Cultivating the Two Most Important Times of Day

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SHOW NOTES

My health and my life dramatically improved when I did these two things....

1. I cultivated the first hour of my day
2. I cultivated the last hour of my day

I stopped letting these hours of the day slip away from me and I used these times to intentionally create the results I wanted in my life.

Research has shown the most effective habits and behaviours we should engage in at these times and so I heeded the advice and created a routine that worked for me.

In today's episode, I talk about how you can do the same in a way the aligns with YOUR goals, not mine or someone else's.

Imagine what you could cultivate in your life if you intentionally cultivated your first and last hour of the day?

TRANSCRIPT

Welcome to man in the Arena. This podcast is for men over 40 who want to master their health and weight loss goals once and for all, with innovative strategies, practical tools and insightful interviews. My goal is to help you overcome your limiting beliefs and achieve your optimal health. It's time to look good, feel good and do better. Hello and welcome to another episode of man in the Arena. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for showing up as a token of my appreciation and my gratitude.

I want to share an exclusive offer that I have for you. From now until the end of May, I've opened up the arena, which is my online community, for lifetime access, and the total cost for this lifetime access is just $197. I decided just last week to make the arena a lifetime membership, which means that once you sign up, you have access to all the challenges, the program, the workouts, all of my content, the weekly group calls, the coaching calls all of this for just $197. This is more than half of what I used to charge for just one year. It's a heck of a deal, and once you sign up, just remember that you don't have to pay for access ever again. So this is an exclusive offer just running to the end of May. Know that there are no catches, and this is just something I've wanted to do for a long time, because I want you to benefit from the community I've created for as long as you live. So please take advantage of this offer. It goes until May 31st and then the lifetime access is going to go up to $997. Okay, so there's my spiel.

Now let's talk about the two most important times of day, especially if you're wanting to lose weight and change your health. The two most important times of day are the morning and the evening, and, more specifically, the first hour of your day and the last hour of your day, the first hour after you wake up and the last hour when you go to bed. These are absolutely magical times, so much so that if you put your energy into cultivating these two times of day in your life, your health and your happiness they're going to level up big time. This is something I've been working on for the last two years, and I've tried so many different iterations and routines, but what I can tell you is just how impactful it's been for me to focus on what I do first thing in the morning and the last thing I do at night. There have been tons of studies and books written from Andrew Huberman's work around all of this and his morning routine. There's also a book called the Morning Miracle, so a lot of this information isn't new.

But what I want you to take away from this episode is the importance of intentionally crafting and cultivating your morning and evening routines in a way that aligns with your goals not my goals or someone else's goals and certainly there's some similarities in our challenges and our desires but I want you to define what works for you based on what I say here and now. So with that, I'm going to talk about the morning first, and then I'm going to talk about the evening, and when I talk about these things, I want to talk about the golden rule. I'm going to talk about these cycle breakers and then common mistakes and best practices. So let's start with the golden rule. The golden rule of your morning and evening is that you have to be intentional, with focused attention. You have to consciously create and decide with precision what you're going to do with the first hour and the last hour every day, and just imagine what would happen if your life, if you did this every day with consistency and with discipline. What would happen if you gave yourself this gift? You have to plan the way that you're going to think, feel and act every morning and evening with intention, in a way that aligns with who you want to become, because if you don't, you're going to automatically default to your past self.

Many of us wake up and immediately begin to think about our problems or the tasks that we have ahead of us that day, and what this does? It just links us to past experiences and emotions, and this pattern keeps us locked in the same behaviors and outcomes that ultimately sabotage us. But by becoming conscious of these patterns and intentionally choosing different thoughts and actions, we can begin to break free from the past. This is the power of the practice we begin to break the cycle of what sabotages us and what keeps us stuck in the past, and let me just say this it's very benign and very innocuous. So, for example, if you wake up and you grab your phone the first thing in the morning and you check your email, or you check the news or your social feed, you've immediately just told your brain and your subconscious to run the same script that it did the day before, and that means that all the thoughts, all the feelings and actions are most likely going to repeat. So that means the urges that you had at certain times of day, the desire for food that you had, the idea of skipping your workout they're all likely to unfold in the same way. Or am I feeling dread, and whatever that is that's going to trigger this unfolding and this cascading of events? Either you're going to relive the past or, when you do this consciously and intentionally, you're going to create the future.

If you consciously decide how you want to think, feel and act differently now, you can start to create a different future, one that's aligned with your best and your healthiest self. That is so frigging powerful, right? That's something that I've been working on. That's something that I work on with my one-to-one coaching clients, and I think that there is no better investment that you can make with your time in terms of the first hour and the last hour of every day. But here's where it can get overwhelming.

