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

by Aubrey Marcus

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.

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.

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.

prepare to live one single day complet...

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.

But small things, when compounded over time, tend to have big consequences.

And you have set in motion a positive cascade of choices.

Nick Saban, possibly the greatest coach in the history of college football, tells his players to follow what he calls “the Process.”

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 tak...

The way to own your life is to own your day. Today. Because t...

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. ...

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.

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 little things are the big things—even for some of the most accomplished people on earth.

those smallest details can be the difference between success and failure.

Well begun is half done. —ARISTOTLE

hydrate immediately (not with coffee!), then seek light and get moving to reset your internal clock.

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.

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, we are owned and controlled by fatigue and the tools we use 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 cl...

CDC estimates that between 50 and 70 million Americans have a sleep disorder.

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.

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

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?’”

As a Stoic, Marcus suggested one remedy for getting over this hump: discipline.

The first step is proper hydration. Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water.

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.

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.

The components of my morning mineral cocktail are water, sea salt, and a splash of lemon.

12 ounces filtered water 3 grams sea salt 1/4 lemon, squeezed

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).

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.

findaspring.com to see if there is any clean, free spring water next to where you live.

Brita pitcher you fill and stick in the refrigerator, a Pur filter you attach straight to your kitchen faucet, or whatever high-quality filter is available near you.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.