COPYRIGHT

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First published by in the USA by HarperWave, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

First published in the UK by Thorsons, an imprint of HarperColllinsPublishers 2018

FIRST EDITION

© Warrior Poet 2018

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Cover photographs © James Law Photography

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Source ISBN: 9780008286415

Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008286422

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This book contains advice and information relating to health care. It should be used to supplement rather than replace the advice of your doctor or another trained health professional. If you know or suspect you have a health problem, it is recommended that you seek your doctor’s advice before embarking on any medical programme or treatment. All efforts have been made to assure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date of publication. This publisher and the author disclaim liability for any medical outcomes that may occur as a result of applying the methods suggested in this book.

Please note the ‘"If You Want to Get High, Now’s the Time’ is based on the author’s experience and is not to be treated as medical advice. The author lives in the US and has written this section from a US perspective, on the basis that marijuana is legal/decriminalised in some states. Marijuana is illegal in the UK and many other countries.

DEDICATION

Dedicated to your future self

CONTENTS

COVER

TITLE PAGE

COPYRIGHT

DEDICATION

INTRODUCTION

1 Water. Light. Movement

Morning Mineral Cocktail

2 Deep Breath, Deep Freeze

3 More Fat, Less Sugar, or Don’t Eat

Classic Breakfast with Greens

Bone Broth and Avocado

Choco-Maca Magic Shake

Açaí Breakfast Blast

4 Essential Supplements

5 Drive Time, Alive Time

6 The Power Plants

MoMatchajito

7 Doin’ Work

8 Eat a Weird Lunch

Chipotle Beef Bowl

Probiotic Ceviche

Bacony Asparagus with Sauerkraut

Garlic Green Beans with Cashews

Turmeric No-Tato Salad

Sautéed Garlic-Mustard Dandelion Greens

Chia Pudding

9 The Binaural Power Nap

10 Training

11 Reset and Reconnect

12 Eat Dinner Like a King

Sensual Steak Salad

Sourdough Garlic Bread

Love Pasta

Game-On Stew

Jammin’ Tandoori Salmon with Tzatziki

Spicy Creamy Greens

Mashed Potatoes

Popcorn with Grass-Fed Butter and Chocolate

13 More, Better Sex

14 Turn Off, Tune In

15 Sleep

Emergency Sleep Cocktail

16 Bring It Home

NOTES: HERE COMES THE SCIENCE!

LIST OF SEARCHABLE TERMS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

INTRODUCTION

Nothing is worth more than this day.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

Nutrition, mind-set, productivity, performance, ﬁtness, sex, sleep—when we look through a keyhole at these areas of focus, we forget that they are interconnected and interdependent. They are spokes on the wheel of the day, every one of them necessary to ride the twenty-four-hour cycle into a life worth living. Because a day isn’t just about what you put into your body, how you look in the mirror, or how much production you can squeeze from eight hours of work. It’s about how you feel, whose lives you connect with, and how much fun you have along the way.

We have to transcend the tendency to place all of our effort on one thing at a time, instead of one day at a time. Just look at the flood of transformational programs out there: twelve days to detox, twenty-eight days to skinny, forty days to enlightenment, ninety days to astronaut. What do they give you? A diet that statistically fails 95 percent of all people or some email batching tips that are magically supposed to make you more productive. If you’re lucky you’ll leave with one or two takeaways that you actually implement in your life for a week or two. But real transformation? Unlikely. What is more likely is that everything else falls out of balance while you doggedly pursue your eight-pack abs.

So we are going to flip the script and recalibrate. We are going to focus on that single indivisible unit. That twenty-four hours. Just one day. You gotta walk before you run, and a day is the first step. To own your life, you gotta own the day. You’re going to read this book, and then prepare to live one single day completely optimally.

Mark it on your calendar, get your head right, get your food right, and do it. You won’t live every day like this right away. You may never live another day exactly like this again. But owning just one of them will be the catalyst to meaningful, demonstrable change. Maybe it’s your morning routine, maybe it’s how you prepare for sleep, or how you spend your drive to work. Maybe it’s how you work out, or how you eat. Maybe it’s everything! But one of those things is going to click first, and when it does, every day after that will be different. I dare you to read this book and not find things that substantially change how you live, and how you look at life. Maybe that will seem small at first. But small things, when compounded over time, tend to have big consequences. That, after all, is the essence of evolution.

