Shadowing Practice: My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day - Learn English Speaking with Video
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Is morning hard for you?
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When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings and maybe a little more stress than you'd like?
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That describes a lot of people.
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That will tell you about your emotional baseline, how you wake up feeling in the morning on an average day, not a day where you've slept nothing or God forbid that you're hungover.
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I'm talking about a normal day when you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're kind of out of sorts.
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You might say to yourself, okay, sure, sure, buddy, I'll get up at 4.30 in the morning, but I'm hitting the espresso machine first.
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That's my first stop, right?
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No, I don't recommend that.
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I have used all of my background in behavioral science
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and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol
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that is enhancing of my wellbeing by managing the negative side of my affect profile and you can do it too.
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Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours.
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I'm Arthur Brooks.
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I'm a professor at Harvard University.
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I'm also the author of How to Build a Life, a column in The Atlantic about happiness.
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I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up
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and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.
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And this podcast is intended to help you to do exactly the same thing, to become a happier person and to bring more happiness to the world around you.
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Thank you for watching my podcast and for subscribing and liking and leaving comments.
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Thanks also for recommending this show.
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I know a lot of people are recommending it to others, and I appreciate that a lot.
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We need as many people as we can looking at content about happiness and applying it to their lives.
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Please do leave a review or a rating and a comment.
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We look at all the comments, and we appreciate them a lot.
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Also, if you have any questions or comments or criticisms or any other way that you want to interact with us,
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the email to the show is officehours at arthurbrooks.com.
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We're looking forward to hearing from you.
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This week, I want to talk about how to start your day in the best possible way to set you up for well-being.
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Now, what I'm going to do today is to talk to you about how I do that.
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My life is based on protocols.
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My life is based on a tremendous amount of discipline.
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And the reason for that is because happiness doesn't have to be left up to chance.
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I mean, a good deal of it depends on what's going on around you, to be sure.
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But there's a lot more of it in your hands than you probably ever understood.
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And if you follow my work, you know that there are many habits that you can adopt that will make you happier today.
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Also less unhappy.
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I'll talk about that distinction in this episode.
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Really, today is about the protocols that I've developed over the years that have tremendously improved my life, that have made my life so much better than it had been in the past.
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And I'm going to tell you why that is
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and exactly how you can adopt these ideas and adapt them to your routines as well.
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Today, a mad scientist's morning well-being protocol.
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Now, I've just referred to myself as a mad scientist, and let me tell you why.
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In a past episode, I talked about positive and negative emotions.
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The fact is that the limbic system of the brain produces positive and negative emotions for very specific reasons.
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You need both.
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You need positive, you need negative.
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And if you don't have one or the other, your life isn't going to work right.
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A lot of people say, I want good feelings and I don't want bad feelings.
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And I say, that's wrong.
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There's no such thing as bad feelings.
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If you didn't have negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week.
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They're an alarm system for what's going on around you.
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Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.
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The trouble is that for a lot of people, they have very intense negative emotionality.
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As a matter of fact, as makes perfect sense, half of the population is above average in the intensity of the production of their negative emotions.
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We're not all the same.
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One of the things that I do, and I've talked about a little bit in the past, is the categorization of the intensity of emotions that people feel.
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Above average positive, above average negative, below average positive, below average negative.
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Now you know that you can interact these two things, and you get four kinds of people.
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Some people, they're really above average positive and below average negative.
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Isn't that great?
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We call them cheerleaders.
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Some people are low on both sides.
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These are low affect people.
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They're low positive and low negative in intensity.
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They're judges.
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Some people are high negative and low positive.
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We call them poets.
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And then there are the people who are intense on both high negative and high positive.
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Those are the mad scientists.
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And that's me.
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I feel things very intensely.
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And that's great on the positive side, but I need to manage the negative side.
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Today, I'm going to tell you how I do that, because a lot of you watching, Well, one of the reasons that you're watching this content
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and you're interested in it is not just because you're trying to feel more joyful every minute, but you're trying to manage negative emotionality,
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which actually has a negative impact from time to time on your happiness.
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I'm not talking about clinical problems here.
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I'm talking about ordinary life.
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And you may have noticed that you have some ups and that's great, but some downs that are pretty intense as well.
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what can you do every day to manage the intensity of your negative emotions such
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that it doesn't feel dysregulated and obstruct your quality of life?
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I'm going to give you a whole bunch of ideas
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that I follow and the schedule on
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which I follow these ideas every single day that has dramatically improved my quality of life.
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During the coronavirus epidemic, when almost everybody was locked down, me included, I thought I could use the time well by experimenting on myself a little bit.
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That led to a lot of research that I talk about in this show and that I write about as well.
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But it also included some experiments that I did on my health.
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I was looking for new ways to get multivitamins that were easy to absorb, pre and probiotics which are great for my health, antioxidants, superfoods.
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And I made a great discovery during those years.
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I found AG1.
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It's an all-in-one-place daily health drink that gives me all the things that I need.
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And I've been a paying customer ever since.
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That's why I'm so pleased that AG1 Next Gen is now a sponsor of Office Hours.
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So head on over to www.drinkag1.com for a free welcome kit.
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You'll get a bottle of vitamin D and five free starter packs of AG1.
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So drink AG1.com slash Arthur Brooks to try AG1 today.
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Now, let's start off with a couple of questions.
