Get outdoors first thing in the morning, ideally without sunglasses, for 2-30 minutes (depending on brightness). This is vital for mental/physical health, metabolic wellbeing, hormone function, and setting circadian rhythms by stimulating alertness and timing the healthy cortisol pulse.
Try to wake up at more or less the same time each day, even after a poor night’s sleep or staying up late. This is crucial for preventing disruption of your circadian rhythm, which is fundamental for immediate and long-term health.
Take a walk first thing in the morning to generate forward ambulation and optic flow. This reduces neural activity in the amygdala, thereby lowering anxiety and promoting an alert but not anxious state.
Purposely delay caffeine intake to 90-120 minutes after waking up. This prevents a late afternoon caffeine crash by allowing adenosine levels to naturally rise before blocking them, ensuring a consistent arc of energy throughout the day.
Engage in dedicated, focused work bouts of 90 minutes, setting a timer. The brain goes through 90-minute ultradian cycles, making this duration optimal for high-focus effort.
Start your 90-minute work bout approximately 4-6 hours after your temperature minimum (which is about two hours before your average wake-up time). This catches the steepest slope of your body temperature rise, supporting focused cognition.
Engage in physical exercise for about an hour (60 +/- 15 minutes) after finishing a cognitive work bout. This supports brain health, brain function, organ health, and bodily function, as longer workouts can be detrimental due to excessive cortisol.
Allow periods of 12 hours or more each 24-hour cycle where you are not ingesting anything. This is beneficial for brain and body health, amplifying effects for fat burning and cellular health.
After lunch and a brief walk, do a 10-minute NSDR protocol, specifically a hypnosis script (e.g., from reverie.com). This promotes deep relaxation, enhances focus, accelerates plasticity, and allows for a focused exit into the afternoon without brain fog.
Step outside around 4-5 PM (as the sun starts to go down) for 10-30 minutes, without sunglasses, to get natural light in your eyes. This lowers retinal sensitivity in the late evening, buffering against negative effects of bright light at night and maintaining an appropriate melatonin rhythm.
Keep the bedroom cool or cold, and sleep under warm blankets. This allows your body to regulate temperature efficiently by removing limbs from covers, which is an efficient cooling mechanism, aiding in falling and staying asleep.
Keep the bedroom very dark. Even a small amount of light can wake up the brain and body, disrupting sleep.
For dinner, eat starchy (non-refined) carbohydrates along with some protein and vegetables. This increases serotonin in the brain, which helps in the transition to sleep and replenishes glycogen stores.
Take a hot bath, hot shower, or use a sauna (e.g., 20 minutes) before bed. This accelerates the necessary drop in body temperature for falling asleep by engaging cooling mechanisms.
If you wake up in the middle of the night and have trouble falling back asleep, use NSDR protocols like Yoga Nidra or sleep hypnosis. These tools help shift the mind by using the body, inducing a state of deep relaxation.
Write down the time you wake up each morning. This helps determine your average wake-up time and temperature minimum, a valuable reference point for scheduling.
Drink at least 16-32 ounces of room temperature water with about half a teaspoon of sea salt first thing in the morning. Hydration is essential for mental performance, and neurons require electrolytes for function.
Don’t eat anything until about 11 AM or 12 noon (or later). Fasting increases adrenaline, providing a heightened sense of focus and ability to encode information.
Position your screen or tablet at least at eye level, ideally slightly higher. When eyes are directed upward, it creates a state of heightened alertness.
Work in an upright sitting or standing position, avoiding reclining. Upright posture increases levels of alertness.
Use a program like “Freedom” to shut off internet access completely during focused work bouts. This prevents distractions and allows for dedicated work.
Turn your phone completely off (not just airplane mode) during focused work blocks, or put it in your car if struggling. This eliminates distractions and maintains deep focus.
Play low-level white noise in the background, not with headphones. This puts the brain into a state optimal for learning and workflow, engaging attention and increasing dopamine release.
Exercise at least five days per week, taking two full days off for rest and recovery. This optimizes cardiovascular and brain health and other body systems.
Alternate 10-12 week regimens: either 3 strength/hypertrophy workouts and 2 endurance workouts per week, or vice-versa. This optimizes cardiovascular and brain health, muscular and bone health, and beneficial factor production.
For resistance training, approximately 80% of sets should not go to failure, while 20% can be higher intensity to failure. This optimizes health benefits and avoids excessive damage.
For endurance work, approximately 80% of the time should be below the “burn” threshold, while 20% should include that burning sensation. This supports neuron health and provides fuel for the brain via lactate metabolism.