Tipping Points and the Process

How many choices in your daily life are essentially toss-ups? Pizza or home cooking? Soda or sparkling water? Netflix or a night out? Should I go to the gym or not? Every day, nearly all of these choices are a fifty-fifty call. You could just as easily land in one place as the other. If you changed one thing you do within the first twenty minutes of waking up (I am going to give you three), however, or you had just a little bit more energy from a high-fat, low-sugar breakfast, maybe you’d choose differently. Maybe it would cease to be a question at all. Of course you’re going to the gym. Then, because you went to the gym, you find yourself less stressed that night. So you have sex. Then you sleep better. Then you wake up more vibrant and with more energy. And you have set in motion a positive cascade of choices. The tipping point was one small change in breakfast. You exchanged your Apple Jacks for an avocado, and all of a sudden your day was different, your week was different, maybe your whole month was different.

Nick Saban, possibly the greatest coach in the history of college football, tells his players to follow what he calls “the Process.” He tells them that the average down in football lasts about seven seconds. If they want to win an SEC championship, or a national title, they should focus on that smallest unit of measurement. Seven seconds. Don’t get lost in the big picture, he says, and risk taking your eye off the prize. Focus on what’s in front of you, focus on something you can chew and swallow. Focus on the micro, in other words, and the macro takes care of itself.

That’s the approach we’re going to take: The way to own your life is to own your day. Today. Because that’s all you have.

The samurai master Miyamoto Musashi told students in his Book of Five Rings, “When you freely beat one man, you beat any man in the world. The spirit of defeating a man is the same for ten million men. The strategist makes small things into big things, like building a great Buddha from a one-foot model. The principle of strategy is having one thing, to know ten thousand things.”

To live one day well is the same as to live ten thousand days well. To master twenty-four hours is to master your life.

Everyone Has Room to Improve

All human beings, every single one of us, have in some way taken a detour off the blueprint of optimal living. We can’t help it, it’s the world we live in. So we have to take measures as strong as the forces opposing us, or else we struggle.

I know from experience. Before I built Onnit into a movement that touches the lives of millions of people, I was stressed, depressed, and suffering as a consequence. Wild blood sugar swings from poor diet choices were exhausting me. I hurt my body with all sorts of toxic substances. I was sick … a lot. Then one day near my thirtieth birthday I made a commitment to be better. It was so significant that I decided to adopt my middle name as my first name, Aubrey, and to strike out from that moment as a better human being. I didn’t have a perfect plan yet, like the one contained in this book. I wish I did. But I had choices, and I started making them. Good ones. I chose to take responsibility for my life. To own it. I chose to accept that whatever happened was on me. I would not hide behind the cozy blankets of relinquished responsibility any longer. I researched furiously, talked to everyone I could, and experimented tirelessly until I found the tools and practices that could bring me total human optimization. These hard-won understandings formed the nexus of a company with the mission to help bring these tools and techniques to the world.

This company, Onnit, has been as great a success as I dared to dream. Based in Austin, Texas, we’ve been honored to be of assistance to some of the most impressive people in the world: my partner from the word go, quintuple threat Joe Rogan; drummer Travis Barker; platinum rapper and actor Ludacris; Olympic gold medal downhill skier Bode Miller; three-time NHL Stanley Cup winners Duncan Keith and Jonathan Toews; US women’s soccer team member Lori “Lightning” Lindsey; Allison Holker of Dancing with the Stars; and mixed martial arts champions Cody Garbrandt, Tyron Woodley, and Michelle Waterson, among many others. You’ll meet some of them in the book.

You know what we find when we sit down with them? They’re not perfect either. They have the same struggles as you and I do. Maybe it’s not getting enough sleep. Maybe their nutrition is off. Maybe they’ve got a bad habit, or they feel foggy all morning. Maybe they have some nagging injury that bothers them through the day. They are almost always dealing with stress, and they too sometimes doubt themselves.

The first thing we do with them is the first thing I’m going to do with you: examine your day. What do you do when you wake up? What do you eat? Are you getting enough of this vitamin or that one? Are you seeking good stress and avoiding the bad? Are you taking advantage of dead time when you travel? How do you wind down after a long day? Are you having enough sex? These little things add up. The little things are the big things—even for some of the most accomplished people on earth. If you fight in a cage for a living or dance live on television in front of millions of people, those smallest details can be the difference between success and failure. If you are the everyday kind of superhero, the one who works hard to support a family or build your career, these details are the tipping point between a life of passion and zeal and a life of gray monotony.

