Master Your Health with Stoicism: Time, Mindset, and Resilience

In this episode, Aaron Shaw dives into the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and how its principles can help you overcome three of the biggest obstacles to a healthy lifestyle: time management, mindset, and resilience. 

Whether you’re in midlife and feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work, family, and your health, or simply struggling to stay consistent with fitness, Stoicism offers powerful tools to take control of your time, adjust your mindset, and build both physical and mental toughness.

Aaron breaks down how Stoicism helps you face the chaos of life with calm and purpose, reclaim lost time by cutting out distractions, and use setbacks to strengthen your body and mind. He also shares personal stories and actionable tips to help you start applying these ideas today. Plus, there’s an opportunity to work with Aaron one-on-one to integrate Stoic principles into your own health journey.

If you’re ready to stop struggling and start thriving, this episode is for you. Take action now and extend your healthspan!

Also visit: https://ryanholiday.net

Take Action!

Want personalized guidance on how to apply Stoicism to your health and fitness? Visit Healthspan PhysioCoaching to book a one-on-one consultation with Aaron today.

FREE 21-Day Kickstart Guide

Want to support this advertiser free show? Please do ---> Buy Me a Coffee
Healthspan coaching consultations, programs, speaker inquiries
Monthly Healthspan PhysioCoaching Newsletter Sign-up
Subscribe: Healthspan YouTube Channel / Video Episodes

Transcript

Time management, a mindset for fitness, and building resilience. These are three of the biggest barriers that my clients face. And really, we all face these barriers. But what if we could face the challenges of today with a sense of calm, with a sense of strength, and a true sense of purpose? And I mean everything from work, meetings, and emails, and texts, and traffic jams, and

being overbooked, having family obligations, all of these day-to-day challenges. And I always have this image of the world spinning around us like a hurricane with all this chaos, but you are cool. You're chilling. You're completely under control and you have a sense of balance. Even feeling content. That would be a perspective of a stoic, somebody who is practicing stoicism, whether they know it or not.

Today we're going to talk about Stoicism. This is an ancient Greek philosophy. And I really believe that it is essential to practice some of these practices of Stoicism if you're going to live a longer life, if you want to live a healthier life, if you want to live a happier life. Stoic principles can help us as we struggle to start or sustain a healthy lifestyle. And I would dare say, particularly those of us that are in midlife,

where there sometimes feels like there's just more more things being piled upon us. Demands are higher. So in today's episode, we are gonna talk about stoicism, what it actually is, what does that actually mean, how to apply it day to day, moment to moment in life and relate it to your healthspan.

My name is Aaron Shaw and I am a healthspan coach and a typical client comes to me in midlife and they're searching for health, weight control, typically physical durability, really want some accountability, some guidance and a path to sustainable health. I've been in the rehab and fitness industries and coaching industries for almost 30 years now. And I am a lifelong student of health and fitness and I do my best to live this lifestyle.

And, but I'm definitely a student of it. So I continually consume more information and learn more. I created my coaching business, healthspan, physio coaching, and this podcast to share what I've learned about the healthspan pillars, what I consider to be these essential pieces of healthspan, which is the duration of time within our lifespan that we are healthy, active, vibrant, durable. These pillars are exercise, nutrition.

sleep, emotional well-being, and preventative care.

Today we're gonna talk about how stoicism can help us manage time, have a mindset of physical fitness, and help us with building our resilience. Those are gonna be the three main points that we're gonna talk about today. And I'm gonna leave you with one action item, one thing you can do today that will help extend your healthspan. And I do wanna start off by saying, I appreciate you listening to this episode.

I do want to make note that if you are struggling with limited time, limited consistency in your physical fitness, your activity level, or your mindset, stay tuned because I'll be sharing an opportunity to work with me one-on-one so we can apply these stoic principles to your life. But first of all, let's start talking about stoicism. What is stoicism? Well, stoicism is an ancient philosophy. You've probably heard it. And it teaches us to focus on what we can control.

accept the things that we cannot control and to build resilience essentially through discipline and clear thinking. It encourages us to approach the challenges of life and there are seemingly infinite number of challenges, but it encourages us to approach the challenges of life with a sense of calmness, strength, purpose.

