On The Suite Spot, sports psychiatrist Dr. Derek H. Suite, MD brings together neuroscience, performance psychology, spiritual wisdom, and lessons from elite sport...practical tools for the people who can't afford to choke when the pressure rises.
Built for athletes, executives, military professionals, first responders, coaches, clinicians, and anyone carrying real weight, each episode sharpens focus, builds resilience, and helps you manage pressure, recover well, and sustain momentum.
This is where the conversation moves beyond motivation into the habits, mental skills, and deeper questions that shape performance across mind, body, and spirit.
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We made it! Finish Strong Friday-- Today we explore how to finish strong by regulating the nervous system, reframing stress as information, and choosing clear next steps. A story about a doctoral student and an MJ song shows how music, breath, and micro actions restore focus and endurance.
Suite Spots: • stress as signal, not verdict • finishing as regulation and rhythm • the dissertation case and fatigue reframes • music as a neural reset and anchor • practical micro actions and breath work • endurance over speed and ancient wisdom • recovery, rest, and self compassion as tools • defining meaning before pressure defines you
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Well, hello there. How are you doing? It's Finish Strong Friday here on The Sweet Spot. You've been in a wonderful series with me called Built for This. I'm Dr. Sweet. I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. As you know, I'm a board certified psychiatrist at work in high performance. More than that, I'm your partner. I'm your sojourner. I walk with you on the path that is leading us to great things as we move forward here on Finish Strong Friday. So, my good friends, before we get into today, let's take a breath and zoom out for a second and recall what we've been doing this entire week around being built for this. Yes, you are built for this.
On Monday, we stopped calling stress a warning sign and started treating it like information. Tuesday, we talked about movement, how nothing changes until something moves. On Win It All Wednesday, we learned why winners don't get rid of pressure. They learn how to stay clear inside of the pressure. They learn how to operate inside of pressure. Absolutely. On Thursday, we learned about trust and how important trust is with pressure. And now we find ourselves here on Finish Strong Friday. Yeah, because at the end of anything, that's where you find the truth. You find out what happens at the end of it. Let me put it this way: finishing strong isn't about suddenly digging deep and figuring it out. No, it's about trying to figure out how to regulate yourself so that you can get to that finish line. Most people want to finish strong. That's not the
issue. What happens near the end? That's the issue. All of the things that come at you. Hey, I'm trying to write this book, sleep, as as as medicine, sleep as a medical sort of uh intervention, and I gotta tell you, it's not easy as I get near the end. So as you get near the end, it's always a bit challenging. You're tired, the stakes feel heavier, the time feels tighter, your mind starts telling you stories. I'm behind, I should be further along. Why am I not finishing? If this were really meant for me, it would really why would it is it why is it so hard? That's where things begin to slip in the conversation we have in our head, what we tell ourselves. So, finishing strong is really about this. Can you keep making clear choices when everything in you wants to rush, wants to get it done really fast, is is trying to shut it down or to move on to something else? Can you stay emotionally steady enough to do the next right thing instead of reacting to how stressed out you feel? Can you keep your rhythm when your body and your brain are clearly done with the week? I speak to myself. That's
the real work. And I saw this clearly with a doctoral student I worked with not long ago. Great guy, sharp dude, really cool guy. He was deep into his dissertation. He had years of effort that he had put in. Brilliant man, great thinker. But instead of feeling relieved as the finish line got closer, he was beginning to feel exhausted, tired, depleted. Like many of us, he felt kind of heavy, dragging. Every edit he had to do on his document, his dissertation was felt like a chore. Every delay that he experienced, and you know how life is. Life will throw all these delays at you. He it began to look like proof that he wasn't going to get this done. And he started sounding like he was done, like he passed a verdict on himself. I don't have it today, man. I I don't know, Doc. I don't fucking really get it done. Yeah, he started talking about how overwhelmed he was and all of that. And it was like a perfect storm uh coming for coming at him to take another year off. He had already taken a year off before. So this was gonna be another year. So we slowed it down a little. We talked about it. We didn't slow down the work. I told him, let's just look at what you're interpreting, let's look at all of your interpretations. We talked about what it was like to just be interpreting things as if it were a disaster, and what it was doing to his body, how his chest felt tight, he was shallow breathing, couldn't sleep, he was restless, he was edgy, anxious.
