Welcome to the Daily Dad podcast, where we provide one lesson every single day to help you with your most important job, being a parent.

I'm Ryan Holiday, and I draw these lessons from ancient philosophy, modern psychology, practical wisdom, and insights from

parents just like you all over the world. Thank you for listening, and we hope this helps.

You do this for both of you. It's important, as we've said, self-care isn't selfish. How can you take care of your kids

if you're not taking care of yourself? Our kids need energy, they need patience, they need strength.

Who else is going to throw them in the pool or carry them in from the car? They need years of our

time too. So we have to think about things that the younger you was

content to ignore. Recovery, heart health, stretching, diet, hydration, sleep. In a recent daily

dad email, we quoted John Leguizamo, who was explaining that having kids makes you really

aware of your environment. He said, when you're young and you're single, you don't care.

You're indestructible.

But now we have to be more aware of things if we want to continue to perform at the same level,

if we want to be able to make it through this marathon of raising a family. But the benefits are not

just to our own health, of course. We're not the only ones that are affected by our lifestyle

anymore. Because our kids will see these

better choices, this intentionality as an example. They'll learn that by taking care of yourself,

eating well, checking the ingredients and what you put in your body, exercising, staying hydrated,

that this is essential to living a healthy life. And they will eat better as a result of the choices

we make. They will be more

mindful of drinking water if they see you doing it. They will know that health is a priority.

Taking care of yourself is contagious. It will spread through your house. And so too will a bad

example, if that's what you choose to set. Because what you were doing is work before because you hate making appointments,

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