their alarm clock. Everyone hits that two to 3:00 PM energy slump, and just kind of, you know, shuffles through the work and then just feels so.

[00:06:42] Drained at the end of their day that they just did just want to lay down on the couch and tune out the world and scroll Instagram, even though they'd rather be hanging out with their kids or, you know, cooking dinner with their partner or going for a walk with a dog or all of the things that, I mean, we created our businesses for us for that schedule freedom and to have the lifestyle we want, but we're too tired to enjoy it.

[00:07:03] But it just seems so normal. Everyone is tired. We just think that I've had clients tell me, oh no, you don't get it. I have kids and everything is different. Oh, you don't get it. I have I I'm, I'm older. I'm going through menopause or I'm going through this. This is just what happens as you get older. And I always like to challenge that and say, why do we want to accept that as the norm would, there is evidence.

[00:07:24] If we look around that there are people that feel on top of their game energetically and they do feel clear and focused. Okay. 

[00:07:31] Lindsay: Let's talk about how to get on top of our game. Especially as coaches, we need to be on top of our game because we have clients who are messaging us, who need feedback, who need help, who need just an ear to listen.

[00:07:43] How do we operate our businesses at our highest level? 

[00:07:48] Tanessa: Yeah. Well, the first thing I always love to optimize is our sleep. And I got to tell you sleep is one of those things that most of us will be like, no, it's fine. I get my seven, eight hours. I'm fine. And I always love when I work with my clients, I.

[00:08:04] Always have them wear a sleep tracker of some kind, whether it's a Fitbit or an apple watch or a ring or something like that. And I analyze the data regularly. And what I'm seeing is that in the clients that really believe they truly believe they're getting their seven to eight hours a night. What they aren't accounting for is the fact that our brains, because we don't know how to turn off our brains.

[00:08:25] We are constantly engaged in our business that we don't actually enter sleep properly. So I find on average entrepreneurs are spending about an hour. To an hour and 17 minutes awake per night, that includes, you know, tossing and turning, taking long time to fall asleep, waking up unexpectedly. And then when we actually look at how much time we're spending asleep, it's closer to six hours.

[00:08:46] Now this is not enough to have a high-performance brain. So this is why I like to start with sleep. Even though it's like not the most sexy thing in the world. I cannot tell you. What a difference it has made because when I had my daughter, I mean, we experienced as parents, the most intense type of sleep deprivation.

[00:09:06] And I tried to go back to coaching my clients two weeks after, because I love my business and I love my clients. And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do this. But I remember sitting on my first call being like, was this a smart idea? Am I actually useful right now? Because my brain wasn't working. And that's when I really started clicking with me and going, yeah, Oh, my gosh, entrepreneurs are always showing up to their business with a low level of this is my brain really working well kind of effect.

[00:09:34] So when it comes to sleep, there's so many things we can talk about in here, but the number one thing that starts with. Are we getting enough sleep? And so what I always like to mention to my clients is we look at something called sleep opportunity. So let's just pretend you're like the average entrepreneur that does spend an hour tossing and turning, falling asleep, waking up during the night.

[00:09:56] If you want to get your seven hours of sleep or your eight hours of sleep. You need to add on an extra hour that you spend in bed to account for that time. So let's say you wanted seven hours of sleep. You need to be spending eight hours trying to sleep to make sure you get that seven. So if you're only believing time for seven, I guarantee you're probably getting either six or five hours, 45 minutes.

[00:10:19] Lindsay: Okay. What are your favorite apps to monitor your sleep? If you have like an apple watch or a Fitbit? I know I had a sleep app, but I know there's so many out there. Do you have one that you can record? 

[00:10:30] Tanessa: Yeah. So there are a whole bunch. I do really like the ones that connect with the devices. I find that the ones that, you know, just be put on your bedside tables and they listen to you all.

[00:10:39] I have experimented with those and I don't find them as accurate. I do have clients that use the apple watch and it does come with a native. With the apple software. However, there is an app called pillow that you can sync with an apple watch that allows you to export your data. And this is important because if you're just looking at one single night, you wake up and look what happened last night.

[00:10:58] Great. And you do that again, but you're not really noticing trends, right. So I do like to be able to just look at those numbers on an Excel sheet and just see, okay, look at this. I got six hours, six and a half, 6 45, 7 hours. 45. So that's the app I like for that. As far as what I use myself and with my clients, I really liked the Fitbit app.

