Trust The Process
How sobriety and tracking my daily habits have improved my health.. drastically: By the numbers
Joel ‘The Process” Embiid
Joel “The Process” Embiid is a Cameroonian basketballer who plays professionally in the NBA for The Philadelphia 76ers. Embiid was drafted third overall by the Philadelphia 76ers in the 2014 NBA Draft. At the time of the draft, Joel had a broken bone in his foot and it was expected to take six months for him to make a full recovery. The injury didn’t heal as expected and Joel ended up sitting out the entire first two NBA seasons due to the injury.
Embiid is 213cm tall and weighs 127 kg. Over the years he sat out, speculation grew that perhaps he was a bust and that being such a big man he would never fully recover from a lower limb injury and not reach his full potential. What makes Embiid outside of his sheer size and strength, is his skill and agility. I don’t think there is a more skilled seven-footer in the NBA. He moves well laterally, has soft hands, and shoots like a shooting guard. There were concerns that the injury would mean he may lose some of that agility.
America, and most of the world these days, is NBA-mad. So as expected there was a lot of coverage around Embiid’s injury. The 76ers were one of the worst teams in the league at the time and were often accused of tanking (sitting your better players out to increase the likelihood of losing so that you are more likely to secure better draft picks for the next season). 76ers fans are some of the most passionate, yet hostile fans in the NBA. They love their team like no other fan base in the league. But they expect a lot in return. So there was no doubt Embiid was feeling pressure to get on the court to live up to the hype from his college days and prove he was worth his price tag.
Over the two-year period that Embiid sat out, he embodied the phrase “trust the process”. He took this from Sam Hinkie, who was the general manager at the 76ers at the time. Hinkie would plead with disgruntled fans to “trust the process” after a clean-out of players and years of subpar performances. Embiid nicknamed himself “The Process”, a perfect summation of the way he spent the two seasons out with injury. He was all about following the steps that were put in place for him by the medical and coaching staff at the 76ers. He focused on what he had to do now, what was next, and nothing else. It wasn’t about setting a date for him to make his NBA debut. It wasn’t about How many seasons he might or might not be able to get through in his career. Embiid knew that trusting the process was all he could do at times and that doing the small things right each day would give him the best opportunity to reach his potential.
Embiid made his NBA debut on October 4th, 2016. Two years, one month, and 10 days after he was drafted into the NBA.
Fast forward to today and Embiid is one of the best players in the NBA. In my opinion, he was the best player in the NBA last year and only came second in MVP votes due to missing more games through injury than the eventual winner, Nikola Jokic. That aside, Embiid has an impressive rap sheet to date, and at 28 years old his best could still be ahead of him. The achievements below speak for themselves.
Not only has Joel achieved a lot personally, but he has taken the 76ers from cellar dwellers to genuine, championship contenders. The passionate yet hostile 76ers fans absolutely love him. T he city is again right behind their team. Joel’s presence at the organisation has made it easier for them to recruit other big-name stars. Whilst he hasn’t done it on his own entirely, there is a fair argument to be made that had Embiid not fully recovered from his initial injuries, both he and the 76ers would not be in the great and improved position they find themselves in today.
They did it by trusting the process.
What Can We Learn From “The Process”
Whilst Embiid dreamed of making his NBA debut, winning games, playing finals, winning championships, all-star games, and MVP trophies, that is not how he made it through the adversity to get to where he is now.
The gap between a zero-game NBA rookie to one of the best players in the league appears massive, and it is. But clearly, there is a step-by-step process that will take you there if you are good enough and want it badly enough. By breaking the process down into tiny, manageable daily practices, Embiid was able to do what he needed to do to eventually make his debut and ultimately become one of the best basketballers in the world.
Does that mean we can play in the NBA? Fuck no.
What we can do though is implement a similar system into our own lives to help us get to where we want to go. Having big or long-term goals is great. But we can lose sight of them because they seem so far away or unattainable. We need to break the goals right down to a point where we can identify and focus on the daily habits that will set us on our path to attaining those long-term goals. Once we do that, we trust the process.
How Trusting The Process Has Improved My Health
Last week I spoke about I wrote “The Knock-On Effect” where I spoke about how identifying the things I need to habituate to improve myself and in turn present a better version of myself to those around me. Click the above link if you’re interested in that.
Since having a bit of a drug and alcohol-induced emotional meltdown at Easter, my focus was largely on my sobriety, moving my family to the coast, starting a new job, and the arrival of my first child. Between late July and Late August, we moved houses and cities. I started a new job and we welcomed our first child into the world on the 22nd of August.
I’ve always exercised but when I first got sober I threw myself even further into exercise. I didn’t have a lot of structure to any of it. I was just keeping busy, It was perfect for me at the time. Fast forward to early September and we were finally moved in and settled in the new house.
Now that things had slowed a little bit, I felt confident I had the time and energy to focus a little more attention on my health. I downloaded The Alfred App and started tracking my calories. I’ve tracked calories before, so I still had a rough idea I was eating reasonably, but the quick and easy-to-use app helped me tune up my nutrition pretty quickly
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Since then, I have started to track and monitor other key habits and metrics to help me identify what works best for me and what I want to achieve. I started with a whiteboard that I used to use for the same thing last year. Pretty simple. Red is bad, and green is good. The more green I get, the better I feel.
Eventually, I walked out of my cave, rubbed my eyes, yawned, stretched, and joined the 21st fucking century and upgraded to a spreadsheet. Slowly implementing more and more changes
I even made some graphs to help me watch the trajectory of progress. This is a great tool for when you have a bad day, you can still see you are heading in the right direction and not give yourself too much of a hard time about it.
Anyway, this week I wanted to show people the objective impact implementing and tracking these habits has had on my physical health.
