The Healthy Wealth Experience: Mental Health & Performance with Dr. Jimmy Moley



The Healthy Wealth Experience: Mental Health & Performance with Dr. Jimmy Moley

1. QUICK ANSWER SUMMARY

“What is the relationship between mental health and peak performance for athletes and executives?”

Mental health should be viewed as a performance enhancement tool rather than just something to fix when it goes wrong. 150 minutes per week of moderate to high-intensity exercise provides more mental health benefits than many prescribed medications, while anxiety can actually improve performance when managed properly – the key is finding the optimal level that creates focus without impairing attention.

2. KEY TAKEAWAYS

Exercise as Medicine: 150 minutes per week of moderate to high-intensity exercise is more effective than many psychiatric medications for treating anxiety, ADHD, depression, and even serious mental illness
Anxiety Optimization: Performance anxiety becomes beneficial when it creates nervous system activation and focus, but crosses into harmful territory when it impairs sustained attention and concentration
Sleep Disruption Impact: Sleep apnea is a major undiagnosed cause of adult ADHD symptoms, making comprehensive medical evaluation crucial before psychiatric treatment
Multi-Sport Development: 80-90% of successful college scholarship athletes played multiple sports in high school, supporting cognitive and physical resilience
AI-Enhanced Training: Wearable devices with 10-20 different sensors can create personalized training regimens based on real-time heart rate, metabolic rate, and sleep pattern data

3. EXPERT QUOTES

I think the way we view anxiety as a society has shifted over the years. In the past, anxiety was always something to run away from, but what we’re learning now is that anxiety often creates an activation of our nervous system and allows us to have an edge.

– Dr. Jimmy Moley

I’m a big believer in the idea that we need to examine the whole body and be very holistic about things. Exercise is oftentimes more effective than a lot of the medications we prescribe.

– Dr. Jimmy Moley

You cannot be wealthy unless you are also healthy. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t feel good about yourself and your body doesn’t feel good, then you’re not going to do well either.

– Chris Hall

4. QUESTIONS ANSWERED

Q: What’s the most effective natural treatment for anxiety and ADHD?
A: Physical exercise at 150 minutes per week of moderate to high intensity, regardless of the type – cardiovascular, weight training, or even bodyweight exercises like pushups and squats all provide equal mental health benefits.

Q: How can executives manage performance anxiety during high-stakes situations?
A: Use box breathing (inhale 4 seconds, hold 4 seconds, exhale 4 seconds, hold 4 seconds) to activate the nervous system’s calming response and maintain focus without eliminating the beneficial edge that anxiety provides.

Q: When should someone seek professional help for mental health vs. trying self-help approaches?
A: If sleep issues, attention problems, or anxiety symptoms persist despite lifestyle changes, comprehensive medical evaluation is crucial – conditions like sleep apnea often masquerade as ADHD in adults.

Q: What’s the difference between helpful and harmful anxiety?
A: Helpful anxiety creates focus and preparation (like an athlete before competition), while harmful anxiety impairs sustained attention and decision-making ability during actual performance.

Q: Should young athletes specialize in one sport early?
A: No – research shows 80-90% of successful college athletes played multiple sports, developing diverse skill sets and mental resilience that single-sport specialization cannot provide.

5. ACTIONABLE TIPS

For Executives and High Performers:

  • Schedule demanding cognitive work during your natural peak energy hours (often morning for most people)
  • Practice box breathing 2-3 hours before high-stakes meetings or presentations
  • Track sleep patterns, heart rate, and energy levels to optimize your daily schedule
  • Maintain social connections even when work demands increase – isolation worsens mental health outcomes

For Athletes and Coaches:

  • Encourage multi-sport participation through high school rather than early specialization
  • Use controlled breathing techniques during pressure situations rather than trying to eliminate all nervousness
  • Focus on process and preparation rather than outcome-based anxiety triggers
  • Integrate regular cardiovascular exercise even during off-seasons for mental health maintenance

For Parents:

  • Expose children to diverse athletic activities rather than focusing on one sport before age 16
  • Model healthy work-life balance – children learn more from observed behavior than verbal instruction
  • Prioritize sleep hygiene and limit screen time to support developing attention spans

6. HEALTH-WEALTH CONNECTION

Dr. Moley’s practice targets both athletes and executives because they share remarkably similar traits: intense focus, drive, and performance demands that can either enhance or impair mental health. The conversation revealed several key connections:

Physical Health Supporting Financial Success:

  • Chris Hall’s personal transformation: reducing work hours from 12+ daily to include 3 gym sessions per week actually increased his productivity and business growth
  • Regular exercise provides the mental acuity needed for complex financial decision-making
  • Sleep optimization directly impacts executive function and strategic thinking

Mental Health as Business Strategy:

  • Anxiety management techniques improve performance in high-stakes financial negotiations
  • Social connections prevent the isolation that often accompanies financial success but leads to depression
  • Sustainable work practices prevent burnout that destroys long-term wealth accumulation

Wearable Technology Integration:

  • Future AI applications will optimize both trading/work schedules and workout timing based on individual biorhythmic data
  • Real-time feedback from heart rate and sleep monitors can prevent costly decision-making during suboptimal mental states

7. DATA POINTS & STATISTICS

150 minutes per week: American Heart Association’s recommended exercise duration for mental health benefits
417% business increase: Dr. Moley achieved this growth in 8 months at Patterson Dental
80-90%: Percentage of college scholarship athletes who played multiple sports in high school (Urban Meyer’s data)
10-20 sensors: Number of different health metrics tracked by modern wearable devices
2-3 hours: Optimal timing for taking melatonin before desired sleep time
23%: Typical improvement in productivity metrics when employees adopt healthy lifestyle practices

8. RESOURCES MENTIONED

Guest Information:

  • Dr. Jimmy Moley, MD – Sports Psychiatrist
  • Website: jimmy.com
  • Instagram: @jimmymoleymd
  • Practice Location: Independence, Ohio (Cleveland area)
  • Specializes in: Adult psychiatry, sports psychiatry, performance optimization

Books/Concepts Referenced:

  • “10 Minute Toughness” – Sports psychology book that helped transform the St. Louis Cardinals
  • Box breathing technique (4-4-4-4 pattern)
  • Blue Zones research on longevity and community
  • Urban Meyer’s multi-sport athlete philosophy

Medical/Health Tools:

  • SSRI/SNRI medications (Zoloft, Prozac, Lexapro) as first-line anxiety treatments
  • Melatonin supplementation for circadian rhythm regulation
  • Sleep apnea screening for adult ADHD symptoms
  • Comprehensive medical evaluation before psychiatric treatment

Technology:

  • Apple Watch, Fitbit, Oura Ring for health tracking
  • AI integration with wearable devices for personalized training
  • Upcoming research paper on artificial intelligence in mental health enhancement

9. FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Click to View Complete Episode Transcript
Chris Hall (00:02.02)
Hello, this is Chris Hall and welcome to Healthy Wealth. For those of you guys who have been following me, this was started out as the Reading Financial Advisors podcast, but as I moved on, I realized that I really do want to talk about things that do with health and wealth, and that I really truly believe that you cannot be wealthy unless you are also healthy. You can have all the money in the world, but if you don’t feel good about yourself and you don’t feel good about your body, doesn’t feel good, then you’re not going to do well either. So this gives me a little bit more.
advantage to talk to different people. I’m extremely excited to announce my next guest, which is Dr. Jimmy Moley. And he is going to tell you a little bit about himself, but just really happy to have him on board. And we’re going to talk a little bit about mental health. And we’re also going to talk about, I’m assuming, concussions and things like that as well, right? Yeah, so all right, I’ll give you I’ll give you some time to talk about your opening. Give me a little bit about yourself, please.
Jimmy Moley, MD (00:53.74)
Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, thank you Chris for having me.
Jimmy Moley, MD (01:00.91)
Absolutely. So my name is Jimmy Molley. I’m a private adult and sports psychiatrist and my practice is based in Independence, Ohio, just outside of Cleveland. And, know, I kind of have a variety of educational backgrounds. I started off at the University of Notre Dame and then moved on to Ohio State for my medical school and residency education. I was at that point that I really developed an interest in sports and performance psychiatry. So thinking about, you know, high performing athletes and, you know, professionals, executives and that sort of thing. So.
developed just a special interest in that and went on to get an additional certificate of training in sports psychiatry and decided to open my private practice straight out of residency. So did that in July of 2024, things are going really well and I’m excited to continue to talk about mental health topics, especially like you said, in areas such as financial wealth that maybe we haven’t thought about them as traditionally in the past, right? But are starting to realize how it can be so important to thriving, you really in all aspects of life.
Chris Hall (02:00.101)
What led you towards this particular, you know, angle? mean, obviously, you know, mental health is huge. But like, why specifically did you go after sports? Did you have a sports background or?
Jimmy Moley, MD (02:13.688)
So I do, know, my growing up, actually, my family were pretty much all coaches. So I was involved in sports from a young age. I played sports for a long time and actually worked as a sports broadcaster for a few years before going into medical school. thank you. So, you know, I’ve been around, you know, athletes and in athletic cultures pretty much my whole life. So I knew going into medical school that I wanted to, work with athletes. And originally I thought that was going to be one of the more maybe traditional pathways, sports medicine, orthopedic surgery.
Chris Hall (02:25.762)
You absolutely have a sports broadcasters voice, no doubt.
Jimmy Moley, MD (02:43.992)
But then I came across my psychiatry rotation and really loved the way I was able to connect. Other specialties I think certainly have a lot of advantages, and for some people that makes the most sense. for me, being able to relate to people on a personal level, to affect mental health, I really felt make a deeper connection with the people I was helping and really made a world of difference. So once I realized that we could do that in a more athletic, executive atmosphere, that’s pretty much what sold me and there was no looking back after that.
Chris Hall (03:13.612)
Nice. Now, do you currently work with anybody at Ohio State? Any of the programs there?
Jimmy Moley, MD (03:19.532)
I do, so I have a number of relationships that I developed. I was there for a little over eight years and still have a close relationship with lot of the folks down in Columbus. That’s nice, I’m in Cleveland so not too far away and a lot of big sports culture, I would say, in both Cleveland and Columbus. It’s been good to become immersed. I’m originally from Cleveland, so get back home and get in areas that are very familiar but very exciting.
Chris Hall (03:38.205)
okay.
Chris Hall (03:41.783)
Nice. That’s awesome. I remember so it was years ago when I first became a financial advisor. So it’d be nine years ago. I remember reading a book called 10 minute toughness. Are you familiar with that book? Yeah, so that was really similar. He was a sports psychologist and he had worked with the St. Louis Cardinals and they were I guess pretty terrible. And then after working with them for like a year or two, they won back to back World Series championships. And so I feel like that’s really like
Jimmy Moley, MD (03:53.324)
I am, yes.
Chris Hall (04:10.944)
undersold the mental part of athletics. You know what mean? Like we really don’t do too much for that. So what do you do with your clients to kind of like make sure that they’re bolstered in that area?
Jimmy Moley, MD (04:22.798)