[00:11:17] And then myself personally, I love using my Oura Ring and that just hooks up to the Oura app that comes with the software. They they're, they have different purposes, a Fitbit and an Oura Ring. So I kind of, I kind of use them together, but I really love nerding out about that stuff. 

[00:11:31] Lindsay: See, I thought the ring looked really nice, cause I sometimes cannot stand it to wear this huge watch while I'm sleeping.

[00:11:38] So I loved the ring idea. So I'm going to put that, we'll link that in the show notes, because I think it's helpful just to know where to get started. Cause you can go to the applications on your phone and then there's so many and you don't even know what to choose. And the last thing we need is another thing to choose from.

[00:11:53] So thank you for telling us. And what we could use. Okay. So why do you think, I mean, I know how many times do you wake up as an entrepreneur? I have a great idea. I need a quick write this down because we're always brainstorming. I think I know I am. I come up with these random ideas and then sometimes they don't make sense when I get up in the morning.

[00:12:12] Like, why did I have an idea to do this? This, that makes no sense, but I think we're always thinking, cause we're so excited and we just love our business so much. What are some other reasons that entrepreneurs in particular. Lose that one hour, one hour and a half while we're sleeping of 

[00:12:27] Tanessa: deep. Yeah, I think there's two big reasons.

[00:12:30] I think number one is that we are not allowing our bodies to actually calm down before bed. And this doesn't have to mean you're working right before bed. Although some of us do and some of us, that's just the opportunity that we get. If we have kids or family or whatever like that. But our bodies actually need to, to take a step down and to step out of that mild fight or flight we're in all day.

[00:12:56] So while we are in our business, we want to be alert and we want to be focused and we want to be attentive. Right? Well, with that comes a mild state of fight or flight, right? We want to be focused. There is cortisol pumping in our body. Unfortunately, when you put that. Sleep that doesn't work so well.

[00:13:13] Right. So what we're finding is if you're waking up in the middle of the night and you're just like, oh, and you have an idea, it probably means that your cortisol wasn't low enough before bed to get you all the way through the night. So I really like to talk a lot about like, what is in that bedtime routine and specifically how you can, I guess, biohack your brainwaves.

[00:13:33] So if you think about the alert and attentive state, we talked about that is when your brainwaves are going to have a state. Beta. So that's good. We love that in our business, but as we wind down towards sleep, we want to down step it into alpha, which is a bit slower. And I like to think of it as feeling relaxed and kind of laid back and you can feel the days slipping away and we need to spend time in this as a transition into sleep so that we're not waking up during the night.

[00:13:59] So that's reason number one is if we're not actually taking that, that down time before bed reason, number two is we actually might be running out of melodies. So melatonin is a hormone that actually ramps up in the hours prior to sleep, to help us fall asleep and stay asleep. Now, the problem is there's a lot of things that disrupt melatonin and the big one that we know about, we've probably all heard about is blue light before bed.

[00:14:22] Whether it's your phone, whether it's computer, your tablet, your TV, so blue light. Special frequency of light that comes from our devices and it's, our brains are super sensitive to blue light and it basically tells your brain it's the middle of the afternoon. Why do you need to go to sleep? We should be wide awake right now.

[00:14:39] So when your brain gets that feedback of. Blue light. We don't need to make melatonin. Let's stay a wide awake. So then we're wide awake, staring into our phones, scrolling Instagram before bed, or we're watching TV. We go to lay down, we close our eyes and our brains, like, what do you mean? It's like one in the afternoon.

[00:14:56] We sleep now. And then we toss and turn, we lay there, stare at the ceiling being like, what is wrong? I can't sleep. And then we fall asleep and then. Because we didn't have enough time to ramp up that melatonin production. We run out early and it's three in the morning and you're like, why am I up at 3 0 2 every single morning?

[00:15:14] So those are the biggest two reasons. 

[00:15:16] Lindsay: That is especially now, nowadays when you're I remember when you first had your cell phone, Plug it in and the kitchen before you went to bed and you would go to bed and now your cell phone is right beside you at all times. And it can be so tempting to just check something or read something.

[00:15:34] And that light is just, it's like going into your child's room at two in the morning and turning on the light. And that's what you're doing to yourself. They're like, oh, it's time to get up. It's bright out. Right. Or when the seasons change and it's dark at night and they're wondering why no, or late in the evening.

