Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex. Aubrey Marcus

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.

      The more you practice this, the better you get. 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. I have seen Bode win a World Cup downhill race against the best competition in the world, on three hours of sleep and a mild hangover. How is this possible? Because he refused to indulge the thoughts that would tell the average man that it wasn’t possible to win a race under those conditions. I have seen Bode turn an emotionally catastrophic event into a happy vibe in minutes. I have seen him push himself harder than any human being in training.

      How was he able to do this? Just like Wim Hof: practice makes the master. As a kid he would push himself to stay longer in the sauna, when every part of him was screaming for relief from the heat. He would force himself to roll shirtless in the snow, when he wanted the cozy warmth of his cabin. When a song got stuck in his head, he would wrestle his mind until he found total, pin-drop silence. This is what made him a champion on the slopes. It is what will make you the hero of your day, and it starts first thing in the morning.

       Deep Dive: Heat Is Your Friend Too

      No one hates the hot and the cold equally. Those few who do move to Portland and spend their free time weaving their beards into their chest hair. For the rest of us, there is always one that produces a stronger “Aw hell no” than the other, and it is our responsibility to manage that response so we can benefit from all they have to offer us. When it comes to heat, sitting in a sauna, steam room, sauna suit, or traditional sweat lodge and sweating buckets may not seem like the greatest way to spend the morning, but it might actually save your life. In addition to reducing all-cause mortality, hyperthermic conditioning, as it is called, helps blood flow to skeletal muscle and surrounding tissue, supporting circulation and muscle growth. It can help train your cardiovascular system and lower your resting heart rate; it can even assist with detoxification, since sweat transports minerals, both good and bad, out of the body. There’s a catch-22 with that, obviously. Yes, sweat can transport things like lead, cadmium, arsenic, and mercury out of your system, but it’s gonna take the good stuff with them too. 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.

      Prescription

      Here’s how:

      LEVEL 1: THE POWER SHOWER

      There are some savages in our midst who hop into the shower every morning, crank the cold knob as far open as it can go, and grit their teeth while they do their scrubbing and shampooing and teeth-brushing, until the discomfort of the cold slowly wears off and they can finally breathe normally again. I’m not asking you to do that. In fact, I don’t actually think that’s the most effective strategy for getting you to the place, mentally, that you should be as you prepare to start your day in earnest.

      Instead, what I want you to do is to turn the shower to hot and take your normal shower. Don’t dawdle, don’t hide from the day under the heavy stream of hot water, but don’t sprint either. Take care to wash and care for yourself in a way that leaves you satisfied. 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. If you feel too light-headed, feel free to sit down in the shower under the stream. Falling on your ass is not a hormetic stressor, it’s an emergency room visit with a better than fifty-fifty shot, if the statistics hold true, of being treated by a doctor who will have no idea what you were thinking.

      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. If you want to go for a second or third round of breathing and cold, go for it. You can even briefly turn on the hot water to create contrast in between your breath cycles. Listen to the signals from your body, explore, and experiment. But at the bare minimum, just do your best to have three minutes of continuous cold exposure somewhere in the process.

      To the uninitiated, three minutes of cold exposure probably sounds both like an impossibly short amount of time for such profound effects and an eternity to endure. But once you’ve done it, it’ll be hard not to become a convert and three minutes will feel like a small price to pay for feeling immortal. And once you’ve gotten comfortable with the power shower, you can take your practice up a notch, to full cold immersion.

       The Power Shower

      1 Turn the shower to hot and wash.

      2 Do Wim Hof breathing (thirty to fifty breaths, or until you feel tingling and/or mild light-headedness).

      3 Turn the shower as cold as it can get.

      4 Continue Wim Hof breaths until breathing calms.

      5 Hold at the bottom of breath until the gasp reflex kicks in.

      Optional: Repeat breathing cycle up to twice more, at your discretion, with cold water running continuously or with periods of warm water between cycles to create contrast.

      Total cold water exposure = ~3 minutes

      LEVEL 2: THE POLAR PLUNGE (COLD IMMERSION WITH CONTRAST)

      I would categorize the power shower as a form of cold exposure. 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. It is shocking. The best way for most people to do cold immersion is in a tub. If you have an icy river or a plunge pool, more power to you, but the rest of us have to be content being a CO₂-emitting ice-melting force of global warming in our own bathtubs. 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. Kyle Kingsbury, former UFC veteran and director of human optimization for Onnit, explained that it cost him $40 in ice every time he wanted to plunge. That adds up. One solution is to freeze buckets of water in your freezer and use them to make your baths cold all the time.

      A great way to enhance the process of cold shock is to include contrast. Contrast comes from heating the body once it is cold, and then cooling the body once it is hot. It sounds odd out of context, but anyone who has ever been drunk on a ski trip has done what I’m describing: it is the classic roll-in-the-snow-and-get-back-in-the-hot-tub trick.

      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). Contrast is not necessary, but for me it seems to produce the best effect. Listen to your body, not to your mind. Learn to distinguish the voices of resistance and prudence. After