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Guest: Dr. Jeff Graham, a physician and the Chief Medical Officer at Wild Health, where he works with high performers to help them extend not just their lifespan but their healthspan as well.
Overview: If you ran your business the way many CEOs manage their health, you’d have to call an emergency board meeting immediately. The same successful CEOs who lead with precise data and dashboards often rely on “gut feel” when it comes to their own biology. Or, worse, they brush aside stress, exhaustion, and that funny feeling in their chest as just part of the job.
On today’s show, Dr. Jeff Graham explains why CEOs who want to perform at a high level over decades need to treat their health as a measurable, optimizable operating system. He also discusses how “precision medicine,” recovery, and adaptability can help leaders stay mentally sharp, improve their health, and keep Making BIG Happen.
Dr. Jeff Graham on applying business logic to biology:
“CEOs already believe in data. They look at dashboards, accountability, tracking. But they just don’t believe in it for their own biology. So at Wild Health, we think about it being an operating system for human performance. If I walked into a setting with a bunch of CEOs or C-suite level people and said, ‘Hey, let’s not worry about tracking revenue. Let’s just trust your gut.’ I’d probably get escorted out. That is exactly how I find, though, that a lot of CEOs treat their health.
“Precision medicine is simply applying logic to the human body. So we’re thinking about the same principles. You’re having an input, you’re getting an output from that. You’re looking at the feedback loop or the result, and then you’re iterating on that. So we try and approach health using those same metrics, tracking everything that we can, looking at our results, and making small changes where necessary.”
Dr. Jeff Graham on why sleep is the ultimate performance hack:
“If sleep were a pill, it would be banned for performance enhancement. It truly is that good. All professional athletes are professional sleepers. That’s what puts you ahead cognitively from a performance base with your physical body. And from an emotional base, when we sleep, we clear out all the bad junk of our day. We organize our memories, our thoughts. When we’re unconscious, we put them in the right files so we can access them later. Our physical body, we clear out inflammation. Our heart gets to recover, gets to slow down. It’s the one muscle that never stops throughout our lifetime. Sleep is really the underappreciated leverage tool that people just don’t concentrate enough on in their own lives.”
Dr. Jeff Graham on the two types of leaders he treats:
“One is a ‘neglected leader.’ And the other I’ve started calling the ‘elite optimizer.’ The neglected leader would be that person who’s built the company, sacrificed the body along the way, sacrificed health for wealth along the way, running on a lot of adrenaline. And then there’s this other person who is already doing a lot of the right stuff because they are genuinely interested in their health, and they just want that extra 10% to 20% to really get them over this next decade. Maybe they’re in their fifties and they want to really remain active in leading a company for the next decade. I feel like we are really good at approaching both of those avatars and both helping to screen on the preventative side when we start picking up things and doing the right tests at the right time. But then also taking that person who’s already optimized, or once we’ve worked with someone for a while, saying, ‘All right, we’re doing really well. Let’s see if we can really optimize this or that different parameter and dial this in to a point that’s going to give you an extra three to five to 10 years of life.”
Links:
How CEOs Can Reclaim Your Mojo and Thrive at 120 – At a recent Make BIG Happen Summit, Dr. Matt Dawson, Co-founder and CEO of Wild Health, discussed breakthroughs that could be a life-changing prescription for CEOs.
Drop Dead: Stress is the Silent Killer of CEOs – The most successful CEOs we work with have adopted some important strategies for reducing stress in their Health, Work, and Lives.
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