[00:15:47] And they're wondering, why do I have to go to bed? Right outside. And it's the same thing. Okay. So sleep is super important. We know that. And I think we should just move on to the next thing. What are there? Things are happening to us and what can we do to remedy this? So again, we're being the best coaches.

[00:16:04] Yeah. So 

[00:16:05] Tanessa: one of the big things that I think is essential to start integrating and incorporating as coaches and entrepreneurs is the idea of doing energy versus being energy. And we need to make sure we're finding time to contrast that. So like, think about. What we do at a day, we are on zoom calls. We are responding to messages, we're writing emails or writing post copy.

[00:16:26] We're posting on social media. We're designing programs, like think of all of the doing we are in, right? So that doing leads to higher cortisol. And we forget that we are human beings, not human, doing that, even when we're done for the day. We have errands to do we cook, we cook dinner. We maybe have a little laundry to throw on.

[00:16:48] Like there's so much stuff in our life that we end up just doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. And then what happens is we get to the end of the day. And we're white and we're like, oh, I don't want to go to bed. I need some me time. And we're all guilty of that with saying like, I know I should go to bed at nine 30 or 10 or whatever your bedtime is.

[00:17:12] But we're just like, I'm just going to watch another episode. I'm just going to stay. I'm going to scroll just a little bit longer and it's because we really need that me-time to start recovering. But what I love to ask is why is it that we need so much of that me time at the expense of the things that are going to help us.

[00:17:29] And it's usually because we spent the whole day in doing energy. So. I always like to say, okay, how can we incorporate a little bit of being energy? And if we're going to contrast that being energy is that idea of being where you are and actually feeling what is going on. So a really simple hack that you can do.

[00:17:48] And I love doing this between client calls, especially if I have, you know, one of those days where we have five to six back-to-back all day is between calls. After I refreshed my water. What I'll do is I will sit at my desk and I will actually take my pulse at my wrist for 30 seconds and I will breathe and I will slow down.

[00:18:08] And I will remind myself that I am a human being because I find that sometimes if we get on those back-to-back calls, sometimes what ends up happening is we get so stuck in that forward, you know almost more of a masculine energy. And we don't listen as well. So it makes us better coaches, if we are able to do.

[00:18:28] Lean back, what is going on? How am I feeling right now? How can I listen better? It's that? Check-in to how you can show up better in your next call. And I mean, we don't always just have to take pulse. We can get up and, you know, we can stretch, or we can plan five to 10 minutes between calls instead of cramming everything back to back, like making sure we're spending time to eat our lunch and eat our lunch, not eat our lunch and be at our desk and also be answering messages and an and right.

[00:18:56] Lindsay: And it's, it's harder than ever to, to just do one thing sometimes I'm we kind of give ourselves this, especially mothers, this award of being such good multitaskers and that's not. A good thing. Right? I think we were so used to toggling back and forth and having a hundred tabs open and on our browsers and talking to this person and this person, but what are the, what's the repercussions of constantly going at full speed?

[00:19:27] What are the repercussions of. 

[00:19:30] Tanessa: Yeah, well, I mean the best way we can describe it and the word we are all familiar with is burnout and brain fog usually comes first. And that's why I like to talk about brain fog so much. Cause it's kind of like the warning flag where it's like, okay, something's going on here?

[00:19:43] We're not, we're not addressing just our health at a base level here, but burnout is where that ends because when we get stuck in all that doing energy, like I said, Cortisol and fight or flight are on all of the time. And this has stress has actually been shown to kill brain cells. So we are not getting any more creative and we are not maintaining our energy.

[00:20:04] And I mean, stress just destroys energy. Right. And even if we think we don't have stressful stuff going on in our lives, Body stress can be entirely different. And that's one of the actual really cool things about the Oura Ring specifically that I have enjoyed is they have a feature on there called your heart rate variability.

[00:20:24] And I know there's some other devices and stuff, but measure it, but basically it is a measure of how stressed out your body is by measuring. How much time there is between each heartbeat without getting too specific on it. You can basically look at the score and tell if your body is stressed out or it is not.

[00:20:42] And that was one of the reasons why I think it's so important for us to be aware of how much sleep we're getting, what type of food we're eating, if we're moving and be tracking this type of stuff, because it's, it's the equivalent of almost. Going shopping and having no idea what is in your bank account and you swipe your credit card and you really just hope it goes through.