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Is morning hard for you?
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When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings and maybe a little more stress than you'd like?
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That describes a lot of people.
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That will tell you about your emotional baseline, how you wake up feeling in the morning on an average day, not a day where you slept nothing or God forbid that you're hungover.
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I'm talking about a normal day.
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when you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're kind of out of sorts.
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People with highly intense negative affect, which is what we call mood in my business, they tend to be these people with this high negative emotionality,
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and that includes me.
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Now, part of the reason is because I'm a high affect person, because I am this mad scientist.
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Part of it is because when you wake up in the morning, especially a few, well, more like 45 minutes after you wake up, you get a spike of cortisol,
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which is a stress hormone, and that kind of, that pours fuel on your high level of negative effect.
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And I'll top that off in my own case by being a pretty poor sleeper.
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It's not because I have bad sleep hygiene.
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It's because I come from a long line of insomniacs.
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I remember as a kid, any time that I would wake up, it was weird.
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If I would get up and go downstairs, I always found my dad.
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And he was always drinking a cup of, you know, postum or hot chocolate or something.
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Two o'clock in the morning, he was up.
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Four o'clock in the morning, he was up.
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Until it finally occurred to me by the time I was about 11 years old, he never sleeps.
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I asked him about it.
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He said, yeah, my dad never slept either.
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He said, good luck to you, son.
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And sure enough, by the time I hit 40, it became a real problem.
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So the result of it is that I'm always battling sleep issues.
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I've got cortisol spikes in the morning like everybody, and I'm a high negative affect person.
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That all adds up to a big need for me to manage mood in the morning more than any other time.
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I have used all of my background in behavioral science
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and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol
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that is enhancing of my well-being by managing the negative side of my affect profile.
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And you can do it too.
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This is a six-part management protocol on negative affect.
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Here's what it starts.
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Now, Now this is going to be a hard one.
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You're not going to necessarily like this.
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But to understand what I'm about to tell you, I want to take you not to some laboratory here in the United States, but from ancient wisdom across to the other side of the world.
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And I want to introduce the concept of Brahma Muhurta.
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That's two words in Sanskrit that means creator's time.
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It's an ancient idea.
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It's probably about 6,000 years old.
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Now, Brahma, it refers to God or the Godhead.
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Muhurta is a specific period of time.
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48 minutes to be exact.
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And so the Brahma Muhurta specifically is two Muhurtas and that adds up to an hour and 36 minutes.
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Now, what is that all about?
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The idea of the Brahma Muhurta, the creator's time, is to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.
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The idea was in ancient Vedic wisdom that you'd have a particular kind of insight into the mind of the Godhead.
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You'd have a special enlightenment.
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You'd have clarity of thinking an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.
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So don't miss it, is what they were saying.
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Now, of course, there are no good treatment control experiments, peer-reviewed studies talking about exactly an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.
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And a lot of you are not going to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn, so you can have this special connection to God.
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I know that.
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And especially if you live pretty far north in the middle of summer, there's no way you could get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.
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I was talking about this summer, this last summer when I was in Helsinki, and I was there at the end of June, and somebody pointed out that it doesn't get dark.
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So, you know, good luck to you on the Brahma Makorta.
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That's not the point.
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The basic point is that modern research shows that whether
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or not you can connect to the divine at this time or not, that if you get up before dawn, And this is based on treatment and control experiments.
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Again, all of this research is going to go into the show notes.
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Don't worry.
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But this is Kumar and Raghavendra and Mujanath in 2012 in the Indian Journal of Physiological Pharmacology.
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This is an excellent study that shows where students are in treatment and control.
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One gets up at seven o'clock in the morning
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and the other gets up something like an hour before dawn and gets to work, that the earlier group has significantly higher attentiveness and recall throughout the day.
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There's also higher levels of creativity and focus.
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If you get up before dawn, your work is gonna be better.
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Now, that's not just a question of higher performance.
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It's also the case that people who witness the dawn, who are up before dawn and fully conscious and witness the dawn, they have lower levels of negative affect.
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This is especially true for people who have seasonal affective disorder, people who have a lot of trouble with depression come January or February.
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It's actually pretty easy to get up before dawn in February because the sun is coming up so late.
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My advice is to use the happiness effect of this and the effectiveness,
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the productivity effects of the brahman-mukhurtah getting up before dawn in a way that will significantly change your life.
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Now, let me talk a little bit more about the science of how this works and how to use that time.
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I get up at 4.30.
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4.30 is my time to rise from bed, but I travel a lot too.
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And so there are times when I'm really jet lagged and I have to alter that a little bit, But I always try to get up before dawn because of these good effects, which I've noticed in my life.
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I've seen in the research and I've been able to witness in my own life as well.
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Now, you might be saying to yourself, yeah, man, good for you.
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You're obviously a morning lark.
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No, I'm not.
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And there's a lot of research on chronotypes.
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Chronotypes are the different kinds of people who are either night-oriented people or morning-oriented people.
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And the morning lark versus the night owl.
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And there's interesting research on that, by the way, that shows that people who tend to have trouble going to sleep and want to sleep in,
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they probably have a circadian rhythm where the day in their brain, the day is not 24 hours, it's a little bit longer.
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And so the result of that is that they're not tired at night.
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They're chronically a little bit not tired at night.
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And that's possibly the case.
