View 10 to 30 minutes of bright light, ideally sunlight, within an hour of waking to set the fundamental layer of time perception and ensure precise circadian entrainment. Precise circadian entrainment is crucial for overall health, mental well-being, and physical/mental performance.
Minimize bright light exposure to your eyes in the evening to maintain precise circadian entrainment. Disruptions to circadian entrainment can cause significant health problems, including increased cancer risk, obesity, and mental health issues.
Ensure you get good quality and sufficient sleep, as disrupted sleep dysregulates the dopaminergic, noradrenergic, and serotonergic states throughout the day. This dysregulation can lead to a feeling of being “off,” impaired concentration, and disrupted time perception.
Limit periods of focused, hard mental or physical work to 90 minutes or less. After approximately 90 minutes, your ability to focus significantly diminishes due to a drop in neurochemicals like acetylcholine and dopamine, making continued high-level performance difficult.
Schedule tasks requiring rigid rules, precision, or clear right/wrong answers (e.g., math, accounting, physical skills, recipes) for the early part of the day. During this time, higher dopamine and norepinephrine levels create a “higher resolution brain” better suited for fine-slicing time and perceptual events, enhancing precision.
Schedule creative thinking, brainstorming, and fluid tasks that are less constrained by specific outcomes for the second half of the day. The brain’s more serotonergic state later in the day is beneficial for tasks requiring flexibility in time perception and blending different ideas.
Integrate specific, habitual routines at regular intervals throughout your day to leverage the dopamine system. These habits cause dopamine release, which acts as a time marker, helping to segment your day into functional units and control the frame rate of your experience.
Eat your meals within a consistent time window each day, though the exact meal times can vary slightly. This practice helps entrain your internal circadian clock to the external light-dark cycle, which is vital for overall health.
Engage in physical activity at fairly regular times of day, ideally within plus or minus two hours from day to day. This consistency has a positive effect on circadian entrainment, linking your internal processes to external events.
Practice Yoga Nidra or Non-Sleep Deep Rest (NSDR), even for short 10-minute sessions. Scientific data shows these protocols can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy.
Engage in cold exposure, such as cold showers or ice baths, as it can robustly increase your baseline dopamine levels by 2.5 times. This increase is long-lasting and appears to be a healthy way to boost dopamine.
During cold exposure, use external cues (e.g., a metronome) or mental distractions (e.g., singing, thinking of something else) to manage discomfort. This helps to “divorce” your perception from the high-resolution experience of pain caused by increased dopamine, making the duration feel less prolonged.
Expose your skin to sunlight for about two hours a day, focusing on areas like the upper body (arms, neck, face). This can influence your sense of well-being by increasing testosterone and estrogen through hormone pathways, even with cloud cover and sunscreen use.
Seek out and engage in novel experiences with other people in different environments. This practice can enhance the perceived familiarity and depth of your relationships, making you feel as if you know that person much better.
Actively seek out novel experiences in a particular place. The more varied and new experiences you have in a location, the longer you will feel you have been there and the more you will feel you know that place, influencing your time perception and memory.
Implement time-restricted feeding by eating within a consistent 8-10 hour window each 24-hour cycle. This practice has positive effects on gene expression, various body tissues, and can facilitate weight loss for some individuals.
Dissolve one packet of electrolytes (like Element) in 16 to 32 ounces of water and drink it first thing in the morning. This ensures adequate hydration and electrolyte balance, which is critical for optimal brain and body function and prevents diminished cognitive/physical performance.
Drink electrolytes dissolved in water during any physical exercise. This practice ensures you maintain adequate hydration and electrolyte levels, vital for the functioning of all cells, especially neurons, and for sustaining performance.
Consider ingesting Athletic Greens during a fasting period. For most people, it does not significantly raise resting blood glucose and therefore does not break a fast.
Ingest fish oil during a fast, as it is primarily fat (essential fatty acids like EPA and DHA) and typically does not significantly raise blood glucose. This means it is unlikely to break a fast for most individuals.
Take pill-type supplements, such as caffeine, vitamins, and minerals, during a fast. Generally, if these supplements do not contain sugar, significant carbohydrates, or protein, they are unlikely to raise blood glucose and break a fast.
Avoid wearing sunglasses when viewing bright light, especially morning sunlight, if it can be done safely. This allows more of the beneficial light to reach your eyes, which is important for precise circadian entrainment.
You can intentionally initiate your 90-minute ultradian work cycles whenever you choose, rather than waiting for a natural start. This allows you to set a specific clock for when focused work begins, leveraging your brain’s capacity for intense concentration.
During your 90-minute focused work cycles, actively limit all distractions, such as putting away your phone and turning off the internet. This practice helps you maximize your concentration and effectively engage with hard problems.
Utilize specific habits as “flankers” or markers throughout your day to segment your experience. The dopamine release associated with these habits helps to carve up your day into distinct, smaller or larger, functional units.
To slow down your perception of time, consciously try to blink less; to speed it up, blink more. This is based on research showing that blink rate is related to the brain’s “frame rate” of experience, influenced by dopamine.
Consider using the Waking Up meditation app for various meditation programs, mindfulness training, and NSDR protocols. It offers meditations of different durations and types to help place your brain and body into desired states.