Julie Hutchinson on Stress, Sleep, and the Science of Elite Success
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- 80% of primary care doctor visits are related to stress, irritable bowel syndrome, arrhythmias, anxiety, heart palpitations, all that stuff. So the key is how do I start self-regulating? 'Cause you have a lot of young entrepreneurs that work with you and they're driven. When you start to learn the self-regulation techniques that I'm gonna teach you today is you can be driven, but you can also find that flow state. We've all been in the zone.

But I ask people, well, how do you get in the zone? What we teach you is scientifically how to get in the zone anytime, anywhere. And when you can do that, you're managing the internal chemistry of the body that helps you remain healthy in the state of flow, helps your brain work better, and helps everything function better.

My name's Rudy Moore, host of Living the Red Life podcast, and I'm here to change the way you see your life in your earpiece every single week. If you're ready to start living the red life, ditch the blue pill, take the red pill, join me in Wonderland and change your life. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Living the Red Life. Joining me today is a good friend, client, Julie. She's

one of the best in the world for high performance coaching, working with top tier executive CEOs, C-suite of major firms, and many great entrepreneurs just like you. And her job is to keep us all alive and functioning, right? As entrepreneurs are crazy, we work hard, we burn out,

And, you know, she's there like, you know, a pro athlete, Olympic athlete, has a sports psychologist and a team around them to keep them healthy. Basically, that's what Julie helps do for top performing CEOs and execs. Julie, welcome. Thank you. Great. Is that a good summary of what you did? That's a pretty good summary. Great. Well, because I, you know, I'm fascinated by sports and the correlation to business and have a sport background.

And I think most people now have realized Olympic athletes have a team of 10 around them. But and they're starting to see the CEOs too, right? Like Elon Musk, Zuckerberg, they have this like performance team around them, right? Like, especially now, most big CEOs are getting into nutrition and health and fitness. But a lot of them

I think like billions, if you've watched that show, you know, the psychologist side of it. I think it's kind of the way CEOs are going. So why is this shift to like this high performing CEO, C-suite exec?

Well, I think the main shift is because so many of us are so driven. A lot of CEOs and high performers are type A personalities. And we have this mindset that if we just do more, we're going to achieve more, but we're not managing our energy in the process. And so what happens is we just go, go, go, go until we burn out. And then when we burn out, we're like, well, that's just part of being a CEO or a high performer. It's just kind of expected.

And in reality, that's the old way of doing it. The new way of doing it is start managing your energy instead of managing your time. It's funny because I've never had that problem. I've always been good, I think, because I've been healthy and I have a good mindset and stuff. And I think another reason I've always never had this problem is when I was 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, I was a personal trainer. And my like...

clientele were executives. I worked at the most expensive health club in my city. So it had all the upper class. So most of my clients were probably similar clients to you. And they were all what you, you know, it's funny, I just thought about it. They were all what you're saying. They're all burnt out, unhealthy. And they would just be like working out with me. And it was also a therapy session. Like they just complained to me. So I probably subconsciously when I became a CEO and entrepreneur, I was like, I don't want to be like that.

Yeah. But I do agree, like definitely, especially 10 years ago, I think that was like the way now there's this big shift to, you know, that that holistic health and holistic great life versus great life over here, miserable life, unhappy life over here. So so how did you get into all this?

Well, it's something that you just said a minute ago, and I'm going to touch on that, and then I'll build onto it from there. You said, I never had that problem, but Rudy, you're still pretty young. Sure. Maybe I'll have it down the line. Oh, exactly. I should have said, yeah, not had that problem yet.

Well, I'll just tell you a quick story. So I have a client who is in their late 50s, and he was telling me, well, I have high blood pressure, but my life is great. I don't have a lot of stress. I have this great job. I'm a Vistage coach, and I'm a consultant for other people. My family life is great. And I said, well, how was your life the last 25 years? And he said, I was running companies, and I was selling them, and I was stressed out.