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And if it is, it's almost certainly genetic.
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but we also have a ton of research out there that chronotype is also extremely environmental.
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For the longest time, I never saw the sunrise.
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I didn't.
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All the way through my 20s, I was making my living as a professional musician, and I got up when the sun was warm.
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I went to bed when it was nice and late, and I always thought I was a night owl.
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Well, looking back on it, no, I was just a musician who drank too much.
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Now, I don't drink at all, and it turns out it's easier to get up.
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Not super easy.
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I'm not one of those people who gets up without an alarm clock.
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No, I use an alarm clock every single day.
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I did this morning.
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It went off at 4.30 and I didn't like it.
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I said, because that morning alarm is something I would like to sleep through.
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But winning the day is a big deal as the first battle in fighting negative affect and raising my wellbeing.
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And it's so effective that I jumped out of bed as I ordinarily do.
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Now, when does this morning at 4.30 start?
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The answer is last night, right?
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The truth is
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that the most important way to be able to wake up early in the morning is to go to bed on time.
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And I try to be in bed by 9.15.
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And for me, if I'm getting seven hours of sleep, that's a great night.
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And I feel great.
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I don't fall asleep at the wheel.
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I'm not falling asleep during meetings.
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I never take naps.
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And I have plenty of energy.
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Right now, I'm taping this in the middle of the afternoon, and I hope it's clear that I'm wide awake.
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One of the reasons that people aren't able to get to bed, especially in their 20s, I've written about this a little bit, is called nighttime procrastination.
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And what this is is a phenomenon where you're sort of rebelling against yourself, especially as a young adult.
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You remember, you have this vestigial memory being put to bed, and you didn't want to be put to bed, and so you rebel against it by, even though you're the one setting the rules, it's unproductive.
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Remember, be metacognitive.
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I've talked about that in past episodes.
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Think about what is actually motivating you and you can manage yourself better.
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That's the first battle is getting to bed, waking up.
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For me, it's 4.30.
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Now, the first thing that I do when I wake up, 15 minutes after I wake up, I'm in the gym.
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I'm very lucky.
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I have a gym in my house.
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That's a must have for me.
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I've had a gym in my house for a long time, precisely because I get up so early.
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I don't feel like getting in the car.
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I want to go downstairs.
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I go down to my basement.
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I've got a real nice setup there, all the things that I actually need because I've been working out almost every day for the past 30 years.
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I'm a bonafide gym rat.
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Now, what do I not do?
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I don't ingest anything except for a little bit of electrolytes, creatine monohydrate, which is the thing.
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I used to take five grams a day and creatine monohydrate.
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I'm now taking 10 or even 15 because of the new research that shows that it has incredibly powerful neurocognitive benefits,
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as well as the physiological benefits with respect to muscle protein synthesis, or at least volumizing muscles when you're doing resistance training.
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And so the result of it is that that's all I'm taking.
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I'll talk to you in a minute about why I'm not taking anything else besides that when I start my workout.
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I work out 60 minutes a day, and I work out seven days a week.
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Now, you might be thinking, that sounds insane.
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You do you.
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You gotta figure out actually how much rest you need.
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But if you're working out seven days a week, You're obviously not working out the same muscles seven days a week.
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I'm 61 years old.
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I would be bent over and hurting all the time if I did that.
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I have all kinds of splits that I've been working on, and I have routines, and I have cycles that I've been doing for years and years.
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My protocols for exercise are something I'm going to cover in a future episode of the show.
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But boil it down to I'm doing a combination of zone two cardio.
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That's the cardio where you can actually talk.
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You're breathing hard, but you can actually talk.
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You're not that out of breath.
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and serious resistance training.
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So I'm either doing half and half or I'll do resistance training and then half an hour of zone two cardio,
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or more likely I'll actually warm down with zone two cardio and I start with 45 minutes of serious resistance training.
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I'm lifting weights is what it comes down to.
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Later in the day, I always do a lot of steps.
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I get a lot of walking.
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Esther and I, we go out for a walk for about 40 minutes every night after dinner.
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We live in a nice neighborhood where we can walk around.
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We're unlikely to get run over by a car and it's certainly not dangerous.
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And that's a real privilege, I have to say.
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But also it's really good right after dinner to do that.
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It's good for your digestion.
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It has a lot of protective benefits.
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And it's one of the practices that my friend Dan Buettner has talked about, that people walk after meals are some of the healthiest, longest lived people in the world.
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Probably you've seen some of the science on that.
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Maybe I'll drop some of that in the show notes as well.
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Okay, so I'm starting my day at 4.30.
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Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep with the alarm clock.
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Side note, I don't use my phone to wake me up part of digital detox is detoxing from digital all night long,
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starting an hour before I go to bed and an hour after I wake up.
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And that means I got to wake up a different way.
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I have this incredible device.
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It's called a $5 alarm clock that I got off Amazon and it always works.
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So I'm not using my phone.
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Very important, especially for a poor sleeper like me, I recommend it.
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Then within 15 minutes, I've got my workout drink and I'm down in the gym and I'm doing that for an hour.
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Okay.
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Now there's a lot of research that suggests that, that for different goals, different times of day for exercise might be better.
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Example for muscle, for muscle hypertrophy, it's probably a little bit better to work out later in the morning, middle of the day, sometimes even in the afternoon.
