– Aubrey Marcus
1. water, light, movement
How many choices in your daily life are centrally tall subs? ? Soda or sparkling water? Netflix were night out? Should I go to the gym or not? Every day, nearly all of these choices are a 50-50 call. You could just as easily wind in one place as the other. If you changed one thing you do within the first 20 minutes of waking up (I am going to give you three), however, where you just have a little bit more energy from a high fat, low sugar breakfast, maybe you 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. Are You have sex. Then you sleep better. Then you wake up more vibrating with more energy. And you have set in motion a positive cascade of choices. The tipping point was just 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.
Hydrate Immediately… when you’re dehydrated and have nothing in your stomach, the caffeine enters into your blood stream incredibly fast, releasing a flood of stress hormones from the adrenal glands that your body reads as a fight or flight trigger… it’s a good rule of thumb to keep aggressive caffeine and feline doses to a minimum first thing in the morning.
78% of Americans are chronically dehydrated
the components of my morning mineral cocktail or water, sea salt, lemon… you can make the whole thing the night before, you can make a concentrate and have the water in the morning, or you can do the whole thing for scratch everyday
he got into the life every time he woke up– From sleep or from a nap
there is real science behind adding a few minutes a playful activity in the morning. Even life exercise their circulation and improves cognitive performance. It releases endorphins and, most important of all, hopes and train the ethical bastard, our circadian rhythm. In addition to sufficient blue light exposure, regular activity– however brief – since strong cues the body that it is time to wake up and get going. That helps at the internal biological clock.
Get lit. Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, flash yourself with 5 to 10 minutes of Blue light exposure
2. Deep breath, deep-freeze
Tony’s bottomless results, vitality, and energy. It also explains why December of the most successful people in history: he practices overcoming resistance everything will day.
You are not rewarded for the comfortable choice
3. More Fat, Less Sugar, Or Don’t Eat
Nonetheless these findings have been confirmed by the recent resurgence of the ketogenic diet. A meta-analysis of over 1,200 subjects in multiple clinical trials has shown that the high-fat, very low-carb ketogenic diet helps you lose more weight than a low-fat diet. To put it another way: if you don’t eat fat, you’re probably fat. This is a hard reality to accept for a lot of people. Because at a surface level it makes sense that something called fat in food would create fat in the body. Fat = fat, right? Wrong. You’ll want a lot more fat in your diet than you think…
Whole egg omelets are back on the menu, baby!
What fats should I eat then? Not all fats are created equal. There are bad fats. Fried oils, refined fata, and trans fat–like you find in potato chips or margarine–drive inflammation and make you feel sluggish and should be limited or avoided. The good fats–saturated fats, cholesterols, triglycerides, and omegas of all sorts–are the ones found in unprocessed meats, dairy, fish, butter, egg, yolks, olives, avocados, coconuts, and raw nuts, and should be sought out for breakfast.
I like to eat half an avocado with lime, sea salt, and cayenne
There is a time and a place for sugar – it’s just never going to be at breakfast. While the classic breakfast options are perhaps the worst of any meal, the advantage is that it is probably the easiest meal to skip while complying with a principle called intermittent fating (IF). The basic structure of intermittent fasting is that you do all your eating in an 8-hour period (for most people, noon to 8:00pm) and effectively fast the other sixteen hours of the day, some of which you’re sleeping through. The idea is that when the body doesn’t have the food, it starts to metabolize excess tissue (fat and protein) at burn as fuel, which is a good thing.
Contrary to the shitty advice that became popular over the last decade, you don’t want to be eating small snacks throughout the days. That is only good for athletes training at extremely high intensity. For us mere mortals, you want turnover in your fuel supply, just like you want your body to burn off that belly fat before bikini season. Interestingly, to get this effect you don’t need to fast for long periods. Even better, by simply compressing your feeding window to 8 hours per day, you can get the benefits of fasting and still have lunch with your friends and dinner with your family. Every day.