A Guide to the Book

To help guide you through the process of owning the day, we repeat the same formula in every chapter. We begin with a section we call “Getting Owned.” We’ve all been there, getting pummeled by the waves of life, never seeming to catch our breath. Then we move on to “Owning It.” Owning it is a matter of having the knowledge and the specific prescription needed to create positive, repeatable habits. We’ve tried to make this process as affordable as possible, but in the case where there are cool biohacking or performance techniques that cost a little more out of pocket, we have broken them into sections called “Pro Tips.” Those are nonessential additions to owning the day. When we geek out on the science, you might see a section called “Deep Dive.” Like the hundreds of citations at the end of the book, those are purely educational pieces for those of us with an inquiring mind. A section called “Caveat” will warn you about any non-obvious risks associated with a particular practice. All of this leads up to the section called “Prescription,” which is the detailed specifics of how to accomplish what we are telling you to do. This leads to the most important section: “Now Do It.” If we did a fraction of what we already knew we should, we would be in pretty good shape. Sometimes you just need a reminder and a kick in the ass to get it done. Finally, as a nod to my years spent on the basketball court, we end with a section called “Three Pointers,” three important takeaways you need to remember from each chapter.

Ultimately, we are building toward one single day for you to plan, in advance, to completely own. It could be next week or next month or next fiscal quarter, but as you read, feel free to employ any of the techniques you find in these pages as you go along. That will only help you troubleshoot and be fully ready for that very first fully owned day. But make no mistake about it, your goal is to prepare and own one full day, like a total boss.

Are you ready? Then let’s go hero, go!

1

WATER. LIGHT. MOVEMENT.

Well begun is half done.

ARISTOTLE

How you wake up sets the tone for your day. Do you slide out of bed and slink through your social media, or do you have purpose in your actions? You want to take control of your day from the word go. So hydrate immediately (not with coffee!), then seek light and get moving to reset your internal clock. That’s three simple things to do within twenty minutes of waking—and your day will be primed for perfection.

Getting Owned

In the days before fuel-injected engines, if you lived in a cold-weather city in the wintertime, you couldn’t just hop in your car first thing in the morning, turn over the engine, throw it in gear, hammer the accelerator, and speed off into the rest of your day. If you tried, the car would be sluggish and perform haltingly at first, because the fluids that make the critical components of the engine function were not properly primed. If you persisted in speeding out of the driveway before the fluids were warm, you’d start to damage internal components, throwing off the engine’s timing, resulting in a hefty mechanic’s bill.

Even today, with fancy onboard computers, high-tech fuel injection, and all sorts of automotive bells and whistles, most experts will tell you that it’s not a bad idea to let your car warm up for thirty to sixty seconds and then take it easy for the first few miles, especially if you’re concerned with maximum performance and long-term durability.

Do you want to guess what proportion of people follow those fairly simple guidelines for warming up their vehicles? It’s about the same as those who properly warm up their bodies upon waking. As a society, we tend to be as rough on our bodies as we are on our cars, which is unfortunate, since, unlike cars, we can’t trade in our bodies for a newer model with lower mileage after twenty years of steady abuse. Instead of paying the mechanic, we pay the doctor—neither of which is a fun check to write.

A brief walk through the first hour of the average day should give you a good sense of what we’re talking about here. The first sensation most of us register when we wake up is thirst. If you’ve managed to sleep well, you’ve just gone seven-plus hours without drinking a drop of water. If you’re in a dry climate, worked out the previous afternoon, or partied hard the night before, you likely hit the pillow at a fluid deficit out of the gate. Depending on the temperature of your room and how many blankets you sleep under, you may have even accelerated the dehydration process through sweat. In combination, the vapor from respiration and perspiration can often amount to a pound of water lost overnight. As a result, we regularly wake up feeling like we’ve been nursing on a cotton ball.

You would think that the logical response to this condition would be to get up and drink some water, to lubricate all those critical internal components we need to fire correctly for our bodies to be most effective today and for the long haul. Instead, what most of us do is hide under the covers, hitting the snooze button like a snare drum until the last possible moment, at which point we hurry out of bed, strip our clothes off, step into the shower and pour an average of twenty scalding-hot gallons of water over our body, then dump three more quarts through a drip coffee maker. We rarely think to actually drink any of this water before it goes down the drain or through the filter, which is insane; if the physical sensations we experience when we wake up happened to us in the middle of our day, we’d say “Damn, I’m thirsty” and then crush a glass of water. Starting the day, though, it always ends with us holding a cup of coffee.

I have news for you: the best part of waking up is not coffee in your cup. But, Aubrey, I’m not myself without a cup of coffee in the mornings. I need it. No, you don’t. Waking up your body with coffee is like setting off a fire alarm as an alarm clock. When you’re dehydrated and have nothing in your stomach, the caffeine enters your bloodstream incredibly fast, releasing a flood of stress hormones from your adrenal glands that your body reads as a fight-or-flight trigger. Like you’ve been woken up being chased by a predatory cat. While this is effective in the short term, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to keep aggressive caffeine and feline doses to a minimum first thing in the morning. Drinking caffeine when you are dehydrated may feel good for the mouth, but you aren’t exactly digging out of the hole. The hydrating water in the coffee is somewhat offset by the dehydrating nature of caffeine. Yet we still reach for coffee in the morning, in large part because these adrenal effects are so damn good at dealing with the other problem we face when we wake up: we’re still tired.

