← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Why Waking Up At 3:30 am Everyday Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE (Try This For 7 Days!) | Tom Bilyeu
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Your life will change forever the moment that you decide to get up early and really attack your day. Go to bed at the same time every day. Don't use an alarm. Sleep as much as you need, but the second you wake up, you're going to get yourself going. Let me tell you all about what my life looked like before I started getting out of bed and really getting after it. 1. I was sliding towards depression because my life felt like it was completely out of control. 2. I was wasting four to five hours a day every day. 3. I spent my time tired all the time because I wasn't going to bed with intention, which means that my body clock was all over the place. I would go to bed two to three hours differently every night, sometimes earlier, sometimes later. I had nothing specific to anchor to to what time that I was going to go to bed, which means that if I just let my body sleep then I was going to wake up whenever I was going to wake up and if I set an al even worse, I was gonna wake up but feel terrible. Now most of the time I had an alarm so I would just wake up feeling terrible and I would snooze the alarm and snooze the alarm and snooze the alarm and I would constantly 1. I would still sleep like another hour, but I would do it in nine minute fits and starts. So you end up starting your day absolutely terribly. You feel like you're on the back foot from the moment you get up because by the time you finally get yourself out of bed and depending on if you're talking about A period when I had a job or when I didn't, which even I can't believe that that's actually true in my lives. But there was life. There was extended periods of time where I didn't have a job and then times where I did. So when I didn't, I would just lay in bed. And when I did, I was on the back foot. And that was when I really could not get momentum going in my life. And I couldn't understand why. Now, from a biological standpoint, I really did not feel good. I was low energy all the time. When you're low energy, you lack motivation. When you lack motivation, then you don't make the changes that you need to make, partly because you're not going out and learning the things you need to learn in order to create a framework in your mind that's going to tell you things like what I'm telling you now. Now, when I started implementing rules in my life, then, one, I was going to bed on time, 9pm every day, like it's a religion. I would wake up when I would wake up without an alarm, so I would actually feel refreshed. And then I gave myself only 10 minutes to get out of bed. So imagine going from snoozing an hour when I had a job or laying in bed four to five hours if I didn't have a job. Two, getting all the sleep that I needed, getting up within 10 minutes, and having my day structured such that if I was awake Monday through Friday, I was either working or working out. Imagine the amount of momentum that you can create in your life when you act like that. And so everything changed dramatically once I started putting those rules in life. Now, when I did this, I actually didn't have a job at the time that I put this rule set into place. But I started going to bed at the same time I started whatever time I woke up. I gave myself 10 minutes to get out of bed, and then I would get right to it. Now, at the time, I had a big goal of writing a screenplay, which I ended up accomplishing. I can't remember how long it took me. Four to six months, something like that. And I was like holding this thing. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I actually managed to accomplish this. Why? Because I was getting up early. Now, what ends up happening? If you're going to bed early, you're going to sleep somewhere between probably seven to nine hours, depending on your age, or if you're really going hard after something that's really exciting for you, or quite frankly, really stressful, might be closer to six, six and a half, which is about where I live. Six and a half to seven hours of sleep measured as an average over the course of a year. And so like last night, I went to bed at 9, I woke up at 3:30am now if you have my rule set, you get up at 3:30am By 3:31 you're either working or working out. Now you can imagine that you get a lot done. As I'm recording this now, I think it's like 3:34pm in the afternoon. I've already worked a 12 hour day by the time that I'm recording this. And I'm filling all of my intermittent moments where I'm transitioning from one thing to another, reading, researching. So I am constantly maximizing my time. Now by the time most people woke up, I'd already been working. If they wake up at what, six o', clock, I'd already been working for two and a half hours. If they wake up at seven o', clock, I've already been working for what, three and a half hours. So I'm able to get a half day's work in because at my pace it's really getting a lot done before most people get to their first meeting. So it's really incredible how much you can do in a day when you begin maximizing it. But it really does begin with going to bed on time, not setting an alarm. This is not me telling people to get six hours of sleep or five hours. This is me telling you to get as much sleep as you can get so that you can be cognitively optimized, so that you've got the biological energy that you need and so that you really can pursue the only thing that matters, which is skill acquisition. Once you have the right skills, you can apply that to accomplishing the things you want. But look, we live in a hyper competitive world. I always tell people there's three things that you've got at your disposal. You can work hard, you can work smart, and you can work long hours. Now people always say, if I'm working hard and smart, why do I have to work long hours? Why Tom, do I need to get up early? Because eventually you will encounter somebody like me and I'm doing all three. So if you're trying to accomplish something big in your life, I'm telling you, you just have to maximize all of the things that are at your disposal. And one of those things is just the number of hours in your day. Now remember, I love what I do. So for me to go hard after the things that I'm trying to do, create and build. It's the ride of a lifetime. I don't want you to do something that's miserable. I don't want you grinding it out to try to make a bunch of money. I want you to pursue your passions with everything that you have to leave it all out on the field like your life depends on it. Because how you feel about your life actually does depend on it. So many people have a constant feeling that they're not doing anything with their lives. And the reason that they feel like they're not doing anything with their lives is because they're not. And that's