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

you can mostly coast and steer. Getting hydrated, getting light, and getting moving is that initial momentum. We’re not asking you to wake up in the morning like a Jamaican bobsledder, jumping from the sheets into a full sprint, we’re just asking you to complete three simple tasks.

      Accomplish these in the first twenty minutes, and you have set the tone for the entire day. It’s your on-ramp to the highway of happiness and effectiveness. It ensures you will be sufficiently warmed up and lubricated, so when we hit the gas later on in the day, you roar like the muscle car you are.

      So ask yourself, are you going to hide from the day under your blankets, squander these minutes and let them pass by, lazily waking up, checking your social media, shoving another pod into the espresso machine? Are you going to succumb to comfort? Or are you gonna own it and stretch yourself a little bit? It’s an exercise of will. It’s an exercise of choice. It’s a routine that will determine how you perform throughout the day and even how you sleep later that night.

      Hydration, light, movement. That’s all it takes. That’s all it will ever take. With a regimen this simple, great mornings should not feel like miracles. They should not arrive like a rainbow—a beautiful surprise that is out of your control. You are the captain of your internal universe. You choose to go get the sun and the water and to move the clouds of stagnation in your body to make your own fucking rainbow.

      THREE POINTERS

       Circadian rhythm influences many biological functions. To optimize circadian rhythm for performance, you need to add light and movement to the first twenty minutes upon waking up.

       Most of us are chronically dehydrated, particularly in the morning. To start your hydration off right, drink the morning mineral cocktail to ensure you are getting adequate water and electrolytes.

       We are highly sensitive to momentum. By starting your morning off with intention, you set your day off on an important positive trajectory.

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       DEEP BREATH, DEEP FREEZE

      If you tiptoe into cold water, you’re missing out on the rush of plunging in headfirst.

      SIMONE ELKELES

      Breath and the cold are the best friends you never knew you had. In fact, you’ve probably been ignoring one and hiding from the other for as long as you can remember. Well, it’s time to emerge from your cozy hiding spot in the hot morning shower and embrace your new allies in the fight against stress and its many cohorts. Once you’re done washing and indulging, take a deep breath, then thirty more, and crank that shower knob to as cold as it can get, because each morning needs to involve the rush that comes with exposing yourself to nature’s extremes for a few minutes and the willpower you cultivate in the process.

      Getting Owned

      Wim Hof owns two dozen extreme sports world records. He has run a marathon above the Arctic Circle with no shirt on. He has hiked past the death zone on Mount Everest, also with no shirt on … in a blizzard. You might think he just hates shirts, but there is a method to his madness. At age fifty-seven, Wim hasn’t been sick in a decade, his joints don’t ache, and he still enjoys a Heineken (or two) with dinner. His nickname is the “Iceman” but he wasn’t born a superhero, he made himself into one. He isn’t a daredevil, either. He’s just dared to tap the potential we all have inside, by exposing his body to the resistance of extreme natural stressors, so that it—and he—may grow stronger as a result.

      Wim’s uniqueness is undeniable, but there is nothing unreplicable in this man. He is not a physical anomaly, nor part penguin. He could be you or me, or anyone. Or rather, we could be him, if we made some of the same choices he has made. Instead, most of us have shied away from exposure to the acute stress of difficult conditions. We choose cozy over cold, automatic over intentional, and with nothing to harden us, we get soft.

      Think about it. Our cars have climate control. We have jackets and scarves, and fans, and air conditioning. We can spend the whole day in our office—lunch delivered—without ever going out in the blistering Texas heat or the biting Chicago wind. If we’re lucky, our homes have heated floors so when we go to the bathroom in the night our little feetsies don’t get cold. Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable. Everything panders to it, and we buy into it because we’ve got all these old scripts running through our heads from our mothers and doctors and crazy old neighbors: If you go out in this cold without a jacket, you might catch your death. Put some shoes on, you’ll catch a cold.

      Though it was always scientifically dubious, there was a time when this idea wasn’t so crazy. It used to be the harshness of nature that was the greatest threat to human survival, not heart disease or driving. In that sense, one way to look at the frantic warnings of our elders is as the modern version of the prehistoric fight-or-flight stress response. For most of primate history (including our brief history as human primates) we had things trying to fight us, hunt us, and kill us—whether animal, environmental, or fellow man. Our bodily response to that stress is brilliant. We temporarily shut down all systems inessential to the necessary response. We scuttle immune response, reproduction, growth, and digestion processes in favor of musculoskeletal efficiency and cognitive performance. In other words, when threatened we push all our energetic resources to help us move well and think fast. That process—largely modulated by “stress hormones” like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—has saved countless human asses and is probably why your grandma can’t totally explain why, when you were a kid, she scrambled to wrap you in a jacket made out of a sleeping bag when it dropped below 60 degrees and then hustled you inside once you were done with whatever brought you outside in the first place.

      The real problem is when the body can’t distinguish between physical threats and psychosocial threats—threats to our job security, or bank account, or social status. These threats often have no concrete conclusion, and so the stress hormones that were built for brief bursts to ward off acute stress go buck wild in your brain box, and chronic stress develops. Leading neuroscientist and stress specialist Robert Sapolsky summed it up for the Stanford News: “If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you’re dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for some of the leading causes of death in Westernized life.”

      That is the great irony of the modern, westernized world. Times have changed. We’ve advanced. Things have gotten better. So why is it that now that everything is so comfortable, we are sick all the time? America spends more on health care than any other nation, and yet we keep getting sicker. And that isn’t just among the older, high-risk population. Young Americans are getting sicker too. A 2013 report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council found that “for many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries.” Survival rates of American women under fifty, for example, are plummeting in comparison to their first-world peers. How is this possible? We are the inventors of Nike, the Fitbit, and the kale smoothie, dammit! We should be terminators. We have every app and gadget in the world, all trying to make it easy for us. Yet everything seems so damn fraught and complicated.

      And that highlights the problem, right there. You see, collectively and individually, we are in a dysfunctional relationship with stress. We have too much of the bad, chronic kind, and not enough of the good, acute kind. What makes things worse, we don’t force ourselves to confront acute stress, because chronic stress has eaten away at our willpower, and as a result we don’t know how to strengthen the muscles of our resolve. We become powerless to cultivate the willpower we require to make the best choices for our lives. The bad stress beats us down, exhausts our energy, and in a very real sense, starts to kill us. My friend the Olympic gold medal skier Bode Miller used to describe this state as “overwhelmed and underqualified.” (He also taught me a lot about the solution—a skill I call mental override—but more on that later.) It is fertile ground for the unvirtuous