Only one in seven people report waking up feeling refreshed after sleeping. Almost half of all Americans report feeling fatigued at least three times during the week. As a nation, Americans are owned and controlled by fatigue and the tools used to fight it. We are chronically tired because we are constantly screwing up our sleep. Sleepiness and energy levels are regulated by something called circadian rhythm, which tells your body when it’s time to wake up and when to sleep. You may have heard it referred to as your body clock or your internal clock. And contrary to popular practice, the hands of that internal clock are not powered by Starbucks. They are powered by sunlight and movement. So when you shuffle your feet around a dimly lit house with your comfy robe on, your body can’t tell if you are awake, asleep, or skinwalking as a cave bear. By restricting those important cues that signal the start of a circadian cycle on a regular basis, your entire body gets thrown out of whack. When you add dehydration to the equation, things only get worse. That’s why, despite our best intentions, we so often don’t feel like working out, our brains are in a fog, we suffer from headaches, and we’re generally on edge and just plain tired. Really tired. Except when it comes time to go to sleep, of course, because then, miraculously, despite being tired all day, we can’t sleep. Sound like anyone you know? If not, you need more friends, because the CDC estimates that between 50 and 70 million Americans have a sleep disorder. You have to know at least one of those people!

There are studies on both men and women showing that even mild dehydration resulting from fluid loss equaling roughly 1 percent of your body weight can cause headaches, moodiness, irritability, anxiety, and fatigue. Decreases in mental performance and short-term memory loss can start at as little as a 2 percent loss in water. You ever find yourself being 1 or 2 percent lighter in the morning than before bed? That is enough. And for reference, mixed martial arts fighters commonly cut up to 10 percent of their body weight before a fight. No wonder they are always yelling and pointing at each other in their underwear on weigh-in day! When you consider that 78 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated, based on their water intake, that does not paint a pretty picture of the start of the average day. It paints a picture of us getting royally owned.

But it isn’t just the water itself that is the problem. We lose electrolytes and minerals over the course of our sleep as well. Minerals are key to modulating and supporting numerous body processes, from the muscles to the organs and even the brain. Without adequate minerals, many of the body’s normal functions start to diminish. Well, guess what, we are just as bad at replacing our minerals on a regular basis as we are at getting ourselves moving and into the sunlight to start our days.

There is a solution to all that: a three-part formula that involves a simple morning mineral cocktail for hydration and adds a little bit of sunlight and a little bit of movement to reset your internal clock, taking you from getting owned to owning it within the first twenty minutes of your day. I’ve tested it, the athletes and high performers I work with have confirmed it, and clinical research has proven it: hydration and circadian balance are the essential ingredients to the consistent perfect wake-up. The formula I am going to walk you through now, then, is about mastering the levels of these essential ingredients so that the morning sets you up for owning the day every time.

Owning It

On an ordinary day a thousand years ago, Emperor Marcus Aurelius had trouble getting out of bed. We know this because he wrote about it in his journal, a remarkable document never intended for publication that somehow managed to survive through the eons. What’s most remarkable is how modern Marcus’s struggle reads to us.

A notorious insomniac but a dedicated public servant, Marcus writes: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things which I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’”

Of course, no matter how much we love our life, getting out of bed is no easy task. As a Stoic, Marcus suggested one remedy for getting over this hump: discipline. His sense of duty was what propelled him through the morning and into the world.

You can have all the stoic discipline you want, but if you don’t handle the first twenty minutes after you get out of bed correctly, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle all day. Tough mornings aren’t tough because of insufficient willpower. They’re tough because no one teaches us how to make them easy, let alone perfect, even though the perfect start to your day is perfectly within reach.

It’s about building momentum. You know this because you’ve had one of these mornings before. When there isn’t a rushed second, when you feel like you’re a step ahead of everything and the whole day feels like it’s at your leisure. Most of us have these days completely by accident, but the reality is, we can have them on purpose, and we can have them regularly.

Hydration

The first step is proper hydration. Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom tap or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning “a cool bath for your organs.” Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.

All I am asking is that you swap your first-thing-in-the-morning coffee for some water and minerals, in a drink I call the morning mineral cocktail. I’m not asking you to eliminate coffee—God forbid, coffee is delicious—just hold off on it until you’ve hydrated properly and can mix it with some fats like butter or coconut oil to slow it down. (You’ll learn more about the importance of fats in the coming chapters.) The components of my morning mineral cocktail are water, sea salt, and a splash of lemon. I’m not saying that the cocktail is magic, but … it’s basically magic. (Drink it and thank me.)