the hard reality that you have to face. We all have 24 hours in our day. We have 365 days a year plus leap year when it comes around. And most people just aren't making the most of it. Most people don't have rules in place. Most people don't know what they're trying to accomplish. Most people don't drag their ass out of bed and get to work. But if what you love to do is the thing that you do when you get up, it really is pretty extraordinary. Here's the thing that we're all up against. You've got all this potential. You can turn it into skillset, but the thing that's required is time and energy. So you need to get sleep to have the energy and you need to get out of bed to get the time. Now, there's something about getting up when it's dark, when the world just feels slow. People aren't texting you, they're not emailing you. It's just you and the things you're trying to accomplish when you take advantage of that time. And by the way, you're going to be sharp, you're going to be fresh. Maybe not in the first 30 minutes when you wake up, but, but man, once you get that engine turning, which is why I recommend that you work out first thing in the morning. Once you get that engine going and you're up to speed, those are going to be the most high performative hours of the day. And so you want to make sure that you're taking advantage of that time so that you can really get things moving. So get up, get going, take advantage of that. Set goals, know what skills you have to acquire, and use that additional time that you get from getting up and getting right to it to stack those skills and accomplish the things that you want. And once you understand that stacking skills is how you do something great, but stacking skills takes time. Then you'll start putting the right rules in place in your life to make sure that you do the things that you need to do to be energized. Get out of bed and get after it. So stop making excuses. Structure your life in a way that that is set up to give you the space that you need to get this all done. Don't make excuses, just get after it. If you want to make the most out of your time, you really have to be very thoughtful about the things you do. The first couple of hours after waking up. I have a very strict routine that I've been adhering to in one form or another. It does vary slightly depending on what I'm doing in my life, but I have a very narrow range of things that I do immediately after waking up. So this is what my life looks like. I don't use an alarm, so I wake up. When I wake up, it's usually six and a half to seven hours after I go to bed. So I'm up very early. 3:30-4:30am is my typical wake up time. I have my gym clothes sitting right next to my bed. I get my feet on the floor within 10 minutes of waking up. I immediately get dressed in my gym clothes. I happen to then grab my dog, take her downstairs, I feed her breakfast, and then I. And by the way, the second I finished putting on my clothes, I put headphones on and I've got something prearranged that I'm going to be researching. So I'm researching, pick up the dog, go downstairs, get her fed. That whole time I'm researching something, I immediately then go to the gym. The whole time I'm researching something while I'm working out in the gym. I work out typically between 30 and 45 minutes. Weightlifting, I don't do cardio. Not saying you shouldn't, just saying that I don't. I then finish working out in the gym. I go, and right now I am immediately meditating. Sometimes I will research for 10 or 15 minutes to let my breathing and my heart rate come down. But right now I'm not. I'm using the meditation time to actually see how rapidly I can slow my breathing down and get back into a calm and creative state. But meditating is very important now. The reason that I'm doing all of these things and I'll finish with my routine in a minute, but the reason I do all of these things is to cognitively optimize the whole point of life from My perspective is to turn your potential into usable skill set. Use that skill set in pursuit of honorable goals. Meaning they elevate you and other people and they're exciting to you. It's something you care about. Not because people told you that you should care about. Because you actually do care about them. Do not let the world try to trick you into thinking you have to care about what is quote unquote right to care about. Care about the things you're into. As long as they elevate other people as well as yourself, I'm all for it. Whether you want to play the guitar or clean up the oceans, you don't give a shit. Just do something you actually care about. So you have this honorable goal. You're going after it with everything you have. You're transforming your potential into skillset. That's what it's all about. But you have to be cognitively optimized, energetically optimized. Meaning that you're actually getting sleep, you're working out and you're eating right. And that brings us to the next thing that you will notice in my morning routine is I haven't mentioned eating. I'm usually up for four to five hours before I eat. So if I wake up at 3:30 in the morning, I'm not going to have my first meal roughly until 8:30. Sometimes I can push it to 9, 9:30 depending on my schedule, but I intermittent fast for on average I measured this over an 18 month period and the average is about 17 to 17 and a half. I now forget the exact amount, but roughly 17, 17 and a half hours over again 18 months. That includes weekends, holidays, all of it where I'll have a slightly shorter window. But during the week that window can push to 1819 hours sometimes. So I'm going to do intermittent fasting. Once I finish working out, meditating, I immediately begin official work. So that typically is going to be somewhere around an hour to an hour and a half after I wake up. I'm in full work mode. So if I wake up at 3:30, by 5am I'm like full blown. Not even research mode, which I'm again doing from the second I wake up. Not even in research mode. I'm sitting down and I'm tackling my important things list, which I keep a list of the most important things that I could be doing that are moving my goals forward. This does not all have to be work, it's whatever you're trying to do with your life. Just so happens that for me, work and what I want to accomplish in my life are one and the same, which by the way, I highly encourage for all of you. But I know that sometimes reality gets in the way and that's not always going to be the case. So whatever matters most to you should be attacking early, early, early, early, early. So I get to it. I don't do my important things list in the morning. I do my important things list. I technically I'm constantly updating it, but I try to have it done before I go to bed so that when I wake up I know exactly what I'm going to be doing, I know what I should be researching and I know what I'm going to be hitting right when I sit down. And then I do that thing. Now