And I think it is an ideal reference point for those of us that want to live a healthy life and want to be physically fit. Stoicism is, again, it's an ancient Greek philosophy

It was around 300 BC and really kind of became more prominent with, it really kind of gained traction with some provocative thinkers in the day, which would be people you may have heard the name Seneca or Marcus Aurelius. And it seems to me like it's even been a more of a resurgence of Stoicism as of late. And I will put a link in the show notes for a couple of books and authors that I really think would be worth adding to your reading list.

But I want to say personally, I use stoic principles all the time, every day, constantly, how would I even say. I think, you know, looking back, I think that I was, this way of thinking started when I was pretty young. And in hindsight, I really felt like I was kind of being defiant. And mostly that came from, you know, typical team being defiant. you may be able to relate.

If you can think back to your teen years or if you have teens yourself that there is a testosterone driven piece of being defiant against the world. But really I use it to brace myself or in a sense refusing to succumb to what seems like a really chaotic world around me. There's tons of chaos and drama and out of control emotions. You don't have look any further than any social media.

platform that you may use, and certainly the news cycle, absolute chaos. And instead, almost again, as a sense of defiance, I wanted to force myself to remain calm, be focused. In a way, I think I was being a little bit selfish even, where I just kind of wanted to insulate myself and toughen myself. But ultimately, little did I realize that some of the ways that I was kind of, as a young person, kind of

teaching myself how to think and callous myself against some things, protect myself against some things. It really falls in line with what stoicism is.

And to be the best I can be for myself and for my life goals and to be the best for the people that I surround myself with, my family, the people that I love, I need to be centered. So approaching the chaos of life demands, busy schedules, fleeting motivations at times and endless distractions, I really need a stoic approach for success. And what we're going to talk about is how this approach, this way of thinking

can be applied day to day in your healthspan journey, in your exercise journey.

The first relationship I want to talk about with Stoicism is Stoicism and time management. There's a Stoic saying that the impediment to action advances action, or what stands in the way becomes the way. And so as a practical example, a really common obstacle for us middle-aged individuals, is juggling career, family.

and much less our health, which always seems to be like the last thing on the list if it's on our list at all. And what stoicism really teaches us is to view this challenge of time, this barrier of time, as an opportunity to improve our discipline. Instead of wasting time on unproductive tasks like social media, you can reclaim those times to invest in your health, in your workouts. What I would encourage you to do is

Audit your day. This is a really simple action. with technology. I'll even give you a little really simple way of doing this. But the question that I want you to think about it, ask yourself is where can you find 30 minutes to exercise every day? Where can you find those 30 minutes? And could you swap out, let's say scrolling on social media for strength training? And if you can't find 30 minutes, where can you find 20 minutes?

And if you say that, well, I can't find 20 minutes a day to exercise. Well, I'm going to call that BS because you can, you know it. I know it. The idea of looking at this time with a stoic viewpoint would be that this lack of time, the sense of lack of time, the roadblock is time. so therefore time is the solution management of time.

is your solution. You need to own your time. A simple thing you can do right now is open up your smartphone. Under your system setting, there will be a way that will give you the information on how much time you spend on each of your apps. I would challenge you to do this. Don't need to hang your head in shame when you see the numbers. But what I would like you to do is to see on average

How much time per day or how much time per week do you spend on social media? How much time? Be honest with yourself and if you don't take action with it, that's on you. That's totally cool. But it is an opportunity to look and reflect a little bit on your busyness and being overwhelmed and not having time to take care of yourself, not having time to exercise. Imagine if all of those minutes, instead of scrolling through doom scrolling and adding more stress and chaos and the hurricane of life,

you know, emotion to your life. Imagine if all of that time was spent resistance training or mobility training or cardiovascular training. Imagine that. And so I am willing to bet that you probably have hours and hours and per week that you spend on your phone scrolling through absolute garbage, absolute garbage for your brain, garbage for your spirit, garbage for your motivation.

It's just a time waster and does nothing, absolutely nothing to improve your health or wellbeing. So please take an assessment of your smartphone usage, of your social media usage and recognize that you may feel that you have a roadblock of life for self-care is time.

See how much time you spend on that smartphone. See how much time you spend on social media, doing things that are, again, meaningless on the big scheme of things. And I promise you, you will find at least 20 minutes a day where you can exercise every single day. If you don't think you have time, well, send me a DM. I'll guide you on how to find those few moments to extend your life because you are worth it, right? It is absolutely worth

this exercise, it's a super simple exercise.

So remember, what stands in the way becomes the way. With limited time, if that's what stands in your way, that becomes the way. We're gonna learn how to reclaim our time for our health.