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I don't recommend working out right before you go to bed
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because I can stimulate a lot of cortisol and that can keep you awake.
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And you don't want that.
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You want your melatonin, your cortisol to cross so that you can go to sleep.
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But when we're talking about mood, you need to do your exercise when you need the exercise for mood management.
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This is the most powerful tool I've got over the course of the day.
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Okay, what do I know?
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People who have high levels of negative affect, intense negative affect.
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Again, we're not talking about clinical problems here.
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We're not talking about mood disorders of clinical depression or generalized anxiety.
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We're just talking about above average negative affect, intensity of negative emotion.
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There are some really bad ways to manage it, and there's some really good ways to manage it.
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The single worst way for you to manage your negative affect is drugs and alcohol.
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If you're numbing yourself, you're going to have problems.
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The second worst way to lower your negative affect is workaholism, just staying really, really distracted from your own feelings.
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Don't do that.
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You're going to ruin your relationships.
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You're going to lower your quality of life.
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What are the good ways to do it?
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Well, to begin with, go pick up heavy things and run around.
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That's a great way to manage negative affect.
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And here's the interesting point.
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I have found in my research that people who can't stay in the gym
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and who hate exercise and find real trouble with the discipline to stay in the gym, they almost always have below average intensity of negative affect.
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They're not mad scientists.
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What they are is cheerleaders, generally speaking, and God love them.
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but that's what I find for the people who struggle with this.
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The people who say, yeah, I love getting in the gym.
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I get in the gym every day.
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This is not hard for me.
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That's because they notice that they feel better, even though they can't quite articulate what's happening with their bodies.
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This is actually happening.
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They're regulating stress hormones and they didn't know it.
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So if you struggle with it, congratulations, you probably don't have a high negative affect issue, but you still got to stay in the gym because it's good for you.
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Me, on the other hand, I'm going for an hour a day at 4.45 every day for the rest of my life.
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And I hope that's a bunch more years.
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That's step two, get physical.
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When people ask me about happiness, I usually outline four areas of life, faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work.
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But there's a fifth element that's also really important for well-being, something that I pay a lot of attention to myself, and that's your health and fitness.
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Every morning, my happiness routine starts with a workout.
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And it's not just because I'm obsessed with bigger biceps and abs, that chip has sailed.
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Well, unhappiness and getting a better quality of life, exercise and nutrition actually will do more for your well-being than most people imagine.
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That's why I love the Pump Club app.
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It's actually not about hacks and trends that promise a lot but don't deliver very much as we all know.
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The app, which was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is called the Positive Corner of the Internet because it brings people together to become healthier,
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fitter, and create better habits and a more joyful life.
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As a listener of Office Hours, you can get 50% off the monthly price and get an annual membership for just $79.
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That's just a little more than $6 per month for your health.
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Visit thepumpclub.com and use the code OFFICEHOURS at checkout.
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That's the type of investment that you want to make in your future.
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The next step, well, since we call that last step Get Physical, Step three is get metaphysical.
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And I learned this one from my extensive work with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.
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Those of you who followed my work for a long time know for the past 13 years now, I've been working quite closely with His Holiness.
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And I go every year to Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills where His Holiness has His monastery.
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And we've done a lot of programs together.
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We've written together on a future episode of this show.
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I think a series of episodes on this show.
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We're going to show you content from one of my last interactions with him.
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So we'll do probably four episodes in a row where you'll meet the Dalai Lama and hear the conversations that we've had, which are very deep and very meaningful.
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But in one of my first trips, I asked him about how he starts his day.
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I'm really interested in how people in different walks of life actually structure the day, how their discipline works.
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He gets up super early, earlier than me, like 3.30 in the morning.
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He pedals on his bike.
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He has a bike.
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He has an exercise bike.
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I mean, he's got to stay in shape too.
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And then his metaphysical experience starts with analytical meditation.
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Now, I know when you think meditation as a Westerner, you're probably thinking about single point meditation where you're trying to focus, trying to focus.
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And for most people, that are early in the morning, if they're doing that, even if you exercise first, you're going to fall asleep, you're going to feel really groggy.
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Analytical meditation in Tibetan Buddhism is much like what Roman Catholics call mental prayer.
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And what it is, is you're contemplating a little passage in scripture or a saying or something wise and thinking about it,
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deeply, deeply thinking about what it means to you in your life.
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That's how the Dalai Lama starts.
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A couple of hours of that after his exercise.
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I thought to myself, yeah, that's really good because what do we need?
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We need body and soul.
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This is to manage your negative affect, to increase your happiness, and to make yourself more productive for the course of the day.
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This is a really good idea.
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I adopted that myself.
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Now, I'm a Catholic and it's really important to me.
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So what do I do?
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After I exercise for an hour, by this point it's 5.45 in the morning, I go and I take a shower and by about 6.10, I'm in the car because I go to church.
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I go to mass every day.
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When I'm on the road and there isn't a church nearby, there's not a 630 mass.
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I pray an ancient, venerable Catholic meditation called the rosary,
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which is a series of repeated prayers over contemplation of certain mysteries in the life of Jesus.
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It's great.
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That's 25 minutes in the mass.
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The daily mass is 25 minutes.
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The rosary takes about 25 minutes.
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And that's that metaphysical state where I'm calibrating the work of the soul.