because I don't take meetings before 8:30. Used to be a little bit later, I've started letting some things actually I will frame it this way. Some things I've gotten so good at identifying what is critically important that I'll actually let it come earlier in my day. Whereas before I tried to push it back because I felt like my time was being inappropriately consumed by other people, I kept pushing my meetings back. Now I've started taking meetings three days a week at 8:30am because I've gotten so good at making sure that those meetings really matter and that I absolutely need to be in them. So I take my first meeting at 8:30. Now if I've woken up at 3:30, that means that I have five hours of productivity before I take my first meeting. Now I'm going to work until I go to bed, which is at 9pm so if I wake up at 3:30 and I work until 9pm, I'm not going to do math, but it's somewhere around what, 17, 18 hours? Ish. I know it's a half, but it's a lot. And so I'm able, because I'm doing that lead domino strategy of important things in a particular order, I'm able to get a lot done. Now that time is highly curated, very cultivated. I'm not checking my phone, I'm not looking at my text messages unless that happened to be on my important things list. If I have a big partnership or something that I'm trying to move forward and I know people are going to be texting me, then I might. But that would be highly, highly, highly intentional. Be very thoughtful to structure your day to make sure that it meets the goals of the things you're trying to accomplish. That is what I do with the first couple hours of my day and I highly encourage you guys to do the same. When you wake up, there are very specific things that you're going to want to avoid. Number one, hitting the snooze button. Don't do it. Not even once. That is how you end up on the back foot trying to make something happen in your day. But you feel tired. You should be getting as much sleep as you can. Unless you are a parent with a newborn, I don't think there's any excuse for not getting enough sleep. Go to bed early. You may have to go to bed ridiculously early. If you have to go to bed at 7pm to get on your kid's schedule, I'm completely fine with that. What I don't advise is getting so little sleep that you're constantly hitting this news alarm. First of all, this news alarm is going to give you terrible sleep. It's going to wake you up in what, nine minute increments, which is absolutely atrocious. Far better to just admit that you're only going to have 15 minutes to get out of bed or to get ready and get out of the house and just get the sleep. Set your alarm for the last possible second. That is far better than hitting the snooze alarm. The snooze alarm says that you've not got control of your evenings. Get control of your evenings, go to bed. If you're telling yourself the absolute catastrophic lie that you need time to unwind, you are creating a torture cycle for yourself. You don't need time to unwind. You need a method for shutting your brain off. So I use fiction books, or that's what I did in the beginning. Now I use nonfiction books. But you need something to get your brain out of problem solving mode. If you put a book on, I fall asleep to a book. What I find there's. I haven't read the research on this, but I'm going to guarantee that if it doesn't already exist. If somebody did the study of whether or not laying down triggers things regarding sleep, I promise you it does. If you need to wake yourself up, sit upright. If you want to fall asleep, even when you don't feel tired, get in bed and lay down. Now, if you're not completely expending yourself during the day, you might have trouble falling asleep. If you're overly stressed, you might have trouble falling asleep. If you're drinking caffeine, you might have trouble falling asleep. If you're working out late, you might have trouble falling asleep. There are a lot of dumb things you might be doing that are keeping you from falling asleep. But if you're not laying down and doing something to shut your brain off, then you're not going to fall asleep. And if you're watching TV with blue light pounding into your eyes, then don't be surprised when you have a hard time falling asleep. So optimize so that you can fall asleep. Get yourself in a position that you're actually going to be able to get out of problem solving mode into relaxation mode. Feeling sleepy? Dark light, no blue light. No staring at your computer, no checking Twitter to see how many people have commented on some stupid thing that you said. So you don't want to spike your stress. You don't want to be checking email. And as a guy, that works right up until I go to bed. There are ways you can section off the things that you're working on. So you're working on less and less stressful things as you get closer to bedtime. So doing all of that will allow you to not violate principle number one, which is don't hit the snooze alarm. The next thing that you're going to want to avoid is laying in bed. So even if you're not hitting the snooze alarm, I give myself 10 minutes to be out of bed, up and at them. There's no laying in bed and playing on your phone. That's the surest way to watch a whole bunch of time go by without you actually getting up and getting after it. So everything in your life once you wake up should be dictated by a routine that you follow religiously that is optimized to help you achieve your goals. Now remember, you should set goals that are honorable and exciting, so it's something you're legitimately interested in doing. Again, don't let other people set goals for you based on what you should want. Don't chase money. Don't chase goals that are good for the planet unless you're excited about it. Now, if you are, that's amazing. But if you're not, don't get tricked into doing things just because other people think you ought to. This is where you really want to jump out of bed. You want a spring in your step. You want to be moving towards something and not just away from something. What is it that you're trying to make come true in your life that you're really amped up about? Go do that thing. So we're not going to lay in bed, we're not going to play on our phones, we're not going to take something in before we start creating outward. We're going to figure out what the important things are in our lives. So don't check email, don't go on social media, go straight to the gym. You want to be doing things that are going to optimize your body and mind. No one is more bored by me than having to deal with the body. I wish that I could just exist in the realm of the mind. But the reality is that your mind and your body are completely interconnected. They are organs in the same ecosystem. And if you don't take care of your body, you will tear apart your mind. So be very, very thoughtful. If you're suffering from depression or anxiety and you're not working out like a fiend, that is step number one.
