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

by Aubrey Marcus

Dr. Rhonda Patrick, a top investigative researcher into the benefits of various hormetic stressors like the cold, put together a brilliant 22-page document highlighting the many research-based advantages of cold exposure, including benefits for brain health, pain managem...

A lot of this rests on the ability of the cold to modulate inflammation.

At its most basic, inflammation is just the body’s response to injury or threat (i.e., stressors), including tissue damage like you would get from exercise or an injury, environmental stress like heat or cold, and pathogens like bacteria or viruses.

the stressor is acute (short-lived, with ample time to recover), inflammation is a positive part of the response that makes you stronger.

When inflammation doesn’t go away, it is called chronic inflammation—and that is literally like living in Dante’s Inferno. Chronic inflammation starts to damage the body. It makes you tired and creates pain. Inflammatory cells can start attacking healthy cells, creating autoimmune diseases and overall wearing the body’s energy resources thin. This leads to many disease states and is generally the root of all sorts of maladies.

What turn off the inflammation when it is no longer needed, preventing it from becoming chronic, are stress hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline. It just so happens that the Wim Hof method is especially adept at releasing a shitload of those hormones. Cold shock has been shown to reliably release up to 300 percent more norepinephrine, and the deprivation of oxygen from breath holds reliably produces more adrenaline and norepinephrine.

With an acute stressor like the cold or a breath hold, hormones like norepinephrine and adrenaline spike enough to reduce inflammation. With inflammation low, the body can relax the chronic production of stress hormones, and you have the opportunity to break the cycle.

While the benefits of inflammation and stress are vital, the thing that really sets cold exposure apart from other forms of hormesis is the mental edge it provides.

Character and resolve are two traits that rarely get tested in modern society, and they tend to atrophy as a result. Resolve, especially, is at the heart of why we let chronic stress steal our life force and why we struggle from our first waking moments to take ownership of our days.

The Powhatan Indians—that’s

If you can conquer freezing water, even grow to love it, you can conquer anything.

Even though you are going to feel like a hero when you tackle any of those feats, your mind computer will still scramble to find excuses and justifications why you shouldn’t. But you are not your mind computer, fueled by fear. You are the operator of your mind computer. And you always have the choice to ignore the thought output and do it. It’s what Albert Einstein was getting at when he said, “You can’t solve a problem on the same level it was created.” You can’t always outsmart the thought-machine with more thoughts. Instead, thank the machine for its efforts, take manual control of what is usually on autopilot, and fucking do it.

Bode Miller is the most decorated downhill skier in American history. He’s won multiple world championships, and every color of Olympic medal. If I had to sum up the reason for Bode’s success, I would call it mental override.

Just like Wim Hof: practice makes the master.

So when it comes to detoxification, make sure you put back all those good minerals after you’re done sucking out all the bad ones. In terms of sheer effectiveness, build up to forty minutes, being mindful to stay hydrated and take as many rounds as you need to reach the forty-minute threshold. You don’t need to go full Bode straight out of the gate. This is a cumulative gain, so just do your best, and make sure to listen to your body.

Then, once you’ve completed the actual hygienic part of your shower, and while the water is still hot, begin a cycle of Wim Hof breathing (thirty breaths or until you feel a tingling sensation in your extremities, whichever comes first). At that moment, turn the water as cold as it can go and let it hit every part of your body. Your reaction, likely, will be to gasp for breath. Listen to your body’s reaction. Listen to the cold. It’s telling you what to do: Breathe more. Continue with the Wim Hof breaths until your body and your breathing have calmed to their pre-cold state. When you no longer need to breathe deeply to withstand the cold, hold your breath at the end of your next exhale (this is called the “bottom” of your breath) for as long as you can, until you feel the reflex to grab more breath.

A typical power shower takes about ten minutes all-in, and as part of that you should aim to be in the cold water for a minimum of three minutes.

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.

Cold immersion, or “cold shock,” is the next level up from that, for exactly the reason you’d expect: you are not just exposed, you are immersed, engulfed, covered virtually from head to toe, all at once.

Unlike the power shower, which likely needs longer exposure to produce benefit, submersion for even twenty seconds in 40-degree water can provide the norepinephrine release we are looking for. But we’re still going to shoot for two minutes, because it’s the amount of time often studied for cryotherapy, and also because it is unlikely you are going to get your bath to 40 degrees.