[00:21:01] Like, it doesn't make sense. We always are aware of what is going on in our bank. Right. So I find that without some way of visually tracking, are we getting enough sleep? Are we managing ourselves? Are we eating whole foods? Are we moving? It's essentially like trying to do your online banking and spend your life, but having no idea what's in there, we need some way because our brains and our bodies don't have these printouts that say you are getting enough sleep.

[00:21:25] You are, you know, managing your stress well, so we need to take that on because I honestly think it's the best investment you can make in your business is a fast. Highly focused brain cause we can get so much more done in a day than we usually do. And nothing has taught me that more than really optimizing my brain over the last couple years and just seeing how much more I can get done.

[00:21:45] How much less time I have to put into that. 

[00:21:47] Lindsay: Optimizing your brain with food. It let's talk about that. Some of the the negatives, the negative symptoms of. I mean, I'm not going to sit here and tell people what to eat and what not to eat. Nobody's perfect. But can we just dive into like a one-on-one.

[00:22:03] Tanessa: Yeah, absolutely. So there is when I'm starting with food, what I always like to look at, and one of the first things, and especially if we're going to relate this to our Workday is we want to take care of that energy crash that happens in the afternoon. Right. Because that's a lot of productive time lost if we just feel like having a nap the whole time.

[00:22:22] So what I always like to do is I like to start by looking at, okay, what are we having for our first and second meal of the day? Because those are the ones that are usually going to set us up energy wise. For the whole day. So when we're talking about food specifically, we want to eat food during our workdays that keep our blood sugar low.

[00:22:40] Now, if you're talking about foods that keep your blood sugar high, it's going to be processed like foods, like carbohydrate-based foods that. Simple carbohydrates. So things like bread and pasta and cookies and treats and buns and breads and all of that kind of stuff, because what happens is when we eat that stuff, our blood sugar shoots up and to follow that is a hormone called insulin.

[00:23:05] Brings it back down, but what goes up, comes down and that's where we get on that roller coaster of energy all the time as we get that shoot up and that crash. So I find oftentimes when I'm working with clients that have that afternoon energy crisis, usually because they grab something convenient for lunch because they were working at their desk, something like a reheated bowl of pasta, maybe made some noodles, grabbed a bowl of cereal.

[00:23:27] Something like that. And they just had a massive blood sugar rising crash, and it just leaves their brain performing poorly for the rest of the day. So what I always love to suggest is like, if we're going to have those really dense foods that do that to our body, I do like to keep those for later in the day.

[00:23:44] So they don't affect my work so much. So what I like to include stat instead is thinking, okay, where are my sources of protein coming from? Where are my sources of fat coming from, and where is my fiber and my vegetables. So really good example of a breakfast. That'll keep your brain feeling really clear are like scrambled eggs and half an avocado, thinking of something like that.

[00:24:03] For lunch, I love the idea of doing fish because it is a brain food because of the omega-3 in there. And maybe with a, you know, a little bit of brown rice and thinking things like Brussels sprouts and asparagus or a salad, you know what I mean? Like really keeping our foods whole. Whether they came from the ground or they had a mother, those kinds of whole foods keeping them whole during the early part of the day so that our brain stays focused and clear as much as possible throughout the day.

[00:24:30] Lindsay: Yes. Okay. What's your thoughts on fasting for brain fog? 

[00:24:34] Tanessa: Ah, so fasting is one of those interesting thing where it's kind of a double edge sword. So for the longest time, there was a lot of research coming out saying, you know, intermittent fasting is great. Right? And I mean, I was part of that. I have been, you know, a deeply ingrained in the fitness industry for over 15 years now.

[00:24:50] But as of the last couple of years, there is actually more and more research coming out on how intermittent fasting affects women specifically because women have traditionally always been left out of research. It is just because we have monthly hormone cycles that fluctuate, right. We have cycles and a lot of time research can't predict where we are in our site.

[00:25:11] All together as a group and standardized results. So we've just been left out, but what's happening is there is more research emerging, and they're finding that our hormones are incredibly susceptible to food restrictions during certain times of the month. So as much as I do love that clear feeling that comes from.

[00:25:32] You know, that intermittent fasting, especially, you know, if you miss through breakfast and don't eat until lunch, I find that in clients that we see that stay on consistent intermittent fasting their HRV, their heart rate, variability, that's that measure of stress plummets. And that is not a good thing.

[00:25:49] So we, what we need to recognize is that because our hormones are changing throughout our cycles, we need to respect that. And for example, when we're talking about this from day about. Of our cycles. So obviously all the way to the start of our period, we actually have naturally higher levels of cortisol in our body, which means our body is naturally under more stress during that phase.