When it comes to health and fitness, the one thing people want most is to lose some fat and keep their muscle mass. Intermittent fasting is one for the few protocols that seems to do both sides of the metabolic (energy burning) equation. It increases your metabolic rate, which helps you burn even more fuel. Then on the other side, by compressing the available window for eating, it typically restricts the amount of fuel you are putting in your body. Studies have seen IT produce weight loss of 3-8% (a huge amount) and waist circumference reduction of 4-7% over periods that range from 3 to 24 weeks. That means a 200-pound man might drop to 184 pounds, just with IT! And for those worried about losing muscle or performance, other studies have found less muscle loss from fasting than from long-term calorie restriction. And as a bonus, growth hormone levels can increase dramatically during fasting, which helps the body repair, recover, and rebuild muscle, aiding in peak performance.
The biggest mind-set shift that we need to make is away from the idea of “breakfast foods” and more toward the philosophy of breakfast as a foundation for a set of nutritional habits.
3 Essential Supplements
Eating pumpkin seeds before you have sex us a supplement
Calm – a popular magnesium supplement
B12
5. Drive Time Alive Time
Your commute does not need to be the most dreaded and frustrating part of your day. One 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 vs. dead. Choose to be alive.
OWNING IT
The author Robert Greene has a useful, simple way of thinking about all the time: it’s either dead or alive. We’ve all experienced dead time. Dead time is basically everything I just got finished describing. It’s every second of Peter Gibson’s life until he goes to the hypnotherapist. It’s when we’re stuck somewhere we don’t want to be, and we give ourselves over to it. We’re stuck in line, stuck in a job we don’t like, stuck in jail, stuck behind someone driving too slow, and we either give up or give in to the emotions that these situations create within us. If you’re like me, you can feel yourself start to burn with impatience. If you’re like Peter, you twitch, you fidget, you flail. You just want it to be over! Why can’t they just move faster? Gah!
Then there’s the opposite: alive time. This is a feeling or purpose and progress. You’re doing exactly what you want to do at the moment. You are firing on all possible cylinders, and you feel like any task before you could be accomplished with ease and energy left to spare. You are on fire–and you know it.
What Greene says, and what I agree with, is that any time can be made into alive time, because alive time is a choice, just as dead time is a choice. It might sound a little abstract, but think about it: you’ve already made a series of choices since you woke up this morning–you’ve gotten up, gotten moving, braced yourself, eaten right, taken supplements, and now you’re on your way to work. You chose how to use those other minutes. You chose what to think about, what to put in your body, how to feel, you owned that time. Why can’t we do this at any time. Why can’t we do this with our commute, even if having to get to work or to school isn’t a choice? The truth is: we can. And it’s the secret to turning your commute into something you relish rather than something you dread, something to look forward to rather than check out from and waste.
IN the days before personal computers, phone, and Wi-Fi, there was literally nothing to do on a plane. There weren’t really even consumer headphones or devices to use them with in the 1960’s. This was the era of libraries, and she was often traveling around foreign countries, packing only her tennis bag, so she didn’t’ have books either. She couldn’t train, she couldn’t work on anything, she was free to just….be…present. It was heaven for her. That is what your car ride can be.
6. The Power Plants
The main plant nootropic we are going to focus on is something called Huperzia serrata or club moss, H. serrata grows wild in Asia and has likely been used in local medicine for thousands of years. It has a very specific and well-defined mechanism of action, has an excellent safety profile, is not a classic stimulant, and targets one neurotransmitter in particular: acetylocholine.
7. Doin Work
We are built for work. It is never going to go away, not would most of us ever want it to. It is part of the balance of life, and however you define it, you will always have work to do. TO derive as much as meaning, pleasure, and value out of this inescapable part of life as possible, you need to know your mission–whether it’s related to the work itself or not. Then you need to own your workspace, and work as effectively as possible. Because what makes work feel less like labor is when you know why you are doing it, and how to do it well.