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All right. Another thing that you should avoid in the first couple of hours after waking up, do not eat. You want to give yourself a nice long window where you are not taxing your digestive tract. So your enteric nervous system has as many neurons, literal brain neurons, as a cat brain. So from having a distinct personality to being very important in terms of responding to the things you eat, you want to be very thoughtful about leaving that gap. So I have my first meal about four to five hours after I wake up and I won't have eaten since about 2pm the day before. So I go from 2pm to roughly 8:30am without eating every day. That's going to allow you to have a whole lot of improvements in terms of how you regulate your glucose, how you're able to produce ketones, which will change your relationship to hunger There's a whole lot of benefits to fasting that are beyond this, but I definitely would not eat when you first wake up. I also do not allow myself caffeine, for I have my first bit of caffeine once the sun has come up. That's rule number one. And then number two, it has to be at least 7am so those two conditions have to be met before I have any caffeine. And then I also water my caffeine down dramatically to the point where, to be honest, I'm really just having coffee for the flavor and I could probably do decaf and I wouldn't notice. On days where I don't drink any caffeine, I don't notice any difference. So I have no addiction to caffeine. I don't do it because it gives me energy, really. I do it because it gives me some taste other than water. The reason that I do that is I don't want to be beholden to any exogenous substance to get me up and going. So I have found that going and working out is far more impactful to elevating my energy levels, to getting me going, to getting my blood pumping and my brain working than any amount of caffeine. So I highly encourage you guys to do that. Also, I'm just super suspect of exogenous substances. This is why I don't supplement. I don't take any supplements regularly. I'm open if I could find one that extended life, for instance, I would take it like crazy. I'm just inherently skeptical about taking exogenous substances. I know there's a lot of people that do take supplements, and I hold them in very high esteem. So it's not something that I have a hard and fast rule. It's just something that I am wary of. So do the research. Make a decision on your own. Okay? That is the bundle of things that I really try to avoid for myself in the morning. All of it is designed to cognitively optimize myself, to get me moving, to not be reliant on anything outside of myself, to get up, get moving. I'm not allowing distractions into my life. I'm just getting to work on those things that matter to me. And that is how you take control of your morning and really get effective. If you struggle getting up and getting your day started early, even though you want to, and know that you should be doing it. This comes down to two things. One, it's all mechanism all the time. What are you doing with your night routine to make sure that you're getting to bed on time because the reality is, if you're tired, you're not gonna wanna get up. The reason so many people lack motivation is because of, as Vince Lombardi said, fatigue makes cowards of us all. If you're tired, you just don't have what you need to face the day. Life is hard. Being a human is difficult. Life is going to kick you in the face. The second law of thermodynamics makes abundantly clear that life moves inextricably towards one thing. Chaos. And the only way to tame the chaos and create order in your life is by pouring energy into the system. To pour that energy into the system, you need energy at two levels. At the cellular level and psychological energy. Now, it's easy enough to get yourself pumped up psychologically, but to get yourself pumped up at a cellular level, you have to make sure that you are getting to bed on time, getting plenty of sleep, eating right, and getting exercise and meditating. If you're not doing those things, then you're not going to be primed at a cellular level. Now, to get the psychological energy, we get to the second thing. You just don't want it badly enough. Most people don't want to the thing that they're pursuing in their life for two reasons. Reason number one, you don't realize that desire is a process. You build desire for things. You were not born with some intense, insatiable desire. You do have imperatives that evolution has given us, but you don't have these intense desires other than like hunger, thirst, sexual drive. But you certainly don't have a drive to go to the gym. You don't have a drive to be more successful at work. That's actually only minorly true, certainly for guys. You probably do have a pretty strong imperative to gain access to resources, but it will not direct you towards the thing that you're specifically going to pursue. So you'll have a vague sense of, I want to do more, I want to be more, I want to be admired. I want to be at the top. But the top of what? That's where people get themselves into trouble because they lack that clarity. They lack that clarity because they don't realize that you just have to pick something that you already respond positively to. Naturally you encountered it, it gave you more energy than it took. You're naturally drawn to that thing. You want to do it, okay, but it's not going to be like, oh, my God, I need to dedicate the rest of my life to this. I spring out of bed in the Morning. Because I'm so excited about this thing. That is not how it works. You'll just be like, oh, that's cool. I dig that thing. Now, if you go put time and energy into building desire, which is basically the process of explaining to yourself why that thing matters to you. And as you repeat that in an embodied way, meaning you embody the enthusiasm for that thing that you want to feel, and you loop around it and you actually go and get better at that and do it in the world. And people are like, oh, man, that's so cool. I'd love that you can do that thing and you get that positive feedback and it was already energizing to you. And you loop around why it matters. Why am I investing in this so much? And you do that over and over in an embodied way. Now all of a sudden, six months later, a year later, it really is this raging inferno at the center of your soul. Something that you care about and want incredibly deeply. But you have to go down that process of gaining mastery, of really pushing yourself around, why you're gonna love this thing so much. And then it actually becomes real. You become what you repeat. So if you're repeating that you're an idiot, that you don't love yourself, that will become true. Now, self worth is a very complicated topic that is beyond the scope of this conversation. But just know that you do become what you repeat. So be very thoughtful, right? Those really are the two reasons that people are going to struggle. So you have to focus on making sure that you're getting yourself energized for this thing that you're pursuing. And then you have to make sure that mechanistically, you're doing the things that you need to do so you're not tired all the time. But most people fail to get enough sleep. They go to bed with such wild swings that it's like having jet lag. Like, everybody goes, oh yeah, if I traveled to the east coast from the west coast and I had three hours of jet lag, of course I'm going to be tired. Well, what do you think happens when