Get outside for a 10-15 minute walk first thing in the morning to get sunlight in your eyes, even on cloudy days. This is vital for mental and physical health, stimulating neurons that signal it’s daytime, promoting alertness, and timing a healthy cortisol pulse.
Take a walk (forward ambulation) first thing in the morning to generate optic flow (visual images passing by). This powerfully quiets or reduces neural activity in the amygdala, thereby lowering anxiety and promoting an alert but calm state.
Drink water with about half a teaspoon of sea salt early in the day, before starting any work, to ensure proper hydration. Neurons require sodium, magnesium, and potassium for function, and we tend to be dehydrated at night.
Purposely delay caffeine intake to 90-120 minutes after waking. This prevents a late afternoon caffeine crash by allowing adenosine levels to naturally clear before caffeine blocks its receptors, ensuring a consistent energy arc throughout the day.
Ensure your sleeping environment’s temperature is correct, as your body temperature needs to drop by 1-3 degrees to fall and stay deeply asleep, and increase by 1-3 degrees to wake up refreshed.
Identify your temperature minimum (approximately two hours before your average wake-up time) and aim to start your best, most focused work 4-6 hours after this minimum. This leverages your body’s natural temperature rise to support cognitive focus.
Get outside in the afternoon or early evening (around 4 PM-ish) for 10-30 minutes without sunglasses to view the sun. This lowers the sensitivity of your retina in the late evening, buffering against the negative effects of bright light at night and supporting natural melatonin production.
Consider fasting until about 11 AM or 12 PM. Fasting increases levels of adrenaline (epinephrine) in the brain and body, which, in optimal ranges, enhances learning and focus.
Position your computer screen or tablet at least at eye level, and ideally slightly higher. Looking down tends to decrease alertness and increase sleepiness, while looking upward creates a state of heightened alertness.
Structure your work into 90-minute blocks, understanding that the brain cycles between alertness and less alertness every 90 minutes. Set a timer and aim for a strong bout of work within this period.
Turn your phone completely off (not just airplane mode) during dedicated work blocks. This prevents distractions and helps you achieve a state of deep focus or ’tunnel of quality work'.
Play low-level white noise during work sessions. White noise, which contains all frequencies of sound mixed randomly, can put the brain into a state optimal for learning and workflow.
Dedicate a morning 90-minute work block to your hardest or most important cognitive task. Positioning this early in the day and structuring other protocols around it ensures it happens with high efficiency.
After a bout of focused work, force yourself to do some form of physical exercise. This supports brain health, brain function, organ health, and bodily function in general.
Aim to keep hard workouts under an hour. Exercising for longer than an hour can be detrimental due to excessive cortisol elevation, which is not desirable throughout the day.
Incorporate both strength/hypertrophy and endurance training across the week, rather than necessarily in the same workout. This combination is immensely beneficial for producing brain-derived neurotrophic factor and regulating inflammatory cytokines.
Structure your resistance training so that approximately 80% of it does not go to failure, while the remaining 20% can be higher intensity training to failure. This optimizes muscle growth and strength without overstressing the body.
For endurance work, focus on pushing past the lactate threshold (experiencing the ‘burn’) for about 20% of your training. This supports brain health and function by generating lactate, which is a fuel source for the brain.
Consider taking AG1 daily, as it is described as a vitamin, mineral, and probiotic drink with bioavailable nutrients and enhanced probiotic strains that support digestive health, immune system health, bowel regularity, and reduced bloating.
Avoid ingesting large volumes of food at any meal. Large meals divert blood to the gut, leading to lethargy and less blood flow to the brain, which can impair thinking ability.
For lunch, emphasize slightly lower or low carbohydrate intake, focusing on protein (e.g., meat, chicken, salmon) and vegetables. This supports alertness by leveraging adrenaline and dopamine, as starches can cause serotonin release and sleepiness.
Ingest at least 1,000 milligrams per day of the EPA form of essential fatty acid. Sufficient omega-3s support healthy mood and can be as effective as prescription antidepressants in relieving depression.
Take a brief walk of 5-30 minutes after your midday meal. This accelerates metabolism, improves nutrient utilization, provides optic flow, and gives your brain more information about light and time of day.
Comprise your dinner largely of starchy carbohydrates and some protein. This increases serotonin in the brain, which is necessary for the transition to and maintenance of deep sleep, and helps replenish glycogen stores.
Avoid supplementing directly with serotonin or its precursors (like 5-HTP or tryptophan) in the evening or at night. This can disrupt sleep architecture, causing rapid sleep onset, deep sleep for a few hours, then difficulty falling back asleep.
Dissolve one packet of Element (an electrolyte drink with sodium, magnesium, and potassium, but no sugar) in 16-32 ounces of water upon waking and during physical exercise. This ensures adequate hydration and electrolyte intake, critical for optimal brain and body function.
Use hot baths, hot showers, or a sauna before bed. Counter-intuitively, getting out of a hot environment triggers cooling mechanisms in your body, accelerating the necessary drop in temperature for easier sleep onset.
Ensure your bedroom is very dark and cool. A cool room aids in falling and staying asleep by allowing the body to regulate its temperature more effectively, especially during sleep phases where movement is possible for cooling.
Consider supplementing with specific forms of magnesium (300-400mg magnesium biglycinate or threonate), 50mg apigenin, and theanine 30-60 minutes before sleep. These compounds can synergistically enhance the transition to sleep by promoting GABA release and reducing forebrain activity.
If you consistently wake up in the middle of the night (e.g., 2:30-3:00 AM) after pushing yourself to stay awake later than your natural sleepiness, try going to bed earlier. This aligns with your natural melatonin pulse and can prevent premature waking.
If you wake up in the middle of the night (e.g., to use the restroom), keep the lights dim and turn them off as soon as possible. This minimizes disruption to your sleep-wake cycle.
Write down the exact time you wake up each morning. This data helps you determine your temperature minimum, which is approximately two hours before your average wake-up time, and is crucial for timing your peak cognitive performance.
Listen to NSDR audio scripts, which guide deep body relaxation and simple breathing exercises. NSDR can restore mental and physical vigor, offset negative effects of slight sleep deprivation, and improve the ability to fall back asleep if you wake up at night.