Own the Day, Own Your Life

Aubrey Marcus

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780062684097
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

The founder and CEO of Onnit, the mega lifestyle brand and one of the fastest growing companies in the country, teaches us how one single day of positive choices leads to a lifetime of concrete strategies for better living, optimal performance, and a stronger mind, body, and spirit.

Human optimization thought leader Aubrey Marcus's personal and professional mission rests on a single question: How can we get the most out of our body and mind on a daily basis?

Marcus answers that question in Own the Day, Own Your Life an empowering handbook that guides readers to optimize every moment of the day, from waking in the morning, through work and play, until bedtime each night. With small, actionable changes implemented throughout the course of one day, we can feel better, perform more efficiently, and live happier. And these daily habits turn into weekly routines, ultimately becoming part of lifelong healthy choices.

From workouts and diet to inbox triage, mindfulness, shower temperature, and sex, this ground-breaking manual provides simple strategies for each element of your day. Drawing from the latest studies and traditional practices from around the world, Own the Da y, Own Your Life delivers an optimization philosophy, including cutting-edge life-hacking tips, nutritional expertise, brain upgrades, and fitness regiments.

Own the Day, Own Your Life is a must-have "choose-your-own-adventure" guide for the everyman and everywoman—packed with pragmatic and effective strategies that empower you to enjoy your life, take charge of your health, and own the day.

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1

Water. Light. Movement.

Well begun is half done.

—ARISTOTLE

How you wake up sets the tone for your day. Do you slide out of bed and slink through your social media, or do you have purpose in your actions? You want to take control of your day from the word go. So hydrate immediately (not with coffee!), then seek light and get moving to reset your internal clock. That’s three simple things to do within twenty minutes of waking—and your day will be primed for perfection.

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Getting Owned

In the days before fuel-injected engines, if you lived in a cold-weather city in the wintertime, you couldn’t just hop in your car first thing in the morning, turn over the engine, throw it in gear, hammer the accelerator, and speed off into the rest of your day. If you tried, the car would be sluggish and perform haltingly at first, because the fluids that make the critical components of the engine function were not properly primed. If you persisted in speeding out of the driveway before the fluids were warm, you’d start to damage internal components, throwing off the engine’s timing, resulting in a hefty mechanic’s bill.

Even today, with fancy onboard computers, high-tech fuel injection, and all sorts of automotive bells and whistles, most experts will tell you that it’s not a bad idea to let your car warm up for thirty to sixty seconds and then take it easy for the first few miles, especially if you’re concerned with maximum performance and long-term durability.

Do you want to guess what proportion of people follow those fairly simple guidelines for warming up their vehicles? It’s about the same as those who properly warm up their bodies upon waking. As a society, we tend to be as rough on our bodies as we are on our cars, which is unfortunate, since, unlike cars, we can’t trade in our bodies for a newer model with lower mileage after twenty years of steady abuse. Instead of paying the mechanic, we pay the doctor—neither of which is a fun check to write.

A brief walk through the first hour of the average day should give you a good sense of what we’re talking about here. The first sensation most of us register when we wake up is thirst. If you’ve managed to sleep well, you’ve just gone seven-plus hours without drinking a drop of water. If you’re in a dry climate, worked out the previous afternoon, or partied hard the night before, you likely hit the pillow at a fluid deficit out of the gate. Depending on the temperature of your room and how many blankets you sleep under, you may have even accelerated the dehydration process through sweat. In combination, the vapor from respiration and perspiration can often amount to a pound of water lost overnight. As a result, we regularly wake up feeling like we’ve been nursing on a cotton ball.