Right, right. You know, I think it’s really a few major buckets. one of the things that we work on a lot is performance optimization, right? So how do we use, you know, primarily psychotherapy techniques and different things like that to really work on elevating performance. So we’re not necessarily talking about, you know, mental health issues as much as we am kind of elevating the mental side and thinking about mental health, not necessarily something, you know, to fix, but something to enhance and use as an asset in the performance realm. So.
That’s definitely one side. We also know too that high performers and athletes specifically often struggle more so with certain types of mental illness, right? What comes to mind a lot is different forms of substance use, rates of PTSD are actually much higher, ADHD, and then some mood and anxiety disorders. So we know there’s probably something about the type of work in athletes and executives that maybe lends itself a little bit more to certain illnesses. there’s also the aspect of managing that.
with either medications, therapy, or a combination of both.
Chris Hall (05:23.98)
Okay. Now you mentioned a few times, executives now. So did that kind of morph in because they’re so similar in the way that they act or was that always the plan for you to be also working with executives?
Jimmy Moley, MD (05:38.658)
You know, it really kind of evolved naturally. say, so I started off with the interest in athletics and came to quickly realize, like you mentioned, the extraordinarily high number of overlapping traits and qualities that it takes to be a high performing executive and how that relates to athletics. Right. So you talk about the dedication, the drive, the almost sole focus right on the craft that lends itself often to success, but at the same time, maybe can create some issues mentally, especially, right.
that need to be addressed. So I think there’s tons of overlap there and I think that my work with one group definitely complements the other as well.
Chris Hall (06:13.188)
Nice. Nice. Okay. Can you tell us like maybe a story or two about some people that you’ve worked with and situations that you’ve managed?
Jimmy Moley, MD (06:21.652)
Absolutely. I’ll give you probably a few kind of the more common, you know, things that I get presented with over the course of time here. Everything obviously depersonalized for privacy reasons. But I would say the number one topic is probably performance anxiety and related anxieties. you know, I think the way we view anxiety as a society, think has shifted over the years, right? So
Chris Hall (06:36.388)
it
Jimmy Moley, MD (06:43.288)
I think in the past, anxiety and the term was always something to run away from, right? To avoid at all costs and being anxious was often seen as a sign of weakness, I think for a long time, right? I think what we’re learning now with the more recent research though is that, you know, anxiety often creates, you know, an activation of our nervous system and allows us to have an edge, right? It allows us to be prepared and to kind of think through all of the possibilities and to really engage and lock in. You think of an athlete right before a big competition, right? You want some level of anxiety.
Chris Hall (06:53.902)
Right.
Jimmy Moley, MD (07:13.292)
The trick really though with that is figuring out when that anxiety crosses the line and when we need to work on it. We want a healthy amount of anxiety without it actually inhibiting your performance. maybe if we’re going into a board meeting or meeting with a client, if you want to be ready, you want to be on edge, but we want to make that not so that it doesn’t really impair your focus and impair your ability to sustain attention and really lock in. So that’s probably the number one thing is trying to find that line and it’s tricky. It’s up to each individual to kind of sit down and…
Chris Hall (07:19.885)
Okay.
Jimmy Moley, MD (07:42.904)
think about maybe where their anxiety comes from and how it’s developed over the course of their life. What are triggers? What are things that help soothe them? I’m a big fan of coming up with very holistic treatment plans too. So we think about all the ways, not just with medications or therapy, but how to diet and exercise and all of these things affect mental health is, I think, has to be part of the conversation.
Chris Hall (07:55.972)
Okay.
Chris Hall (08:05.304)
Okay, I like that. Yeah, my son is a nationally rated long snapper in high school. He’s going into his senior year. We just went to a showcase recently and he’s literally snapping in front of let’s call it 20 division one coaches who are just standing there watching his snaps. And I mean him and you there was like a few other kids there too. But I just thought man, that must just feel like such pressure.
And I was really surprised that how he handles that pressure like he really just kind of just gets in his groove and does his own thing and you know, he has a good snap and maybe he has a Not so good snap and he just kind of keeps plugging away and I think it’s pretty cool like practice I think is huge, you know, I mean the fact that he’s confident because he does a lot of practice but One of the things I always kind of it was just kind of something I noticed was and again I think you’re the reason I mentioned this is because you had said something regarding it
But like we would go to a certain showcase where they would put out a target and like you had to get it inside this red target. And for some reason, man, he would hit the side of that target. Like, you know, if the, if the box is here, he would literally hit the box, but not inside, but he would nail it. Like almost every time he just had, in my opinion, some type of mental block that could, that kept him away from going in that target. Because if you took the target away and put a human being there,
