We drive ourselves day and night. We never rest. We never step back. We push and push and push.

Why is this a problem? Because that’s not how the brain works. It’s not how the body works. It’s not how performance works. And it’s not what optimizes our health and longevity.

Conventional wisdom has always said that achieving more means pushing harder. It’s not true. Why? Because that’s not how brains work.

I’d like to challenge you to think differently about performance and health by embracing what seems like a counter-intuitive notion: slow down to speed up. Being deliberate about how you live and work can enable you to be more effective and efficient.

During his remarks, Eisenhower referred to a university president he knew who was fond of saying, “I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” This phrase went on to become the basis for what is known as The Eisenhower Decision Principle – a decision-making process for prioritizing tasks and projects.

Though body and mind are typically thought of as being separate, it’s helpful to consider them as a unit because they work together. For your mind to be engaged, your body needs to be energized. There is a growing body of research showing that physical activity improves brain function and facilitates learning, creativity and problem solving among other key functions. Even simple movements like walking get you physically energized and open up the possibility of creating beta wave activity in the brain, which is reflective of the brain state you need to be in if you have to work at a task or perform an action that requires your concentration.

Kunal Gupta is the founder & CEO of Polar, a technology company transforming the digital media publishing landscape. Kunal started Polar ten years ago and has grown it into a global business-to-business tech company with offices in Toronto, New York, London, and Sydney that works with about 800 publishers around the world, including Huffington Post, USA Today and GQ.  

Despite this tremendous success, Kunal is a big believer in mindfulness, and finding focus and calm in a modern era. 

If you want to live a world-class life, you’ll need an exercise plan, because physical activity can dramatically improve your health and performance. In particular, you will want an approach that capitalizes what I call the 4Fs: Fitness, Force, Fast and Flexible.

In the #hustle culture of manic busyness, it can be hard to remember the basic facts about personal growth. Mentally and physically, human beings are built to adapt to stress, but it will not happen if we don’t take time to rest and recover. That’s when the growth occurs. We cannot grow, let alone heal, if we are constantly on the go.

There is widespread agreement that one of the common pathways involved in all human disease, especially chronic diseases, is inflammation. We also know that chronic stress is one of the primary contributors to elevated inflammation levels in the human body. As a result, any conversation about optimal health and performance needs to include an exploration of how we can decrease systemic inflammation. We all need to make an effort to recover and regenerate more effectively so we give ourselves the best chance to avoid conditions such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and depression.

In the last six months, I have been exploring ways that exercise can facilitate a change in mindset when it comes to improving physical and mental health and performance. To take advantage of this shift, I want you to think about exercise in a new way.

There are several ways you can alter your physical environment to change the way you work. You might not be able to change the state of your building, but you can make small changes to workspaces or rooms that make a big difference. And you don’t have to spend a ton of money—you can work with what you have to create a space more conducive to improved focus and productivity.

Science shows that when our creativity is peaking, we emit theta waves and several regions of our brains interact to make new connections and come up with novel ideas. But how do we get into that state, keep track of the ideas we generate and stimulate a long-term source of ideas?

As the foundation of all health and performance, sleep is something you need to take seriously. And while you may not have access to a sleep coach like the pro sports teams do, you can still put a protocol in place to help you achieve optimal sleep.

Optimizing the functioning and growth of your brain is essential to your performance and health. In particular, it’s important to understand the role of two kinds of tissues – white matter and grey matter – and how you can make them grow.

I’ve talked a lot recently about the importance of exercise for controlling focus and attention, which is one of the main benefits on top of the major impacts exercise has on physical health.

But exercise is also essential for establishing and sustaining a joyful and positive mood, which is a funny effect because the secret to establishing a consistent habit of exercise is actually finding the joy in movement.

The other day, a friend of mine who used to work crazy hours told me about his desire to become a true Sleep Master. He had at long last accepted the science of sleep, which I talked about a few months ago in this blog. Exhausted all the time, his health and relationships were suffering and he was making a change.