Peak performance isn’t built in the boardroom — it’s built in the hours before you walk into it. A conversation with former NBA player and current G League Head Coach Paul Jesperson introduced a framework that has stayed with me since: MEDS — Meditation, Exercise, Diet, and Sleep. Four foundational inputs that determine the quality of every decision, conversation, and high-stakes moment that follows. The research is unambiguous, the principle is simple, and the hardest part isn’t knowing it. It’s that when leaders are most stretched, these are the first things they cut — which is exactly when each one matters most.
A few years ago, I caught up with Paul Jesperson — a former player of mine who is now the Head Coach of the Phoenix G League team. At the time, he was working with the Atlanta Hawks organization, and we fell into a conversation about what they were focusing on with their players during the preseason.
Paul mentioned that one of their main points of emphasis was getting players their “meds.”
I stopped him. “What does that mean?”
He smiled and said: “Meditation, exercise, diet, and sleep.”
I’ll be honest — I’m usually not a fan of acronyms. Most of them feel forced. Like someone reverse-engineered the letters to sound clever. But this one stopped me, because it wasn’t clever for the sake of it. It was just true.
And it has stayed with me ever since.
The Foundation Beneath the Work
Here’s the framing that’s helped me most with MEDS: think of your capacity as a leader like a house. The decisions you make, the people you lead, the pressure you perform under — all of that sits on top of a foundation. When the foundation is solid, you can handle almost anything built on top of it. When it’s cracked, everything above it is compromised.
MEDS is the foundation.
And the hardest truth about it? When your plate is full and your capacity is maxed out — which is exactly when high-performing leaders tend to skip the gym, eat whatever is fastest, shortchange sleep, and drop any kind of mindfulness practice — those are the moments you need each of these things the most.
Think of four legs on a chair. When one is off, the whole thing starts to wobble. When sleep deteriorates, energy for exercise goes with it. Focus during any kind of practice disappears. Hunger signals get distorted. One leg starts pulling at the others.
I lived this recently. A rough stretch of very little sleep had a compounding effect across every area of my life — my work, my relationships, my own mental health. I kept waiting for the fog to lift, not understanding that I was the one extending it by not addressing the root.
Let’s break each one down.
Meditation: Building the Operating System
My specific lane within the broader category of meditation is mindfulness — the practice of returning your attention to the present moment, again and again, without judgment. It is not about emptying your mind. It is about noticing when your mind has wandered somewhere else and developing the muscle to bring it back.
For leaders, that muscle is everything.
Research published in Harvard Business Review found that mindfulness practice meaningfully reduces the defensive tendencies of the ego — the part of a leader that holds on to past decisions too long, reacts defensively to feedback, and gets emotional when clarity is what the moment demands. Harvard Business School professor William George, former CEO of Medtronic, has said it plainly: leaders who are mindful tend to be more effective at understanding people, relating to them, and moving them toward shared goals.
The science tracks the intuition. Neuroscience research published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience confirms that regular practice physically reshapes how the brain manages attention, regulates stress, and recovers from distraction. One study from the Journal of Management Development found that executives who practiced for just ten minutes a day showed a 32% improvement in decision quality after eight weeks — specifically during complex or high-pressure situations.
That last part matters. It is not that meditation makes you calmer in calm moments. It is that it expands your capacity to function when the heat is on.
Within mindfulness specifically, there are a few different forms that tend to work well for leaders. Focused attention practice — where you train your attention on a single anchor like breath — builds the core muscle. Open awareness practice helps you take in more of what is actually happening in a room, a conversation, or a complex situation. Compassion-based practices, which are increasingly supported by research on emotional intelligence, build the kind of connection that retains talent and drives teams forward.
You do not need all of it at once. You need a consistent starting point.
Exercise: Move Your Body, Clear Your Mind
There is a line from the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard that I keep returning to: he wrote that he “walked himself into his best thoughts.” What he intuitively knew, neuroscience has since confirmed. When we do cardiovascular exercise, the brain’s prefrontal cortex — the region responsible for executive function, attention, working memory, and decision-making — benefits directly and measurably.
Research from University College London, published in late 2024, found that the cognitive benefits of physical activity do not just last a few hours after a workout — they carry into the following day, improving memory and mental performance the next morning. For leaders whose most important work is often front-loaded into the first half of the day, this finding has real weight.
When it comes to what type of exercise does the most for mental peak performance, the research points in a clear direction. A 2024 review by UC Santa Barbara researchers, which analyzed thousands of exercise studies spanning nearly three decades, found that HIIT — high-intensity interval training — produced the most consistent improvements in executive function specifically. Brief, vigorous efforts under 30 minutes showed the strongest effects on the cognitive domains that matter most to high performers: attention, working memory, and the ability to think clearly under pressure.
Zone 2 cardio — steady, conversational-pace aerobic work — builds the aerobic base and stress resilience over time. Resistance training supports focus and mood regulation. The research suggests the best answer is not one modality. It is consistent movement across different types.
The Harvard Leadership and Happiness Laboratory has noted that cardiovascular movement also clears the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex — the region tied to rumination and negative self-talk — which is one reason a hard workout can physically change what you are able to think about afterward. Creative output has been shown to improve by as much as 60% after walking. If you have ever stepped out of a difficult meeting, gone for a run, and come back with a solution that was not there before — you have felt this firsthand.