your bedtime swings by an hour, two hours, three hours, you're going to experience that same kind of disruption in your sleep cycle. Also, people do a lot of things to have poor sleep hygiene from breathing through their mouth, taking in blue light, going to bed at different times, watching TV right before they go to bed, checking their text messages, reading emails, working on stressful things. All of this stuff are things that are going to disrupt your sleep. And, and, and the Biggest one, which we haven't even talked about. How close to your bedtime do you eat food? I have roughly seven hours between my last meal and my bedtime. And it's amazing. And I have found that if I even eat within three hours of going to bed, I can feel the difference. Now, three hours is, I would say, good. If you got three hours of distance between the last moment you were chewing, so not when you start the meal, the last moment you were chewing, and when you go to bed, you're in pretty good shape. I think you will find that you sleep better the longer that you stretch that period out. There's, of course, also a lot of individual variability. I've heard some very interesting information around carbohydrates, and if you have your last meal, has a fair amount of carbohydrates, that you will sleep better. Now, I find for me that that actually is true if I have carbohydrates, but they're not high sugar. Wear a glucose monitor, it's very enlightening. But if I have something that doesn't spike my glucose massively, so think about doing a lot of greens, things like that, leafy greens, that I actually will sleep better. But I need to have a pretty big distance still between my last meal and when I go to bed. You have to experiment with this stuff. When it comes to diet, there's so much individual variability, it's absolutely terrifying. So try it, run that. But I find that most people eat within an. An hour, maybe 90 minutes before they go to bed. That's going to disrupt your sleep massively. So be very thoughtful about trying that and experimenting. Once you get all of that down and you hold yourself accountable to doing all of this stuff, then I think you're going to find getting up is very easy. But if you don't address how badly you want the thing you're getting out of bed for and your physiology, it's going to be a struggle forever. And last but not least, I'll throw in a little bonus here, and that is you have to have standards. I'm angry with myself if I don't get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. I'm angry at myself if I don't go to bed on time, because I really want the things that I'm pursuing. So be really thoughtful about that. Don't do it because you ought to find a way to get excited about it, then build rules in your life around that. And so you're doing it because it's what you want for yourself and so the reason that you're upset with yourself when you don't do it isn't because you're worried about disappointing other people. It's because you really want it and you're not acting in accordance with that. That's it, get after it. If you have a goal to get up early and you find that you don't and you're feeling badly about yourself, you have to be very thoughtful about how you react in that moment. I'm a big fan of rewarding and punishing yourself, but you have to be very good at how you go about that. So when you do what you're supposed to do, of course you want to pat yourself on the back. You want to give yourself that emotional uplift of recognizing a job well done. And when you don't, you definitely want to face square on, you said you were going to do it and you didn't do it. And that is a black mark on your day. Now, the problem is that when you continue to beat yourself up now, you're going to begin to diminish your sense of self. I advise you, never do anything that diminishes your sense of self. You want to hold yourself accountable. You want to have a standard. You want to live up to it. I think that's incredibly important. Important, and I think so many people fail to get where they want to go in life because they fail to hold themselves accountable. So you want to set a standard, you want to hold yourself accountable to that standard, but you also want to make sure that you only do and believe that which moves you towards your goals. I have a rule in my life that I only do that. I'm not trying to live in a post truth world. This isn't me just deciding that I'm going to believe in whatever I want to believe in. In fact, I define truth as the thing that most efficiently moves you towards your goal. I think that you're most closely aligned to what is true when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors. And when you're able to predict the outcome of your behaviors, I think you're onto what is true. So we're not going to sit there and belittle ourselves and tear ourselves apart. We're going to acknowledge that what we did, it breaks our rule that we had that rule in the first place, because it is the set of behaviors that most effectively moves us towards our goal. So we want to get back on track because we actually care about our goal and we want to do the thing that's moving us towards our goal. We're not going to get back on track because we think we're a bad person or we're worried what the world is going to think. This all needs to be intrinsic motivation. You need to care, you need to have some reason why you want this thing so badly that you've put all these rules around yourself in the first place. All the rules that I have, the amount of work that I do, how hardcore I am, the standard that I hold myself to, rewarding myself, punishing myself, it's all in service of what I want. So make sure that you want something that is legitimately exciting to you. Make sure that you've spent the time to build that desire in yourself. And then make sure that you recognize that the most important thing that you can do to bounce back is to bounce back right away, to not beat yourself up any more than is useful to bouncing back to getting back on track. And then when you get back on track and you say, okay, cool. This happens to me all the time. I have a rule. I get out of bed in 10 minutes or less and sometimes my feet will hit the floor right as it clicks over into the 11th minute. Now, I never miss it by much, but when I do one, I confess. I tell my wife, I'll go on camera, I'll tell people, ah, I didn't make it today. I like to hold myself accountable and. And I feel good when I hold myself accountable because I'm willing to stare nakedly at my inadequacies. I didn't do it today. I said I was going to and I didn't. But my willingness to own that, to admit it, to not lie to myself, to not lie to other people, to say, hey, I didn't do it today, that act makes me feel good because I know how effective it is. I know how much I've gotten out of my life by being honest. When I don't do the things that I wanted to do by reminding myself why, I want to do them by reminding myself why I have these rules in place and then living in accordance with that. And when I don't, to give myself that reminder that, hey, you said you were going to do it and you didn't, not making excuses, owning everything completely, and reminding myself that my life is an exact reflection of my choices and that I made my day a little bit worse by not doing what I said I was going to do. But at the same time, if I just sat there and beat myself up and what a loser I am, that I'm not going to get done the things that I need to get done in order to make meaningful progress