And that brings us to the second point of stoicism and really having a mindset for fitness, a mindset for building resilience, building durability. There's a stoic saying that says, you have power over your mind, not outside events. Realize this and you will find strength. From a practical standpoint, this means there's a million things day to day that are, you know,

Outside of our control, can again be speed bumps to what may be a perfectly well-intended day. You may have planned out your entire day, including time for yourself, time for your family, time for your work, time for rest and recovery, and then real life gets in the way. It is completely normal. The question is, when these things happen, how do we react? How do we behave? What decisions do we make when these things happen? So whether that's, you know, demands at work,

derail you or the really bad weather may disrupt workout plans even. But stoicism can teach us that the only thing that we control is our response to these things. If you miss a workout, can you adjust or can you do something different? It's about staying flexible and adaptable and maintaining focus. So imagine this, you're planning at the gym after work, but you're

boss throws in a meeting, puts a meeting on your calendar last minute, and you're frustrated as we all would be. And it's easy to think, well, I guess today's workout's out the window. Like I'm not going be able to work out today. My boss put in a this extra meeting, know, set me behind on what I really wanted to do. But instead, instead of throwing it out the window completely, what if you thought, what can I control in this moment? What can I control in this situation?

And no, maybe you can't do your full 45 minute workout. That happens. But could you do 15 minutes? Could you do 15 minutes of mobility work or core work when you get home? It is a small wind and these small winds add up. And if there's, you know, one of the many lessons I've kind of learned through years of only training for myself, but working with clients is that it gets pretty easy to

kind of shrug off when you only have 10 or 15 minutes. Like, I guess I can't do anything today. I really want to do an hour of exercise or this fitness class that was 45 minutes or an hour. But everything got in the way. fell behind. Now I've only got 10 or 15 minutes. I'm back home. I just don't have the time to do it. Well, 10 minutes, as little as 10 minutes, you can have a productive exercise. You can do something.

In the comfort of your own home, you can do something that will improve your health, improve your healthspan, improve your muscle activation, improve your mobility, improve your, you know, all the beautiful chemical reactions that happen when we do exercise that make us feel good. And even, you know, the psychological part of still overcoming a barrier and still doing something gives us a sense of accomplishment and pride and self-esteem.

So if you think that you can't do anything productive in 10 minutes at home, do this. If you only got 10 minutes, this is my challenge to you. I want to give you two exercises to do in 10 minutes, just two. And all you need is gravity, a floor and a wall. So hopefully you have all these things in your house. If you do, you're set up for success. What I want you to do in the 10 minutes, again, this is like worst case scenario, your day's falling apart.

I want you to do a plank for as long as you can. Doesn't matter how long, but you got 10 minutes, so we're gonna do as long as you possibly can.

So assuming you can't do a plank for 10 minutes, or if you can, great, you're done. Let's say you do a plank for 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes, three minutes, whatever that happens to be. That's tough. As soon as you're done with that plank, I want you to do a wall sit. If you don't know what a wall sit is, you can look it up online, but basically it is putting your back up against the wall, sliding down until you're sitting, kind of sitting without a chair. looks like you're sitting in a chair, 90 degrees to your hips and knees.

And you're using your glutes and your core and your quads to hold you up against the wall. And you're sitting there and sitting and sitting, hold that wall sit for as long as you possibly can. Again, 30 seconds, a minute, two minutes. mean, if anybody out there can hold a wall sit for, you know, five minutes or so send me a DM. That would be pretty rad. I'd like to see that. But here you have 10 minutes. You can do a plank. Then you do a wall sit.

And you do a plank and you do a wall sit and your limited time, your day has fallen apart. All these things you can't control has just thrown you off track. Take that time back. Take that ownership of your life back. Take back that time for self care because you are worth it. Take those 10 minutes, throw the excuse out the window. It's garbage. It doesn't matter. Do a plank long as you can. Do a wall sit as long as you can.

Repeat that 10 minutes. You're done. I promise you, you will be tired. I promise you, you will feel your legs the next day because you've challenged yourself. You've taken this, the mindset of, I can control myself. can't control outside events. You've taken, you've made the decision to say, yeah, you know, my boss through this crazy, you know, last minute meeting, totally threw me off track, ruined what I wanted to do.