Diet: What You Eat Is a Leadership Decision
I want to be direct here without being prescriptive, because the nuance matters.
A large-scale study published in Nature Mental Health in 2024, drawing on data from nearly 182,000 participants, found that a balanced, varied diet was associated with better mental health, superior cognitive function, and higher volumes of grey matter in the brain compared to a nutritionally poor one. The relationship between what you eat and how your brain performs is not soft correlation. It is structural.
For leaders, a few things stand out. Anti-inflammatory foods — omega-3 fatty acids, leafy greens, berries, nuts, fatty fish — support the brain’s ability to process information and protect against long-term decline. Research on cognitive health across the lifespan published in PMC consistently links Mediterranean-style and MIND diet patterns to preserved cognitive function and lower risk of decline over time. These are whole food patterns built on vegetables, fish, olive oil, and legumes. Not complicated, but consistently abandoned when schedules tighten.
Meal timing matters more than most leaders realize. Eating a heavy meal within two to three hours of sleep significantly disrupts sleep quality, which then bleeds into every other area of performance the next day. Blood sugar instability — caused by high-glycemic foods, skipped meals, and erratic eating patterns — directly affects mood regulation, decision quality, and sustained focus throughout the day.
Organic food choices, where it matters, reduce exposure to compounds that drive systemic inflammation. And inflammation has a direct line to brain fog and reduced cognitive clarity. You do not have to do all of this perfectly. But your food choices are a daily decision about the quality of your thinking, your emotional regulation, and your capacity to lead under pressure. What you eat you become. Your food choices literally become the cells your body runs on.
Sleep: The Non-Negotiable
Dr. Matthew Walker, neuroscientist at UC Berkeley and author of Why We Sleep, has said something I return to often: there is not one process in the human body that is not improved by sleep.
McKinsey’s research on sleep and leadership — surveying 196 business leaders — found that 43% reported not getting enough sleep at least four nights a week. Almost half believed lack of sleep had little effect on their performance. That is the cruel irony of sleep deprivation: the brain loses its ability to accurately assess its own impairment. The less you sleep, the more confident you are that you’re fine.
The research does not agree. After 17 to 19 hours of wakefulness, performance on cognitive tasks reaches the equivalent of a blood-alcohol level of 0.05%. After 20 hours, that climbs to 0.1% — the legal definition of drunk driving in the United States. And in their study of 81 organizations and 189,000 people worldwide, McKinsey found that the four leadership behaviors most tied to high-performing executive teams — results orientation, problem-solving, perspective-taking, and supporting others — all depend directly on the executive brain functions that sleep deprivation hits hardest.
Sleep is not separate from leadership. It is leadership.
The three pillars of sleep quality that the research returns to consistently are light, temperature, and what happens in the hours before bed.
Light is the most powerful signal your body has for setting its internal clock. Getting natural light within the first hour of waking anchors your circadian rhythm. In the hour before bed, the opposite applies — dimming indoor lights and stepping away from screens allows melatonin to rise naturally. Walker’s research recommends treating the last hour before sleep as a transition zone: lower the lights, close the devices, and let your biology do what it was designed to do.
Temperature is something most people underestimate. To initiate sleep, your body needs to drop its core temperature by roughly two to three degrees Fahrenheit. That is why a room set to around 65°F consistently produces better sleep than a warm one. A warm shower an hour before bed actually helps — the body’s attempt to cool itself after stepping out drives core temperature down faster. Sleep scientists call this the “warm bath effect,” and it is one of the most reliable zero-cost adjustments available.
What you eat and drink in the evening plays a direct role in sleep architecture. Heavy meals close to bedtime disrupt the transition to deep sleep. Alcohol fragments it — even if it helps you fall asleep faster, it strips the REM sleep your brain needs for emotional processing, pattern recognition, and creative problem-solving. Caffeine has a half-life of five to six hours, meaning a 3pm coffee is still half-strength in your system at 8pm.
These are not hacks. They are conditions. Sleep hygiene is the operating environment for every cognitive function you depend on as a leader.
When One Leg Goes, They All Feel It
I want to return to the chair.
What Paul Jesperson gave me that day was not just four good habits. It was a systems perspective. MEDS is not a checklist. It is a set of interdependent variables. You cannot shortchange one without the others absorbing the impact. And the leaders who are most at risk of unraveling are the ones who believe their drive and their discipline can compensate for a foundation that is missing pieces.
They cannot. I have been that leader. The days I function below my capacity almost always trace back to one or more of these four things being off. And that gap between your current reality and your potential is one of the biggest emotional pains leaders experience.
The most important moments of your leadership career do not announce themselves in advance. You do not know when the board meeting will shift, when a key person on your team will come to you at the edge, when the deal you have worked toward will require every piece of you at once. What you do know is that the version of yourself who meets that moment was built in the days and weeks before it arrived.
That version is built on MEDS. Moment by moment.
Mike Lee is a peak performance keynote speaker, #1 bestselling author, and leadership coach. He has worked with organizations including Google, Deloitte, IBM, and Wells Fargo to help leaders and teams perform under pressure and win the moments that matter. If you are looking to bring a leadership keynote speaker to your next event or explore executive coaching, reach out here.
