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

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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DEEP BREATH, DEEP FREEZE (#ulink_8293d561-83a3-5691-9f7d-48c14f287e82)

If you tiptoe into cold water, you’re missing out on the rush of plunging in headfirst.

SIMONE ELKELES

Breath and the cold are the best friends you never knew you had. In fact, you’ve probably been ignoring one and hiding from the other for as long as you can remember. Well, it’s time to emerge from your cozy hiding spot in the hot morning shower and embrace your new allies in the fight against stress and its many cohorts. Once you’re done washing and indulging, take a deep breath, then thirty more, and crank that shower knob to as cold as it can get, because each morning needs to involve the rush that comes with exposing yourself to nature’s extremes for a few minutes and the willpower you cultivate in the process.

Getting Owned

Wim Hof owns two dozen extreme sports world records. He has run a marathon above the Arctic Circle with no shirt on. He has hiked past the death zone on Mount Everest, also with no shirt on … in a blizzard. You might think he just hates shirts, but there is a method to his madness. At age fifty-seven, Wim hasn’t been sick in a decade, his joints don’t ache, and he still enjoys a Heineken (or two) with dinner. His nickname is the “Iceman” but he wasn’t born a superhero, he made himself into one. He isn’t a daredevil, either. He’s just dared to tap the potential we all have inside, by exposing his body to the resistance of extreme natural stressors, so that it—and he—may grow stronger as a result.

Wim’s uniqueness is undeniable, but there is nothing unreplicable in this man. He is not a physical anomaly, nor part penguin. He could be you or me, or anyone. Or rather, we could be him, if we made some of the same choices he has made. Instead, most of us have shied away from exposure to the acute stress of difficult conditions. We choose cozy over cold, automatic over intentional, and with nothing to harden us, we get soft.

Think about it. Our cars have climate control. We have jackets and scarves, and fans, and air conditioning. We can spend the whole day in our office—lunch delivered—without ever going out in the blistering Texas heat or the biting Chicago wind. If we’re lucky, our homes have heated floors so when we go to the bathroom in the night our little feetsies don’t get cold. Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable. Everything panders to it, and we buy into it because we’ve got all these old scripts running through our heads from our mothers and doctors and crazy old neighbors: If you go out in this cold without a jacket, you might catch your death. Put some shoes on, you’ll catch a cold.

Though it was always scientifically dubious, there was a time when this idea wasn’t so crazy. It used to be the harshness of nature that was the greatest threat to human survival, not heart disease or driving. In that sense, one way to look at the frantic warnings of our elders is as the modern version of the prehistoric fight-or-flight stress response. For most of primate history (including our brief history as human primates) we had things trying to fight us, hunt us, and kill us—whether animal, environmental, or fellow man. Our bodily response to that stress is brilliant. We temporarily shut down all systems inessential to the necessary response. We scuttle immune response, reproduction, growth, and digestion processes in favor of musculoskeletal efficiency and cognitive performance. In other words, when threatened we push all our energetic resources to help us move well and think fast. That process—largely modulated by “stress hormones” like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—has saved countless human asses and is probably why your grandma can’t totally explain why, when you were a kid, she scrambled to wrap you in a jacket made out of a sleeping bag when it dropped below 60 degrees and then hustled you inside once you were done with whatever brought you outside in the first place.

The real problem is when the body can’t distinguish between physical threats and psychosocial threats—threats to our job security, or bank account, or social status. These threats often have no concrete conclusion, and so the stress hormones that were built for brief bursts to ward off acute stress go buck wild in your brain box, and chronic stress develops. Leading neuroscientist and stress specialist Robert Sapolsky summed it up for the Stanford News: “If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you’re dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for some of the leading causes of death in Westernized life.”

That is the great irony of the modern, westernized world. Times have changed. We’ve advanced. Things have gotten better. So why is it that now that everything is so comfortable, we are sick all the time? America spends more on health care than any other nation, and yet we keep getting sicker. And that isn’t just among the older, high-risk population. Young Americans are getting sicker too. A 2013 report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council found that “for many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries.” Survival rates of American women under fifty, for example, are plummeting in comparison to their first-world peers. How is this possible? We are the inventors of Nike, the Fitbit, and the kale smoothie, dammit! We should be terminators. We have every app and gadget in the world, all trying to make it easy for us. Yet everything seems so damn fraught and complicated.

And that highlights the problem, right there. You see, collectively and individually, we are in a dysfunctional relationship with stress. We have too much of the bad, chronic kind, and not enough of the good, acute kind. What makes things worse, we don’t force ourselves to confront acute stress, because chronic stress has eaten away at our willpower, and as a result we don’t know how to strengthen the muscles of our resolve. We become powerless to cultivate the willpower we require to make the best choices for our lives. The bad stress beats us down, exhausts our energy, and in a very real sense, starts to kill us. My friend the Olympic gold medal skier Bode Miller used to describe this state as “overwhelmed and underqualified.” (He also taught me a lot about the solution—a skill I call mental override—but more on that later.) It is fertile ground for the unvirtuous cycle of stress and illness.