But instead of going home and pouting, or instead of saying, forget it, my day is done, what you're do is say, hell, I'm worth making something out of this, because I'm gonna own it. And you can own that with those 10 minutes, plank, wall sit. That's just one of the million different things you can do when you have 10 minutes. So if all you have is 10 minutes, there are things you can do, for sure. So the punchline here is control what you can, it's your effort, your discipline, and your consistency.

Choosing to stay worked up about things that are out of your control, like choosing to get home and fret and bitch and moan about your boss's last minute meeting is really just, it's really just a lack of discipline. It's laziness. It's absolute laziness. It's an excuse. It's a cop out. And sadly, when we do cop outs like this, and we've all done them for sure, it is abusing ourself.

from, you know, it's like adding insult to injury. Like there's already been a curve ball. There's already been a bad situation. There's already been excess demands they weren't planning for placed upon us. So instead of saying, well, how can I make this better? We go home, we pout, we, you know, maybe overeat or maybe, you know, have a cocktail or do all these things that ultimately take a bad situation from the outside world. And we self-sabotage ourself on top of it. It's stupid. It's dumb. Versus saying, I'm going do something about it.

Do something with those 10 minutes. You're totally worth it.

That brings us to the third point about utilizing stoicism viewpoints to help with our healthspan, help with our physical exercise, our wellness. And this is about building resilience through stoicism. So physical exercise isn't just about building muscle. It's about building resilience. And why does this matter? Well, know, many of us middle-aged people

might feel discouraged about our physical limitations, our bodies are changing in a way that we're not super stoked about, whether it's joint pain, maybe an old injury or a new injury, or simply just feeling like we're not as fit as we used to be. This is definitely a reason to start feeling frustrated. And many people will just either give up or just stop pushing themselves hard. there's a sense of

almost throwing in the towel. And I think that for some people, at least some of the clients that I end up working with, there's sometimes people will go through a period where they do kind of throw in the towel and they lose some resilience and they lose some confidence and like, there's, you know, days, weeks, months, or a couple of years or many years, sometimes where people kind of don't do much for themselves. And then they come back around and realize like, Hey, I got to do something about it. And that's when they kind of get in contact with me, but it happens.

Stoicism can teach us that challenges and setbacks are actually opportunities to build resilience mentally and physically. resilience to me is, there's the physical resilience of lifting a heavier weight. It's building some more durability by taking these challenges head on, taking the challenge of a weight of resistance head on and forcing yourself to

do repetition after repetition of the hard thing in your body, your muscles adapt, which is awesome. It's crazy how amazing our body can adapt. The same thing that adaptability and building resilience for your bicep or your deltoid or your rotator cuff. Same thing happens with us mentally through building resilience.

So I think about this stoic idea, the obstacle is the way when it comes to an injury, when it comes to a physical limitation that we have, that can be seen as a roadblock. But if the obstacle is the way, this, you know, feeling this lack of resilience, because I've got an injury, I've got some tendon inflammation, there is a way to look at this as an opportunity for growth, an opportunity for growth, maybe in other areas. For example, I have a client.

who recently had a total knee replacement. Well, now I guess it's been almost a year out now, had a total knee replacement. She's in her mid-60s, always active for her whole life. And there was a period of time, an extended period of time where we couldn't do the normal routine. I talk about a major roadblock, major surgery, even had a little complications with the surgery along the way. the challenge was, how do we...

capitalize on this situation? How do we maintain and even build some resilience to kind of get through this when being sidelined with a major surgery like this can be such a major setback? So what we had to do is figure out, well, list of things that we have to kind of avoid or work around, what could we do? How can we be creative? And what else can we do? So we worked on

obviously some upper body exercises worked on some core strength and a whole list of other, you know, even kind of mindset shifts and working through like the positivity and again, controlling the things that we can control for her kind of resigning herself. Are there some part of the healing processes that, you know, she had to just deal with, you know, the knee replacement, is what it is. Couldn't change that, but what could be changed is nutrition. What could be changed was hydration.

sleep, exercising other parts of the body. And the bonus of the whole thing was building mental toughness. coming through the other side of this, you know, the surgery for this client was the sense of resilience, know, the sense of toughness and durability and like, yeah, I mean, that was super tough, hard to get through, you know, ups and downs, had some bad days, but we pushed through and came out on the other side.

really kind of feeling stronger and the, I mean like emotionally stronger and more emotionally competent and ready to take on more challenging things because again, those of us that are in middle age and especially as we continue to age, there are gonna be more obstacles, guaranteed. There are gonna be injuries, aches, pains, barriers. I mean, I'm probably gonna have my left knee replaced at some point in my life because I've got some issues with that.