And I said, well, that's the challenge is that you spend so many years being stressed out, but now you have this really great life. Yeah. But you wired your nervous system for go, go, go, go, otherwise known as fight or flight.

And when you wire your nervous system like that, it's going to break down eventually because what we see is 80% of primary care doctor visits are related to stress, irritable bowel syndrome, arrhythmias, anxiety, heart palpitations, all that stuff. And so if we've been running, running, running at that pace for a long time,

We're going to start breaking down. So the key is how do I start self-regulating? Because you have a lot of young entrepreneurs that work with you and they're driven. When you start to learn the self-regulation techniques that I'm going to teach you today is you can be driven, but you can also find that flow state. You're an athlete. I'm an athlete. Probably a lot of people that are listening to this are athletes themselves.

We've all been in the zone, but I ask people, well, how do you get in the zone? And they usually say, oh, I slept good the night before. I had a good meal or something like that.

What we teach you is scientifically how to get in the zone anytime, anywhere. And when you can do that, you're managing the internal chemistry of the body that helps you remain healthy in the state of flow, helps your brain work better and helps everything function better. Got it. So, so, so I'm excited to dive into those techniques just quickly before we do. Give us the 30 second backstory. Like how did you end up doing, you know, all of this? Yeah. Great, great question.

So I was a driven person and I was just, I kept climbing the corporate ladder. And then at one point I end up, I was a fifth employee of a company in Austin, Texas by the name of Sommio Solutions. We were a creative services agency. We bootstrapped the company and we said, we're not going out for any funding and we're going to work with the biggest clients in the world. And at that time it was IBM, 3M, Dell, Hewlett Packard. I joined the team, fifth employee of the company. And our goal being on the Inc's 5,000 fastest companies, we did it.

And they did it in three years. And it all sounds great. And I had a great life and I had a great car and a boat and a house and threw parties all the time. But inside I was breaking down. And when I went to the doctor, the doctor said, your adrenal glands are shot. Your cortisol stress hormone, cortisol levels are through the roof. And here's the traditional way of dealing with it, which a lot of us know is taking medications. I didn't want to take medications. I already had a pretty good diet.

And I started to just figure out my way. I became a yoga instructor. I became a living food chef. I was a living food raw foodist for five years thinking that was going to fix it. But when I went to IBM's headquarters, I couldn't strike a downward dog or eat an apple and expect my stress to go away. I had to find something different.

That's when I discovered biohacking. Okay. And when I discovered biohacking, I went for HRV biohacking because the heart is the master switch inside the body. 90% of the information is sent to the heart, from the heart to the brain, and 10% is sent down through the vagus nerve. Okay.

So if your heart is beating like this because you're under pressure all the time, it's sending a signal to the brain that tells the brain, danger, danger, I'm in fight or flight. So you're living in that. And then the prefrontal cortex, which is where we make our decisions, we call this the CEO of the brain, it shuts down. So we can't think as clearly. Because when you're in stress, it's not a time to solve problems or get creative. And so when I started to learn how to biohack,

And I could go give big presentations at IBM's headquarters or Dell's headquarters to big vice presidents of the company. If I felt nervous, I could start biohacking, connect on a deeper level. I'm like, I'm regulating my nervous system on the fly and nobody knows I'm doing it. My sales went through the roof. My relationships got better. I started sleeping through the night. I felt better.

I'm like, why isn't anybody else teaching this? So that's how I got into it. Yeah. And I mean, again, just coming back to the athlete correlation, HRV is like the number one metric all pro athletes use. And I use for monitoring training status, you know, and recovery. And I have to, I track it every morning with two different methods. And it's, you know, it's kind of seen in the sports science world as the gold standard way to track recovery and stress levels. And, you

You know, I also think the blood work, like I've done blood work twice a year for the last six, seven years of my life. And a lot of CEOs I know now are starting, you know, to do blood work. And I know how to read it because of my sports science background. And it's interesting. All of my friends read.