And I told him, look, this is not failure, this is your nervous system. In the book that I'm writing on sleep, we talk about recovery as a skill, and that your nervous system is what's running the show, and so we've gotta get in touch with what your nervous system is trying to tell you today. What is your nervous system saying? And that's what it takes to finish because the nervous system is usually under the stress, under the load, under the pressure. Because for many of us, something important is at stake when we are trying to finish something. And it doesn't matter what it is, you're gonna feel pressure when you come near the end. That doesn't mean you're breaking, it means that you care when you feel all this stress and pressure, and that's what I told him. And I gave him a surprising assignment. He wasn't ready for this. I told him he was a Michael Jackson fan, he was an MJ fan, like me,
right? And I said, I want you to listen to this song by Michael Jackson that's gonna help you. I just want you to listen to it and just come back and tell me what you got from it. And I, super analytical guy, I knew he was gonna like get into like every single word of the song or whatever. And interestingly, he had never heard this song by Michael Jackson, and he called himself a Michael Jackson fan. I'm like, dude, you don't know keep the faith. So I gave him Keep the Faith, and he was fascinated by it, and I told him, This is gonna be just your reminder, just listen to it. So, what I was doing was several things, right? Sometimes listening to your favorite song or listening to music, it gives the brain a chance to breathe. It gives the amygdala a chance, the threat detection center, a chance to relax. It allows new neural pathways to form and old ones to be reignited. It it gives you a sense of relief. That was just part of it. But then the lyrics of the song, Keep the Faith, and you should check it out if you have time, maybe over the weekend or whatever. Um, the lyrics of this song had a message for him, and he came back and he told me, he said, Look, I love that line. And the line was, all you need is the will to want it and a little self-esteem. So keep the faith, don't let nobody turn you round. Keep the faith, keep your feet flat on the ground. So that was a refrain in the song, and he loved it, he absolutely loved it. So we talked about it, what it meant, and we talked about MJ and what his life meant, and you know, we got into a whole different thing. He didn't even realize what was happening, that we were kind of off to another level of discussion about uh people who push past
limits and who also understand something about staying oriented because that's what the song was all about. When you're tired and you're close to the end, and your job feels like it's gonna, it's kind of hard. You you stay oriented, you don't let the fatigue rewrite who you are, you don't let the pressure tell you that this moment defines your worth. And there was another line that he loved. It was uh the one that says, You gotta know when it's good to go to get your dreams up off the ground. Yeah. You gotta know when it's good to go to get your dreams up off the ground. Keep the faith, don't let nobody turn you around. So, yeah, that's about finishing strong, right? It's not forcing the outcome. You have to know when it's good to go. It's your dream that we're trying to get off the ground here. Don't panic, right? So it's the idea of steadying yourself, listening to the beat, keeping up with what you have to do, allowing your nervous system to chill, listen to some music, take a deep breath. You know, once this guy stopped fighting his stress and stopped treating it like it was a sign of failure, his thinking came back online. His PFC, his prefrontal cortex was able to come back online. He was able to say, hmm, yeah, I'm under stress. Instead of me just thinking I have to finish everything, it's like, well, what can I do with the next paragraph? Instead of just focusing on falling apart, it's like, okay, I'm tired. Maybe I'll build in some time to listen to some music, go to the gym, chill out, relax, and I'll hit it tomorrow when I'm fresh. As opposed to having a catastrophic interpretation of the stress signal his nervous system was was uh giving him. You see, the nervous system tells us when it's time to rest, when something needs a little attention. It's not the worst thing in the world. And so he finished this thing, not because he
found more motivation, he was able to finish because he stopped letting his fatigue hijack the meaning of the moment for him. He didn't let the fatigue determine what the moment meant anymore. And that's what finishing strong can look like. It's not dramatic, it's not really dramatic at all. It's really a kind of a steady thing where you kind of recognize that you can take one foot and put it in front of the other, breathe. Take another foot step by step. Remembering that, you know, the turtle sometimes wins the race here. You don't always have to be rushing. And the and the ancient wisdom backs us up on that in Ecclesiastes 9-1-1 of all the of all the numbers, right? 9-1-1. What does it say in Ecclesiastes 9-1-1, right? It says, the race is not for the swift, homeboy. It doesn't say that. I'm just uh, oh my gosh, this message Bible, I gotta get out of it, right? It's so cool, but the KJV people are looking at me like, hey, dude, that's not in the Bible. But the idea of the race not being the swift is in the Bible. So the idea is look, the ancient wisdom is trying to tell us something. It's not the verse here is not saying don't try, it's reminding us that speed alone doesn't
win everything. You don't have to be the fastest on the block. You know what wins? Endurance wins. The one that endures to the end wins, the one who perseveres wins. Having good judgment is is what wins. Yeah. That's what you're built for. And that's what built for this is all about this week. You were built to feel pressure without letting it define you. You were built to carry fatigue without collapsing into it and giving in. You were built to finish with clarity, with clarity, not chaos. That's what you're built for. It's okay to feel all this stress and pressure, but you have a plan inside of it. It involves self-care, it involves taking a breath, it involves setting the right goals. It involves not misinterpreting every cue and signal. So that's your finished strong Friday move. Yeah. What are you telling yourself that distress means? That's the question. And then correcting it. It doesn't mean I'm falling. It doesn't mean I'm failing. It means I'm close. I've got to take a slower breath. I've got to take one micro action today, maybe a smaller action, make it doable, make it clean, and I'm just gonna finish strong segmentally, bit by bit, whatever I gotta do. That's the message, beautiful soul, for Finish Strong Friday. And tomorrow on Self-Care Saturday, we're gonna talk about something just as important as effort and grit.
We're gonna spend a minute or two on how recovery, rest, and compassion aren't rewards. No, they're not rewards for you finishing, they're part of what allows you to finish in the first place. So, recovery and rest and compassion and self-compassion, that's a part of it. It's not some reward or some gift that you get. That's a tool. Those are tools that we're gonna use, and we're gonna spend more time with that tomorrow. Because strength isn't just built in the push, my friend. It's preserved in how you care for yourself as well after the push. Talk to you tomorrow. This is the sweet spot. It's Finish Strong Friday. You're built to finish. Take a breath, relax, reset, and I'll see you then.