towards my goals. So I do it just enough to kick myself in the ass and then I stop, I get back on track, I reward myself for getting back on track and boom, it's all system scale. The most important thing that you can do to wake up early is to get your night routine on point. My night routine really begins at 2pm this is all true. So what I found was the number one thing that disrupted my sleep was I would wake up in the middle of the night to pee and then my mind would start worrying around all the problems that I have to solve and I would be up for two, two and a half hours in the middle of the night every single night. And so I was like, okay, what would I need to do in order to make sure that I never wake up to pee? And at first I thought, well, if I just stop drinking water in the late afternoons or the evening, I should be fine. That didn't work. And then I realized, ah, this is a food problem. If I stop eating food earlier, then I can kill two birds with one stone. One, I can elongate my intermittent fasting window, which is already incredibly powerful. But two, I'm also not going to have a bunch of water being extracted from the food as I lead up to bedtime. So what I do is I have my last meal. I start eating at about 1:15. I'm usually done chewing by about 2 o'. Clock. Then by the time I go to bed at 9pm, I've had seven hours without eating. And I also I don't drink. I have one sort of final sip right before I go to bed at call it 8:50, 8:55. But from 2 to then I don't have any water. So I'm able to sleep through the night perfectly well. I'm able to drink as much water as I need during because I wake up at say 3:30 to 4:30 somewhere in there. So I'm able to get a ton of water on my system before 2pm and so everything works perfectly. So that's the first thing that I start doing. The next thing I do is going to the food thing. I want to make sure that I have a minimum of three hours of not eating before I go to bed for reasons of digestion. So even if I didn't have the water problem, not eating, not having food in my digestion is hugely important. Now the reason that I know that this actually makes a difference is if on the weekend I'M having a cheat meal, I can actually drink water. I don't have to stop drinking water because the carbohydrate intake will cause me to retain water. So I'm not going to have that problem even if I eat close to bedtime and keep drinking throughout the day. It's actually wonderful. I love it. I can pound water right before I go to bed. Something about water at night tastes so good. I don't have to worry about that if I've had a high carbohydrate meal. So what I found though is that even by eating, let's say three hours before I go to bed, I can still tell the difference in my sleep. But three hours is sort of that maximum where it's not truly disruptive. So no matter what, whether you have trouble with peeing at night or not, you want to make sure that starting three hours before you go to bed, you finished all of your food intake. That's really important. Also, three hours before I go to bed, I will avoid blue light. So I wear blue blocking glasses. And I make sure that my computer shifts over into night mode so that it actually turns the screen warmer colors. I dim the lights, I try not to get bright lights in my eyes. All of this stuff makes a really big difference. Also, I don't do any stressful work at least an hour before I go to bed. So even though I'll keep working up until I go to bed at 9, as I get later into the evening, I do things that are far more predictable and less stressful. So for instance, I have an episode to prepare for today. And so tonight, as I start getting ready for bed, that will be one of the last things that I do, literally right up until I go to bed. Because it's something that isn't about problem solving. It's not stressful. I'm not going to be surprised by some problem that exists in the business. Right as I'm about to go to bed, I realize huge spike of adrenaline and cortisol because, oh my God, I just realized we have some problem that needs to be solved. So it's something that's based around learning. It's usually exciting. It puts my brain in a different mode. And so that is really useful to helping me begin to move my brain at a problem solving mode and get into a mode that's going to allow me to fall asleep. Also, I tend to 30 to 40 minutes before I fall asleep. I'll get into bed. Now, I know a lot of people say, don't take work to bed with you. I have not found that to be problematic at all. As long as it's a certain type of work, like doing research is my go to for being in bed. So I can really begin to relax and calm down. I will also, if I've had a particularly stressful day in that last hour, I might do some meditation to really make sure that I'm calming myself down. And then right as I'm about to lay in bed, and this is the one thing that I'm conflicted about recommending to people is I put headphones in and I begin reading a book right as I go to bed. So as I lay down and fall asleep, I put headphones in and I put a book on. I've used fiction in the past. I'm using nonfiction currently. But it's a certain type of book one. It's a very long book. So often biographies about a moment in time or a given person. I guess technically a biography is about a person or a moment in time. And the books often are like 20 hours, 30 hours. So you know that you're not going to get woken up in the middle of the night by the book ending, which has happened to me, unfortunately, with shorter books. And so I will listen to those books. They're not where I'm trying to learn something. So it's just something that's interesting and that puts my brain into a certain zone. And I tend to fall asleep very quickly. I'm talking like five minutes quickly or less. I'll wake up in the middle of the night and I'll rewind the book back to a part that makes sense. But because it's such a big topic, it tends to be something where whether I get exactly to where I was or not, I can still get the gist. It's not like a story where, man, if you miss anything, you're going to be completely lost. What happened? It's disoriented. So that has been really, really useful. And then the last thing that I do is I tape my mouth closed. Because if you breathe through your nose, it can actually dry out your throat, disrupt your sleep. There's a whole book on this called Breathe by James Nestor. If I'm remembering correctly. And it's really been transformative to my sleep because I used to wake up with a dry throat and it would pull me out of sleep. And, you know, your lip smacking. You need like something to drink. It's terrible. So by taping my mouth, I'm able to sleep through the night much better. Really Was a game changer. I highly recommend that you guys try. Not only that, but all of the things that I just talked about. I think that they will radically improve your sleep hygiene which will allow you to sleep much better. You will be far more rested and able to get to the holy Grail, which is not setting an alarm. So you wake up naturally right at the perfect part of your sleep cycle. Having gotten as much sleep as your body needs, book a Loved by Guest property with VRBO and you get a top rated vacation rental that's loved for all the right reasons.
- [43:59]
B
Ugh.
- [44:00]
C
I love my VRBO for the location. Good reason.
- [44:02]
B
Oh and for the pool.
- [44:03]
C
Cause pools are cool. I feel the love. Book a VRBO that's loved by guests if you know you vrbo.
- [44:08]
A
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.