These things are coming down the pike. We can build resilience. When we take these things head on and figure out there's a way to make the best of a bad situation, there are ways to build resilience instead of throwing in the towel. There's ways to.

to literally be stronger despite a bad situation.

So building resilience now, even when you have setbacks, ensures that we're gonna be able to continue to move forward no matter what comes our way. The work you put in today will pay off tomorrow, will pay off next year, pay off decades from now.

And what's been interesting with me kind of preparing for this particular episode is that when I recognize as I was looking at my approach with my clients, that I always have this thread of kind stoicism mixed into the coaching plan, mixed into certainly all the conversations I have with my clients, because there's always going to be time management constraints. There's always going to be obstacles. There's always going to be things that are out of our control every day.

every single day. And so we are going to be so much better off if we can approach these things level headed, calm, controlled, controlling the things that we can, not worrying about the things that we can't.

We will literally be extending our healthspan. We will be living a longer life. We will be happier. We'll be more durable. We'll be able to overcome things. We'll be more pleasant to be around. You know, if we were walking around in this world when this hurricane of stress and chaos and victims of all the things around us, you're not going to be super fun to be with versus being competent, being calm, being a source of strength for those around you really can be useful.

when you are following stoic principles. So no time, nighting injury, new injury, unhealthy habits, whatever it is, these are the obstacles and...

They're not just barriers, but they are literally opportunities for us to grow.

And if you want help on how to figure out how to navigate those obstacles, I'm offering one-to-one consultations. I'm happy to have a one-off conversation with you about how to navigate your specific barriers to meet your ultimate needs, overcome these limitations, reach your goals. I'll leave my contact information in the bio, but let's talk about one thing you can do today to extend your healthspan. One thing you can do today to extend...

to extend your healthspan is to take the time, take a few moments and define one, just one obstacle that you have to exercising regularly, consistently. Find one obstacle you have. We all have these. We all have a list of them. But I want you to pick just one obstacle. Like what is that thing? What is so damn hard for me? What gets in the way?

of exercising, taking care of my health is one thing. Then I want you to face that obstacle head on. You define it, you face it head on and create a plan, literally a plan, an action to overcome that. Face it head on. What is that one thing you can do where you see that obstacle like, I can never get to the gym because of X? Well, look at X.

Face it head on and create a plan to overcome that X. Of course, if you don't know how to overcome X, you need help, message me, that's what I do. You are worth finding that barrier, taking that barrier head on.

Your life depends on it. And I'll even say, know, if you're over 40 years old and you are not exercising regularly, consistently, you are literally shortening your life. 100%. You are shortening your life. You have to be doing resistance training and cardiovascular training consistently, multiple days per week, every single week of the year. If you're in your forties and above, or else you were choosing.

to live a shortened life. Sucks. It sucks. That's the reality of it. know, youth is wasted on the young. We should know that by now.

But in conclusion, let's think about the key points here are time management through the discipline, use your time wisely, your mindset, making sure that you are controlling your reactions to external events because you can't change the external events themselves. You can just control your reaction to them. Let go of the things you can't control like the boss, the schedules, that late meeting is what it is. And build resilience, physical limitations, these aches and pains, these injuries that can get in the way of our regular exercise routine.

looking at things through a stoic lens will help us adapt and find other things that can do. When we are injured, for example, we can rest an injured body part and exercise something else. We can do it. We can work around these things following the basics of stoicism.

So if you've been listening and thinking, I really need help integrating these store principles into my journey, awesome. Shoot me a message. I'm happy to help. I'll leave my link in the bio. And as always, I'm super grateful for you listening, paying attention. I hope this gives you just a little bit of insight and a specific action item you can do to extend your healthspan. You are totally worth it. Listening to this episode, listening to this, you my podcast series or the videos I put online are

Hopefully informative, they're meant to be informative. I'm just dropping knowledge and some personal experience, the ups and downs that I go through. But listening to this podcast alone is not going to get you healthier. You have to take action. You have to do something, do the things to reap the rewards. And I would say that, you know, looking online or seeing a workout plan or being a few miles from the local gym, those are great. It doesn't do squat until you get in the gym.

You do the hard work, do the resistance training, do the cardiovascular training, break a sweat, be tired, be a little bit sore. Unless you're doing those things, you're missing the point. So I'm grateful for your time until next time. Get to the gym. Be stoic. You got this.