Everyone needs a mission, Imagine the totality of your being, your work product, your energy, your will, expressed as a force. You could say that every force has a fundamental desire, which is to be applied to maximum effort. A bowling ball’s “desire” is to knock down all of the pins. The sun “desires” to burn bright and hot, radiating energy to distant planets where it draws seeds from the soil and puts warmth on the skin. As humans we desire to apply our force–our work–to the maximum effect possible. Our mission is what we want that force to accomplish. While the meaning of life might be complicated, your mission in life should not be complicated. What are you, in this lifetime, on this planet. In this body, here to do? What do you want more than anything else?
I’m a firm believer that there are two kinds of people in this world: those who need to find purpose and meaning in what they do for a living, and those who find purpose and meaning elsewhere and use work as a means to those ends.
Interestingly enough, if the smell of fish is the biggest disruptor of workplace productivity, research indicates that it is lemon (the same thing you use to disguise fishy taste) that might increase productivity the most. In Japan, according to the author of a book titled The Healthy Workplace, a large fragrance and flavor company investigated how smells affects the accuracy of typists. Their research found that “54% made fewer errors when they could smell lemon, 33% fewer with jasmine, and 20% fewer with lavender.” Lemon-jasmine-lavender tea for the win!
So when it comes to productivity at work first things first: invest in an expensive pair of noise-canceling headphones or a white noise machine. You want to drown out what’s going on out there, so you can focus on what’s going on in front of you.
8. Eat a Weird Lunch
Then I would literally feel sick to my stomach and drag ass the rest of the afternoon Why? Well let me tell you what that sandwich really was. It was meat and bacon that had been shot full of hormones and antibiotics and raised on Monsanto corn. It was yellow “cheese” that was somewhere between milk and Nickelodeon “gak” engineered not for flavor but for its ability to “melt” over the “all-beef” patty like a high gloss latex paint. It was sugary BBQ sauce for tang, and breaded onion fried in canola oil for crunch, all of it sandwiched between two fluffy slices of refined blood-sugar-spiking carbohydrates.
The biggest surprise to many of Mike Dolce’s clients, in fact, is just how much food he tells them to eat. Convinced by years of diet fad brainwashing of the calorie-in, calorie-out hypothesis, his overweight clients are shocked that when they eat more food than they ever have, they start losing weight. These anecdotes are plausible because when it comes to food and owning your health it ain’t about the calories, it about the nutrients. The body needs good macronutrients to trigger the hormonal signals that help you start losing weight. A 100-calorie pack or crackers is not going to be as good as a small handful of almonds, or a couple piece of grass-fed jerky, or any of the weird foods we’re going to talk about in this chapter.
Sugar-sweetened beverages contributed to a staggering 60% increase in childhood obesity.
Look at the higher concentration of healthy fats like CLA in grass-fed beef vs conventional beef. Or just look at the food, period. Often you can actually see the difference in nutritional quality. Wild-caught salmon, with higher natural levels of the colorful antioxidant astaxanthin, have a much deeper pink flesh compared to farm raised salmon, which would be unrecognizable without the red dye added for coloring. Pasture-raised chickens produce eggs with rich orange yolks, whereas factory farmed chickens lay eggs with almost sickly yellow yolks. Even corn and berries, when grown organically, can have to up 50% more antioxidants. And veggies, well, they are only as good as the soil and water that made them grow.
Besides taking a supplement to fix our screwed up guts, the next best thing we can do is dramatically increase the type and variety of foods we eat, because with that diversity comes a more robust and more diverse group of microbiota.
So here’s the move: anytime you can’t believe it’s not butter… or see something with trans fats, throw that shit in the trash. Even if it says 0 trans fats on the packaging, double check that the ingredients don’t include anything listed as partially hydrogenated ______ oil” because that shit is trans fats. Companies get to claim zero because the FDA allows them to round down for anything that contains less than 0.5 grams per serving.