[00:26:12] Now, anytime you restrict food, it also increases stress because one of the country indications of fasting. Is stress levels. If you have high, if you are a high stress individual, it has been clearly said, fasting is not going to be for you. So during this time, I always like to kind of widen the eating window out to like 10 to 12 hours.

[00:26:31] And then if I'm really wanting to get those benefits of fasting, that's what comes during the first two weeks of the cycle. So really making sure that we are, you know, respecting our hormones and our longevity and well-being, and at the same time, getting that clarity of focus. 

[00:26:46] Lindsay: That is interesting. I love, I love fasting, but if we're talking about a female, it is so much easier to fast within the first two weeks.

[00:26:56] Okay. Compared to later, and I didn't even know there was science behind that. So thank you. I think that that makes so much sense. Yeah, 

[00:27:03] Tanessa: it's actually interesting because at the, during the first two weeks, our blood sugar is naturally more stable and you have a naturally reduced appetite. Both of these things make for a beautiful environment for fasting.

[00:27:17] But like we said, in the last two weeks, not only is cortisol. Blood sugar is unstable and we do have an increased appetite. So this is why everything will feel more challenging during those second two weeks. And I even mean things like your workouts, all of a sudden you're like, why is this so hard? I did this problem last week.

[00:27:35] Why do I feel so hungry? Why do I want more carbs? This is all so normal. And so I love to use this as an opportunity to like, say. This is where we use compassion for ourselves, because this is going on on a hormonal level. This is not in our heads. We are not weak. We are not failing. This is a hormonal thing that we need to work with to make us feel better.

[00:27:55] Not again. 

[00:27:56] Lindsay: I think that's such a great outlook working with it. And it kind of gives you a little bit more variety too, to your mountains, right? You're not like, okay, now I have to fast everyday for the rest of my life. Cause I really enjoy it. But sometimes it feels difficult and it's always during those times, so that makes so much sense to me.

[00:28:13] And it almost feels like, okay, well the first two weeks I can do this. And then as the next, the rest of the month amps up, then I can give myself a little bit more. And not feel like, oh my God, I failed once again or whatever that is. So thank you for shining some science on that. Yeah. Okay. So now we talk, we talked about sleep.

[00:28:32] We talked about food. Let's talk about exercise. I know lots of entrepreneurs will say, well, I'll start working out once I get everything situated and running on its own, but that will never happen. Just start now. Right. But let's talk about when we're not moving our bodies, what happens to our brains?

[00:28:50] Tanessa: Yeah. So the, one of my favorite things that happens with exercise is there something called brain derived, neurotrophic factor, BDNF, and it is produced when we exercise and it actually creates neuroplasticity. It makes us smarter. It makes us more creative and it makes us better. Problem-solvers all of these things are.

[00:29:08] Wonderful. But aside from that, it's one of the best ways at creating stable mood and stable energy and really help to dissipate any of the stress we are experiencing on our bodies, on our brains from being so passionate and involved in our businesses. Like I'm one of those people, like I love to work and I don't think it's a bad thing to say that as long as we're cognizant of like the fact that it needs to be balanced with also caring for your body.

[00:29:36] Right. And so. Exercise. It's one of those things where we can really just take a break, but most of my clients are in the same boat. It's either if I can't do five days a week, what is the point in doing two or yes. Right when I hit, when I get, you know, my first five clients, when I hit my first $5,000 a month, whatever it is then, oh my gosh, all my problems are gonna be solved.

[00:29:57] Everything will feel easy. I won't feel so worried all the time, but I mean, we all know having gone through those milestones, All of a sudden, now you're looking at 10 K months and you're looking at 10 clients and you're your horizon is always moving forward. So I really have had to take that moment and be like, okay, how do I want my business to feel then while I have to start feeling that way now, if I want to make time for movement, then I have to make it now, because if I show up to those first five clients or that first $5,000 a month or whatever it is with the brain that I'm using right now, My life is going to feel and look the exact same then no matter what's in my bank account, no matter how many clients I have.

[00:30:40] So making that proactive change. And like I said, a lot of us are busy, whether we're entrepreneurs or we're parents or whatever it might be. So the idea of just like starting exercise might seem exceptionally overwhelming. So here is the place that I always recommend. You start set a minimum base for daily.

