Ben Greenfield Fitness: Diet, Fat Loss And Performance

For two years, since nearly breaking the 4 hour mark in a Half-Ironman in Japan, I've had an "anchor". Not that heavy piece of metal you drop off the back of a boat. I'm talking about a mental anchor. Basically, it goes like this: when I'm in the middle of a race, I squeeze my thumb up against the inside of my hand, and this triggers my mind to shout this phrase "never gonna catch me". Then I seem to just take off like a shot. I'm totally not kidding. It shuts down the pain, let's me focus, and causes me to tap into a quick burst of hidden energy. I developed this anchor during something called a neurolingustic programming session (also known as "NLP") that I recorded for a podcast just a few days before that race in Japan, and I released the podcast a few days later. You can listen to it at "How To Rewire Your Brain and Body With Neurolinguistic Programming". But this simple programming technique still didn't tackle another important issue - the trouble that many athletes have getting to sleep at night befor