and said, hey, hit me right here, no problem. So it is kind of interesting how, like, thank God that when they play football that there’s not a target back there. There’s actually a human being back there because, you know, he has a hard time with that. But that is interesting to me. Like, I could just kind of see it. Like, he’s so well prepared and so mentally there. And the minute you stick a target in front of him, it’s like, well, this isn’t going to go super great. anyway, but can you speak to that? Kind of like what that looks like for you?
Jimmy Moley, MD (09:59.118)
Now you make a really good point, and I think there’s probably certain sports in certain positions, and maybe even in everyday life too, that lends itself more to that type of issue. So I lung snapping is an excellent example, because it’s more of a singular, repetitive motion. So we see this a lot in more individual type sports, especially, I think of golfers as a big one.
with kind of the mental game behind that and you think of even high profile examples on the PGA Tour and you get in major tournaments and certain holes, certain situations, certain courses that seem to have some sort of mental block. Pitchers are probably another one where we see it very commonly and we can think of all kinds of examples at the major leagues of players that have really struggled and just seem to hit a certain point where the mental side just seems to take over and probably the other most common is maybe field goal kickers.
Chris Hall (10:20.579)
right?
Jimmy Moley, MD (10:48.588)
right in the NFL or college level that really just seemed to struggle and it’s tough because there’s such pressure and such intensity. And even like to bring it back to the example with your son, you think about if he’s thinking in the moment with each snap, like what’s on the line with college and future, can become overwhelming really quickly. it’s how do we channel that? How do we really stay present and mindful in the moment enough to rely on the practice and the reputation to overcome those challenges?
Chris Hall (11:06.308)
Yeah.
Chris Hall (11:15.844)
Now, I’m not a doctor. But one of the things I kind of always try to tell my kids when they were growing up and the coach, I also coach football, so I try to tell them as well. But I say there’s a fine line between like anxiety and excitement. And it’s kind of like it’s really how you’re internalizing that emotion. And so would you agree with that? Or would you kind of say like, no, anxiety is clearly anxiety?
Jimmy Moley, MD (11:42.546)
No, think excitement is a good way to phrase it. I think that it’s way to describe a state where you are focused, you’re locked in, you’re fully present in the moment, right? And you’re not going to feel that way when you’re sitting at home, right, eating breakfast, right? There’s something different about it that creates that state. And there’s a lot of advantages to that, right? Like I said, that’s what allows you to be locked in and to perform your best. I think, you know, however you want to phrase it, I think it makes sense to try to reach that kind of locked in, almost like a psychological state of flow, right?
where you kind of reach that point where you’re just firing on all cylinders. But how do we reach that point? How do we learn to recognize it and figure out what leads us there is the million dollar question, right?
Chris Hall (12:23.588)
Yeah, well, I that’s what you get paid for, Are there a few, are there a few kind of techniques or things like that that you can kind of say are more universal that people, you know, maybe listening to the podcast or watching it could go, Oh, yeah, that I have that issue. And, you know, is there something like, again, like, you know, going back what you said, like, lot of golfers, right, people who play golf, not necessarily good at it, they get on hole number six, and I’m like, man, I hate this hole, I always go in the water. Is there some like techniques that you can use with those?
Jimmy Moley, MD (12:25.72)
Right.
Jimmy Moley, MD (12:48.174)
Right.
Right, know, one of the most common that became popular amongst MLB pitchers probably about five to six years ago was the idea of paced breathing and diaphragmatic breathing. And what that means is ways to control your breath as a way to stay present and mindful in the moment, right? It also probably has biologically an effect on your nervous system. It’s able to kind of calm down some of that excitement and that activation. So like the most common that I’m sure some of our listeners have heard of it is called box breathing, right? Where you…
Chris Hall (13:08.621)
Okay.
Chris Hall (13:21.442)
Yeah.
Jimmy Moley, MD (13:22.23)
Yeah, you inhale for four seconds, hold it for four seconds, exhale for four seconds, and then hold that for four seconds. There’s actually very good scientific evidence that that is able to kind of reduce some of that tension in the nervous system and allow us to become re-centered and re-focused. So, know, whether it’s back breathing and there’s plenty of other techniques or different paced breathing, different grounding techniques, but that’s probably the most common to re-center and really lock in in those moments.
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Note: This is a condensed preview. The complete transcript contains the entire 42+ minute conversation.

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