Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex

to give you additional energy and pep, or glutathione to help restore your liver, or just a plain old banana bag to cover your bases, IV therapy is only going to get more popular. And as the price goes down, the only question you really need to answer for yourself is: Is the juice worth the squeeze?

The Emptor-iest of All Caveats

If you’re not taking supplements, you’re missing an opportunity, plain and simple. But taking the wrong supplements is just as bad, and sometimes it’s worse than taking no supplements at all, because not all supplements work. We have all tried some that didn’t do shit. Some are not strong enough; some have herbs that don’t do what they say, or vitamins that won’t absorb. You can spend hundreds of dollars on things that basically create more expensive pee, with no performance gains to show for it. The key is to find a good company that makes quality products.

I personally take products from several other places besides Onnit, including Sunwarrior, Healthforce Superfoods, NuMedica, and LivOn. Unfortunately, our industry is full of brands peddling a ton of garbage, so it is extra critical for you to choose wisely when it comes to supplements and the companies that sell them. Believe me, I understand the potential for elephantine bias in those words, as a supplement maker myself, but it doesn’t make them any less true or the need for me to say them any less urgent. This isn’t Supplement Supermarket Sweep, after all. We can’t have you just running down the aisles of your local GNC with your arms out, scooping bottles into your basket without reading the labels and figuring out who made what’s inside.

Here’s what you need to know and look for when you’re shopping around for each of the supplements we’ve just recommended:

Avoid supplements that make medical claims. Supplements are technically categorized as a food, not a drug, by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Foods can benefit your health, but drugs treat medical conditions. Therefore, a supplement company cannot advertise that its product is able to fix a medical condition or a disease of any sort without the bitch slap of justice eventually finding its mark upside their head. Remember that product Airborne, which was supposed to keep you from getting sick while flying or teaching elementary school? Well, those exaggerated promises cost its makers to the tune of $23 million.

If a supplement is claiming a miracle cure for a real medical condition, you know at least one of two things. The company making it is either about to get sued, or run by amateurs too small to get noticed by the FDA and too insignificant to be penalized by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Both of those are red flags, especially the latter. Amateurs can produce supplements and get them on the shelf without actually following the rules. It’s kind of like those unlabeled cookies wrapped in cling film at the counter of the gas station. Who makes those things? While this informality occasionally results in delicious cookies, it’s not what you want for supplements. Supplements must be controlled by a variety of FDA checkpoints during the development and production process.

First of all, every ingredient needs to have something called GRAS (generally recognized as safe) status. If it’s not on the GRAS list, it shouldn’t be in the formula. Second, there are strict laws concerning how the food/supplement is produced. This is called good manufacturing practice (GMP). Every supplement needs to be produced in a GMP-compliant facility until it is fully packaged and sealed, preventing contamination. These facilities are regularly audited by the FDA and additionally audited by the manufacturing brands. Finally, every supplement is tested for microbial and metal contamination twice before it is released to the public: each ingredient is tested individually, then the finished batch is tested. You can be fairly confident that supplements making medical claims have not cleared these rigorous regulatory hurdles on their way from some dude’s basement to your kitchen counter.

Avoid companies that don’t perform randomized clinical trials on their own products. If a company hasn’t performed any clinical trials, it is a sign that either they are cheap or they don’t believe their stuff works. As a point of reference, we spent over $400,000 to get our nootropic formula tested twice by the Boston Center for Memory against placebo. There was plenty of research on the ingredients already published, and in chapter 6 you’ll read about one in particular. But we wanted to do more than just suggest that our product would work. We wanted to test it in the most rigorous method possible—randomized clinical trials, run by someone who had no stake in whether Alpha Brain worked or not. That’s important: it’s so easy for great marketers to convince you that a product will help your memory or help you lose weight; it’s a lot harder to show—with evidence, data, and testing—that it actually does so. While it usually isn’t feasible to run tests on every single product, if a company hasn’t run independent clinical trials on any products, they are not for you.

Watch out for supplements filled with caffeine. One of the big ways those great marketers make you think that what you’re swallowing is doing what they say it will is by juicing it with caffeine. The caffeine gives you an instant hit when you take it, and you end up saying to yourself, “Well, it’s definitely doing something!” And it is: it’s sinking its little hormonal claws into your adrenal system and memorizing your credit card number. There are plenty of good ways to take caffeine. They usually don’t involve supplements. So avoid most supplements that contain heavy caffeine; it’s there to cover up the weaknesses of the core product.

Prescription

Since all supplements are different, and you are different, I’m not going to give you specific amounts to take here. The first step is to supplement your lifestyle in the most natural way possible. Get more sunshine, spinach, and fish, and eat all the weird foods you can. We’ll talk about more of that in chapter 8. Then when it comes to dietary supplements, the best practice is to talk to a health-care practitioner, dietitian, or functional medicine specialist.

It’s also important not to expect miracles or dramatic overnight changes. Your problems weren’t built in a day; the solutions may not come so quickly either. Since I am acutely aware of how my body functions and feels (hey, it’s my job!), I can usually feel a difference the same day I take a supplement, but I have also learned that sometimes it takes weeks before you accrue the whole-body benefits. Track how you feel over time. Do that however you like: use an app, keep a journal, send yourself an email at the end of each day. Just make sure to get a sense of whether and how something you’ve taken is affecting you.

