This week’s Superset is about reclaiming control.

Control over your mind. Control over your training. Control over your time.

We talk often about actionable ideas, foundationally based and supported, to take into our weeks. This week is packed with 3 of these that can be benefited from today if you so choose.

Our mental rep this week details how much of your anxiety isn’t random… but rooted in avoidance. The work you’re postponing. The conversation you’re dodging. The decision you know you need to make.

Our physical rep of the week explains why slowing down your runs (intentionally training in Zone 2) might be the exact thing that finally makes you faster and more durable.

And our intellectual rep offers a confronting but powerful challenge: converting 20% of your daily screen time into reading time, and what happens when you replace noise with depth.

Intentional reps through smarter outputs is the name of the game this week. Now let’s have a day.

Any time I go through a period where I have a noticeably higher level of anxious feelings or thoughts, I refer back to this quote that I’ve seen packaged in many different mediums, mostly recently in Sahil Bloom’s book 5 Types of Wealth:

“Most of your anxiety is self-inflicted. You’re anxious because you’re avoiding something you know you need to do.”

The actual work that needs to be done, not the busy. The decision you know you need to make but haven’t yet. The hard conversation you’ve been avoiding.

Do the thing. Watch your anxiety disappear.

At first, I think most people will reject this idea. Anxiety feels like something that happens to us. But more often than we’d like to admit, it’s something we sustain.

There’s a reason for that.

When you avoid a necessary action, your brain doesn’t forget about it. It keeps the tab open. Psychologists call this the “Zeigarnik effect”. Unfinished tasks create cognitive tension. Your brain wants closure. Until it gets it, it keeps pinging you.

So when you feel that low-level hum, that’s often simply unresolved business. This is not to discount clinical anxiety, rather to combat our own internal dialogues about labeling all of our stress as outwardly induced anxiousness

Avoidance temporarily reduces discomfort. But in the background, it increases uncertainty, and uncertainty fuels anxiety. The anticipation of doing something hard is usually worse than the act itself.

Think about it:

Anxiety often isn’t a sign you’re incapable or in a rut, yet it’s a signal you’re postponing courage. And the reason this is so crucial of an “aha” moment to have - if avoidance creates it, action dissolves it. You can reframe your mind’s way back into control.

This week I want you do something simple. Make a “One Thing” List.

Write down the one task, decision, or conversation you’ve been avoiding that creates the most background stress.

Then do this:

Send the email. Make the call. Book the appointment. Start the draft. Have the talk.

There’s a considerable amount of anxiety that we suffer from that is self-induced, and this is the segmentation of that dilemma that we want to focus our attention on weeding out. Procrastination work is contagious for yourself. Once you have the hard conversation, it’s easy to do again. Once you start, you can start faster the next time.

For a long time, I didn’t believe in Zone 2 training.

It sounded like something recreational runners did because they weren’t willing to push themselves. That didn’t line up with the David Goggins speech running through my ears. I prided myself on grinding. If a run didn’t leave me breathing hard and checking my watch to see how fast I held the pace, it didn’t feel productive. Slowing down felt like regression. Like I was losing fitness instead of building it.

But after one too many cycles of building speed, flirting with burnout, and not being able to sustain a training block long enough to make it to a race, I decided to test it honestly. Not for a week. I knew this wasn’t a short game. I committed to running by heart rate and holding myself to it, even when my ego hated the pace.

The first few runs were so damn humbling. My “easy” pace was much slower than I thought it should be. I had to resist the urge to surge on every hill. It felt almost embarrassingly controlled.

And then, like many other compounding behaviors in life, something shifted for me after weeks of running.

My recovery improved bit by bit. My long runs stopped wrecking me for days after. I started noticing my pace was going up while my heart rate was going down. Without forcing speed, I was becoming faster.

Here’s what it took to convince me that Zone 2 works:

1. It builds your aerobic engine.
Training at roughly 60–70% of max heart rate increases mitochondrial density - the energy factories inside your cells. More mitochondria means better energy production and a higher ceiling for performance. Makes sense.

2. It improves fat oxidation.
At lower intensities, your body becomes more efficient at burning fat for fuel. That spares glycogen and delays fatigue when you do run hard. You have exponentially more fat on your body than you’ll ever be able to duplicate in carb consumption.

3. It strengthens your capillary network.
Zone 2 increases capillary density, improving oxygen delivery to working muscles - a foundational adaptation for endurance.

And maybe most importantly: it lowers injury risk. You can stack more consistent weeks together. And consistency beats intensity every time.

So many people I know don’t get into running because it SUCKS at first. So many of those people would stick with it if it sucked less, and one easy way to make sure it sucks less, is to lower your speed. But this isn’t only a concession, it’s a strategic maneuver.

Use Dr. Phil Maffetone’s MAF formula:

180 – your age = max Zone 2 heart rate

Example: 35 years old → 180 – 35 = 145 bpm

Adjustments:

Keep your runs at or below that number. The old adage of you have to slow down to speed up rings true here when we’re talking about running.

If you love knocking two birds out with one stone, then let me ask you a confronting question:

If your phone told you exactly how much of your life you traded for scrolling this week… would you be proud of the return?

Let me ask you this too: If a mentor of yours asked about your reading volume from the week, would you be proud of the time you spent in the pages?

Most of us don’t need more time. We need better exchanges. Chances are you reading this also would in a perfect world have two things - less screen time, more time reading.

So here’s the challenge to leverage the benefits of both:

Convert 20% of your daily screen time into reading time.

4 hours/day on screens? → 48 minutes of reading. 3 hours/day? → 36 minutes.

If you are a 6 hour scroller, 72 minutes may seem like a daunting number. Might even feel confronting. That’s part of the design. If you need a soft entry point, start with 10%.

We’re not just adding reading. We’re reclaiming time.

1. Screen reduction improves cognitive performance.
Research shows excessive screen exposure (especially fast, dopamine-driven content) fragments attention and reduces deep focus capacity. Decreasing screen time improves sustained attention and mental clarity.

2. Reading strengthens the brain differently.
Studies using fMRI scans show that reading activates neural networks tied to language, comprehension, and imagination in ways passive scrolling does not. Deep reading improves empathy, critical thinking, and long-term memory retention.

3. Habit coupling multiplies results.
Behavioral science (like James Clear’s work) consistently shows that eliminating a habit in isolation creates a vacuum. Pairing removal (less screen time) with replacement (reading) reduces relapse and increases adherence. You’re not just quitting something, you’re upgrading it.

We call this strategic substitution rather than subtraction. You fill the void of scrolling with reading, and then over time, you couple the mental benefits of reading, with the mental benefits of spending less time on the phone.

Everyone says they want to read more. Almost no one says, “I should scroll more.”

By converting even 10–20% of screen time into books, you:

In a world addicted to noise, depth becomes a competitive edge.

Try to do it yourself this week. Be hard on yourself. If you can’t cut 20% of your screen time, or can’t focus long enough to read for the allotted time (even if broken up through the day), you should feel motivated to change that. Pick something you want to read, and don’t scroll until you’ve completed your days task.