I have a confession to make – in 2022, I did not feel good.

I didn’t feel sick, I didn’t feel depressed, I just felt like a wasn’t up to par. I felt groggy most of the time. I didn’t want to get up in the morning, and when I finally got up it took me even longer to start the day. Everything was hard to do: the household chores, developing plans for my clients, even doing fun things like connecting with friends and family. Even worse, it felt like a grueling cycle that just continued to reinforce itself.

I had tons of questions running through my head: why did I feel like this? What was I doing wrong? More importantly, what did I need to do right?

We have all heard the health talk. Eat right, exercise, get 8 hours sleep, yadda yadda yadda. I don’t know about you, but whenever I try any of this, I end up giving up at some point. No exercise is not enough, but three days a week just became too much of a chore. Sure, sleep is great, but then I miss out on games with friends or that new show my wife and I have been wanting to watch. Yes, I want to eat my broccoli, but I also want to eat the party size pack of Oreos staring at me from the kitchen. I know what I’m supposed to do, but why couldn’t I do it? Where was my discipline? Where was my drive?

I was looking at it all wrong. As it turns out, I was not setting my body up for success.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying getting sleep, exercising, and eating good is not important. They are fundamentals for having a healthy lifestyle. But I do feel as a society we have an unrealistic (and perhaps even unachievable) view of what this entails. Getting exercise means pumping iron in the gym two hours a day and leaves you where you can barely walk. Eating healthy means cutting out the cake and the ice cream and stuffing yourself full of every green you can find. Good sleep means I got to get up at 4:30 in the morning like all the “successful” people do and going to bed at 8:00 on the dot. The problem with all this is that it is simply not true.

I don’t know anybody on this planet who can go from napping all day, scarfing down the Cheetos, and essentially zero movement in their body to hyper driven gym maniac who never breaks their diet. It just doesn’t happen, it’s not real. And the problem is, we tell ourselves it is. We tell ourselves that if we have enough willpower and we want it bad enough we’ll make it happen, and if you can’t you just don’t have enough discipline.

We need to change this mindset.

If we push ourselves to do these things because we hate ourselves and we feel we must do it to be good enough or healthy enough, we are chasing a dead-end goal. Our relationship with sleep, diet, and exercise should be simple: it needs to be consistent, it needs to be realistic, and it needs to leave us feeling better than we did before. Don’t go to the gym because you need to exercise. Go to the gym because you want to honor your body and feel good. Don’t cut out the cake and the ice cream and force yourself to eat a salad. Listen to your body and ask what it needs. Does it need energy? Great, get some protein in you. Do you feel thirsty? Awesome, reach for the water. Does it just need to relax and enjoy something? Go get that milkshake. Food is not good or bad, it is a fuel that serves different purposes, make sure you are giving your body the fuel it needs when it needs it. Finally, don’t force yourself to get up at unimaginable hours to give yourself a false sense of accomplishment. Set realistic standards that you can not only achieve, but that respect your body’s needs.

When I had this shift in perspective, everything changed. Instead of forcing myself to hit the gym an hour a day with insane workouts that left me barely able to turn the steering wheel, I switched to daily twenty-minute sessions that left me feeling energized. I stopped pushing the idea of eight hours of sleep, and instead have started going to bed an hour earlier and getting nine hours. I started making my mealtime a priority instead of putting it off until I was starving, and I started drinking water with every meal. Let me tell you: I haven’t strayed from any of these for the first couple months of 2023. In the past, I would be lucky to make it two weeks before I had a break in some way, like skipping the gym, sleeping in an extra hour, or not eating until it was dinnertime. But now, wake up feeling rested. I get my workouts in early and feel like I want to do it again tomorrow. I make eating food a priority and don’t starve myself until dinnertime because I have so many things to do.

I present this challenge to you: prioritize yourself. Prioritize your body and your well-being, in whatever way that looks like, even if it’s the tiniest change. Who knows, maybe you’ll end up becoming a 3-hour-a-day gym rat, or even a bigger morning person. You can always make your goals and aspirations bigger, but you must start somewhere. Let’s start by changing our relationship with our exercise, diet, and sleep. Let’s set ourselves up for success.