Work 1 Minute After Waking Up. It'll Change Your Life.

your morning routine probably sucks maybe you've Fallen prey to the morning routine dilemma where you either have a sprawling routine loaded with biohacks and optimized to the nth degree but you don't really start doing any actual work until 10 or 11 A.M or you don't have a routine instead you wake up press snooze pick up your phone scroll for way too long see that it's almost 8 30 or 9 o'clock and are now in a rush stressed to get the day started you know you should be doing a morning routine and maybe sometimes you do but most of the time you skip it because you went to bed later than you wanted which means you wake up later than you want then you have this kind of persistent nagging guilt about the fact that you're not doing your meditation or your journaling or whatever it is so I'll show you how to avoid these mistakes and how to use Neuroscience to make your mornings as productive as possible now my name is Ryan Doris I'm the co-founder and CEO of flow research Collective with Stephen Cutler where we help professionals use science-based behavioral change to access Flow State what is the point of a morning routine in the first place because it's a topic that's both constantly talked about and persistently misunderstood now when growing up in Ireland I had a comically excessive morning routine I did whatever young biohacker does lemon water yoga journaling exercise affirmations mushroom coffee ice baths sunlight sticking my feet on the wet Irish grass for grounding it would take forever so long in fact that I wouldn't start work until just before lunch and then years later after doing this routine for a long time I moved to LA and met Tech Titans and famous startup Founders and billionaires who ran circles around me from a productivity and results standpoint and guess what I noticed none of these folks cared about their morning routines or talked about their morning routines for example you don't hear Elon saying that he's had a bad day running SpaceX Tesla and Twitter because he forgot to foam roll his glutes or didn't do red light therapy that morning instead these folks just wake up and get to work they just get it done so this blew my mind I decided that I would test what I was seeing with all these successful folks in the states here and I decided I'd start just waking up and working and following their approach and at first it felt really weird my morning routine was supposed to give me an edge so I was nervous I'd stumble into work and perform poorly kind of in a groggy zombiely-like state but right away I realized that the billionaires were on to something in fact it worked shockingly well I could just wake up and get to work and slip straight into a flow state a peak State of Consciousness where the work I was doing felt effortless productivity surged and hours went by in what felt like minutes and it turns out it's due to what's called flow croneness which was discovered by psychologist mihai chick sent me high in the 1970s now flow proneness is simply our tendency to experience Flow State and that's when the dots connected for me because a morning routine is meant to heighten your productivity that's the point of a morning routine but how does a morning routine do this well it does this by increasing your flow proneness case in point cold showers boost dopamine by up to 250 percent for two hours afterwards which plays a key role in Focus which is key for flow meditation helps Drive attention into the present moment and improve self-regulation both being key for flow journaling helps to clarify goals clear goals are a trigger for flow so all these routines and many others share a common theme which is that they boost flow promos they make us more likely to get in the flow later on in the day which then boosts our productivity so really the unspoken purpose of a morning routine is to boost flow pronus but here's the wild thing as soon as you wake up in the morning when you would normally be doing your morning routine if you're a biohacker your flow pronus is naturally and organically highest and that's for two reasons the first is that your cognitive load is low think of it like a ram in a computer cognitive load is lowest upon waking up because we haven't yet loaded anything into our conscious mind the less cognitive load we have the easier it is to access flow and second upon waking your brain waves are close to flow the neuroelectrical signature or brain waves of flow are not far from Theta or Delta which are the brain waves of sleep and this makes it easier to slide out of bed and deep into a flow state so what does this mean for your morning routine well since flow proneness is highest as soon as you wake up you don't want to cannibalize that Prime flow time that your biology is just giving to you with an elaborate morning routine the biohacker wakes up and squanders the flow that they could have with an elaborate routine that ironically is designed to help them get into flow later on doesn't make any sense whereas the billionaire types wake up and dive straight into high priority work immediately and they're rewarded with flow the productivity from doing this both moves you towards your goals immediately and you get into flow doing it which makes it a win-win or is it well after trying this wake up and flow approach for a year while I was getting tons of work done first thing in the morning I actually did start to burn out and I saw this with the the billionaire types and successful entrepreneurs I was observing as well I found that while these Titans were productive the picture wasn't as pretty they were tired some were overweight they had lots of bad relationships and I too started to feel a little tired a little frazzled and I missed the calm Clarity Zen state that came from my previous morning routine with practices like meditation ice baths yoga all The Usual Suspects so I realized that this approach of waking up and working all morning wasn't quite right either and the research reveals why it turns out flow isn't binary it's not like a light switch that you can just flick on and off instead there's a cycle to flow with four distinct phases so it's more like a dimmer switch what matters most here is the recovery phase flow is expensive for the brain to produce there's a lot of neurochemistry involved and because you can expand a lot of energy effortlessly while in flow it requires recovery in order to access flow again and to flow a second time and so it's no wonder the billionaire entrepreneur types were burning out they never took the time to recover when it comes to recovery the biohackers crushed it they were doing amazing they're meticulously optimized morning routines are really powerful recovery protocols so we want to avoid the mistakes on both sides of the spectrum biohackers block the morning flow that their biology naturally serves up to them with these elaborate routines and the entrepreneurial types don't do any elaborate routines and they burn out as a result and based on the research there's a sweet spot between the biohackers elaborate carry-on and the entrepreneurial types no-nonsense approach there's a few steps to this first thing that we want to do is Implement what we call wake up and flow so instead of the elaborate routine wake up and dive into your highest priority work not in an hour not even in 10 or 15 minutes we're talking within 90 seconds of opening your eyes while you're still half asleep so that your brain waves are closer to Theta or Delta it'll be a struggle at first within 15 minutes or so you'll be deep in flow and you'll essentially wake fully up while working in a flow State and then after we do this wake up and flow protocol on our highest priority tasks for one to three hours you can do everything that makes you feel great for the rest of the day the lemon water the stretching the yoga the red light therapy ice baths whatever it is think of this as the inverted morning routine work first recover later but never skip recovery this is backed up by research but it's not just theoretical so this is the perfect blend of what the biohackers and billionaires bring to the table and solves the morning routine dilemma because we harness the natural period of flow pronoun as our biology gives us and we also recover and boost flow pronus for the rest of the day now just two more tips that you want to make sure you implement as you pin this new routine down the first is to prepare in advance you need to set the task up the night before in extreme detail so you don't waste any time figuring out what to work on when you wake up so that when we're half asleep and we're waking up and going straight to work we can mindlessly glide right into the task rather than having to wonder about what we should work on or how we should do it or what materials we need to begin and the second thing is to just make sure that you allocate enough time to really have this long flow block aim for one to three hours of dedicated high priority work to harness flow and take advantage of wake up and flow starting your day strong now I challenge you to actually do this tomorrow that means tonight prep the task prep whatever high priority work you're going to do first thing in the morning and untangle the first step of the first step identify exactly what it is you need to do to complete that task and get it all organized nicely so you can glide right into it and then tomorrow as soon as you wake up ideally within 60 to 90 seconds of opening your eyes drop into the task and you'll find that you'll drop deep in the flow very quickly and effortlessly then ride that wave for two to three hours and then do your reboot routine to recover and boost flow pronus back up for the rest of the day

Channel: Rian Doris

Views: 1,546,978

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Id: XJOsPyyYork

Length: 9min 36sec (576 seconds)

Published: Tue May 23 2023