The Morning Upgrade Podcast Featuring Dr. Steven Cangiano

Welcome to episode #24 of the Morning Upgrade Podcast. In this interview, I had the pleasure of speaking with Dr. Steven Cangiano. He is the owner of several health and personal development products and digital publications. 

Top Talking Points

• The importance of controlling one’s behavior in order to achieve one’s goals.
• How sleep is essential in one’s overall health.
• Why you should workout early after waking up.

Resources & Links

Share Link for this episode

Connect With Dr. Cangiano at humanity-upgrade.com

Resource mentioned in this episode:

• relationship-development.com

Find The Books Mentioned on Kindle or Audible: 

Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker

The Recreation Handbook by Robert Loffelbein

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Transcription Of The Episode

Ryan

Hey morning upgraders it’s Ryan. Before we get to the show, I have a quick question for you. Do you want to start a morning routine, but you don’t know what to do or don’t have a lot of time? Well, I have an exciting announcement. I just launched my first product called the morning upgrade cards. It’s a journal type product, but in card format, and they help anyone start and stick with a morning routine. And you only need 20 minutes every morning to take a card pen to paper and answer the questions and follow the prompts. The morning upgrade cards make it easy to build what I consider to be the number one habit and that’s investing in yourself first thing in the morning with a morning routine. To learn more, go to morning upgrade.com forward slash cards. Thanks for letting me share and now on to the show.

Announcer

Welcome to the Morning upgrade podcast with Ryan cote where we feature casual conversations with entrepreneurs about personal development and growth.

Ryan

Hey everyone, this is Ryan cote from the morning upgrade Podcast. Today I’m super excited to be speaking with Dr. Steven kenjijoe. Hi, Steven, how are you?

Dr. Cangiano

Good. Ryan, how are you?

Ryan

I’m doing great. Thanks for joining us. Why don’t you start off by telling everyone what you do. And then what you enjoy doing, what your interests are.

Dr. Cangiano

My background is academic medicine. I taught foot and ankle surgery for about 13 years, I then had a life changing health and personal development experience I lost 91 pounds. And I’ve actually kept that weight off for almost 30 years which is you know, somewhat unique. So I became very enamored with preventive health. And then also the life enhancement human development industry. About 10 years ago I met my current wife and she happened to be in the IT media publishing and events business probably one of the most successful people in that industry in the IT and cloud computing space. And so when she retired, she decided she was going to help me with you know, the the health and the relationships and the personal development, human development, types of things that I really enjoy. And so now we have five magazines, relationship development and transformation. Humanity upgrade humanity, upgrade MD humanity, upgrade education, humanity upgrade fit. So it’s been an amazing journey. And I’m really happy to be here and speak with you or with your with your people.

Ryan

Yeah, absolutely. 91 pounds. That’s, I mean, I know it comes down to you know, what you eat and exercise. But is there anything else that you learned during that weight loss journey?

Dr. Cangiano

Yeah, so for me, it became this compelling journey. And I did it through the Human Development, personal development industry, as we were speaking about, you know, prequel to this. And for me, weight loss is objective. And my my medical training background was taught me to be very objective, systematic, and, you know, do things in a predictable way. So what interests me about weight loss is that it is at the focal point, the fulcrum of behavior, how do we direct and control our behavior to any result we desire in this lifetime? More and more importantly, how do we become consistent with who we are and who we want to become. And I know you’re about helping people become what they want to become in a predictable way. So that’s probably why we’re here. The second thing is, food is the relationship of last resort. And really, if you look at relationship, in the context of being a human being, there’s nothing in my opinion, more important, it allowed us to survive when we were meager animals on the savannas. It allowed us to dominate the world, all these amazing technological advancements, some of them are starting to creep up on us. But for the first time in human history, we can disconnect from every other relationship. But we are permanently intimately tied into a relationship with food and we can transform that. And 74.1% of the population struggle with that relationship almost 50% in a very severe way. And then obviously, my health background. So I’m a personal development expert, but probably a health enthusiast very well educated. And for me, I have this unbelievable front row seat because of all the magazines I have, I get to read, discuss, you know, talk with people like you who are really trying to help this world become a better place and so I just feel very fortunate, fortunate. So, behavior, relationship and health that focal that fulcrum that that that center point of that for a lot of people is weight loss. So that’s why I focus about 50% of my energies on that.

Ryan

So it sounds like a lot of it comes down to habits and imagine in your journey through personal development and weight loss and trying to help people you’ve developed your own habits that have been really key, can you share any of your habits?