Morning Mineral Cocktail

350ml filtered water

3g sea salt

¼ lemon, squeezed

WATER: DO IT RIGHT

Despite the proliferation of fitness magazine listicles and online hydration calculators, there is no magic formula for the amount of water you should be drinking. Depending on habituation, diet, workload, toxicity, and a number of other fluctuating factors, every individual’s water needs will vary. As a general rule of thumb, err on the side of more water than not enough. Make a good glass or aluminum water bottle your favorite accessory so you have water available to you at all times. If it’s in another room and you’re like me, you’ll probably wait until you are dying of thirst to get up and go chug some water like a toddler who just found his sippy cup after a long day on the playground. Keep your water close, and sip often.

Just as important as drinking enough water is drinking the right kind of water. Water is one of nature’s best solvents, which means that most of the solids it comes in contact with eventually dissolve into it. That’s great when it comes to absorbing minerals, but problematic when it comes to certain solids like plastics that contain harmful chemicals like BPA that can throw your hormone balance out of whack and set you up for a host of associated issues. As such, it’s important to choose your water sources wisely.

In a perfect world, you’d be able to suckle from the teat of Mother Nature and drink spring water exclusively. Spring water has the right balance of what you want (useful minerals), with little to none of what you don’t (chlorine, heavy metals, contaminants). When I switched to spring water, I stayed more hydrated through the night, which meant a better quality of sleep all around. The reason is that my body wasn’t just thirsty for water; it was thirsty for the minerals called electrolytes that are present in spring water but absent in most filtered waters.

I recognize that buying several liters of spring water in glass bottles every day can get expensive, but many of us still have access to free spring water. Before you go buying anything, check findaspring.com to see if there is any clean, free spring water next to where you live. For those of us not quite that lucky and who also do not have a line item for water in our grocery budgets, the next best thing is filtered water—either through a Brita pitcher you fill and stick in the refrigerator, a Pur filter you attach straight to your kitchen tap, or whatever high-quality filter is available near you. This takes care of the problem of things floating in your water that you don’t want. But then you have to make sure you get enough of the stuff you do want. Specifically, you need to add mineral electrolytes, like those found in sea salt, to get you properly hydrated and mineralized. A small pinch of sea salt into distilled or filtered water should help reset the balance. Add a wedge of lemon juice for some additional refreshing nutrients (a lighter version of the morning mineral cocktail) and you’ve optimized your water. It’s what the pro fighters do when they are recovering from cutting weight, and if it’s good enough for the best in the world on their most important day, it should be good enough for us too. (We’ll cover the effects of inadequate mineralization in chapter 4.)

SALT: THE ORIGINAL MINERAL SUPPLEMENT

Sea salt contains upward of sixty trace minerals above and beyond the sodium, chloride, and iodine in regular table salt, including phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, potassium, bromine, boron, zinc, iron, manganese, and copper. Together they are essential for healthy bodily function and contribute meaningfully to optimal performance. Sodium binds to water in the body to maintain the proper level of hydration inside and outside our cells. Along with potassium, it also helps maintain electrical gradients across cell membranes, which are critical for nerve transmission, muscle contraction, and various other functions. Without it, needless to say, we would be toast.

Unfortunately, salt has become a dirty word over the past few decades—for two reasons: (1) it causes water retention (really just another way to say “makes us more hydrated”), and (2) it increases blood pressure. Both of these claims are technically true. When there are higher concentrations of salt in the body, it is able to hold more water, and your blood will be a little bit thicker. Thicker blood raises your blood pressure slightly because it takes more force to pump.

But is this a problem? While high blood pressure is correlated to cardiovascular disease, an analysis of eight randomized controlled trials showed insufficient evidence that the reduction of salt in one’s diet prevented cardiovascular death or disease. Two further epidemiological studies on populations of 11,346 and 3,681 subjects confirm those findings. There is no conclusively proven benefit to sodium restriction when it comes to preventing heart disease or death—especially for those with a healthy heart. What likely happened here was a classic case of correlation, rather than causation. High blood pressure is correlated to obesity. Obesity is correlated to heart disease. But the increase in high blood pressure caused by salt has not been shown to cause heart disease. As we’ll learn throughout this book, this isn’t the first time that the authorities got their nutrition advice wrong. They should have looked to the history books for some commonsense guidance.