- [44:39]
C
If you find that despite having really good sleep hygiene that you're still getting tired later in the day, a lot of people wonder if they can take a nap or if they should avoid it. And to be honest, I think that it's completely up to the person. There are some times where I'm so tired that if I don't allow myself to at least completely let go, meaning I lay down, I close my eyes, and I give myself permission to sleep. I just, I can't focus, I can't concentrate. And I have found that sometimes even just letting myself go like that, even though I don't fall asleep for 10 or 15 minutes, can be extremely rejuvenating. Other times I find that falling asleep for 10 or 15 minutes is completely rejuvenating. And other times, I have no idea why. I feel super groggy. And even sleeping for an hour may make me feel worse than just staying awake. That's always super bizarre where you lay down, you don't set an alarm. You just give yourself permission to sleep as long as you need. You wake up. One would think that you got a full sleep cycle, but for whatever reason, man, when I wake up, I'm like, God, I just feel awful. I feel sluggish, I have a little bit of a headache. Just the whole rest of the day I feel off. So to be honest, it's pretty rare that I take a nap. Even times where because if I get five hours of sleep that I hate, that I can get by if it's one day, but I really really really don't like doing it, I would much rather get six hours. Six hours is magical. Seven is unbeatable. So if I've gotten five I will give myself the chance to lay down and take a nap. But I often find that it's like man, the whole rest of the day just never feels like I quite get back on. And if I've gotten five hours of sleep, the only time I will give myself a chance to take a NAP is before 7am so that I'm still getting that sleep early. The sun typically for most of the year is still down and so I'm able to sleep while it's still dark. Because remember, if I only got five hours of sleep, chances are I woke up around 2:30ish. So I can, by that point I have gone worked out, I've started working for a few hours and then I find that just wave of fatigue really hitting me, then I will lay down. But if the sun is up and my day is going, the odds of me taking a nap are virtually zero. Again, there's a lot of self experimentation that you should do. Figure out what works for you. Learning those rhythms, figuring out what are the times like, can you notice a pattern when you end up getting sleepy and and are unable to bounce back. For me it's like if the day is really going and the sun is up and if I've had caffeine or anything like that, the odds of me feeling better after I take a nap are very very low. But this really is something that you should experiment with because there are going to be times where you may have gotten so little sleep that the only way to function is to get that rest is to allow yourself to lay down and take a nap. So I certainly don't have any moral judgments on taking a nap. I think some people do. I don't like. For one, if I'm flying, there's something about flying. If I'm flying and I'm just like, I cannot keep my eyes open. I'm like, I'll take a nap. I've heard people like oh my God, like I'd never take a nap. That's crazy to me. You want to cognitively optimize, you want to make sure that you are performing at your best. And if taking a nap is going to be the thing that lets you perform at your best. Then take the nap. You're far better to if you. Let's say you're going to work for three hours, you're far better. Or you have three hours to work, I should say you're far better napping for an hour and a half and being really sharp that last hour and a half than you are just like struggling through not being at your best and trying to get something done. Now everything is on balance. I work so hard, I leave everything out on the field. I just don't think twice about taking a nap if that's what I need, because I know that I'm not doing it out of laziness. And I think that's where a lot of people get conflicted is they know that taking the nap is something that they do as a way to avoid doing the work and that they do that kind of thing a lot and that they probably were feeling tired because they stayed up too late watching something Netflix or playing video games or hanging out, whatever, or they had a few too many drinks, they've done something dumb that is counter to the goals. If those things are your goals, by all means do them. I don't pass any moral judgment on watching Netflix, playing video games. Get as drunk as you want if that's your goal. But if it's not your goal and you did those things, something tells me that now you're beating yourself up over being lazy. And part of the reason that you don't want to take the nap is because you feel guilty. And if you play all out all the time and you know that you've earned that respect with yourself, then taking a nap is a no brainer if that's going to be the thing that cognitively optimizes you. Just a reminder, psa. Enjoy your life. And if taking a nap is going to let you enjoy it, do it. If it doesn't and it's going to mess up your rhythm, then don't just grind it out. If you let me control your life for the next seven days, here is exactly what I would have you do. I'm actually thinking about turning this into a challenge because I think that this would be amazingly empowering, impactful for people. And it goes like this. Our goal is to get up early and really attack the day so that we can get a lot of momentum going so that we can outperform other people. Remember, I am super competitive when it comes to doing the things that I most want in life. Now I do that from a place of Joy and abundance, think everybody can have what they want. But it's actually fun to go hard to compete against other people and really see how far you can push your life. All right, it goes like this. This is the ultimate life routine. Number one. We're going to go to bed at 9pm like it's a religion. No if, ands or buts. And we're gonna, as you see, as we go through the day, when we wake up, we're gonna do a lot of things to make sure that we are ready for bed at 9pm but we go to bed at 9pm like it's a religion. We do not set an alarm clock. You can have an emergency alarm clock if you've got a meeting or a flight to catch or something like that, so that you just don't have it on your mind. Because I know some people are so paranoid they're going to oversleep. It actually interrupts their sleep. By all means, set an emergency alarm. But the goal would be to have at least nine hours before our emergency alarm would have to go off. Most people are not going to sleep for nine hours unless they've been chronically sleep deprived. So no alarm. Go to bed at 9 or 8 if you have kids, or 7 if you have kids, whatever. But we're going to go to bed early enough that we don't need to set an alarm for me, that's nine. You're going to go to bed at that time, you're going to wake up. When you wake up, you get out of bed in 10 minutes or less. Your feet are on the floor. Next to your bed is your gym clothes. You're going to put your gym clothes on immediately. You don't have to go to the gym. You can work out at home. I don't care. We can do all body