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I could also tell you actually what's probably going on the hippocampus of the brain, because there's brain science that accompanies all of the metaphysics,
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all of the spiritual work.
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Of course, these two things work together.
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The net net result is I'm ready to work when I'm done.
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And I'm a lot less on edge as a result of that, because I've done those two things together.
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I've worked my body.
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I've worked my mind.
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I've worked my soul.
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I've worked my heart.
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And that's done at seven.
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That's part three.
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Now, you're not Catholic and you're not a meditator, you can still do this.
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You find your way.
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Some people will talk about this by journaling for 20 minutes or half an hour.
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Doing something that's contemplative, that's what you need.
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Something that's calm, that's focused, that's centering, that's highly metacognitive, where you're thinking about thinking.
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That's what you actually need.
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That's what your brain needs.
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Why?
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Because when you're in a naturally high level of negative of emotional affect,
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you need to pay attention to that, to manage that.
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You need to be in an active posture of managing your limbic system so your limbic system isn't managing you.
396
That's what I'm doing when I'm in mass or when I'm praying my rosary.
397
That's what the Dalai Lama is doing in analytical meditation.
398
That's what you can do using any of these metacognitive techniques from journaling to prayer to any form of meditation
399
that you like.
400
find something that you get really good at.
401
And that my friends is step three, getting metaphysical.
402
There's a lot of research behind, uh, in the neuroscience and benefits.
403
Let me drop some of that stuff in the, in the, in the show notes as well for meditation, even by the way, among completely inexperienced meditators,
404
a lot of people beat themselves up.
405
It's like, I'm terrible meditator.
406
You're really going to judge yourself on that.
407
Even for very short periods, it significantly lowers negative effect because of the metacognitive effects that we're talking about here.
408
Really good study.
409
That's in behavioral brain research from 2019.
410
I'll drop that in the show notes that gives you treatment and control experiments that actually how that works.
411
Interestingly, one of the neural effects that we see in studies of the brain are that people who are more depressed,
412
they have lower hippocampal volume.
413
And what we find is that both exercise and meditation,
414
people who are exercisers over the long period and people who are meditators over the long haul, they actually have higher hippocampal volume.
415
In other words, this is neurophysiologically protective.
416
This induces changes, biological changes to the brain, almost certainly.
417
Okay.
418
Now, one thing you might have noticed is I haven't said anything about psychostimulants.
419
I don't use any imagination on that.
420
I mean, coffee.
421
I haven't had any coffee yet.
422
You might say to yourself, okay, sure, sure, buddy, I'll get up at 4.30 in the morning, but I'm hitting the espresso machine first.
423
That's my first stop, right?
424
No, I don't recommend that.
425
I actually strongly recommend against doing that.
426
And I know it makes it harder, but trust me, When you get used to this, you're going to love the results of what we do.
427
Now, I'm not one of those guys who just doesn't hear about coffee.
428
On the contrary, I grew up in Seattle.
429
And I was a kid in middle school when there was one Starbucks.
430
I'm talking about the 70s, 1978.
431
It was near my house, near enough to my house.
432
I could walk there because I didn't have a driver's license, obviously.
433
And I would walk down to the first Starbucks.
434
And I've been drinking Starbucks dark roast coffee since I was 14 years old, 13 years old.
435
Yeah, man, I've got a grizzled adrenal system.
436
Yeah, a little respect here.
437
I've been doing that for the longest time.
438
And that's one of the reasons I love dark roast coffee, because Starbucks coffee was traditionally like super, super like burnt.
439
It doesn't taste burnt to me.
440
You could introduce something called Indonesian ashes and I would buy it and I would drink it because I love that stuff.
441
So yeah, I love coffee for sure, but I don't drink it when I first wake up.
442
And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that.
443
As a matter of fact, I don't have my first cup of coffee until 7.30 in the morning.
444
Sounds early.
445
Not if you're waking up at 4.30.
446
I don't drink it for the first three hours.
447
And there's a lot of research that talks about why that might be the case.
448
Now, if you watch a lot of other fitness and biology-based kind of shows on this, you know that caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors.
449
Adenosine is an inhibitory neurochemical.
450
What it does is it kind of, your brain is always in a state of homeostasis between excitatory and inhibitory neuromodulators or neurotransmitters.
451
And what they're doing is pepping you up and calming you down such
452
that you're not too up or too down all day long.
453
And they're always up and they're always on and off.
454
And one of the ones that keeps you groggy or makes you calmer and groggier is adenosine.
455
When you wake up in the morning, there's a lot of circulating adenosine in your brain.
456
It's one of the reasons that you still feel groggy.
457
Now, how does caffeine work?
458
Caffeine works by going in the little sockets that adenosine is ideally suited for because the molecule is shaped the same way.
459
And when it does that, adenosine can't get into the receptor.
460
And so it can't make you groggy.
461
So when caffeine, which very quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier and goes into the receptors.
462
For adenosine, the adenosine has no place to go.
463
And that's why you feel peppy from the coffee.
464
The problem is that if you leave, and this is one of the theories, this is like everything else in neuroscience, this is a highly contested theory.
465
But I find it compelling nonetheless.
466
So take it as you will.
467
These are, by the way, if you're keeping track, these are A2A adenosine receptors.
468
There's a number of different kinds.
469
The problem is that when you block all the adenosine receptors, when there's a lot of adenosine that's circulating in your brain first thing in the morning, the adenosine is going to keep circulating in your brain.