Salt has been a part of our diet for millennia. Roman soldiers of antiquity were “paid” with an allotment of salt. The words salt and salary are derived from the same Latin root word: sal. When we describe people’s worth or utility, we refer to whether they are “worth their salt.” So why was salt such a big deal? Well, if you were a Roman soldier marching around the empire, swinging swords everywhere you went, you had to hydrate and replenish the minerals you lost through sweat, and salt was the surest way to do that.

Can you overdo salt consumption? Of course you can. All medicine becomes poison at a certain dose, but the point of all this is that salt, particularly in its most mineral-rich form, is not the demon it has been made out to be. As for which sea salt to choose, pink Himalayan salt comes from ancient oceanic deposits—long before oil tankers and Jet Skis were crisscrossing Earth’s waters—and also has the benefit of additional iron, which gives it its pink hue. For women who tend to be lower in iron, cooking, seasoning, and mineralizing with pink salt is a great option. But any regular old sea salt will do, as long as it comes from a good source. Kosher salt means nothing nutritionally; it is purely a religious distinction, so don’t get confused. Shalom!

Get Lit

You can give a plant all the water it will ever need, but if it isn’t exposed to enough light, it just won’t grow. It’ll only drown. The same is true for human beings. You can hydrate until you have mineral cocktail coming out of your ears, but that’s only one of the variables in this morning math problem we’re trying to solve. A lack of sufficient or timely exposure to light will short-circuit every attempt you make to start your mornings off with the kind of energy necessary to own the day. This is a problem that everyone faces, from students to self-employed moms to workaholic dads to professional athletes. Biologically we are supposed to wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the stars. This is the timing that our body patterned for millennia, and the essence of circadian rhythm.

To the average person, circadian balance might not seem all that important until you realize that, as your circadian rhythms go, so goes the rest of your life. Women with atypical circadian rhythm, for example, have unusual eating and hormone patterns. This physiological and behavioral cycle follows the typical twenty-four-hour day, and controls a huge variety of biological processes, from the sleep-wake cycle to body temperature, metabolism, and even the life of the cell. The timing of these rhythms can easily become altered by the environment or choices we make, which can cause internal desynchronization. Sometimes this desynchronization manifests as jet lag, sometimes as sleep problems. There is even an association with increased incidence of cancer. Not to mention waking up extremely freaking early, even though all you really want to do is sleep in a little bit. What this means, very simply, is that the more synchronized your circadian rhythms are, the better your life becomes.

The strongest synchronizing agent for the circadian system? You guessed it: light. Specifically, blue light. Even more specifically, environmental light, aka sunlight, which is the most natural and abundant source of blue light. None of this should be too much of a surprise. The natural life-giving, regulating force of the sun—whether we understood it as a source of blue light or not—has drawn humans toward it for millennia. It’s why we find ourselves wandering out so often to look at the sky during dawn and at dusk. It’s why sunset cruises are so popular at beach vacation resorts. It’s why the road up to Haleakala Crater on Maui is packed at 4:00 a.m. during the high season in anticipation of the epic sunrise. It speaks to us. It’s our body being drawn, unconsciously, to the energy and rhythm of the sun. When we deny it, we begin to fall out of our own rhythm. When we accept and engage it, things begin to fall into place.

To rely on the sun to live in accord with Earth’s natural biorhythms, however, is virtually impossible in modern life. Everyone would have to go to bed shortly after it gets dark (for most of us equator huggers, that’s around 9:00 p.m.) and wake up when it’s light (around 6:00 a.m.). The real world often requires a different schedule. Maybe you’re a very early riser, or you sleep during the day and work at night, or you simply decide that nocturnal pleasures outweigh the delights of dawn. (Personally, I enjoy when the house is quiet after 10:00 p.m., so I prefer a midnight–7:00 a.m. sleep schedule.) Whatever the reason, you and the sun might not be on speaking terms on occasion. This creates a twofold problem: circadian rhythm disruption and a lack of means for fixing it.

This is what Duncan Keith, assistant captain of the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, was feeling during his 2014–15 season. His body clock was getting out of whack because he traveled a lot and worked at night in a profession where he spends most of his time during the season in darkness. A lot of hockey cities are in the frozen north, above the wall where the wildlings live, and two-thirds of the regular season schedule take place there, coinciding with the curious daylight savings custom. This meant that walking outside to get some sunlight was rarely an option for Duncan. As a result, his circadian rhythms were often out of sync with the ebbs and flows of his life. It was enough that he was noticing an effect on energy and alertness come game time.

To help solve Duncan’s problem, we talked about a tweak to his routine that everyone can, and should, make to their own routine to reset their circadian rhythms. He got into the light every time he woke up—from sleep or from a nap.