You know, they post their blood work photos now. Oh, wow. It's getting like more. It's like a thing to do. Yeah. So it's really fascinating how. And there's these biohacking Netflix shows coming out now. So it's really gone full circle, I think. And that's probably good for your business, too, because more people. I always teach it's hard to sell something when you have to educate people on the need for it.

And I guess 10 years ago, you were probably like having to really explain and wait till someone was super sick before they wanted help. Right. And that's how most of the world works. They wait till they're in a car crash to go to our insurance. Right. Whereas now I'm sure it's probably going to get easier and easier, too, because people are going to come to you proactively versus reactively over time.

So let's talk about some of the methods people listening, you know, most of these people listening, maybe they are more interested in the proactive method. They're not burnt out yet. Because they probably wouldn't listen to my podcast if they were. They're probably resting in bed, you know, taking it easy, trying to recover. But how do they avoid burning out, right? What are some of these methods to keep healthy when they're burning the candle at both ends?

Well, first one is awareness. And I say that because our bodies and brain operate like a computer and they are a record of the past. And so our brain is a storage and recognition system. So what we think about it, we fire and wire neurons in the brain, what we feel, what we experience, we carry that inside of our bodies. Now, what science has shown is that 80% of our thoughts are negative. Can't, I don't want to, it's too hard.

Do you know what percent of those thoughts are the same thoughts as yesterday and the day before and the day before? Any idea? I don't know. But I do want to touch on this too. Why is that? Because I don't think, like, I think a very small percent of my thoughts were ever negative. But I know I'm very unique. You're a very unique person. I'm very successful because I very rarely ever have negative thoughts. Right.

like very rarely, like 1% of the time. But why is most people have the opposite? Well, and I will say this because I do know this about you, Rudy. You grew up with Olympians as parents. So not a lot of us have Olympians as parents. And if you're an Olympian, you're probably going to have some pretty good thoughts, right? However, most of us grow up in doubt and fear.

It's since childhood. It's since childhood. It's indoctrinated into us. It's indoctrinated in whether, you know, if you go to a Catholic school, you're taught that you're a sinner, right? And you're taught that we're not powerful beyond all measure. And we compare ourselves to other people. You know, it's like, I'm not good enough because that person is better than me. And so the thoughts, I mean, look at our language. I can't, I don't want to, it's too hard. Right.

Why did that person do it to me? I'm a victim. It's just kind of in consciousness. You mean it's America or the whole world? I think it's the whole world. It's the whole world. I think America, though, is maybe more open about it. Because from England, maybe it's because I left when I was younger, but no one would ever talk about this stuff in England. So I don't know if it's like American people are more open about childhood trauma and issues and how that's correlated.

But yeah, it's definitely fascinating how that carries through. And most successful entrepreneurs that sit in that seat or I know

They've come through it and had to battle through it and turned it around. And now they have the positive force like me all the time, I guess. But that took a lot of work to get to that point. Yeah, because you've got to unwire the thoughts. If we're like a computer and we're pro, it's kind of like programming, right? We have to break those habits. We have to break those thoughts. And the cool thing about it is we're

What we teach is neuroplasticity because neuroplasticity, you can change your brain at any age. It doesn't matter how old you are. You just have to have the conscious awareness of what you're thinking. And when you think thoughts, we talk about firing and wiring. You're firing and wiring neurons. And the more you fire and wire them, they get down in the subconscious, right?

And unless we become aware of what's happening in the subconscious, like I'm scared or a lot of people are doing social media, but they don't want to be seen. You've got to break those thoughts. I'm comfortable being seen. It's okay for me to be seen. And when you break, we call it pruning negative thoughts. You literally can unwire old patterns that you've been thinking and feeling for a long time. Now the...

The language of the brain is the thoughts. The language of the body is feelings. They go hand in hand. We can break those habits that we've been accustomed to. We can rewire, refire new positive thoughts and new positive emotions. This is a side question. Do you ever do much with clients looking at gut health and its correlation to this? Because there's a lot of research now on bad gut and how... They say the gut is the second brain. We haven't gotten into that yet, but I always say yet because...