Avocado oil has the highest smoke point of all cooking oils. With a nice mild flavor, it’s great for any kind of sauté or stir fry. And with a smoke point upward of 500 degrees F, you’ll be hard pressed to scorch it.
This is why lunch is important not only for the body but also for the mind. But it doesn’t have to be a wrestling match with yourself. Make eating weird food a game, take some of the pressure off. The world is full of awesome food, so stop thinking about what you can’t have and get excited about what you can. Expand that list by seeking out restaurants and foods you never tried before and giving them a go. I’m talking about a new concept or a new type of nut, fruit, vegetable. Something like a rutabaga, or macambo, or pili nuts.
9. The Binaural Power Nap
Naps have been shown to consistently outperform high doses of caffeine for cognitive tasks and even motor performance. They’ve been shown to improve logical reasoning, reaction time, and immune function.
Naps have been indicated to decrease levels of frustration and impulsiveness.
That’s where brain-wave entrainment comes in. Entrainment can help round the corners so you can reach your intent faster and more effectively. In plain English, targeting theta and delta waves can help you take your naps to the next level. One of my favorite ways to do this is with binaural beat technology. Binaural beats are an auditory biohack designed to facilitate brain-wave entrainment. While the effect of any form of music on a human individual is highly personal and therefore resistant to generalization, a variety of research shows potential improvements for everything from cognitive performance to enhanced relaxation. Data aside, of all the biohacks in the world, if II had to personally chose to keep only one, it would be my binaural beats.
Wearing headphones, you listen to an audio track that pumps one frequency or tone in one ear and a different frequency or tone in the other ear. The difference in the frequency between the left and the right ear determines which of the 5 brain-wave states you entrain. You can find binaural beat tracks for sale online or on YouTube, but to get you started I have hosted two of mine for free at aubreymarcus.come/beats
10. Training
Swinging a club can gently pull your joints into greater ranges of motion while forcing your body to stabilize it at the same time – the optimal way to improve flexibility that you can access during activity.
11. Reset and reconnect
The dopamine hits from social media and our email inbox makes living your whole damn life online or at work seem almost worth it. But it’s not and you can’t and you shouldn’t try. You’ll get so much more out of a meal with a small group of friends than with a big group of clients who are footing the bill. You will be filled with more light and love hearing about your family’s day than you ever will be adding another thousand Twitter or Instagram followers.
Research shows that when music is playing at home, people become physically closer. People are literally 12% closer when music is playing than when it’s not. When the music’s going, people are a third more likely to cook together and almost 90% more likely to invite people over. They are more likely to laugh together, and here’s the kicker: they are more likely to say the words “I love you”. …. Couples reported a stunning increase in intimacy when listening to music, and a nearly 40% increase in what they hilariously called “awake time” in bed.
Harvard psychology Ellen Langer writes in her book Counterclockwise about an experiment where she took 8 men in their seventies and out them in an environment where everything around them-from the music to the television, the car in the driveway, the newspapers and magazines in the house-mimicked what life was like two decades earlier. A week later the men, who arrived frail on walkers and canes, were playing and impromptu game of touch football on the lawn. It wasn’t just their bodies that felt younger-the men in the test group scored 63% higher on an intelligence test. It was a powerful testament to the power of the mind and the placebo effect. Youth might really be a state of mind after all.
12. Eat Dinner like a King
Raw milk cheese, like raw juice, has not been pasteurized, so any of the more delicate nutrients, probiotics, and enzymes that aid with digestion stay intact. This is likely why a survey of 2,503 raw milk drinkers in Michigan revealed that 81% of those diagnosed with lactose intolerance reported reduced symptoms of indigestion after having switched from store-bought pasteurized and homogenized milk. IN addition, three studies totaling 20,000 subjects showed that the consumption of raw milk has a significant benefit in the reduction of allergies and asthma.
