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What I Do Every Day for a Sharper Mind

I recently read a piece by Mark Divine—retired Navy SEAL Commander, bestselling author, and founder of SEALFIT—where he shared three daily habits he credits with keeping his mind sharp through combat deployments, and now through his work with Fortune 500 executives.

If you run a company, you already know this truth: your mental sharpness is your business. There’s often no board of directors to catch what you miss. No deep bench of VPs to pick up the slack when your thinking gets foggy. Your clarity drives revenue, team performance, and every strategic decision that determines whether you scale or stall.

Divine’s habits resonated with me because they’re not theoretical. They’re not “optimize your morning routine” influencer content. They’re field-tested practices with real science behind them. And they translate directly to the demands of running a growing business.

Here’s what I do every day—inspired by Divine’s framework and adapted for the reality of leading a growth-stage company.

1. Move Frequently, Not Heroically

Divine makes a point that stuck with me: you don’t need a punishing workout. You need frequent, deliberate movement throughout the day. A set of body weight squats between meetings. A ten-minute walk after lunch. Some slow breathing while stretching.

The research backs this up. A 2025 study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that people who took brief micro-breaks during sustained work outperformed those who powered through without stopping. The improvement wasn’t marginal—it was significant and sustained over time.

Another study from the National Institutes of Health demonstrated that ten-minute physical activity breaks improved both attention and executive function in workers—the exact cognitive skills you need for strategic decision-making, difficult conversations, and staying ahead of operational complexity.

What this means for your business: That four-hour strategy session without a break isn’t making you more productive. Your best thinking happens when you interrupt sustained effort with brief movement. Schedule it. Protect it. Your P&L depends on it.

2. Train Your Breathing Before You Need It

Divine’s second habit is deliberate breath work—and his point is critical: don’t wait until you’re stressed to start breathing with intention. Build the practice in calm conditions so it’s available to you under pressure.

A 2025 narrative review in the journal Stress and Health analyzed 30 studies and found that slow, nasal, belly breathing significantly improves heart rate variability, and emotional control while reducing anxiety and stress. Heart rate variability, in particular, is a key marker of resilience—your nervous system’s ability to adapt to changing demands.

A meta-analysis published in Scientific Reports confirmed that breath work interventions produced a statistically significant reduction in stress, anxiety, and depressive symptoms across 785 participants in randomized controlled trials. The effect was most pronounced with slow-paced breathing techniques.

Here’s the practical version: I do two to three minutes of slow nasal breathing—roughly five seconds in, five seconds out—before any high-stakes meeting, phone call, or decision point. It takes almost no time. The effect is immediate and measurable.

What this means for your business: When you lose a key employee, get blindsided by a cash flow issue, or face a hostile customer situation, your body reacts before your brain has time to think. If your nervous system is already primed for calm, you respond with clarity instead of reacting from panic. That’s the difference between a founder who handles crisis and one who creates additional chaos.

3. Starve the Negative Thought Loop

This is the one that hits hardest for founders. Divine’s third habit is active mental discipline: every negative thought you dwell on strengthens a neural pathway. You weaken those patterns by denying them attention and deliberately redirecting to constructive thinking.

This isn’t positive-thinking fluff. Neuroscience has consistently demonstrated that repetitive thought patterns create and reinforce neural pathways. What you focus on, your brain gets better at producing. Founders who mentally replay every worst-case scenario aren’t being “realistic”—they’re training their brain to default to threat focus instead of opportunity recognition.

My version of this: when I catch myself over focusing on a problem—replaying a difficult conversation, overreacting and worrying about something I can’t control—I interrupt the pattern. I ask: What’s the most useful thing I can do about this in the next 30 minutes? If the answer is “nothing,” I redirect my attention to something productive. Not because the problem isn’t real, but because reflection doesn’t solve anything.

What this means for your business: Founders who can’t manage their internal thoughts become the bottleneck on their own growth. They delay decisions. They avoid hard conversations. They second-guess strategies that are working because their brain is stuck in threat mode. Learning to interrupt that cycle is as much a business skill as reading a financial statement.

Here’s My Take

None of this requires a gym membership, a meditation app subscription, or a weekend retreat. It requires intention and consistency. Ten minutes of movement scattered through your day. Two minutes of controlled breathing before pressure moments. And the discipline to catch yourself when your thinking goes sideways.

Mark Divine developed these habits in environments where mental failure could get people killed. You and I face lower stakes—but the principle is the same. A sharper mind isn’t a luxury for founders. It’s the infrastructure everything else is built on.

Protect it daily. Your business will reflect it.