A Healthy Bottom Line

Adam Eatros (BS Management ’06) and Mark Kappelman (BS Accountancy ’06, MAIS ’07) share a love for sports, which started when they attended the same elementary school in South Dakota. Separated in third grade, when Eatros’ dad transferred to another state, fate brought them back together at ASU. Five years ago, they reconnected again and founded RealEstateAccounting.co (REA), a company that specializes in outsourcing the accounting and tax needs of property managers, real estate investors, and other real estate professionals. Both three-sport high school athletes, Kappelman and Eatros, with two and three kids, respectively, stay active most days coaching their kids’ sports teams. In addition, Kappelman does triathlons and plays basketball, tennis, and pickleball, while Eatros skis, hikes, and plays golf regularly. Naturally competitive, they often use their wearable devices to gamify their daily movement goals.

Pam Brooks, senior organizational development consultant for W. P. Carey and Fulton Schools of Engineering, was a Pac-10 all-American volleyball player at the University of Washington in the 1980s. Now that she’s a grandmother, her impressive athletic endeavors—like placing second in the 100-mile Tour de Tucson at age 45—have changed, and so has her perspective on them.

Brooks tries not to let unhealthy comparisons keep her from finding joy in what she can do today. “We’re creatures of comparison,” she says, which can be good and bad. Comparing yourself to someone better, or even a younger version of yourself, can be unhealthy when it makes us feel less than. “We’re not the same people we were yesterday,” she says.

Comparison can sneak into your thoughts in the weight room at the gym, on the running path, or in the yoga studio. But don’t let it, Brooks says. Instead, ask yourself: Where am I today? What injuries have I had? And what is my purpose? “My purpose is to be healthy and to have fun,” she says.

Brooks looks for places where exercise fits naturally into her daily routine and stays motivated because movement makes her feel better. “I try to start my day by doing yoga and stretching, and there is such a big difference when I do. I also consciously try to put breaks in the day to move — and, thank goodness, my dog helps me with that.”

Nicole Wood (BS Finance/Supply Chain Management ’11) is CEO and co-founder of the coaching firm Ama La Vida, a name that means “love life.” In her work life, she helps people in the mid-stage of their careers achieve their goals. Wood lives in Chicago with her husband and young child. One of her personal goals is to eat out and order in less often.

“I like to cook, but I get extremely burned out from the need to feed bodies every day,” she says. To help, she started creating a Pinterest board of enticing recipes. Every Sunday, Wood scans the board to pick what she’ll cook for the week, shops, and does meal prep. “That’s helped me be better prepared and get more excited about cooking versus panicking about what I’m going to pull together at the last minute.”

Brooks also struggles with fatigue from a packed schedule and constant decision-making. She avoids going grocery shopping hungry, so she’s less likely to buy junk food, and she makes sure there’s always good quick food in the house so she and her husband avoid the temptation to eat out or make unhealthy choices. “It makes it so much easier because, by default, I’ve removed the need to make a decision,” Brooks says. “And then when we do splurge on occasion, it’s OK because we have a normal healthy routine to return to.”

Although Wood says she doesn’t think of herself as the epitome of physical health, she does prioritize her mental health, and that starts with getting seven to eight hours of sleep each night. “I don’t believe that to be an entrepreneur, you have to burn the midnight oil every night,” she says. “I am not a kind person when I don’t sleep, and I don’t do my best work when I don’t sleep.” Wood has had to learn to get comfortable with the possibility that something might get pushed to the next day, especially after becoming a parent and experiencing considerably compressed available time.

Both entering their 40s, Kappelman and Eatros are making preventive health care a priority. Eatros says he recently went to the doctor for the first time in years. “I figured it’s time to proactively take health care more seriously.” Kappelman is of a like mind; he and a group of friends plan to get bloodwork done regularly to see how changes compare to their baseline. “My dad died of a heart attack five years ago,” Kappelman says. “On the outside, he looked good. But looks can be deceiving. On the inside, it might be telling a very different story.”

During COVID-19, Wood got into the Netflix organizing show The Home Edit. One of the things that stuck with her was when they asked one of the hosts how she had time to keep her house organized with a business and kids and all this stuff. “And she said, ‘I don’t have time not to do this.’ ” Wood has found that the time she spends getting things organized has saved her countless hours, helped her avoid panic buying, and eased the stress of being unable to find something when needed.