The big reason to eat popcorn and dispense with the fiction that it’s a secret indulgence to be enjoyed in the dark of the movie theater is the whopping 15 grams of insoluble fiber that come with it, which is extremely high. It’s why my fiancée dubbed popcorn “PooCorn”. Insoluble fiber like that found in popcorn is great for those legendary belly-flattening poops that provide a unique window into the importance of digestion, not just for health but to start the morrow off right.
No surprise that overeating is a big problem with fast eaters. Study after study shows that non-chewers and fast eaters are in a constant struggle with weight. One found that fast eaters are up to 115% more likely to be obese. Another survey of 4,000 people showed that those who ate “very fast” tended to be heavier and had gained the most body weight since age 20. Put simply, overweight people chew less than normal-weight people, because when you chew more, you tend to eat less-15% less, in one study that used delicious pizza for its experiment.
One of the most common digestive mistakes people make is consuming cold beverages while they eat. Any beverage dilutes the HCL in your stomach, making the overall acid concentration acting on your food weaker, while the cold slows down your digestion like a snake in a snowstorm. Leave the cold drinks for well before and well after your meals.
In actuality, heartburn is often the opposite there is not enough acid in your system to effectively break down the food, so it stays around longer, burning the inner lining.
Ginger has the ability to speed up the time it takes your stomach to pass food to your digestive tract by up to 50%. Add ginger to your meal, and you can say so long to that full feeling in your gut and hello to that full feeling in your pants sooner. Ginger tea works, pickled ginger is great, or just a half thumb of peeled ginger boiled into a tea, or even raw, will do the trick.
Here are some foods with a high dietary nitrate level that are easily converted into the biological signal of nitric oxide: beets pumpkin seeds, Swiss chard, arugula, watermelon, red wine, dark chocolate. Eat as many of those as possible with dinner.
How to Think about sugar:
- Slow it down. As we have discussed ad nausea to this point, the speed at which sugar is delivered into the body is the crucial factor when it comes to regulating blood sugar and fighting downstream effects like obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. For overall health and optimal mood and physical performance, you need to pair any sugar you consume with something that slows its absorption into the body-and the two things that do that are fat and fiber. That’s why having sugar after a high-fat, high-fiber meal is great.
- Don’t add gas to the fire…When you had sugar to an already high-carbohydrate meal, you are adding fuel to the fire. Which of course is exactly what your brain tells you to do after a full meal of carbs, to stave off that dreaded blood sugar crash. Ge the desert! It’s like prolonging a hangover by continuing to drink. That’s how you become a drunk, and getting the desert after a high-carb meal is how you get fat.
Cheater Shooter: mix 1-ounce Apple Cider Vinegar and half a teaspoon of Ceylon cinnamon into 3 ounces of room-temperature water.
Hangover Cure: rehydrate with a supplement of molybdenum 300mg.
13. More, better sex
Hedonic tolerance
Polarity is sexy.
Kegel Camp – app for Kegel training regimen
14. Turn off, tune in
If a regular invasion of privacy is a possibility in your relationship or household, I recommend using a secure password-protected file system on your computer. The best way to do this is to create a separate email address on Gmail, and use the google drive feature for your journaling. Your email will not be in use and so the likelihood of it being hacked is almost zero.
A study by Australian researchers showed that ever hour of watching television after age 25 is associated with a 22-minute reduction in life expectancy.
15. Sleep
The sleep messiah himself, Shawn Stevenson, like English ivy, NASA’s top recommended air-filtering plant, and the perennial snake plant, which is nocturnal and release oxygen during the night rather than the day.
Emergency Sleep Cocktail: ¼ teaspoon cream of tartar, ½ teaspoon turmeric, ¼ teaspoon sea salt, dash of black pepper. Mix into 10-12 ounces of filtered water. Drink.