The results of this blue-light tweak, with other supplement and nutrition improvements to Duncan’s game-day protocol, speak for themselves: not only did the Blackhawks go on to win the Stanley Cup that year, but Duncan was named Finals MVP as the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy. ESPN called his performance during the postseason an “indefatigable two-month surge” and “one of the most dominant … in NHL history.” He played more than thirty minutes per game and logged more than 700 minutes of playing time over the course of the playoffs—both of which are ridiculous numbers that put him in rarefied company as a defenseman. I’m not going to take any credit for his performance—he’s a fucking savage—but the adjustment to his postsleep light exposure and the rest of the tips and tactics you’ll find in this book certainly didn’t hurt! And it certainly won’t hurt your performance either.

Movement

I haven’t said anything about order for these first three essential ingredients to the perfect wake-up, but I will tell you how I start the best of my mornings: I wake up quietly. I have my morning mineral cocktail. I step outside into the rising sun. Then I sneak up on my just-waking fiancée. With ninja stealth, I make a slow and calculated attack. She protests, I laugh. I tease her in a bad Portuguese accent about her nickname “Miss2Jits” and the fact that she is a blue belt and I’m just a white belt. Eventually she’s had enough of my mouthiness and we grapple to see who can gain dominant position.

To me, there is no better start to the morning than this. It’s a chance to practice my “jits” and wrestle with a beautiful naked woman. While it’s a disaster for keeping the fitted sheet on the mattress, it’s totally worth it. If you’ve never tried coed naked jujitsu, you haven’t really lived! (Side note: Remember how popular those Coed Naked sports shirts were? Whatever happened to those?) But this isn’t just a fun little diversion to delay getting to work. There is real science behind adding a few minutes of playful activity in the morning. Even light exercise boosts circulation and improves cognitive performance. It releases endorphins and, most important of all, helps entrain that fickle bastard, our circadian rhythm. In addition to sufficient blue-light exposure, regular activity—however brief—sends strong cues to the body that it is time to wake up and get going. It helps set that internal biological clock.

Prescription

The morning prescription comes in three parts: hydrate, get lit, and move it.

Hydrate. There are no secret, scary, crazy steps to combining these ingredients into the morning mineral cocktail, but there are a couple things you want to be mindful of during preparation and consumption. First, the water should be room temperature. When you’re looking to maximize mineral absorption and aid digestion, room temperature is always best for any beverage. And second, the salt needs to dissolve or stay off the bottom of the glass when you drink it. Salt is the essential component for mineralization, but since it is denser than water, it sinks to the bottom before it dissolves if you let it come to rest after mixing. Then you end up with a salty sludge at the bottom of your glass that, unless you have a tongue like beef cattle, you’re gonna find hard to get out of there.

The best way to avoid that problem is to simply mix the cocktail in a shaker or a water bottle. You can make the whole thing the night before, you can make a concentrate and add the water in the morning, or you can do the whole thing from scratch every day, like a little ritual, but doing it in something with a lid allows you to drink at a pace you’re comfortable with, which is important. You don’t want to force the cocktail down; that only turns the whole process into something that feels more like punishment and less like nourishment. Whichever method is best for you is the method you should employ, because this is the ultimate lubricant for sliding into the day, and it would be a shame if you missed out on it.

Get lit. Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, blast yourself with five to ten minutes of direct blue-light exposure. Ideally, you’ll be able to do this by stepping outside and exposing as much of your skin as possible to that giant yellow orb in the sky, basking in its bright, warm blueness, like a cat with less body hair. When that’s not possible, you’ll need to adapt. Fortunately, there is a good biohack at your disposal that can do the trick.

Pro Tip—Human Charging

Light-emitting earbuds. Believe it or not, the retinas are not the only light-sensitive receptors on the human body. These receptors are also found in many locations on the brain, including the cerebrum and the hypothalamus. One of the surest ways to shine light on them is through the ears. A device called the HumanCharger25, made by a company named Valkee out of Helsinki, Finland, has pioneered this technology for consumer use. Their light-emitting device uses earbuds, like the kind you’d buy at an airport newsstand or an Apple Store, that make it feel like you’re shining light straight onto your brain through your ear canals. It sounds crazy, I know, but a number of studies have shown it to be incredibly effective in reducing symptoms and increasing cognitive performance in people with seasonal affective disorder who have limited exposure to natural sunlight.

Move it. Of the three parts to this energy equation, this is by far the most difficult for people. The urge to crawl back under the blankets and slam the snooze button like a whack-a-mole is incredibly strong. The key to overcoming that resistance is understanding that what we’re talking about here is not a morning workout. This is morning movement.