You’ve made it a little over halfway through this list, and if you feel overwhelmed, you’re not alone. Paharia says our current wellness culture creates some impossible standards. “I would listen to wellness podcasts and be like, ‘Oh, I should do that,’ and write it down on a list. Then, one day, I looked at the list and thought, ‘If I tried to do all this stuff, I would have no time to do anything.’ ” Instead, she’s selective. “I try to take a walk every day,” she says. “I feel like that’s the least I can do. I also try to eat well, stretch, and take vitamins.”

Paharia has researched the busyness culture, and with a 1- and 7-year-old and a demanding career, she knows busy. But she’s found that the obsession with being busier than everyone else is a modern American condition. The thought is: If you’re busy, it must mean your time is valuable and you’re important. “In olden times and other countries,” Paharia explains, “if you had no money, you had to work. If you had money, you had time to relax, learn how to ride horses, and learn where the salad fork goes.”

On weekends, Paharia bans busyness and avoids overscheduling her family. “We don’t go out of our way to fill our time,” she says. “Maybe we’ll go to the farmers market. Maybe we’ll run into a friend. It leaves more time for spontaneity.”

She is still working on cracking the code and scheduling all the day-to-day to-dos that come with family life, like doctor’s appointments, helping with homework, getting groceries, and cooking dinner. “Those things are not voluntary busyness. Unfortunately, that’s stuff you’re stuck doing that takes away from other things,” Paharia says.

She jokes that figuring out work-life balance would be easier with an operations manager. “You need somebody to say, ‘On Tuesday, we’re doing laundry. On Wednesday, we fold it while we’re watching TV. Thursday, we go grocery shopping. Friday, we make fish. We use the leftover fish to make pasta on Sunday.’ You have to find a way to take a step back and figure out how to optimize the whole system.”

When Brooks moved to Massachusetts to work remotely, she quickly realized she missed the daily interactions she experienced working on campus at ASU. She now purposely puts time on her calendar three times a week to connect with people in her life. “They say a friend is the best gift you can give yourself,” she says. “I’ve always tried to keep up those connections because somebody who knows you well will tell you when you’re not being yourself—and that’s a healthy comparison.”

Wood craves one-on-one connect time, too, so she ensures she has a process to make it happen. “If I say it’s important to me to prioritize my friendships,” she says, “what’s the system I have to make that happen?” For her, it means her husband is on kid duty every Thursday night so she can go out with friends. She encourages people to create the most straightforward systems to align their behavior with their goals.

Business owners Wood, Kappelman, and Eatros understand that it’s essential to lead by example. “If we say our company is about loving your life—and that includes work life—that has to be how we operate as an organization,” Wood stresses, adding that they also schedule closures on non-holidays so employees can fully disconnect on days when services, like childcare, are available. “When you take PTO, you’re offline, versus if everyone is offline. It’s a different mental break than built-in holidays.”

For REA’s 200 accountants, Eatros admits that work can be grueling. “There are a lot of demands and pressures,” he says. And as Kappelman points out, there’s not much gray in accounting. “If you don’t get it right, it’s obvious.” That makes the pair aware of employee burnout. Their fully remote workforce has unlimited vacation time and generally does not have weekend demands, promoting a work culture that values both physical and mental well-being.

It can be easy to maintain healthy habits when they bring clear benefits. But staying attuned to the little changes each action creates can add up.

Kappelman, for example, has a daily ritual of cold plunging—sometimes in the winter in icy Lake Michigan. “I don’t know the science behind it, but it makes me feel alive,” he says. “I’ve also read that doing something challenging every day helps you feel like you’ve accomplished something, which can lead to momentum, and cold plunging for me is just that.”

Brooks gets her burst by starting every morning with a green nutrient drink that gives her more energy and makes her feel good. That feeling is much more motivational than all the “woulda, coulda, shouldas” she could tell herself.

Externally motivated, Wood knows she’s most successful when she makes commitments to others, like signing up for a yoga series a friend was teaching. “I’m a big external accountability person, so I never would have invested the time and money if I hadn’t wanted to support her,” she says. If Wood slips or feels like quitting, she tells herself, “I’m not committing tomorrow; I’m committing today. And every little thing you do builds the momentum to do the next thing.”

As you can see, no one has it all figured out. But starting small with smart daily decisions that benefit your physical and mental health can have big payoffs.