[00:30:59] Activity. So what I always love that first challenge is set something like 5,000 steps a day. What that means to me is I don't have to go out and go exercise to get that. I just might need to pick up a, you know, do a couple extra loads of laundry around the house. I just might need to get out of my chair between calls, but it's proactively bringing my brain to the idea that I am a person that moves all day a little bit, because what we have this idea of is that.

[00:31:26] One hour workout five times a week is what should be perfect. But then we sit the rest of the day and that's called an active couch potato. And that actually has health effects as well. That aren't that positive, right? You're better off enjoying a lifestyle that is physically active on the daily. Then having your structured one hour workouts and sitting the rest of the week.

[00:31:45] So I always set a base goal and I need mine is 5,000 steps a day. I go over it most of the time, but that is my minimum. So if I'm on a day where I have five or six calls and I'm watching my steps and I'm at 3000, I know that I'm going to have to put the effort in on that day. And it just keeps me more active.

[00:32:03] And this is the best place to start because it is something doable. And if at this point, like I've worked with entrepreneurs that get one to 2000 steps a day, totally normal. If you're really in the weeds of your business and you weren't growing it. Let's start with 2000, then work up to 3000. I mean, find yourself where you're at and how can you incorporate 10% better of your steps per day?

[00:32:26] Just start there and watch what happens as you gain that, just that clarity and start feeling better about yourself. And you find that space in your day. 

[00:32:36] Lindsay: Oh, such good tips. So one thing that really helped me last year at around this time, I was just, I've been working from home for 17, 18 years, and I just, I couldn't sit anymore.

[00:32:48] It was driving me insane. And so I got a thing to put on top of my desk to rise, raise up my computer and I took my chair downstairs and locked it in a closet. And I got a. Foot mat with like the weirdest sphere in the middle. So you can kind of like put your leg up a little, put your foot up and kind of shoot out your hip and kind of switch posture.

[00:33:11] That has been a game changer with energy because I have three kids around me at all times, and they're always asking for something. And I had found that every time they would ask me, like, can I have a drink of water? Can you reach the bowls or whatever? I had to get up and that was like, oh my God, I have to get up.

[00:33:27] You know, I just sat down and now I'm just standing all day and it feels so good. Yes. There are days where it gets really long when I have an 8:00 PM client call and I've been standing here since 5:00 AM. It feels so good and I actually cannot sit anymore. So I don't know if that's good either, but standing.

[00:33:44] It was a game changer while I'm working. And so that made a huge difference because, you know, I live in North Dakota and you live in Vancouver. Right. And so we'd have really cold winters. We can't just like go outside and go for walks or whatever in the, in the dead of winter. So this kind of made me feel like I was still doing something and it was so much easier for me to just walk in and out of my own.

[00:34:07] Tanessa: Yes. Oh my God. I love the idea of the standing desks. I got myself, a standing desk as well. And you know what, the interesting thing is what you said, you know, what you use for your feet to stand on. That's actually one of the biggest recommendations because when most people are like, I'm going to get a standing desk, they either just go, you know, I got mine at Ikea or you can get the desktop or one either way, and then most people just stand there.

[00:34:29] But. The majority of us, because we've been sitting so long or standing on funky postures, I'll just say it that way. Whether we are arch through our lower back or hunch through our shoulders and standing in that position can really create a lot of stress on the body as well. So I love what you said. So one of the things I always like to do is just, do you have a small box lying around the house and alternate putting your feet on it?

[00:34:53] So it shifts your posture and shifts your position. And if you're like, oh, that's idea of a standing desk is great. Yeah. I always recommend starting small start with doing 10 to 15 minutes every hour standing, and then sit and work your way up. Because like you said, that is something that you've probably achieved over the long-term and it feels fantastic.

[00:35:13] And it is good for your body because your body is used to that. But if you're just someone right now, who's like, I like the idea. I'm going to try it. Start doing it in small bursts and let your body gain the strength to stand for those longer periods of time. And you'll start noticing it because you go right to try to stand the whole time, right off the bat.

[00:35:30] You'll often find that you'll end up with more aches. Yes. 

[00:35:34] Lindsay: Comfortable right away. 

[00:35:35] Tanessa: No, it's not. It's definitely something your body gets used to, but a hundred percent, it's just learning. I always like to think before we all lived indoors all the time with lights and, you know, technology. We probably spent a lot of our time, you know, hunting and gathering and moving around and creating and all of that kind of stuff.