Weight Loss
I was torn about starting with weight loss, or even putting it in here. Oftentimes weight loss can as unhealthy as it is healthy. We can create an unhealthy obsession with a number on a scale. In terms of weight and food, I have not had, and still don’t have a fixed number in my head that I want to weigh. I want to feel good. I want to feel fit enough to run when I want to run and strong enough to go to the gym when I want to go the gym. I track my weight purely out of curiosity, so I can see the impact my exercise and nutrition have on my weight and how I feel.
So for those who like numbers, here it is.
I don’t like body weight as a metric, but it is completely objective. It doesn’t lie. Without even focusing on losing weight, I have lost around a kilo per week since I have been tracking my calorie input against output. ensuring I am in a small, sustainable deficit most days and forgetting about the rest. I know that I don’t have to worry about my weight if I maintain that small calorie deficit each day.
Sleep
Having ADHD sleep has always been a struggle for me. It has improved a lot since I have been sober, but even more so again since I have been mindful of how much I need versus how much I am getting. you can see below my sleep score improved massively when I got sober in March. Then again in October. It’s always taken me a long time to get to sleep but I am spending less time falling asleep than ever before. There could be a multitude of factors, but tracking my sleep has made me mindful of it. Once you are mindful of something you are in a position to make the necessary changes. So many things depend on how you sleep. Your energy, your mood, and your cognitive function. The better you are sleeping, the better your day will be
Stress
Stress is a killer. It affects us physically. Read about the physical effects of stress here. I’m not going to try to explain. All we need to know is that stress is bad, it can kill you, and we need to try to reduce it as much as we can.
Again, in the below, you can see a massive improvement in my stress levels since being sober, and again since being mindful of the key daily habits I believe are important to me. Life can be an asshole and we are all living in different circumstances, sometimes genuinely stressful shit happens. We can’t control that. But we can control certain things that can help reduce our stress. Like what time we wake up, our nutrition, the exercise we do, and how we spend our free time. Be mindful of your stress levels. Tracking your habits will help you identify what you can do to reduce your stress. If I have a period of higher-than-usual stress I can look at my spreadsheet and see what it is that I am not doing enough of that may be contributing to it. I would bet I will find something in there that correlates directly to the heightened stress.
Resting Heart Rate
This is a massive one for me. Studies have shown that there is an association between a higher resting heart rate and high blood pressure. I take stimulant medication for the treatment of ADHD. If I get diagnosed with high blood pressure I will be taken off the medication immediately. My medication regulates the release of serotonin and dopamine. The chemicals that make us feel good. Because I have been taking my medication as long as I have, my brain no longer regulates that for me. Our bodies are smart, if they identify that they no longer need to do something because it’s being done by something else, they will stop doing it. That’s why bodybuilders’ bodies stop producing their own testosterone.
The risk for me is that if I stop taking my medication, I could fall into depression for up to two years while my brain readjusts to regulating my serotonin and dopamine again. So it’s in my best interest to avoid high blood pressure, maybe more so than most people. Given high blood pressure runs rampant through my extended family, it’s something I have to be extra mindful of.
A quick google will tell you that the best way to avoid high blood pressure is;
Eat a healthy diet with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables.
Be physically active.
Maintain a healthy weight.
Do not smoke.
Limit your alcohol intake.
Get enough sleep.
Again, everyone is different, some people have naturally higher and lower resting heart rates. The important thing is to make yourself aware of your resting heart rate. Track it, and collect the data, so you can be aware when it changes and then make any necessary adjustments.
By far, the greatest thing I have done to improve my resting heart rate is Zone 2 Cardiovascular Exercise. It’s one of the easiest ways you can exercise and one of the most beneficial, particularly for cardiovascular fitness and mental health.
What I find incredible about the below is how inconsistent my resting heart rate was while I was drinking and using drugs, and then how much more consistent it became with sobriety. It’s quite confronting as I sit here looking at it. It’s scary how much I was risking my health without even knowing it. You can see a significant dip again from the middle of September when I started tracking things properly.
Summary
People will debate over the accuracy of tracking tools until they find a way to literally shove one into our bodies, which probably isn’t that far away. Whilst I think accuracy is somewhat important, I think it’s more important that we consistently collect data using the same instrument. If your watch reads your heart rate at five beats per minute too high, it’ll do the same tomorrow. The trajectory won’t be affected. We don’t want to overdo this stuff. We just want to be aware of it and make subtle changes as we need to, after considering the snapshot of data.
The difference in my data alone purely by making myself mindful of it is pretty insane, I think. I haven’t made sweeping changes to my lifestyle in September, just minor adjustments. When considering the significance of the results in comparison to the effort I’ve put in to effect change, I think the output far outweighs the input. You just have to give shit. Once you do, it’s pretty easy.
This is the last one I want to share. I’m 34. I’m a dad to a newborn, I have a partner and a full-time job, and we use the downstairs unit at our house as an Airbnb. We’re pretty busy. Yet according to Garmin, I’m getting younger!
I eat junk food every day. Not heaps, but I don’t go without. I’m a very ordinary bloke. Tracking my habits has improved my life. clearly. It’s made life easier. I spend a couple of minutes filling out my spreadsheet each morning and that’s it.
It keeps me on track, pardon the pun. It’s preventative, it helps me stay in good health, so I can get more out of life. It helps me identify why I don’t feel great when I don’t and helps me make the necessary adjustments to get back up to feeling like I should.
Time is the most valuable, yet finite commodity we have. We have no sure way of getting more of it, we don’t know when we will run out of it, and we can’t control that. What we can do is control our health and give ourselves the best opportunity possible to live for as long as we can, in good health.
How do we do that? Trust the process…
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