weight workouts or we can go to the gym and go ham. Whatever works for you. But we are going to work out. We are going to get our blood pumping. No one, and I mean no one, hates going to the gym more than me. I don't. Whatever the endorphin rush is that other people get, I don't get. But it does allow me to cognitively optimize. If you haven't read the book Spark, read it. Studies show that if you have a hard problem to solve, you want to tackle that hard problem immediately after working out. They did all these crazy studies where they had kids go in and do like these incredibly hard workouts where your grade was based on your heart rate. So it was like you didn't have to run a mile in under six minutes, but you had to get your heart rate up to whatever, 140, 150, and maintain that for, I forget how long, let's call it 15, 20 minutes. And then if they had their hardest class immediately following that. So for me it would have been like calculus. If I had had that immediately following gym class where I got my heart rate up into that ideal zone, I would perform better there because you're cognitively optimizing. So I'm going to work out, I'm going to get my heart rate up. That is key. I'm also going to be intermittent fasting. So we're going to get to when I clock that change, but I'm not going to eat before I work out. So I'm going to work out, fasted, then I'm going to go and I'm going to meditate. By the way, I work out for about 30 to 45 minutes. By all means, workout longer. I wouldn't work out a lot shorter. I'm going to sit down and I'm going to meditate. I'm going to meditate for about 20 minutes. I'm trying to get myself into a place where I'm completely relaxed. No stress, no anxiety. It is very possible, no matter what is going on in your life, to get to the point where you have no stress, no anxiety. Now if you're really going through something and you the thought of trying to sit down and meditate is just unbelievably torturous. Give yourself seven minutes of doom scrolling cats. It will put your brain in a certain place. It's very interesting. It is the art of distraction. There is a reason from an evolutionary standpoint that distraction exists. Go for it. Seven minutes only. At the end of the seven minutes, then we're going to go into meditation and you're going to meditate. If you did seven minutes of doom scrolling cats and you just don't have extra time, fine, 13 minutes of meditation, so be it. But I think you're better off making it 27 minutes. Seven minutes doom scrolling cats and then 20 minutes of meditation. The goal of meditation is to just breathe. You're not trying to have any grand epiphanies, you're just trying to breathe. Your mind is going to wander like crazy and it's going to happen a lot to the point where it's going to distress you and you're going to think you're doing something wrong. You are not. The whole point is to just come Back to the breath. Come back to the breath. Back to the breath. Back to the breath. Getting yourself in that calm, creative state. No stress, no anxiety. Lengthening the period of time where you can focus on the breath. Incredibly powerful. Now, if you haven't done this for an extended period of time yet, the next thing I want you to do is take a cold shower. We're doing all of this to accomplish two goals. Toughen up, buttercup. And cognitively optimize. So working out, as much as it's good for the brain, it's also to show you that you can do hard things. Because in your life you need to be doing hard things. The other hard thing that you're going to do, that's also good for your brain and good for a whole host of other things, including anti inflammatory, getting all the effects of longevity that come from cold exposure. You're going to get in the cold shower. Now, the amount of time you need to stay in the cold shower is going to depend on the time of year and where you live. Because let me tell you, Minnesota in February is very different than LA in August. The cold temperature in LA in August, not that cold. So and compared to. And I've actually done this. Was it in Minnesota? No, Chicago. I did Chicago in the winter. I can't remember exactly what month. And the water hitting my forehead gave me a headache. I was like, damn, this is a whole nother level of cold. So doing that versus in LA was a world of difference. But in la, I would keep myself in the shower. I think my record was like, oh, God. It was somewhere between 12 and 17 minutes. I can't remember. But for what was it? 13 months? I did this every single shower. Weekend. No weekend, actually. That might be a lie. Every shower Monday through Friday. That's correct. I think on the weekends I allowed myself a warm shower. Don't hold me to that. I can't remember. But for 13 months I took so many cold showers, it was horrifying. In fact, I stopped. I promised myself I'd do it for 30 days. I did it for 13 months. I began to resent my shower. But it is extremely powerful for doing things that are difficult. So we're going to do the cold challenge. Expose yourself for the cold as long as you can possibly bear. Extend that period of time. You should be shivering before you get out of the shower, like uncontrollably shivering. That is a good way of knowing if you've been in long enough. Now, again, Minnesota in February, it's going to happen a lot faster than a warm climate later in the year, but get cold exposure after that. We're going to go to our important things list and we're going to work our way down the most important things that we could be doing in order to make meaningful progress towards our goals. Once we finish all of that, I know you're going to have to do a lot of work to pay bills and all that good stuff. Fair enough. Go do your job. Crush it. Then we're going to get into the intermittent fasting zone. So there are two ways to handle this way. Number one is that you can stop eating really early and then you're going to eat breakfast, or you can stop eating a little bit later. Call it five, six o' clock at night, but then you can't have your first meal until much later the next day. The rule of thumb is 16 hours of fasting is about right. I try to push that to, on average, about 17 and a half hours when averaged over a full week. But during the week, that tends to mean that I'm not having a meal for about 18 to 19 hours. And then on the weekend it's closer to 15, 16 hours. So I track that over a year and a half and that's what it came out to be. On average. If you do all of those things, your life will be unrecognizable. And I hope that if you do that for seven days, that you're not going to want to quit because it really will transform your entire life. All right, get after it, boys and girls. All of those things will help you get up, get going, attack the day, create momentum in your life and actually accomplish the things that at one point you wouldn't have believed were even possible.
- [58:25]
A
If you work in university maintenance, Granger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H VAC and plumbing supplies to lighting and more. And all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock. So your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-GRAINGER visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.