470
When inevitably you metabolize the caffeine, usually at two or three in the afternoon, because it takes a while, there's a half-life for the caffeine,
471
all the adenosine is going to go into the receptors at the same time and it's going to give you a crash.
472
That's one of the explanations that people often give for the caffeine crash, for the coffee crash, or the energy crash that you get in early afternoon.
473
If you wait until you've cleared the adenosine, naturally, you don't get the crash.
474
That's the theory.
475
I've tested it out.
476
It completely works for me.
477
You try it.
478
Delay your caffeine consumption.
479
But more than that, it actually helps mood.
480
A2A adenosine receptors are pretty interesting because you find that people with high stress,
481
high negative affect, they tend to have a lot of A2A receptors.
482
It's one of the reasons that that coffee blocking those receptors makes them feel so much better.
483
But you'll want to do it when you're not going to get a whole bunch of adenosine coming in behind it.
484
Because if you drink your coffee too early and you get the crash in the afternoon, there's a lot of adenosine going into the receptors at two or three in the afternoon,
485
you're going to feel really crummy and your high negative affect is going to come back in a rush.
486
If you're a naturally high negative affect person like me, you get the point that I'm trying to make.
487
So wait, wait, wait.
488
And I like waiting in three hours.
489
It's a really good feeling because I'm not trying to wake myself up.
490
On the contrary, I'm trying to use caffeine to focus.
491
This is where it gets really good.
492
That's step four, the magic bean at 7.30.
493
Now my day is really, really starting at 7.30 in the morning.
494
And you might say, well, when do you eat breakfast?
495
That's when I eat breakfast.
496
And that's when I'm eating my first very high protein meal.
497
I keep a very high protein diet because I want to be able to
498
have a relatively efficient level of muscle protein synthesis, which means I need to eat a much higher protein diet than I would have
499
when I was 50 or 40 or 30.
500
Um, when you can, I mean, you can have a piece of beef jerky and build muscle when you're 20 for Pete's sake, but now you have to eat a lot more protein because your,
501
your body is less efficient at doing that.
502
So I try to eat between 175 and 200 grams of protein a day.
503
My natural body weight is 170 pounds.
504
and I'm trying to stay at that, you know, one gram per pound of body weight or a little bit above.
505
And that's why I start a little margin for error on that.
506
And that means that I'm going to have to eat high protein meals starting absolutely first thing of the day.
507
So my first meal actually does two things for me
508
and that's I eat it just as I'm making my coffee at 7 30 in the morning.
509
And this is step five.
510
I call this tryptophan time.
511
Now I know when you've heard of tryptophan, tryptophan is the thing you get in the turkey, right?
512
I'm not eating a turkey dinner for breakfast, trust me.
513
I'm weird, but I'm not that weird.
514
And that's gross.
515
I eat Greek unflavored nonfat Greek yogurt, which I put a scoop of whey protein into,
516
and then I mix it up with walnuts, which are really good for you, and berries, which have a low glycemic index, and they're really high in antioxidants.
517
So I usually blackberries, blueberries, I like strawberries.
518
And sometimes Sometimes I'll put in a little bit of stevia to make it a little bit sweeter, but that's real high in tryptophan.
519
And I'm usually getting about 60 grams of protein for breakfast with a very, very good nutritional profile.
520
It's low in carbohydrate.
521
It's relatively low in fat as well.
522
And it makes me feel great.
523
It keeps me full all through the morning and fueled up.
524
And I got my first 60 grams of protein out of the way.
525
I'm not hungry until noon or 1230 when I have my next very protein-rich meal, which is generally speaking cottage cheese,
526
chicken, vegetables, or something like that.
527
And I do eat a lot of vegetables to make sure
528
that I get a proper amount of all the other micronutrients that the vegetables are going to bring.
529
So I usually eat five, seven, even nine servings of vegetables a day.
530
I guess I would count the berries in that to start the day as well.
531
Now, one source of protein that's not good for this, by the way, is collagen.
532
Collagen protein is very low in tryptophan.
533
Why am I talking about tryptophan?
534
Because tryptophan actually has a nice effect on your neurochemistry.
535
Most notably, that high tryptophan diet actually will increase the amount of serotonin in your brain, which makes you feel calmer, which is good for your negative affect.
536
And so you eat 60 grams of protein in Greek yogurt, and you're going to say, I think I can face the world.
537
I'm not quite sure why.
538
That's why.
539
Tryptophan, serotonin, calm, and it's better.
540
There's a great paper on this that I'd like you to read if you're wondering about some of these issues.
541
And just for laughs, I'm going to tell you that here's the title of the paper.
542
This is why I love academia.
543
Here's the title of the paper.
544
the bovine protein alpha lactobumin increases the plasma ratio of tryptophan to the other large neutral amino acids
545
and in vulnerable subjects raises brain serotonin activity reduces cortisol concentration
546
and improves mood under stress that's not the article that's the
547
title anyway um it'll go in the show notes go read it okay
548
so where are we that's step five is is tryptophan
549
and man at this point 7 45 in the morning
550
and i'm ready to rock and roll i'm ready to face the I mean, I'm set up, my negative affect is managed,
551
my focus and creativity are really working great.
