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

the rising sun. Then I sneak up on my just-waking fiancée. With ninja stealth, I make a slow and calculated attack. She protests, I laugh. I tease her in a bad Portuguese accent about her nickname “Miss2Jits” and the fact that she is a blue belt and I’m just a white belt. Eventually she’s had enough of my mouthiness and we grapple to see who can gain dominant position.

      To me, there is no better start to the morning than this. It’s a chance to practice my “jits” and wrestle with a beautiful naked woman. While it’s a disaster for keeping the fitted sheet on the mattress, it’s totally worth it. If you’ve never tried coed naked jujitsu, you haven’t really lived! (Side note: Remember how popular those Coed Naked sports shirts were? Whatever happened to those?) But this isn’t just a fun little diversion to delay getting to work. There is real science behind adding a few minutes of playful activity in the morning. Even light exercise boosts circulation and improves cognitive performance. It releases endorphins and, most important of all, helps entrain that fickle bastard, our circadian rhythm. In addition to sufficient blue-light exposure, regular activity—however brief—sends strong cues to the body that it is time to wake up and get going. It helps set that internal biological clock.

      Prescription

      The morning prescription comes in three parts: hydrate, get lit, and move it.

      Hydrate. There are no secret, scary, crazy steps to combining these ingredients into the morning mineral cocktail, but there are a couple things you want to be mindful of during preparation and consumption. First, the water should be room temperature. When you’re looking to maximize mineral absorption and aid digestion, room temperature is always best for any beverage. And second, the salt needs to dissolve or stay off the bottom of the glass when you drink it. Salt is the essential component for mineralization, but since it is denser than water, it sinks to the bottom before it dissolves if you let it come to rest after mixing. Then you end up with a salty sludge at the bottom of your glass that, unless you have a tongue like beef cattle, you’re gonna find hard to get out of there.

      The best way to avoid that problem is to simply mix the cocktail in a shaker or a water bottle. You can make the whole thing the night before, you can make a concentrate and add the water in the morning, or you can do the whole thing from scratch every day, like a little ritual, but doing it in something with a lid allows you to drink at a pace you’re comfortable with, which is important. You don’t want to force the cocktail down; that only turns the whole process into something that feels more like punishment and less like nourishment. Whichever method is best for you is the method you should employ, because this is the ultimate lubricant for sliding into the day, and it would be a shame if you missed out on it.

      Get lit. Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, blast yourself with five to ten minutes of direct blue-light exposure. Ideally, you’ll be able to do this by stepping outside and exposing as much of your skin as possible to that giant yellow orb in the sky, basking in its bright, warm blueness, like a cat with less body hair. When that’s not possible, you’ll need to adapt. Fortunately, there is a good biohack at your disposal that can do the trick.

       Pro Tip—Human Charging

      Light-emitting earbuds. Believe it or not, the retinas are not the only light-sensitive receptors on the human body. These receptors are also found in many locations on the brain, including the cerebrum and the hypothalamus. One of the surest ways to shine light on them is through the ears. A device called the HumanCharger25, made by a company named Valkee out of Helsinki, Finland, has pioneered this technology for consumer use. Their light-emitting device uses earbuds, like the kind you’d buy at an airport newsstand or an Apple Store, that make it feel like you’re shining light straight onto your brain through your ear canals. It sounds crazy, I know, but a number of studies have shown it to be incredibly effective in reducing symptoms and increasing cognitive performance in people with seasonal affective disorder who have limited exposure to natural sunlight.

      Move it. Of the three parts to this energy equation, this is by far the most difficult for people. The urge to crawl back under the blankets and slam the snooze button like a whack-a-mole is incredibly strong. The key to overcoming that resistance is understanding that what we’re talking about here is not a morning workout. This is morning movement.

      There are many ways to get this movement in. Even just light movement will increase core temperature, cortisol, circulation, and the release of endorphins that will make you more alert, and put that grogginess behind you. I want it to be fun for you, so pick what you like: light yoga, pushups, air squats, jumping jacks, a Richard Simmons clip on YouTube. Chase your dog around the house or pick your kid up and fly her around like an airplane. It doesn’t really matter; it’s all part of circadian entrainment. Here are some of my go-to morning movements.

      QUICK AND DIRTY: 1–3 MINUTES

      Twenty-three burpees. Why? I like the number 23. I wore it on my back for years out on the basketball court, and to this day it makes me happy. If you are feeling frisky, add the pushup to the bottom of the burpee. If you need to break this up into several sets, go for it. Otherwise the whole thing should be over in about a minute. If twenty-three feels like a real workout to you, make up your own number. The key is simply that your heart rate gets elevated and muscles start working.

      SLOW AND SEXY: 5–10 MINUTES

      This is a little yoga flow I developed for the morning. I hold each position for two full intentional breaths, allowing up to one breath for the transition. Start standing with your palms open and facing outwards. Then forward fold. Walk your hands forward into down dog. Bring your left leg up parallel to your hands, into lizard lunge. Take your left hand and open it up to the sky for spinal twist. Put your hand back down. Take your leg back to high plank. Do a pushup (drop to knees if necessary). Repeat on the right side. When you complete the pushup, walk your hands back to forward fold. Roll up one vertebra at a time. Raise your arms, into a gentle backbend, then bring your hands down and your arms to center prayer pose. Repeat as many times as you like.

       Pro Tip—Rebounder

      Buy a dorky little mini trampoline called a rebounder to get the juices flowing. If you watched the Tony Robbins documentary I Am Not Your Guru, this is one of the things he uses to jump-start his biology before heading out onstage at the event venue. Proponents claim benefits to the lymph system (key to healthy immune function) due to the G-forces created from gravitational unloading. While this has yet to be conclusively proven, regular low-leg exercise has been shown to improve lymph movement. So regardless, the rebounder qualifies. Not only that, the bouncing is going to help build coordination and balance as well, as shown in a study on fighter pilots. For me personally, I feel like it brings circulation all the way from my head to my feet. Nothing shakes off the grogginess like bouncing like the one and only Tigger. Super triple bonus points if you sing the Tigger song, “The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers”, while bouncing.

      The point here is not to exercise, it is to elevate your heart rate and get the lead out—all without crossing the threshold for activity that requires some form of recovery. You don’t want to be sore as a result of this early-morning activity, and you don’t want it to diminish your workout later, but generally speaking you want to eliminate the segregation between ordinary sedentary life and that forty-five-minute block of time where you work out at the gym. We want to add movement, activity, and play into all parts of your day, especially the beginning, to set the tone for the day to come. I think you’ll find that a little play wrestling can do as much as a cup of coffee, especially if you’re ticklish and the claws come out.

      Now Do It

      Starting and finishing are the two hardest parts of any task. Taking the first step is bringing your inertia from a dead halt into motion. Or as billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel would say, going from zero to one.