Most of us don't know who we want to be. We don't know what our health looks like or what our happiness looks like, and this is an important step. You need to decide if you are a person who wants to exercise every morning, or do you want to be someone who meditates? Do you want to be someone who's more peaceful or more kind? Do you want to feel more in control or confident? And that's what's available to you. So, personally, I made this decision to be more present and more aware. I also wanted to be in the best shape of my life as I get older, so that's something I put a lot of energy and thought into. I also wanted to be productive and highly organized every day, and I want to be in a position where I'm creating my life and not just kind of reacting to what happens to me.

Now, even if you're not quite sure who you want to be, you can still take action right now and figure this out as you go. It's better to start there than to just continue to default to the past like we have been doing normally. Now, even if you're not quite sure who you want to be, you can start taking action right now and figure this out as you go. It's better to start and get going rather than just continue wallowing in the past. So let's talk about the sort of the ideal morning routine, the first hour, what that looks like, and there's lots of research to say you should do this, you should do this, and I think what I want to do here is just bring it all together and offer what I think is the best practice to include in your first hour of every day.

The first one is some movement right Now. This doesn't have to be a hardcore workout where you're lifting weights or running. This can be mobility, this can be yoga, this can be stretching, this can just be going for a walk, any kind of movement. And what we're trying to do here is bring the body back to life. We're trying to energize it, we're trying to get the blood flowing, we're going to try to oxygenate our muscles and all of our cells, and so movement is such a great thing to do.

First thing in the morning, okay, and in conjunction with that, what I often do as I'm working out is I try to drink a liter of water, and so now we're hydrating. So hydrating is the second thing. Right, you got to imagine, as you're sleeping all night, you're expiring air, and so you are losing a lot of water as you sleep, so becoming dehydrated. So, again, we want to bring the body back to life, want to rehydrate, and so, if that's with a liter of water or some electrolyte. That's my best recommendation Stay away from the tea and the coffee until later on, maybe an hour later. The next thing we want to do is we want to meditate. Why is this so important? Well, so important to do first thing in the morning because it's going to allow you to stay present for the rest of the day. It's going to allow you to connect with what's going on in your body, what you're feeling. You're going to be able to notice the old thoughts that just want to rise up in your brain and you're going to be able to just let them go and bring new thoughts into your mind. So this is a really great way to stay connected and grounded first thing in the morning.

The last thing that I highly recommend is planning. This allows us to be so much more productive, but it also reduces the decision fatigue we're going to have later on in the day. And what I find is, if I don't plan my day, I'm going to default to just chasing dopamine throughout the day. So I'm going to be on my phone more often, I'm going to scroll more, I'm going to check the news, I'm going to have more urges and more cravings just because my brain wants dopamine and dopamine is not a bad thing. But I don't want to chase it and instead I want to look at my day and have things planned out and get dopamine from being productive and effective throughout the day with my time. So planning allows me to do that. So when you first start, this can be as little as five minutes for each of these, so for a total of 20 minutes you can do some movement, you can hydrate, you can meditate and you can plan your day all in a matter of 20 minutes. And then, as you progress and this becomes more effective and you get better at this, then you can say, you know, 45 minutes of movement and water, five minutes of meditation and maybe 10 minutes of planning, which is the first hour of your day.

Here's why it's so powerful. Beyond the obvious of moving and hydrating and practicing mindfulness, I think that when you do these things first thing in the morning, in your first hour, you're creating early wins. You're creating early wins and then that's just going to set the tone for the day, and what happens is they kind of compound over the day, because now you've had early wins, you've had a taste of that and you look for other wins in the day as well. The next thing that having this first hour of a routine is it builds resiliency, kind of in alignment with the wins is you know that you've already contributed something to yourself and improving yourself, and so now you know you're capable of doing more throughout the day. You have this resiliency, whether it's emotionally, physically. You've just kind of put money in the bank, and that helps you later on in the day, as I mentioned earlier, the mental clarity. You reduce decision fatigue. And the last thing and I think perhaps this is the most important thing is you create this undeniable stack of evidence that you have discipline and that you're a consistent person, and when you just embody those values, it's really hard to fail the rest of the day.

Now I do see common mistakes, though, and I've experienced these as well as I've sort of evolved my morning routine. The first one is don't do too much to begin with. As I said, start with a 20-minute routine. You don't have to start with an hour right off the bat, so start small, don't do too much. The next thing is you want to have a plan. You want to have a sequence of tasks or actions that you're going to take. So, like I said, it's the workout and then meditation and hydration and planning. That's a plan. You want to have that in place.