You never know where we're going to go. Growing and expanding. Definitely, I think, interesting. And most people have had

Most executives, high stress damages the gut, bad diet, probably traveling, flying, drinking in bars, dinners for 20 years. A lot, you know, I think that's definitely an interesting like next step too. So, so what are some of the things like strategies, people listening, you know, that we talked about the mindset side is a foundation, but you know, is this like learning a meditation technique? Is this like, what, what are some of the best ways to work?

Well, when you first learn it, you want to learn it with your eyes closed because we want to take our stimulus off the outside world because it's kind of hard to feel it if you have all the stimulus. So what we teach people is, first of all, where you put your attention is where you put your energy. So when you can shift your attention to your heart, that's the key because the heart is the master switch of the body. So you shift your attention to your heart and you start to do some breathing techniques.

And when you start doing this, what we call heart-focused breathing, you can change the pattern of the heart from like an erratic pattern to a smooth, what we call a coherent pattern. So heart-focused breathing is the very first thing that we teach people. When you become aware of that and you can move it into a coherent state...

Then we bring in emotions. And the reason that we bring in emotions is because a lot of our emotions are operating on the subconscious level, doubt, fear, shame, guilt, over past stuff that we've done. When you can shift those emotions to higher frequency emotions, love, peace, joy, calm,

Then we start to shift how the nervous system is feeling and bring it into what we call a state of coherence. Now, here's the tricky thing about that. I mean, that's the basic technique that we teach. But the tricky thing about it is...

We can get addicted to stress. We can get addicted to emotions. So for those people that are listening, you might want to think about like, have I been worried about finances for more than a year? Have I, do I have guilt or shame over past decision? Maybe I'm angry at somebody from a divorce or a relationship. If you've been feeling those emotions, um,

six months or longer, you very well could be addicted to those emotions because the body gets addicted to it and then it gets addicted to the chemical state of the, the

rush of adrenaline that's coming through the adrenal glands and the cortisol and you get that jolt of energy and the body feels alive and awake. It's like having an afternoon monster drink or a Red Bull or something. And then the body's like, I got to have more of that because it feels good. And so subconsciously, all we have to do is think a thought, stimulus, and then the response of the body. And when that happens, we get the jolt of energy. And before you know it, you become addicted to it.

And you're addicted to a life you don't even like anymore. Yeah, it's funny. I think another thing that, like, coming back to the mindset I do think it's an underlying principle because a lot of those pieces you were saying, I think another reason I handle it well is I did so much, like, Brian Tracy books, personal development when I was, like, in my early 20s. And I took to it very well and implemented it. And, you know, I think I used to have some of those things where I would stay stressed longer or hold resentment over things

an employee that stole from me for months, right? Whereas, and I think a lot of the personal development I did in my early 20s, I...

implemented all of that. So now, you know, I'll have employees steal or something go crazy wrong. And, you know, I might be upset about it for a day and then I'm just like, whatever. Yeah. And I think that whatever personality can really help you in business because you move past stuff quickly. And you build your level of resilience. Yeah. It's like you've been there, you've handled it, you know, it wasn't the end of the world. That's a big one. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think when we have those experiences, because they say resilience is a capacity to prepare for and recover in the face of adversity. It's just like your first love, right? When you're 18, you split where you got to. It's the end of the world. It's the end of the world.

I can't believe this person broke up with me. Yeah, yeah. I'll never be the same. But it's like people get that in love. But in business, I meet entrepreneurs, you know, in our community that are 40 older than me that have been doing business longer than me, but they still treat it like their first love. And what are you doing? All right, let go of it. Yeah, it's funny how they can't make that correlation. So, yeah, and it's funny how this keeps coming back to that foundation mindset.

