Why Cheaters Never Win
How Hormones Affect Your Bottom Line, New in Health, What to Read, Tweets of the Week
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Neuro Athletes,
As long as there have been sports, there have been athletes in search of an advantage. Of all the ways to get ahead and have an inch of speed on your opponent, many have turned to performance enhancing drugs.
Sigh.
So many false claims around quick fixes and how to gain results by literally doing anything other than what actually works. Why? Because it’s faster.
I’m sure you’ve heard about them in just about every sport in the U.S. Some of the best baseball players of all time have been accused of doping, American football players are regularly suspended for failing drug tests, and of course Lance Armstrong famously finally came clean about blood doping in 2012 vacating his seven Tour de France victories in the process.
Some of these performance enhancing drugs have now reached the financial sector with some of the biggest financial institutions on Wall Street. These institutions are home to tired, hungry, competitive traders who all want that winning pill that will make them trade longer, faster and better.
We refer to them as drugs but most performance enhancers are really just versions of the chemicals that you already have in your body. These are the compounds that your body uses to build and heal itself and keep itself healthy but by ramping up the levels of these compounds and getting more out of your body would end up putting yourself in more trouble then when you began.
Why would someone want to take performance enhancers if they come at a cost to your health, wealth and status? Fear.
Here’s why:
We’re living in a culture where we want a quick fix
Science is still not loud enough in the teaching people that the only way to produce ongoing results day in and day out is by manipulating the nervous system through scientifically proven protocols
When the bottom line is at stake, you turn to what you know and feel is most comfortable to you. The easiest way out.
I have been fortunate enough at Neuro Athletics to work with high level people such as elite athletes, military, hedge fund managers and even neurosurgeons. They work in very high performing yet very complicated, even chaotic, type fields. While they all have demanding jobs where even one small error can be catastrophic, they execute on this common trait…
Fearlessness.
Stress, fear and threat were designed to agitate us so that we actually move towards our target but what controls our level of stress and fear? What can we do to have a safe level of fear but also have the courage to relentlessly push beyond the limits of fear and become fearless?
Primer
I recently read this article in the New York Times that profiles the activist short-seller behind Hindenburg Research- Nathan Anderson. He has been described as fearless in his pursuit to expose bad companies and their wrong doings.
What’s interesting about this trait is that ‘fearlessness’ requires more than just gambling on something you feel certain about. Fearlessness is deep rooted in the brains ability to endure, manage stress and reach equilibrium between sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system.
Hormones and Fear
Fear is a chain reaction in the brain that happens when you encounter a potentially harmful stimulus. The amygdala is the part of your brain that receives information from many parts of the brain and interprets this information to generate the emotion of fear. When the amygdala generates a fear emotion, it sends impulses to another part of the brain, the hypothalamus.
The hypothalamus then sends impulses to many different parts of the body to trigger a fight‐or‐flight response. During the fight‐ or flight response, many body systems undergo changes to give your body a burst of energy needed to defend yourself (fight) or to escape (flight) in a potentially harmful situation.
The other way to get messages to many different parts of the body is through hormones (chemical messengers) secreted by the endocrine system.
The adrenal gland is an endocrine gland that produces two fear hormones—adrenaline and cortisol.
Adrenaline increases heart rate, increases breathing rate, dilates blood vessels to the lungs and muscles while decreasing blood flow to the brain.
Cortisol increases blood sugar level by converting stored glycogen and fats into blood sugar while suppressing the immune response and inflammation.
5 hormones that directly impact decision-making
Testosterone
Estrogen and Progesterone
Cortisol
Dopamine
Oxytocin
You can learn more about these hormones and how they affect your behaviours and in turn affect how you perform by subscribing to my premium newsletter that will be released later today.
In this report you will get full access to:
My exclusive interview with Dr. Carrie Jones about hormones as it relates to high performance
How to test your hormones including what lab values you should be aiming for
A profile on Bill Ackman and how he is utilising human optimisation to gain greater results in his career
Hot and cold water immersion protocols for increased brain health, lowered inflammation and increased recovery.
Best protocols for increasing brain endurance
If you have information you would like to share please contact me at louisa.nicola@gmail.com
What to Read
“After years of losses, a hedge fund iconoclast ponders his future” (Institutional Investor)
I loved reading this article although it was from 2017, it still highlights some of the highs and lows of the great Bill Ackman. “Are investors unhappy with our performance? I’m unhappy with our performance, but if I recover the way I expect to from this, Pershing Square becomes much, much stronger. We’re never going to challenge it again.”
“Episode 91: Healthy Brain, Happy Life - How to Train Your Brain | DR. WENDY SUZUKI” (Podcast)
In this episode we discuss: 1. Different forms of anxiety and how to treat it, memory and how to train it, exercise and its effects on brain health, meditation and how it effects the brain.
Tweets of the Week
Answer me this
Do you believe that skilled and experienced asset managers can be coached to become more effective stock pickers?
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Probably by training them to understand and recognize their own biases