The next mistake I see people make is they don't track their progress. So if you're working out, you want to track how strong you're getting or how much better your cardiovascular endurance is getting. Maybe you want to track just your consistency in terms of meditation, tracking that habit. So it's important to track your progress because that can help you get over certain plateaus and help you overcome different challenges you might face along the way.

The next mistake I see that happens is guys don't get up early enough before the chaos of their household sort of unfolds, so they get up too late and then their kids get up or their partner gets up and then it's hard to just focus in on what your routine is and what's important for you. So it's important to get to bed early, get up early enough so that you have the time to yourself, no distractions. And the last thing is that the weekend changes. So maybe you stay up a bit too late on a Friday night or a Saturday night and then that affects your morning routine on the Saturday or the Sunday and then it kind of bleeds into Monday and you get off to a rough start on the Monday. So it's so important that you still connect to your routine. Maybe you have a sort of shorter routine on the weekend, maybe it's just the movement piece, maybe it's just the hydration and you save the other stuff for later on. But you still want to connect to your routine so that you can stay consistent.

Now, speaking of staying up too late, your morning routine's best friend is the evening routine. This is peanut butter and jelly. These guys go together. It is so important because if you're not getting to bed early enough, it's going to make that morning routine really challenging. We want to get up, we want to feel refreshed and we want to get at it. So with the evening routine, there's four things that I've identified that sort of mirror and match the morning routine. I've identified that sort of mirror and match the morning routine. Right, it's almost like yin and yang. So the first one is breath, and the purpose of focusing on some breathing exercises is to calm the nervous system. We want to bring it down into parasympathetic. That way we can have the most restorative sleep that's available to us.

The second thing that I try to do is read. This helps quiet my mind. It helps me feel like I'm focused on improving myself, and so, even if it's just one page I try to focus on 10 pages but if it's one page or 10 minutes, that allows you to kind of quiet your mind and you'll find, most often than not, you're going to fall asleep while you read. Another great exercise is journaling. So this offers us the best opportunity to reflect on our day, to reflect on our goals, to reflect on all the wins that we've had throughout the day. So, even if you just write down a couple sentences, that is really powerful. Now, on those days where you don't feel like journaling, what I often tell my clients is go back to a previous entry and maybe you just write down some of the notes from a previous entry, or you read the previous entry and then again that just connects you to the practice.

And the last one is to express gratitude in some way. What are you grateful for for that day? Maybe it's someone you ran into, maybe it's someone you saw, maybe your colleague helped you in some way, maybe you accomplished a new milestone or a new personal best. Just reflect on and write down what you are grateful for and why is this so important? Before you go to bed, what's so powerful and the research shows this is it primes our subconscious right, it primes our subconscious brain and then this is what we encode as we sleep. So the more, the more, the more that we are grateful, the more we think about our positive elements of our day, the more that we are relaxed and we maybe read inspiring content. That is what's going to prime our subconscious and allow us to get the most out of the day, and then when we wake up, we're feeling much more happier, much more content. And there's a famous quote by Ben Franklin which I love and he suggests never go to bed without a request for your subconscious. I love that quote Again start small.

You don't have to do this for an hour At the end of your day. Five minutes of breath, work, five minutes of reading, five minutes of journaling and gratitude is more than enough, and then maybe you just expand as you go. In conjunction with that, there's some things you want to avoid. You want to avoid screens, avoid your phone and TV, avoid food and water in that last hour, because you don't want to get up through the night, and you will certainly want to have a restorative sleep.

If you already have a morning and an evening routine. You might be listening to this thinking I'm good, I've got this all figured out. Perhaps this is your opportunity to optimize your morning and evening routine. So maybe you want to ask yourself is there something I can do better? Is there something that I can do to optimize what I'm already doing? Maybe that means switching things up, adding a different element to the routine, but either way, there's always room for improvement. As I mentioned earlier, I'm always tinkering with my routines and I'm always looking to evolve them, as long as it doesn't happen that frequently and I'm just changing things and being inconsistent. And there has to be sort of this empirical evidence that the change that I make is going to have a better outcome.

If you already have a routine, then you know the power of the last hour of the day and the first hour of the morning. If you don't, and you want to see positive changes in your life, take action right now to focus on creating and cultivating your morning and evening routines. It's going to have a massive impact on your happiness and your health. Believe me, that's all I have for you today, fellas, don't forget to join the arena at our special rate. This is not going to last long, just until the end of the month. You can go to the show notes of this episode. You can find them at thespearmethodcom slash blog and there's a link in there to sign up now. All right, till next week, guys, keep showing up, doing the uncomfortable work to get better, get better, do better and be better. Thanks a lot. Now is the time to take action and change your life. Head on over to thespearmethodcom and discover how I can help you get started on your path. Better health and weight loss.