Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex

by Aubrey Marcus

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.

To own your life, you gotta own the day.

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.

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.

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.

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.

hydration and circadian balance are the essential ingredients to the consistent perfect wake-up.

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

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

Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable.

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.

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.

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.

The Power Shower Turn the shower to hot and wash. Do Wim Hof breathing (thirty to fifty breaths, or until you feel tingling and/or mild light-headedness). Turn the shower as cold as it can get. Continue Wim Hof breaths until breathing calms. Hold at the bottom of breath until the gasp reflex kicks in. Optional: Repeat breathing cycle up to twice more, at your discretion, with cold water running continuously or with periods of warm water between cycles to create contrast. Total cold water exposure = ~3 minutes

Super Coconut Probiotic Yogurt,

the gut is our “second brain,” and it is where 80 percent of our immune system lives, controlling neurotransmitter and hormone balance and acting as the gatekeeper to inflammation response.

Don’t have any illusions: you can’t just take a pill and own the day if you eat like a sloth and move like one too. The first move to give you every advantage should always be improvements to diet and lifestyle.

reach for a multinutrient “green food” mix, which will cover a lot of your nutrient bases.

magnesium supplementation has been shown in clinical research to assist with facilitating healthy bone mass, the performance of athletes, supporting men and women during exercise, even improving blood sugar regulation through diminishing insulin resistance.

a yeast-based strain called Saccharomyces boulardii.

Small things have big consequences. Over time, those consequences compound. We are the accumulated momentum of all our choices.

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.

There are two primary reasons to supplement: to remediate potential deficiencies, and to gain access to unusual or hard-to-find nutrients.

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.

The author Robert Greene has a useful, simple way of thinking about all time: it’s either alive or dead.

Bringing this time to life is a two-step process. It requires preparing and opening your mind, then flexing and filling it. Or, as I like to call it: mindfulness and mindfillness.

Mindfulness is simply being aware and conscious in the present moment.

mindfillness is what animates that time and makes it productive. It fills the mind that you’ve just focused and opened.

As soon as you get in your car take six deep breaths. Expand your lungs as much as possible, and focus your breath into your belly—that

practice the wide peripheral gaze when you are stopped.

Aubrey Marcus Podcast.

The Joe Rogan Experience, Tim Ferriss is essential listening, and Lewis Howes’s School of Greatness

We all have the same amount of the only currency that matters: time. To spend your minutes well—that is the only goal of a life well lived.

a nootropic is any supplement, food, or drug that improves some aspect of mental performance.

Huperzia serrata is a tool in your arsenal, a screwdriver in your set, and while you don’t need to take it every day, on the days you need to be at your best, on days you want to own, you should have it available.

Time is the wrong metric to use when we evaluate work. Because it’s not just about how much time you work, it’s about how effectively you use that time.

there is no amount of work you will do that will finally make the work go away, and definitely no amount of money you can make that will solve all your problems. And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you can look for happiness in places where it might actually be found.

What sets guys like Gary Vee apart from the rest of us, though, is that he enjoys his work. He doesn’t just embrace the grind, he relishes it. He’s working toward something, and that something matters to him.

happiness is a magnet for success. Happy people do better work and draw other happy people to them.

I needed a strategy. I needed a mission. A very clear “Why?” that was just my own, that would function as a lodestar to help me chart a course

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.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Emerson is right, though I think the piece of that equation he failed to mention is that if you do all those things—be useful, honorable, compassionate—happiness tends to be the result.

what do you want to do? What does your best self want more than anything else, want so bad that your inability to stop thinking about it will make it impossible for anyone to stop you from achieving it?

owning your space is not just about the things in your office, it’s also about how you engage with your space, and how people interact with you while you’re there.

research indicates that it is lemon (the same thing you use to disguise fishy taste) that might increase productivity the most.

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!

Companies like Altra and Kuru have sprung up who make some great training, casual, and running shoes with a wide toe box so you can move your feet a little more like nature intended.

check out toe spreaders like those made by Yoga Toes or Correct Toes.

If anyone is in an energetically challenging place, instead of indulging it, or telling them to fix it, be a good teammate and shoot for laughter.

You ever hear the cliché, “If you do what you love you’ll never work a day in your life”? It’s bullshit.