You would think that the logical response to this condition would be to get up and drink some water, to lubricate all those critical internal components we need to fire correctly for our bodies to be most effective today and for the long haul. Instead, what most of us do is hide under the covers, hitting the snooze button like a snare drum until the last possible moment, at which point we hurry out of bed, strip our clothes off, step into the shower and pour an average of twenty scalding-hot gallons of water over our body, then dump three more quarts through a drip coffee maker. We rarely think to actually drink any of this water before it goes down the drain or through the filter, which is insane; if the physical sensations we experience when we wake up happened to us in the middle of our day, we’d say “Damn, I’m thirsty” and then crush a glass of water. Starting the day, though, it always ends with us holding a cup of coffee.

I have news for you: the best part of waking up is not Folgers in your cup. But, Aubrey, I’m not myself without a cup of coffee in the mornings. I need it. No, you don’t. Waking up your body with coffee is like setting off a fire alarm as an alarm clock. When you’re dehydrated and have nothing in your stomach, the caffeine enters your bloodstream incredibly fast, releasing a flood of stress hormones from your adrenal glands that your body reads as a fight-or-flight trigger. Like you’ve been woken up being chased by a predatory cat. While this is effective in the short term, it’s generally a good rule of thumb to keep aggressive caffeine and feline doses to a minimum first thing in the morning. Drinking caffeine when you are dehydrated may feel good for the mouth, but you aren’t exactly digging out of the hole. The hydrating water in the coffee is somewhat offset by the dehydrating nature of caffeine. Yet we still reach for coffee in the morning, in large part because these adrenal effects are so damn good at dealing with the other problem we face when we wake up: we’re still tired.

Only one in seven people report waking up feeling refreshed after sleeping. Almost half of all Americans report feeling fatigued at least three times during the week. As a nation, we are owned and controlled by fatigue and the tools we use to fight it. We are chronically tired because we are constantly screwing up our sleep. Sleepiness and energy levels are regulated by something called circadian rhythm, which tells your body when it’s time to wake up and when to sleep. You may have heard it referred to as your body clock or your internal clock. And contrary to popular practice, the hands of that internal clock are not powered by Starbucks. They are powered by sunlight and movement. So when you shuffle your feet around a dimly lit house with your comfy robe on, your body can’t tell if you are awake, asleep, or skinwalking as a cave bear. By restricting those important cues that signal the start of a circadian cycle on a regular basis, your entire body gets thrown out of whack. When you add dehydration to the equation, things only get worse. That’s why, despite our best intentions, we so often don’t feel like working out, our brains are in a fog, we suffer from headaches, and we’re generally on edge and just plain tired. Really tired. Except when it comes time to go to sleep, of course, because then, miraculously, despite being tired all day, we can’t sleep. Sound like anyone you know? If not, you need more friends, because the CDC estimates that between 50 and 70 million Americans have a sleep disorder. You have to know at least one of those people!

There are studies on both men and women showing that even mild dehydration resulting from fluid loss equaling roughly 1 percent of your body weight can cause headaches, moodiness, irritability, anxiety, and fatigue. Decreases in mental performance and short-term memory loss can start at as little as a 2 percent loss in water. You ever find yourself being 1 or 2 percent lighter in the morning than before bed? That is enough. And for reference, mixed martial arts fighters commonly cut up to 10 percent of their body weight before a fight. No wonder they are always yelling and pointing at each other in their underwear on weigh-in day! When you consider that 78 percent of Americans are chronically dehydrated, based on their water intake, that does not paint a pretty picture of the start of the average day. It paints a picture of us getting royally owned.

But it isn’t just the water itself that is the problem. We lose electrolytes and minerals over the course of our sleep as well. Minerals are key to modulating and supporting numerous body processes, from the muscles to the organs and even the brain. Without adequate minerals, many of the body’s normal functions start to diminish. Well, guess what, we are just as bad at replacing our minerals on a regular basis as we are at getting ourselves moving and into the sunlight to start our days.