Strive to do workouts without eating anything beforehand. Engaging in physical exercise while fasted can amplify the effects for fat burning, cellular health, and organ health.
Before morning exercise, ingest water with sea salt (half a teaspoon) and/or a 99mg potassium tablet, or an electrolyte product like Element. This supports neuron function, can quell hunger, and provides mental clarity for physical and mental work.
Eat your first meal around noon, plus or minus an hour. This maintains the benefits of early-day fasting for focus and alertness.
Do not ingest large volumes of food at any meal. Large volumes divert blood to the gut, leading to lethargy and less blood flow to the brain, diminishing thinking ability.
For lunch, emphasize slightly lower carbohydrate or low carbohydrate intake, consisting mainly of protein and vegetables, with some starches if you’ve exercised. This supports alertness by avoiding serotonin-induced sleepiness.
Ingest at least 1,000 milligrams per day of the EPA form of essential fatty acid, from food or supplements. This supports healthy mood, can act as an antidepressant, and increases dopamine and other neuromodulators.
Eat a few Brazil nuts each day. Ingesting sufficient selenium is important for proper thyroid production and function, impacting body and brain metabolism.
Ingest cholesterol from sources like butter. Cholesterol is a precursor to sex steroid hormones (testosterone and estrogen), which are vitally important for brain function and overall well-being.
Take a brief walk of 5-30 minutes after ingesting food, especially lunch. This accelerates metabolism, improves nutrient utilization, and provides more light information to the brain.
Hydrate with water immediately after completing an NSDR practice. Hydration is vitally important for brain and bodily functions, and linking it to a routine helps ensure it’s done.
If napping, keep naps to 90 minutes or less (20-minute naps are fine). Naps longer than 90 minutes can interfere with falling and staying asleep later that night.
Do not supplement directly with serotonin, 5-HTP, or tryptophan in the evening or at night. This can disrupt sleep architecture, causing fast sleep followed by waking up and inability to fall back asleep.
Take 300-400mg of magnesium biglycinate or magnesium threonate 30-60 minutes before sleep. These forms promote GABA release in the brain, reducing rumination and aiding sleep.
Take 50mg of Apigenin (found in chamomile) 30 minutes before sleep. This acts to shut off the forebrain, reduce rumination and anxiety, helping people fall and stay asleep.
Take 100-200mg of Theanine before sleep. This increases GABA and activates chloride channels, which turn off neurons and lower their activity, aiding in sleep transition.
If you are tired in the evenings but push yourself to stay awake, then wake up at 2:30-3 AM unable to fall back asleep, try going to bed earlier. This helps align your melatonin pulse.
If you get a poor night’s sleep or stay up late, try to stay up to your normal bedtime rather than going to bed many hours earlier. Going to bed too early can be very disruptive to your circadian rhythm.
Consider supplementing Vitamin D3 and K2. D3 is essential for brain and body health (many are deficient); K2 regulates cardiovascular function and calcium.
Ingest Athletic Greens once or twice a day. This helps cover basic nutritional needs, makes up for deficiencies, and provides probiotics vital for microbiome health, immune system, brain, and mood.
Use an app like Waking Up for meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR protocols. This helps learn meditations of different durations and restore cognitive/physical energy.
If outdoor sunlight is unavailable, use a bright light pad (e.g., 930 lux light pad) positioned above or in front of you. This stimulates alertness.
Do not wear blue blockers early in the day, throughout the day, or anytime you want to be awake. Blue light is optimal for stimulating circadian rhythm neurons.
If you use blue blockers, wear them only in the late evening and at night when headed towards sleep. This limits bright light impact on the eyes when preparing for sleep.
Instead of blue blockers, dim the lights and set them lower in the environment in the evening. This sets up the brain and body for sleep much better.
Step away from the computer from time to time and look far off into the distance (ideally longer than 20 feet). This alleviates headaches from prolonged screen viewing.
Drink Yerba Mate or Guayusa tea during the fasting period, and reuse the leaves. These teas increase GLP-1, which increases fat burning and provides alertness from caffeine/adrenaline.
On rare occasions, if needing help with motivation or an extreme push, ingest 300mg of Alpha GPC before training. This supports acetylcholine release, increasing physical and cognitive performance.
If you have lower than desired levels of testosterone or too much sex hormone binding globulin, consider taking 400mg per day of Tongkat Ali. This can help increase levels of free testosterone.
Consider taking Fadogia Agrestis. This increases levels of luteinizing hormone, which stimulates the release of estrogen or testosterone from the gonads.
Put your phone on airplane mode about an hour before going to sleep. This mitigates hazards associated with sleeping with the phone in the room.