Generally four or five bags of ice are enough to drop the water temperature in your home tub to the desired level. Hard-core enthusiasts aiming for the 40-degree mark will want more.

A great way to enhance the process of cold shock is to include contrast.

Just like with the power shower, you can do the polar plunge every day that you feel healthy (you don’t want to do cold immersion when you’re sick or already under a simultaneous acute stress load).

Pro Tip: Cryotherapy

Typically costing around $40 per session, cryotherapy works by taking one of the literally coldest substances on earth, liquid nitrogen, and using it to cool the chamber you are standing in.

“If you don’t have ten minutes for yourself,” he has said, “you don’t have a life.”

To wait for the external world to change before you alleviate your stress is a fool’s errand. You know what is beyond that mountain? More fucking mountains. If you’re going to climb, then you better adapt. Chronic stress is less about the environment, and more about your response to it. So own it. Put yourself intentionally into the occasional fire, and take yourself intentionally out of the chronic stress oven. It’s a choice, your choice. Take that power and never give it away—especially to something as capricious as fate and fortune.

You will have to mentally override the fear of the cold. Override the urges that are driving you toward cozy warmth and shallow breath. This is as essential a skill as any. Just know that as soon as the cold hits your body and your fingers tingle, what you are experiencing is the exhilaration of victory—not just over the cold itself but over resistance, over stress. What better way to start the day!

Miyamoto Musashi said, “Today is victory over yourself of yesterday, tomorrow is victory over a lesser foe.”

you can conquer the acute natural stress of something like freezing water, something that makes you stronger—even grow to...

The cold also offers the opportunity to practice an essential life skill—what I call “mental override”—the ability to make yourself do something you don’t want to do.

Eat to live, don’t live to eat. —BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

At breakfast, don’t just think about breaking the fast. Think about breaking the habit of fast breakfast. This means fast-metabolizing foods like sugar and bread are out, fats and fiber are in. You want foods that are slow and simple for your first meal. And if you can’t find them—if all you have is sugar and refined carbohydrates—then skip breakfast altogether.

Those are the options made accessible to the average American: fast foods filled with sugar and refined carbohydrates.

Blood sugar is supposed to rise slowly after you eat a balanced meal full of fats, complex carbohydrates like fiber (the best kind of carbs), and protein, allowing time for the body to release just the right amount of a hormone called insulin to drop the blood sugar and help store the sugar as fuel.

Where did I think the nutrition was coming from—the bready part? It wasn’t even bread! I would have been better off just eating the cardboard box the Pop-Tarts came in. At least that has fiber.

It is this inherently imbalanced relationship that has made sugar probably the worst thing to happen to human health in the last two hundred years.

As consumption of our favorite sweet thang has increased over the decades, public health has deteriorated. Obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and even cancer have been linked to sugar and the associated blood sugar swings. The numbers speak for themselves. Thirty million Americans have diabetes. Cardiovascular disease is our leading cause of death. Childhood obesity is at epidemic levels, with one out of every five children clinically obese. Only 16 percent of women and 32 percent of men don’t ever worry about their weight. The great irony of all these statistics, of course, is that we have more gyms, diet coaches, juice bars, and “health food” restaurants than any place on the planet. By far. Yet despite constant worry and myriad options, we’re getting owned by our diet choices.

The fast, sugary foods making us fat and sick are perfectly engineered to trigger biological responses that are incredibly hard to resist. High-sugar foods release a massive hit of dopamine. Dopamine is a chemical reward for the brain, and as the pleasure monkeys we are, we are wired to seek it. Whether you want to call it an addiction or not, when you figure out how to releas...

the first step in your nutrition plan is simple: no sugary stuff for breakfast. Period. Instead, we need to add fats back into our diet in sugar’s place. Yep, you heard me, fats. Fats fats fats fats. Get used to the word, because you are going to hear it a lot. Make this simple substitution—fat for sugar—and you will have the sustained, balanced energy to power you all the way up to lunch. And if you can’t find a way to make this happen, then skip breakfast entirely. Breakfast is not mandatory, and in fact you might just be better off without it altogether.