There are many ways to get this movement in. Even just light movement will increase core temperature, cortisol, circulation, and the release of endorphins that will make you more alert, and put that grogginess behind you. I want it to be fun for you, so pick what you like: light yoga, pushups, air squats, jumping jacks, a Richard Simmons clip on YouTube. Chase your dog around the house or pick your kid up and fly her around like an airplane. It doesn’t really matter; it’s all part of circadian entrainment. Here are some of my go-to morning movements.

QUICK AND DIRTY: 1–3 MINUTES

Twenty-three burpees. Why? I like the number 23. I wore it on my back for years out on the basketball court, and to this day it makes me happy. If you are feeling frisky, add the pushup to the bottom of the burpee. If you need to break this up into several sets, go for it. Otherwise the whole thing should be over in about a minute. If twenty-three feels like a real workout to you, make up your own number. The key is simply that your heart rate gets elevated and muscles start working.

SLOW AND SEXY: 5–10 MINUTES

This is a little yoga flow I developed for the morning. I hold each position for two full intentional breaths, allowing up to one breath for the transition. Start standing with your palms open and facing outwards. Then forward fold. Walk your hands forward into down dog. Bring your left leg up parallel to your hands, into lizard lunge. Take your left hand and open it up to the sky for spinal twist. Put your hand back down. Take your leg back to high plank. Do a pushup (drop to knees if necessary). Repeat on the right side. When you complete the pushup, walk your hands back to forward fold. Roll up one vertebra at a time. Raise your arms, into a gentle backbend, then bring your hands down and your arms to center prayer pose. Repeat as many times as you like.

Pro Tip—Rebounder

Buy a dorky little mini trampoline called a rebounder to get the juices flowing. If you watched the Tony Robbins documentary I Am Not Your Guru, this is one of the things he uses to jump-start his biology before heading out onstage at the event venue. Proponents claim benefits to the lymph system (key to healthy immune function) due to the G-forces created from gravitational unloading. While this has yet to be conclusively proven, regular low-leg exercise has been shown to improve lymph movement. So regardless, the rebounder qualifies. Not only that, the bouncing is going to help build coordination and balance as well, as shown in a study on fighter pilots. For me personally, I feel like it brings circulation all the way from my head to my feet. Nothing shakes off the grogginess like bouncing like the one and only Tigger. Super triple bonus points if you sing the Tigger song, “The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers”, while bouncing.

The point here is not to exercise, it is to elevate your heart rate and get the lead out—all without crossing the threshold for activity that requires some form of recovery. You don’t want to be sore as a result of this early-morning activity, and you don’t want it to diminish your workout later, but generally speaking you want to eliminate the segregation between ordinary sedentary life and that forty-five-minute block of time where you work out at the gym. We want to add movement, activity, and play into all parts of your day, especially the beginning, to set the tone for the day to come. I think you’ll find that a little play wrestling can do as much as a cup of coffee, especially if you’re ticklish and the claws come out.

Now Do It

Starting and finishing are the two hardest parts of any task. Taking the first step is bringing your inertia from a dead halt into motion. Or as billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel would say, going from zero to one. It’s like trying to push a car. The bulk of the effort is actually getting the wheels to start rolling. From there you can mostly coast and steer. Getting hydrated, getting light, and getting moving is that initial momentum. We’re not asking you to wake up in the morning like a Jamaican bobsledder, jumping from the sheets into a full sprint, we’re just asking you to complete three simple tasks.

Accomplish these in the first twenty minutes, and you have set the tone for the entire day. It’s your on-ramp to the highway of happiness and effectiveness. It ensures you will be sufficiently warmed up and lubricated, so when we hit the gas later on in the day, you roar like the muscle car you are.

So ask yourself, are you going to hide from the day under your blankets, squander these minutes and let them pass by, lazily waking up, checking your social media, shoving another pod into the espresso machine? Are you going to succumb to comfort? Or are you gonna own it and stretch yourself a little bit? It’s an exercise of will. It’s an exercise of choice. It’s a routine that will determine how you perform throughout the day and even how you sleep later that night.

Hydration, light, movement. That’s all it takes. That’s all it will ever take. With a regimen this simple, great mornings should not feel like miracles. They should not arrive like a rainbow—a beautiful surprise that is out of your control. You are the captain of your internal universe. You choose to go get the sun and the water and to move the clouds of stagnation in your body to make your own fucking rainbow.

THREE POINTERS

 Circadian rhythm influences many biological functions. To optimize circadian rhythm for performance, you need to add light and movement to the first twenty minutes upon waking up.

 Most of us are chronically dehydrated, particularly in the morning. To start your hydration off right, drink the morning mineral cocktail to ensure you are getting adequate water and electrolytes.

 We are highly sensitive to momentum. By starting your morning off with intention, you set your day off on an important positive trajectory.

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