There is a solution to all that: a three-part formula that involves a simple morning mineral cocktail for hydration and adds a little bit of sunlight and a little bit of movement to reset your internal clock, taking you from getting owned to owning it within the first twenty minutes of your day. I’ve tested it, the athletes and high performers I work with have confirmed it, and clinical research has proven it: hydration and circadian balance are the essential ingredients to the consistent perfect wake-up. The formula I am going to walk you through now, then, is about mastering the levels of these essential ingredients so that the morning sets you up for owning the day every time.

Owning It

On an ordinary day a thousand years ago, Emperor Marcus Aurelius had trouble getting out of bed. We know this because he wrote about it in his journal, a remarkable document never intended for publication that somehow managed to survive through the eons. What’s most remarkable is how modern Marcus’s struggle reads to us.

A notorious insomniac but a dedicated public servant, Marcus writes: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things which I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’”

Of course, no matter how much we love our life, getting out of bed is no easy task. As a Stoic, Marcus suggested one remedy for getting over this hump: discipline. His sense of duty was what propelled him through the morning and into the world.

You can have all the stoic discipline you want, but if you don’t handle the first twenty minutes after you get out of bed correctly, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle all day. Tough mornings aren’t tough because of insufficient willpower. They’re tough because no one teaches us how to make them easy, let alone perfect, even though the perfect start to your day is perfectly within reach.

It’s about building momentum. You know this because you’ve had one of these mornings before. When there isn’t a rushed second, when you feel like you’re a step ahead of everything and the whole day feels like it’s at your leisure. Most of us have these days completely by accident, but the reality is, we can have them on purpose, and we can have them regularly.

Hydration

The first step is proper hydration. Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom faucet or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning “a cool bath for your organs.” Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.

All I am asking is that you swap your first-thing-in-the-morning coffee for some water and minerals, in a drink I call the morning mineral cocktail. I’m not asking you to eliminate coffee—God forbid, coffee is delicious—just hold off on it until you’ve hydrated properly and can mix it with some fats like butter or coconut oil to slow it down. (You’ll learn more about the importance of fats in the coming chapters.) The components of my morning mineral cocktail are water, sea salt, and a splash of lemon. I’m not saying that the cocktail is magic, but . . . it’s basically magic. (Drink it and thank me.)

Morning Mineral Cocktail

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12 ounces filtered water

3 grams sea salt

1/4 lemon, squeezed

WATER: DO IT RIGHT

Despite the proliferation of fitness magazine listicles and online hydration calculators, there is no magic formula for the amount of water you should be drinking. Depending on habituation, diet, workload, toxicity, and a number of other fluctuating factors, every individual’s water needs will vary. As a general rule of thumb, err on the side of more water than not enough. Make a good glass or aluminum water bottle your favorite accessory so you have water available to you at all times. If it’s in another room and you’re like me, you’ll probably wait until you are dying of thirst to get up and go chug some water like a toddler who just found his sippy cup after a long day on the playground. Keep your water close, and sip often.

Just as important as drinking enough water is drinking the right kind of water. Water is one of nature’s best solvents, which means that most of the solids it comes in contact with eventually dissolve into it. That’s great when it comes to absorbing minerals, but problematic when it comes to certain solids like plastics that contain harmful chemicals like BPA that can throw your hormone balance out of whack and set you up for a host of associated issues. As such, it’s important to choose your water sources wisely.

In a perfect world, you’d be able to suckle from the teat of Mother Nature and drink spring water exclusively. Spring water has the right balance of what you want (useful minerals), with little to none of what you don’t (chlorine, heavy metals, contaminants). When I switched to spring water, I stayed more hydrated through the night, which meant a better quality of sleep all around. The reason is that my body wasn’t just thirsty for water; it was thirsty for the minerals called electrolytes that are present in spring water but absent in most filtered waters.

I recognize that buying several liters of spring water in glass bottles every day can get expensive, but many of us still have access to free spring water. Before you go buying anything, check findaspring.com to see if there is any clean, free spring water next to where you live. For those of us not quite that lucky and who also do not have a line item fo...