16. Bring it home.
Visualize: every single peak performer I work with visualizes their success. I’ve always thought that it was a silly question when people ask an entrepreneur, “Did you ever imagine that Onnit could be this big?” Of course he did. To create it, you have to see it first. It’s not just entrepreneurs. The speaker visualizes what she is going to say and the audience’s reaction to it. The fighter visualizes what is going to happen in the cage. Nearly every time they show a contestant doing a sparring round in preparation for a fight, at the end of the final training round their coach makes them walk around the octagon with their hands raised in triumph, visualizing their victory. This is not some old fighter’s superstition these guys are engaged in, like not talking to a pitcher in the middle of a no-hitter. Visualization is a legitimate powerful force.
Employ positive self-talk. I’ve always known that I’m hard on myself. But I didn’t realize just how brutal I was until one evening when I was driving home from work, replaying the day in my head. I had solved a pretty complicated series of problems at the office that day in a surprising and inspired way. Out of nowhere, I said to myself, “Good job. Aubrey. You did good today.” It hit me like a blast from a bomb. My whole body lit up, I was flooded with warmth, and my eyes welled up. I don’t know if I had ever told myself soemthign like that before. IN 34 years, I had never given myself permission to be proud of myself. I certainly told myself how much I had sucked, or failed, or what a POS I was a thousand times. But never pride, never “Good job, buddy”. I could acknowledge when I did something well, but I never told myself Good Job.
Coaching course: Go for Your Win
Psychologists agree that there are 4 keys to compelling positive action: 1) know what to do and how to do it, 2) believe it will work, 3) see the value, and 4) get support from your community/tribe/family.
The practice for radical forgiveness is a simple dialogue you have with yourself or a loved one, which requires you to say 4 things. We’re going to focus it on yourself for now, but keep this in your medicine bag when you need to resolve a conflict with anyone else.
- “I love you.” Love is the appropriate bond that can unify all aspects of yourself. To express this love sets the foundation for all the communication to follow.
- “I’m sorry”. This is to clear you of any guilt you may carry for the times you’ve done yourself wrong–from negative self-talk to forcing your body to cope with way too much cheap tequila.
- “Forgive Me”. The humble act of asking for forgiveness, when sincere, is not often opposed. Grant yourself the forgiveness you seek.
- “Thank you”. This is an expression of gratitude to your body and mind, not only for the forgiveness but for everything it has given you. It’s gotten you this far, after all, right?
Create Your Mantra
Let’s go, Champ! This expression blasted across the public consciousness when heavyweight fighter Shannon Briggs dropped it on the Joe Rogan Experience podcast. He talked about a dark time in his life, when he felt he was at a crossroads. He developed the expression to help push him through the challenges, to buoy him during down times, and as a kind of magic spell against he wizardry of resistance. It became his mantra–a potent form of positive self-talk, holstered and ready for the first sign of turbulence. The expression I learned to tell myself, the expression that became my mantra, is “go, hero, go.” Maybe my favorite mantra , however, comes from editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine, Jason Feifer. From the time he started working for a regional magazine, he would tell himself the same thing every day, “I’m not fucking around.” Monday: not fucking around. Tuesday: not fucking around. Wednesday: you get the idea. This is really what this book has been about. Whether it is work or play or fitness or fucking around–to own your day, you are not fucking around.
Now do it
The people of our world are hurting. Not just the poor and the impoverished, all people. People we know and love. We have lost control of the operating system, and we are getting owned by life. But it doesn’t have to be that way. There is a reason that in al great stories the strongest motivating force for the hero is a threat not to his own life but to the lives of the ones he loves.
The second reason is that by owning the day and taking control of your life, you can be the living proof to others of what is possible. You can lead by example. Why is that when someone first does a new trick on a skateboard or a motocross bike that was previously believed to “never be possible” then all of a sudden a year later three more people can do the same trick? It’s because when you do it, other people believe they can do it too.
They are all looking for some sign that somebody knows what the hell is going on out there and that something better is possible. You can be that sign, that someone, that something better. You can be the one they point to. You aren’t just owning the day for yourself, you are owning the day for everyone you know.