[00:35:55] And that's how our bodies are designed to move. I mean, if you think back then there were no one hour structured workouts with weights and spin bikes, right. I mean, that's just didn't exist. And it was all about just physical activity over the day. So if you're like an hour workout, doesn't fit in. Start with something just like standing for 10 to 15 minutes every hour, start by increasing your steps.

[00:36:17] And then when you're ready for exercise, like the minimum baseline I set for myself is I tell myself I'm going to do three 20 minute workouts per week. 20 minutes is something that my brain can be like, I can make time for that. And most of the time it ends up being like, But it doesn't have to be. And sometimes I do five days a week, but it doesn't have to be in, it really takes that pressure off of, I should be doing this because it's supposed to be good for me and takes it to like, how can we just move in a way that we're not seated all day?

[00:36:46] How can we get out of sedentary and then start introducing little bits of exercise that actually feel enjoyable and doing. 

[00:36:54] Lindsay: Yes. Oh my gosh. And I always think, you know, in the morning when I get up, I don't really want to go work out. But then I think how will I feel for the rest of the day and the alternative.

[00:37:07] Not very great because I didn't get it in and it's going to be the first thing that I do every morning during the week, I used to do it during the weekend. And I was like, you know what I need to have, I need to have variety. So Monday through Friday, that's what I do. And it makes me feel good. And I know that the rest of the day I noticed that I did and that pay, that just pays off.

[00:37:27] So I always pay attention. How will I feel in about an hour? And which one do you choose then go with that. Like always go with the feeling. 

[00:37:36] Tanessa: Absolutely. And you know what, the interesting thing tying this back to what we were talking about earlier with our hormones that change during our cycle. Like if you are someone who has a regular exercise plan and you notice that some days feel harder than the others.

[00:37:48] Well, we had talked about the last two weeks of your cycle specifically, and we talked about the fact that your cortisol is naturally higher. So this is going to make things harder. What that does is it increases your body's temporary. It increases your natural heart rate. So if you were doing like a spin class per se, and all of a sudden, you didn't feel like you could push because your heart rate just felt higher that day.

[00:38:09] It's not anything you're doing. It's your hormone. So what I always like to do is phase my workout intensity based on where I am in my cycle as well. So I always like to think of it as from day one, I'm making it more intense. Maybe the workouts are longer. I'm picking up a heavier weight. I'm pushing harder.

[00:38:26] All the way up until the middle of my cycle, where I call that like where I can just do like the craziest bootcamp class. And I'm just like, wow, I'm strong. And then I like to tailor it down towards the end where I start bringing in more, walks, more yoga, more stretching, and meeting my body where it's at, instead of expecting my body to be able to perform at this like intensity the same level, push the same weights throughout the month.

[00:38:49] And when you start paying attention to that, you'll notice like, Oh, it is harder. Maybe that's why my shoulder always bugs up once a month. It's because I'm trying to push at a time where my body is just not wanting to push. And so listening in on that. So thinking day, one of your period, you're at your lowest energy, middle of the psychometric highest, and then it tapers down and, and adjusting your workout, frequency, length, and intensity with.

[00:39:14] Lindsay: Genius. I love this. This is such a good conversation. Tanessa I think everyone's going to be blown away. How can they find more out about what you do? 

[00:39:23] Tanessa: So I have a freebie that you can get your hands on. It's called 12 ways to biohack your energy. So biohacking is essentially. Doing all of the fun things we talked about, but looking at what the outcome is.

[00:39:35] So for example, if you're working out in accordance with your cycle, that is biohacking your workouts, right? So I have all kinds of things like this. That'll really help with energy, focus and clarity, especially if you're waking up feeling tired every morning. So that's a PDF. You can grab it to NESA sheers.com.

[00:39:50] Energy, but otherwise I'm on Instagram all the time. I do daily stories and lots of posts and interactive stuff to really make sure that you can, you know, get to the root of why you're feeling foggy and tired and start feeling the way you want to feel in your business. So Instagram's where I'm living right now.

[00:40:08] Lindsay: Yay. Awesome. This was such a good episode. Please go follow. Tanessa go download her freebie. I'm going to go download it too. She's so smart. And I love how she. It makes it feel like that. I love the variety of it that really sparked my brain. And it doesn't have to be one thing every day for the rest of your life and to, especially as females to give yourself that grace to, to change and to evolve.

[00:40:32] And this is, thank you so much for sharing all of this. 

[00:40:36] Tanessa: Thank you for having me on.