552
One of the wonderful things about the caffeine that I've ingested, and I'm not embarrassed to tell you that I've probably,
553
at this point, I'm in the middle of about 20 ounces of Starbucks dark roast coffee.
554
I like French roast because it's the most burnt.
555
Is that what that's doing is just vacuuming dopamine into my prefrontal cortex.
556
Most of you know that dopamine is a neuromodulator that's implicated in a lot of different things.
557
Anticipation of reward, for example, wanting, learning, liking, but also creativity and focus.
558
I'm ready to go, and my job is creative stuff.
559
I have to prepare this podcast.
560
I write my column.
561
I'm always working on a book.
562
I'm preparing my lectures for the university.
563
I need creative focus, and I need big ideas.
564
And what I'm coming out of the shoot with in the next two hours is my absolute best work.
565
I promise you that this setup of what I've done about Brahma Muhurta
566
and the hardcore exercise and the metaphysics and then the coffee
567
and the tryptophan
568
and altogether what this is adding up to is the perfect neurochemical milieu where I can do this work
569
that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise.
570
Now, what I've noticed is that a lot of people waste this time.
571
They waste this time by checking email and reading the paper.
572
And it's kind of like, you know, before a dog wants to get into its bed and go to sleep, it kind of circles the bed and circles the bed like 90 times.
573
Don't do that.
574
Don't waste your neurochemistry.
575
Don't waste the dopamine in your prefrontal cortex.
576
You've got to be good to go.
577
Leave all that stuff aside.
578
Don't take any Zoom meetings, friends.
579
Don't take any phone calls.
580
look at your phone once every hour there's nothing good coming in don't read the paper yet go
581
when i do that i can actually get two hours of super high quality creative work
582
and about four hours total of creative work
583
and i can get a lot done i can get more done between eight o'clock
584
and noon with this setup i mean and this requires
585
that nobody bug me and that nobody bug you this is sacred time for you.
586
I can get more done in
587
that time than I would have been able to do when I was a younger man in three days.
588
I'm like superhuman because of the way this whole thing is set up.
589
I'm in the flow.
590
I'm in the flow for the rest of the day.
591
And the neuroscientific benefits of this really are related to what Csikszentmihalyi, the great social psychologist, we call the flow state.
592
I'll throw something on the flow state into the show notes as well.
593
I've got a nice paper here in Horizons of Psychology called the experience of flow and subjective well-being in music students, which I like an awful lot.
594
But you got to set yourself up neurochemically to be in the flow.
595
And part of that is making sure you've managed your negative affect, your high levels of negative affect.
596
This is my morning protocol, my friends.
597
I hope this is useful to you.
598
Does it sound insane?
599
All right, try it.
600
And then experiment on yourself.
601
This is the result of my experiments.
602
you need the result of your experiments.
603
Tell me how you're altering it.
604
Tell me how you're doing it differently.
605
Put it in the show, put it under in the comments on any platform you're looking on this.
606
I'm going to be reading those comments and I want to see what's working for you, what's not working for you, what works better for you, how you interpret the research differently than I do,
607
any objections that you have to this.
608
But if all of this is new for you, use this as a template.
609
You'll see in the show notes that this is all kind of laid out.
610
If you're missing it, you don't have to rewind and watch the whole show again, but you might want to.
611
Hope that's useful.
612
It's a good way for me to start this day.
613
It's how I'm starting tomorrow too, and every day.
614
Let's go to some audience questions.
615
Love it.
616
I've got a couple of really interesting ones.
617
One that came in over YouTube.
618
This is Skeltona, Skeltona, Skeltona1.
619
Interesting question.
620
How do we stay compassionate while protecting ourselves?
621
This is based on something I've done in previous episodes.
622
I'm talking an awful lot about how this is, that the art of happiness is not just about trying to get happier.
623
The real art of happiness is making other people happier, lifting other people up.
624
But in so doing, good question, Skelton Na.
625
One, how do you stay compassionate toward others while still protecting yourself?
626
Now, the way to do this is by understanding the difference between empathy and compassion.
627
Empathy is a very overused emotion.
628
It really is about feeling somebody else's pain.
629
We valorize that a lot because feelings are such a big deal, man.
630
That's how I feel.
631
As a matter of fact, a lot of reasons that people can't follow this protocol I've talked about here is
632
because they're comfy between the sheets at 4.30 in the morning.
633
They don't feel like getting up.
634
Win the day, man.
635
All of us, we should be doing that.
636
And one of the ways that we can do
637
that is by being a little bit skeptical about the overused emotion of empathy.
638
I'm not against empathy.
639
I just think it's incomplete.
640
What I like is compassion.
641
Compassion and empathy are not the same thing.
642
Compassion is an algorithm that contains empathy.
643
It starts with an understanding of what somebody is suffering.
644
Number two is enough feeling of that person's pain for you to deepen your understanding and want to act, but not too much because you don't want to be paralyzed.
645
The third is understanding what to do.
646
And the fourth is having the conviction and the courage to do it.
647
And a lot of the time, compassion is flinty hard.
648
It's something that people don't want.
649
I had three teenagers that I raised, and they made it all the way into their 20s, and they're having their own kids now, and they're struggling with their own toddlers,
650
which is just awesome to watch them struggle.
651
And I say, I'm so sympathetic.
652
I'm almost saying things like, oh, I'm sorry.
653
His diaper exploded on the plane.