Dr. Cangiano

Yeah, so the number one for me, like, you know, cuz I love this, like, our magazine is humanity upgrade and your morning upgrade. Boy, you need to start today, right. And this is going to be a little counterintuitive, but what I do is, is I start the night, right, and here’s what I mean. When I go to the mall, the number one health thing you can do, believe it or not, is not eating better not exercise, the number one healthy thing you can do is sleep better. And so now I’ve regimented myself to get in bed lights out, you know, at the same time every night, and I get my eight and a half to nine hours sleep, which is, you know, not common in this society. So that’s the number one habit. The number two habit is a resource that we have. It’s called the recreation handbook. And I think fundamentally, what you’re doing is, is you’re asking the good questions. And what we do is our patterns of thinking or questions on Fortunately, we’ve become a condition. And we come by this honestly, and this is a pattern and a habit that has to be broken for most people, is we ask ourselves bad questions. And so I developed a resource called the recreation handbook, which is free on the site, you can log in and just, you know, download it. And what it does is help people predictably, improve their moment-to-moment quality of consciousness. And for me, and I think this is well documented in the industry. This is the starting point. For everyone who wants to transform their life, who wants to move their life forward, who wants to create different things in their life, and it has 10 disciplines, they’re not really disciplines, they’re recreations, and I call a recreation because the root of the word recreation means to recreate yourself. And Recreation is fun. So it’s conscious practices, conscious breathing, conscious, eating, conscious thinking, conscious, relating, conscious listening, so on and so forth. And I’m happy to have any, anybody who listens to this, they can download it for free. It’s a tremendously valuable resource in the Human Development, personal development industry.

Ryan

He will definitely link that up in the show notes, for sure. And I’m gonna, I’m gonna make sure I download that as well. Normally, I ask your number one personal development tip, you already something gave it in terms of sleep. And that’s something that we don’t, as of yet, I haven’t spoken much about that on the show. But I know it’s super important. So I’d like to dive a little bit deeper into that because I think my listeners would benefit from that. So sleep, you know, as you said, eight to nine hours, do you have any hate to use word hacks, but I can’t think of a better word on top my head hacks for better sleep, whether it’s tools that you might use, like, I think it’s what the like the o ring or something like that, or maybe something else? How do you sleep best?

Dr. Cangiano

Yeah. So I got introduced to this. It’s really fascinating. And it’s funny, you asked this question because I resist the RE I’ve been in that literature for two years, a little rusty over the last couple of months. And this week, I’ve actually reinvigorated myself into it is absolutely mind-boggling. So you look at sleep from an evolutionary perspective. And we’ve been programmed to sleep eight to nine hours a day. And it we, you know, basically evolution said to us, Hey, you got to lock down for eight to nine hours a day to be healthy. It increased our predation and gave us less time for you know, for survival things like getting food and that kind of thing. If you look at the biometric parameters of sleep, and for instance, a week of short sleep four hours instead of eight hours, actually gives you these metabolic indications of being have metabolic syndrome, which is what basically is, yeah, just for one week of short sleep, some of the hacks you can do is turn off your devices an hour before you go to bed. There’s a lot of good research with blue light, human beings. And Ryan, this is what I would have it call under the broad category of evolutionary mismatches. We’re supposed to calm down when the sun goes down, and we’re supposed to wake up when the sun comes up. And there’s a lot of people who don’t follow that evolutionary direction. And so another, for instance, people on shift work, shift work is now considered a class two carcinogen. by the World Health Organization, people who don’t sleep are much more likely to have diabetes, chronic disease, depression, it is absolutely mind-boggling. And there’s a great book I would direct your people to is by Dr. Matthew Walker, I think he’s at the Berkeley Sleep Center. And it is a phenomenon worldwide. And it really goes into all of the things you can and can’t do. But really, you have to cover it, your sleep, it is the best thing you can do for your health. One last little tidbit I’ll give you which I just learned this read this yesterday, you can live about two to three minutes without oxygen, about two to three days, depending on the environment without water, food, anywhere from people has actually lived as long as a year 384 days of the record on water fast this person was obviously severely obese. Basically, the longest anyone’s lived without sleep is 24 days. So you need sleep more than you need food, which is was mind-boggling to me.

Ryan

Yeah, I mean, this is something that we don’t talk enough about. I think I tie so closely into personal development. So I’m glad you brought it up. Do you use any sleep tracking devices? I know you said put all your devices but anything that helps you track the quality of your sleep?