So are you training a lot of the mindset side alongside this? Because I guess if that's still kind of quote unquote broken or suboptimal, everything else you're going to do is going to not work, right? Well, it starts with our thoughts. Yeah. So the mindset is really key. But the other thing that I think a lot of people don't talk about is how the body stores what you think. Yeah.

Because the language of the body is emotion. The language of the brain is thoughts. So it's thoughts and emotions go together. You've got to get those in sync. Well, and I've seen some of the science studies. So they measure brain waves, and then they tell you to think of scenarios.

Yeah. And they look at how cortisol spikes and everything reacts and even gut health and. Yeah. For the glucose levels. Connected. Yeah. And I mean, I know a lot of this from my sports science days, but it's interesting how like most people don't realize how connected it is. Yes. And you can see it like I see it with employees. They get stressed about something and then everything gets thrown off. Right. Oh, and yeah.

Yes, I think that's so important. What about sleep? Let's talk about sleep because I think that's a big one that most I've always been good at that. Like I sleep eight hours a day pretty much all the time. Less than seven for me is very rare. And I think that's one reason I stayed pretty like healthy and stuff. But I know a lot of CEOs get four or five hours and do that for 20 years.

And, yeah, I was just talking to somebody last night in our mastermind group who said, I only get three hours of sleep a night, three to four. And I'm like, how do you do it? Oh, I've always done it. And I thought, you're young. You know, eventually it's going to catch up. Sleep is key. Yeah. And what we notice is that a lot of people that are stressed out, once they get to bedtime, they've been going, going, going all day and they're exhausted, but they can't fall asleep. Right.

Part of the reason that they can't fall asleep is because especially as entrepreneurs, CEOs, executives, you're making decisions all day. Your brain is in what we call a high beta brainwave. And when you're thinking, thinking, thinking, the natural progression in sleep is to go from beta to alpha to theta into delta.

If you're trying to fall asleep and you're trying to solve problems or you forgot to do something and then the body is feeling anxiety or worry or overwhelmed, you're in this state and then the body's like, I can't sleep. I'm designed to keep you alive and I feel a threat just by your thought alone.

So you may fall asleep out of exhaustion, but oftentimes what I hear people say is, I'll wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. And then they go right back into the high beta brainwaves and it is virtually impossible to fall asleep because you've got to go down into the alpha, into the theta and wire the brainwaves. Yeah, I mean, sleep, like everyone listening, like if you're an entrepreneur, just like an athlete, you should track it. Like I've tracked it for...

The last five, six years and, you know, my aura and stuff. And I'm always like 95 percent. Like, you know, I have eight hours, two hours REM, two hours deep. I take like 12 supplements before I go to bed, which help. Yeah. I don't take melatonin, but I take a bunch of other stuff.

And I think it's like one of the hacks because it's like your recovery, right? So you, I mean, you can actually, and there's a lot of science to prove this in sport. You can go way harder and do way more training if your sleep's optimal. It's like a life, it's like a get out of jail free card in Monopoly. Great way to say it.

And for all the athletes out there, if you start tracking your workouts, if you work out in the morning, notice how strong you are after a good night's sleep versus how weak you are after a terrible night's sleep. It will drastically affect how much you can lift. I've noticed that for myself. And there's some science too because I actually had food poisoning two days ago. I only slept 90 minutes. But I was fine all day and everyone said, how are you?

And how you find, and I remember when I was also a researcher, one of the sleep experts did this about like sleep banking. So there's some research that shows if you have like perfect sleep for a week and one night it's bad sleep, you can kind of recover. And I think that's so important too as entrepreneurs because we fly to events, we speak, we have jet lag.

But if you, you know, you have base good sleep, then it can really protect you when you have those, you know, crazy launches or crazy speaking or traveling or big events like we did yesterday, right? We're going for 14 hours. So, so. Well,

Well, you know what's interesting about what you said about sleep is I know you as a very, very high energy person. Like, I've never seen you slow down, really. And I was asking myself yesterday, I mean, you're just going, going, going, and your energy is so high. I was like, how does he do it? Well, the answer lies in your sleep, right? That's a big piece of it in your mindset. Yeah, one of the big things with pretty much every pro athlete is they're able to switch off.

