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

by Aubrey Marcus

There is real science behind adding a few minutes of playful activity in the morning. Even light exercise boosts circulation and improves cognitive performance. It releases endorphins and, most important of all, helps entrain that fickle bastard, our circadian rhythm. In addition to sufficient blue-light exposure, regular activity—however brief—sends strong cues to the body that it is time to wake up and get going. It helps set that internal biological clock.

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

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.

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.

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.

what we’re talking about here is not a morning workout. This is morning movement.

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.

Twenty-three burpees. Why? I like the number 23.

the whole thing should be over in about a minute.

The key is simply that your heart rate gets elevated and muscles start working.

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.

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.

Nothing shakes off the grogginess like bouncing like the one and only Tigger.

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.

Starting and finishing are the two hardest parts of any task.

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.

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...

Breath and the cold are the best friends you never knew you had.

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.

Wim Hof owns two dozen extreme sports world records.

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.

We choose cozy over cold, automatic over intentional, and with nothing to harden us, we get soft.

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.

It used to be the harshness of nature that was the greatest threat to human survival, not heart disease or driving.

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 F...

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 ...

American Psychological Association, there was a strong correlation between high levels of str...

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 p...

Institutionally, individually, collectively, and sometimes even me personally—we are...

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.

Wim has trained groups of ordinary men and women as old as sixty-five to climb with him up Kilimanjaro.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

it reduces the chronic stress that makes you chronically tired.

conscious breathing doesn’t only reduce stress; according to multiple studies, it enhances relaxation and decreases perception of pain.

Breath is the rudder of our life. We have the choice to either take over conscious control or let ourselves wander aimlessly. If you are going to own the day, you must own your breath.

The Wim Hof method of breathing—like pranayama and Lamaze—is about taking back control of your entire breathing apparatus and focusing intently on the breath.

But it is not until the method is paired with cold exposure that it becomes truly life altering—a mechanism for both healing and growth. That is because without the cold there is no external resistance to tell you when enough is enough. There is no force outside the physical capacity of your lungs to push against to guide your sense of progress. There is no acute stress. This is not a revolutionary concept. We have known for millennia that resistance is the shortest path to growth. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another,” says the Old Testament (Proverbs 27:17). Put more weight on the bar, you get stronger. Run harder, you get faster. It’s a form of good, acute stress known as hormesis.

hormesis is a biological phenomenon in which low-dose exposure to an environmental agent (called a “hormetic stressor”) produces a beneficial effect, while a higher-dose exposure produces a toxic effect. The layman’s explanation for this odd duality is often summarized by the famous Friedrich Nietzsche quote: “What does not kill me makes me stronger.”

Mark Sisson, bestselling author and a thought leader in ancestral health, writes, “Think of hormesis as your body ‘hedging its bet’ and going a little above and beyond just to be safe. You don’t just compensate for the stressor, you super-compensate. You get stronger/faster/healthier/more resistant to the challenge than you were before.”

Cold is one of those good, acute stressors that makes us hearty and resilient, like a sherpa or a Viking. Or a Viking sherpa!