654
I'm so sorry.
655
And, you know, I don't think he's possessed by Satan.
656
It's great.
657
I'm having so much shot in front of it.
658
Anyway, I digress.
659
The point is, when I had teenage kids, it was very important to be compassionate and not just empathetic.
660
If you just are empathetic and your kids are doing something they shouldn't be doing, it's bad for them.
661
You're a bad parent.
662
Furthermore, I wouldn't be able to protect myself emotionally.
663
There's an old saying that you're never happier than your unhappiest child.
664
That's bad parenting.
665
Nobody wants an unhappy mother.
666
Nobody wants an unhappy father.
667
Your job is to take care of yourself and give your kids what they actually need.
668
So, skeltonah1, compassion, not empathy.
669
Next question.
670
This is from Eduardo Soria of 638, also on YouTube.
671
A couple of good YouTube questions today.
672
Is there a direct relation between anger and lack of happiness?
673
Yes, yes, there is.
674
And this gets back to what we've talked about with respect to the limbic system and positive and negative emotionality.
675
The four negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.
676
So anger is, you know, implicates the amygdala, part of the limbic system.
677
It's part of your fight or flight response.
678
Fight is anger.
679
Flight is generally associated with fear.
680
Same basic setup, different kinds of reactions.
681
And these are negative emotions.
682
Now, negative emotions, don't forget, these are an indication that something isn't right and you need to react.
683
So thank God for your amygdala and thank God for these negative emotions.
684
You would have been dead a thousand times over were it not for these negative emotions to be sure, but they're not pleasant because they're not supposed to be.
685
So you're not feeling happy when you're angry.
686
That's just a fact.
687
Also, when you're disgusted, sad, or afraid, you're not feeling happy and you're not supposed to feel happy under the circumstances.
688
That's perfect and fine.
689
The problem is when anger is dysregulated, when anger is disequilibrated, when you've got a hair trigger, when you're having to apologize because of your bad temper,
690
or when you simply are not just too fast to anger, but you're angry too much of the time and for too long.
691
There's interesting research that suggests that people who have this hair trigger and they're angry all the time, they literally have a bigger amygdala than the average person,
692
physically bigger amygdala, and you need to take care of that.
693
You need to actually self-regulate.
694
That doesn't mean you need to go on some sort of pharmaceutical regimen, but it means you need metacognitive techniques, count to 10, count to 100, prayer, journaling, meditation.
695
There's a lot of different ways to therapy.
696
There's a lot of different ways to deal with this.
697
But the whole point is that don't worry about your negative emotionality until it becomes dysregulated, at which point you don't want to eliminate it.
698
You want to learn to manage it using many of the techniques that we've talked about right here.
699
Thanks for that question.
700
It's terrific.
701
And we've come to the end of the episode.
702
Ah, the mad scientist morning protocol.
703
Hope it's useful for you.
704
And I can't wait to see your feedback on this as well.
705
Let me know your thoughts at officehours at arthurbrooks.com or leave your comments on any platform that you're using.
706
We will see them.
707
Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple.
708
Leave a comment.
709
Even if it's negative, we want to see it.
710
We want to make the show as good as it can possibly be.
711
Follow me on Instagram.
712
Arthur C.
713
Brooks is my handle on LinkedIn, all the other platforms.
714
And don't forget to order The Happiness Files, as my latest book, Insights on Work and Life.
715
I hope you have a wonderful week.
716
Tell your friends we need another couple million or billion people watching this so that we can change the world together.
717
Join me in being a happiness teacher.
718
And until next time, stay happy.
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About This Lesson
In this lesson, you’ll practice English speaking and listening by engaging with a video about building a morning routine for happiness. You’ll focus on understanding conversational tone, academic vocabulary, and natural phrasing, while using the shadowing technique to improve fluency—ideal for IELTS speaking practice. By the end, you’ll be able to follow complex explanations, repeat key phrases, and apply the video’s ideas in your own words.
Key Vocabulary & Phrases
- Protocol: A set of steps followed regularly (e.g., "My morning protocol keeps me focused").
- Emotional baseline: Your typical emotional state (e.g., "Check your emotional baseline when you wake up").
- Affect profile: The mix of positive and negative emotions you experience (e.g., "Managing your affect profile boosts well-being").
- Limbic system: The part of the brain linked to emotions (e.g., "The limbic system controls feelings").
- Well-being: A state of health and happiness (e.g., "Morning routines enhance well-being").
Practice Tips
The video features a calm, conversational tone with moderate speed—perfect for shadowing. Here’s how to practice: First, listen to 10-second clips and repeat immediately, mimicking the speaker’s rhythm and stress (e.g., emphasize "tremendous amount of discipline"). This "shadowspeak" technique trains your mouth to form English sounds naturally. Second, focus on linking words like "and" and "but" to maintain flow, as the speaker often connects ideas smoothly. Third, pause and paraphrase key points (e.g., "Happiness isn’t just luck—it’s a choice") to reinforce comprehension and speaking skills. For IELTS practice, record yourself shadowing and compare it to the video to refine pronunciation and intonation. Learning English with videos like this helps you master real-world language while building confidence in expressing complex ideas.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | I've been working · I've been drinking · I've been doing |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | you've slept · you've gotten · I've learned |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | is intended · is based · be left |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | people who are · probiotics which are · affect, which is |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.