So like they can go hard all day. Yeah. But then when it's 10 o'clock, they knock out for eight hours. And some of the best athletes in history, they're so trained that they can do 30, 20 minute nets just whenever they need.

And they actually like train their body to be able to do it. And I remember that. So, yeah, I've always valued sleep because I think I knew how important it was. And, yeah, that's why I can go all day because I'm like 10 o'clock. I take all my supplements. I fall asleep in 15 minutes, eight hours of perfect sleep, wake up naturally, no alarm, full of energy. Research has just shown. I mean, that is where our brains recharge. It's like the cleaning process. We go and we clean our brain, we clean our body.

body what we don't process during the day we process at night a sleep is so important yeah so so last couple of questions because we've covered a lot and it's such a great foundation for everyone listening but you know i know you have like a hundred times more and like actually the systems the like process of doing this so how do people learn more about this from you

Yeah, well, since we're on the sleep topic, it's been such a key point to a lot of people that I work with. We just launched a sleep course. We just launched it. I didn't know that, I promise. I swear to God. We're actually just launching it tomorrow, as a matter of fact. And we did it because so many people are having trouble sleeping. We talk about the brain waves. We talk about the nervous system. It's what a lot of the other sleep experts are not talking about. They're talking about supplements and other things. We're talking about the internal state.

And so if you want to learn more about us, check us out on coreperformance.us. You can email me julieh at coreperformance.us. We can get you the link for that sleep course. We're going to have it on our LinkedIn, my LinkedIn profile on Instagram.

And then do you want me to talk about some of the other stuff that we do? Okay. So we have something called the Resilient Transformation Academy. It's for leaders and executives to learn how to get out of that survival overwhelmed state. Everybody gets a biofeedback device on their phone. We give you data interpretation of your biofeedback. We tell you where your nervous system is, and we build you out a personalized roadmap to get you from survival state to flow state. Yep.

And so you get all kinds of stuff. You get group calls that we have with all the other executives. You get one-on-one transformation coaching, access to our membership website and your biofeedback device and your personalized roadmap to get you from point A to point B. We guarantee the results, but here's the catch.

It's not for everybody. Yeah. There's an interview process. Yeah. We got to know that we're a right fit. And we don't take just anybody because our results are so high. We're committed to getting results for people that are committed to doing the work. Yeah, there's a lot of work that goes into it. It is work. It's not going to happen by magic. So that's our first course. Then the second course is all about the neuroscience of change. Yeah. And that is our mastermind. And then we have a longer program called Becoming Supernatural. Mm-hmm.

And it's based on the quantum field. It's based on learning how to access the quantum field and consciousness. And you're learning how to create versus going to do, do, do, do all the time. You're creating and learning the state of being and holding particular frequencies. And that's the key because we're nearly 100% energy. And so we teach people how to embody those frequencies.

That reminds me of the Ant-Man movie. I don't know if you've watched. I don't think I have. Is that, is that what it's called? The Ant-Man movie? It's called Ant-Man. They go through these warps and stuff. So that's what I have to watch that. That's what I picked you when you tell me that. But, uh, okay. Well, thank you so much. And, you know, obviously we've known each other for a while and, and we'll have to maybe get you back on to talk about LinkedIn too, because you marketing business side, you do such a great job there. Uh,

And yeah, I had so much fun talking about the other side of entrepreneurship. And I always teach people like you're the you're the celebrity, you're the MVP. And if you don't take care of yourself, the whole team suffers. And especially now everyone's a personal brand. Your brand is going to suffer, too. Very much. So it's so important. So thank you for coming on, guys. Pay attention to this. If you want to go further down the rabbit hole, check Julie's stuff out. I know she does amazing work and I've been, you know, working with her for a couple of years and

As always, keep living the red life. I'll see you guys soon. Thanks.