Pro Tip: Don’t Make Me Think

Sourcing all these things can be intimidating, but I encourage you to see what’s out there. We’ve done a lot of the work for you, though, with formulas that pack all the key vitamins and minerals, along with greens and krill oil, plus a host of herbal nutrients in convenient day and night packs. We also offer a complete care kit for your gut that includes probiotics you can take with any meal. All the packs are sleek, easy to travel with, and absolutely comprehensive. I could pretend that I don’t think ours is the best solution, but that would be withholding information from you just to avoid seeming biased. It’s what I use, and it’s the starting point for our pro team and many of the customers we serve.

Now Do It

What is a supplement really going to do for me? That’s the question you were probably asking as you worked your way through the material in this chapter. It’s definitely the question I get most often when I meet new people and tell them what I do. If it’s the right supplement, the answer is … something. The clinical research backs that up.

Suppose your mood is a little better from the vitamin D. When your daughter asks you “Why, Daddy?” for the tenth time, instead of getting snippy you can answer her with a tickle and a smile.

Suppose you have more mental energy from the B vitamins. Instead of surfing Facebook at work because your brain is too tired, you actually start working on the long-term project that is going to take your career to the next level.

Suppose your joints don’t ache after the krill oil. Instead of sliding onto the couch when you get home, you go for a nice long run to clear your head.

Suppose you can relax better after mineral supplementation. Instead of being stressed all night, you read a book that changes the way you think about some aspect of your world.

Suppose you don’t have to worry about getting diarrhea when you travel that world. Maybe you book that trip to Peru and come back a different person.

Small things have big consequences. Over time, those consequences compound. We are the accumulated momentum of all our choices. Some of those choices are binary. Go to the gym or not: that choice in that moment is going to change your day. Over time that choice will change your life. We tend to ignore the importance of fractional benefit because we lose sight of the concept of the tipping point—the little benefit that tips the cup to release a flood of benefit. It may be a 2 percent difference in force or momentum that flips the coin from heads to tails, or yes to no.

Supplements stack the odds in your favor. You will survive without them. But will you thrive without them? Will you be your best? Probably not. You’re likely leaving some level of performance on the table. What is that costing you? That’s for you to find out. Whether that means scheduling time in the sun, eating mad greens, taking Epsom salts baths, or purchasing some supplements from a reputable source, the key is to treat yourself like a pro. Because you are a pro … you are professional at being you. You get paid for it, right? So be the best fucking you that you can be.

THREE POINTERS

There are two primary reasons to supplement: to remediate potential deficiencies, and to gain access to unusual or hard-to-find nutrients. You don’t need to think of supplements as something that comes in a capsule, either. Getting the right amount of sun, sleep, and food is itself a kind of supplementation, and the first line of defense.

The key things to consider supplementing are greens, probiotics, B vitamins, krill oil, vitamin D, and additional minerals.

While dietary supplements are generally safe, and more regulated than you might have heard, they are not all created equal. Look for companies that engage in clinical research on their products and use natural forms of ingredients when possible.

5 (#ulink_741c6527-cf5c-5f01-bb92-a35cdc3f2cc8)

DRIVE TIME, ALIVE TIME (#ulink_741c6527-cf5c-5f01-bb92-a35cdc3f2cc8)

If time be of all things the most precious, wasting time must be the greatest prodigality.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

Your commute does not need to be the most dreaded and frustrating part of your day. On the contrary, it can contain some of the most enjoyable and productive minutes of your morning and your evening. But only if you stop looking at your commute as a prison sentence—and see it instead as an opportunity. It’s a choice to turn the dead time where you can’t do anything to alive time where you are learning, growing, or practicing mindfulness. It’s a simple distinction: alive versus dead. Choose to be alive.

Getting Owned

One of my favorite comedies of all time is Office Space, directed by Mike Judge, the genius behind Beavis and Butt-Head, Idiocracy, and Silicon Valley. It’s about a software engineer named Peter Gibbons who has basically had it with his boring life, his unfulfilling relationship, and his dead-end job. Early in the movie, he goes to a hypnotherapist with his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend to get better. He tells the therapist that the reason he’s there is that every day is the worst day of his life. His nemesis is a clueless middle manager who passive-aggressively hounds him about making sure he uses the proper cover sheet on his TPS reports. Later on, talking to his neighbor about what he’d do with a million dollars, he says he’d sit on his ass, relax, and do nothing. Peter’s neighbor, like a redneck Confucius, reminds him that you don’t need a million dollars to relax and do nothing. “Take a look at my cousin,” he says. “He’s broke, don’t do shit.”

Know where Office Space starts? In the car. On the way to work. In the span of ninety seconds, we see Peter go through anger, frustration, panic, desperation, exasperation, and defeat as he tries to navigate gridlocked traffic on the way to a job he hates. Mike Judge made this the very first scene in the film because he knew millions of people would immediately identify with Peter’s plight and every single emotion he was experiencing. Office Space came out in 1999, and not a lot has changed about our daily commute since. Actually, that’s not true. One thing has changed: our commute has gotten worse.

Since 1980, when the US Census began tracking them, commutes have gotten 20 percent longer. And it’s not just one part of the country—it’s all of it. The average New Yorker spends nearly 70 minutes commuting to and from work each day. In Washington, DC, the average lobbyist, cabinet secretary, and government worker spent 32.8 minutes getting to work. On the West Coast, it takes the average Oakland resident 29.9 minutes to get to her desk, and the average worker in the Inland Empire 29.8 minutes. Three percent of the US population commutes more than 90 minutes each way.

And that’s just America: the land of long drives, suburbs, and five-lane highways. In Western Europe, where they supposedly have superior public transportation and are more “enlightened” about the environment, the average commute is actually longer than America’s most congested cities. Better grab another éclair for the road!