Dr. Cangiano

I’ve actually considered getting in the aura ring or the whoop, I haven’t done it yet. But I’m actually talking with a bunch of physicians. And this is up for a lot of people in the health industry. Because look, the major thrust in the alternative medical health industry is a lifestyle. And we have a lifestyle tracking platform in what’s called our HQ fit. And we’re trying looking at integrating the sleep monitoring things. Now. I’ve done a lot of research on it. And they’re not really good necessarily. They actually create some sleep anxiety. Some people say I get my aura ring on my whoop. And then I’m worried if I’m sleeping right in my quality of sleep because you have to have deep sleep REM sleep and this whole bunch of other phases of sleep. So good question, I don’t have enough experience. Personally, I have some knowledge because I’ve been researching it. And one of the big trends in personal development and life and human development, which is what you’re all about is biometric tracking. And there’s a lot of big companies getting into that and sleep, the proper monitoring of sleep is going to be one of the bigger things glucose, obviously, weight, metabolic you know, all these different things. But we’re going to be able to do that with carrying around devices very soon. It’s really amazing stuff.

Ryan

Yeah, I mean, I think device or not what you said before about just making sure that you turn your devices off an hour before bed. I’m assuming a dark room, you know, temperature-controlled, you know, making sure you’re going to bed at a reasonable time and getting up at a reasonable time. I think that right, there’s probably gets 80% of the way there.

Dr. Cangiano

The hack Ryan, which I failed to mention, and that’s trying to eat three hours before you go to bed for hours. collapse your eating window. And there’s better. A lot of people use that for dieting, and I’m obviously very familiar with that. But I think it’s more important for sleep than alcohol. If you’re going to have alcohol, have it in the middle of the day, not at night, because that really interrupts your REM sleep. So besides those things you mentioned, which is an excellent synopsis, the other thing is, is try and limit the alcohol after four or five o’clock if he can try and limit food after five, seven, depending on what time I’m sorry, six, seven, depending on what time you go to bed.

Ryan

Excellent. Or thanks for sharing. I’ve got one more question for you, Steven. And then I’d like to wrap up with you telling everyone how they can learn more about you website or what have you. Do you have a morning routine? And if yes, what does it look like?

Dr. Cangiano

Yeah, so it’s kind of funny you mentioned that because what I’ll do is is I try I go to bed at 10 and I try to get up I usually have a gym down in the house. And so I’ve been setting my internal alarm clock in my brain to get up at six o’clock and it hasn’t been working. I’ve actually needed to set the alarm. And what I’ll do is it’s really easy. I never turn on my devices. never looked at my phone until I get downstairs the, into the gym and I and now I’ve kind of in house I like I used to love to go to the gym. But I’m in the house and I do my peloton, I tried to do, I try to alternate that I had some hip operations. So I’m kind of limited on the cardio I can do. And so I try to mix and match like to do a high-intensity interval training. I’ll do it to Bata, I’ll do a long, long, slow ride. And I try and mix it up. Because I don’t have that diversity, I’d love to go run I’d love to I hate swimming. It’s a great exercise nothing against it’s just not for me, I used to do the ellipticals, I’m really limited. So what I do is I try to maximize my diversity on that one piece of equipment. And then we have some weights, resistance training, especially the axial muscles of the hips are super important. Resistance training, I’m 62. So it’s really important to avoid something called sarcopenia. So you really want to have a good mix of cardio and resistance training. And so that’s my morning routine, and then walk the dogs make sure my wife’s well taken care of with coffee and whatever else she needs and wants. And so that’s the there’s a lot there. But that’s my morning routine.

Ryan

Yeah, heavy into fitness, I love it. It’s a great way to start your day. I really appreciate your time, Steven, all the advice you shared, I love that we talked a lot about sleep and give some actual tips around that I think my listeners are gonna get a lot from that. What’s the best way somebody could connect with you if they want to learn more.

Dr. Cangiano

So like I said, you know, put the recreation handbook in, it’ll take you 45 minutes to read, it has a two-minute summary. That’s a great resource. It’s free. And it can you know, it can really transform your mental processes on a daily basis. And that’s the start of any kind of personal human development thing. We have relationship development and transformation, which is our first magazine. We have also had humanity hyphen, upgrade, calm, humanity hyphen, MD. We have a weight loss website, and we have 120 thought leaders. I’m really happy to have you contribute to the magazine. It’s really a privilege and an honor for me to be able to communicate with your people with people like you and through the magazine. And yeah, I really like what you’re doing here. I really appreciate it.

Ryan

Yeah, I appreciate that. Steven, I’m looking forward to keeping in touch with you. Thanks, everyone for listening, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Ryan

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