In fact, in a survey reported by the American Psychological Association, there was a strong correlation between high levels of stress and poor health scores. Chronic stress, which brings with it chronic inflammation, suppresses the immune system, increases occurrence of pain, and is a major correlative to depression. That’s a lot. It’s no wonder that upward of 75 percent of all doctor visits have a stress-related component. What is a wonder, however, is that less than 3 percent of doctor visits include counseling about stress. Maybe it has something to do with the 76 percent of physicians surveyed who lacked confidence in their ability to counsel patients about stress, or the 57 percent who “rarely” or “never” practice stress reduction techniques themselves. Institutionally, individually, collectively, and sometimes even me personally—we are getting owned by stress.

To fix the problems, what we need are simple strategies for reducing the bad, chronic stress and diving feetfirst into the good, acute stress. Fortunately, we can find both in a two-part regimen from that crazy Dutchman who went topless to the top of the world. Wim Hof’s conscious breathing techniques and cold exposure practices are going to deliver for us the reduction in bad, chronic stress we need for greater health, and the increase in good, acute stress we need for more consistent growth in both our body and our character. The best part: we can do them at the same time, just like it happens in nature, and develop our willpower in the process.

Owning It

Wim Hof’s many physical feats are astonishing even to consider, but what is truly impressive is what he has been able to teach others to do. Wim has trained groups of ordinary men and women as old as sixty-five to climb with him up Kilimanjaro. And yes, some of them went without a shirt on. He has proven in a laboratory-controlled study that he can teach people to alter the immune system’s inflammatory response to pathogens—rewriting both textbooks and expectations in the process. His work on breath and cold has also turned him into a performance coach of sorts for some of the greatest athletes and performers in the world, including the biggest of all coaches (in more ways than one), Tony Robbins.

Arguably the most successful motivational speaker in history, Tony Robbins is nothing short of a human dynamo. He’s a bundle of indefatigable energy capable of nearly inhuman feats. He’s six feet seven inches tall but spry and nimble. He can walk across hot coals and keep a crowd of thousands captivated during his legendary weeklong motivation marathons. All of this he embodies at virtually the same age as Wim Hof himself (they’re born ten months apart), after decades of emotionally demanding work and a calendar perpetually filled with grueling international travel.

If you ask Tony, a big part of his capability springs from the fundamentals of the routine I am going to lay out for you in this chapter. As he says, “It’s not exactly a gentle way to wake up, but that’s beside the point.” In fact, it is the point, because this two-part ritual—deliberate, conscious breathing exercises and cold-water exposure—goes a long way toward explaining Tony’s bottomless resolve, vitality, and energy. It also explains why he’s been one of the most successful people in history: he practices overcoming resistance every single day.

The Breath

There are hundreds of different breathing traditions from all over the world. Some are shrouded in arcane symbolism. Others come with complicated instructions, like the world’s worst IKEA dresser: ring finger to the left nostril; spiral helix breath in lotus posture; “turn your stomach into the shape of a vase.” Huh? Wim Hof cuts through that bullshit. His instructions are simple. He just wants you to get the breath in. It doesn’t matter which hole it comes through, because it’s what the breath does for you that matters to him. Here is his method in two steps.

STEP 1: THIRTY TO FIFTY POWER BREATHS

Inhale through the nose or mouth into the belly with deep, powerful breaths. Exhale without additional effort, just let the chest fall. Keep a steady pace and make sure to focus on drawing the breath deep into your belly. Do this until you feel a slight light-headedness and a tingling sensation in your extremities. That is the sign that a shift is happening and your blood is hyperoxygenated. For most people that effect starts to kick in around thirty breaths, but it can take up to fifty, depending on certain factors.

Note: It’s important not to overbreathe to the point of serious light-headedness, strong tingles, or involuntary closing of the hands. That will take you beyond the currently desired effect and into the realm of a practice called holotropic or shamanic breathing, which is a topic for a different book.

STEP 2: THE HOLD (RETENTION AFTER EXHALATION)

After the thirty to fifty breaths, or once you start to feel the tingling, draw the breath in one more time and fill the lungs to maximum capacity. Then calmly let the air out and hold for as long as you can at the bottom of the breath. You don’t need to set a world record, just hold your breath until you feel that gasp reflex and you really want to breathe again.

That is one full breath cycle of what has become known as the Wim Hof method. While it is unique to Wim, it has a couple of ancient forebears from the Eastern world: specifically, Tummo breathing (sometimes called Inner Fire meditation) and the yogic tradition of pranayama, which roughly translates to “the deliberate control of breath.” The part that is particularly unique to Wim is the holding of the breath with empty lungs. Temporarily depriving yourself of breath releases some of the same hormones that coffee produces, namely adrenaline and norepinephrine. This is what makes Wim’s method not just relaxing, like much of the focus of conscious breathing, but energizing. It is why it is such a great way to start the day, and why you shouldn’t melt into a puddle of terror when you realize that I’m asking you to hold off on your morning coffee for a few hours. You won’t need it. This regimen is its own kind of cold brew.