Luyện nói tiếng Anh bằng Shadowing qua video: My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day

Is morning hard for you?

When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings and maybe a little more stress than you'd like?

That describes a lot of people.

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.

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.

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.

That's my first stop, right?

No, I don't recommend that.

I have used all of my background in behavioral science

and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol

that is enhancing of my wellbeing by managing the negative side of my affect profile and you can do it too.

Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours.

I'm Arthur Brooks.

I'm a professor at Harvard University.

I'm also the author of How to Build a Life, a column in The Atlantic about happiness.

I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up

and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas.

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.

Thank you for watching my podcast and for subscribing and liking and leaving comments.

Thanks also for recommending this show.

I know a lot of people are recommending it to others, and I appreciate that a lot.

We need as many people as we can looking at content about happiness and applying it to their lives.

Please do leave a review or a rating and a comment.

We look at all the comments, and we appreciate them a lot.

Also, if you have any questions or comments or criticisms or any other way that you want to interact with us,

the email to the show is officehours at arthurbrooks.com.

We're looking forward to hearing from you.

This week, I want to talk about how to start your day in the best possible way to set you up for well-being.

Now, what I'm going to do today is to talk to you about how I do that.

My life is based on protocols.

My life is based on a tremendous amount of discipline.

And the reason for that is because happiness doesn't have to be left up to chance.

I mean, a good deal of it depends on what's going on around you, to be sure.

But there's a lot more of it in your hands than you probably ever understood.

And if you follow my work, you know that there are many habits that you can adopt that will make you happier today.

Also less unhappy.

I'll talk about that distinction in this episode.

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.

And I'm going to tell you why that is

and exactly how you can adopt these ideas and adapt them to your routines as well.

Today, a mad scientist's morning well-being protocol.

Now, I've just referred to myself as a mad scientist, and let me tell you why.

In a past episode, I talked about positive and negative emotions.

The fact is that the limbic system of the brain produces positive and negative emotions for very specific reasons.

You need both.

You need positive, you need negative.

And if you don't have one or the other, your life isn't going to work right.

A lot of people say, I want good feelings and I don't want bad feelings.

And I say, that's wrong.

There's no such thing as bad feelings.

If you didn't have negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week.

They're an alarm system for what's going on around you.

Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness.

The trouble is that for a lot of people, they have very intense negative emotionality.

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.

We're not all the same.

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.

Above average positive, above average negative, below average positive, below average negative.

Now you know that you can interact these two things, and you get four kinds of people.

Some people, they're really above average positive and below average negative.

Isn't that great?

We call them cheerleaders.

Some people are low on both sides.

These are low affect people.

They're low positive and low negative in intensity.

They're judges.

Some people are high negative and low positive.

We call them poets.

And then there are the people who are intense on both high negative and high positive.

Those are the mad scientists.

And that's me.

I feel things very intensely.

And that's great on the positive side, but I need to manage the negative side.

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

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,

which actually has a negative impact from time to time on your happiness.

I'm not talking about clinical problems here.

I'm talking about ordinary life.

And you may have noticed that you have some ups and that's great, but some downs that are pretty intense as well.

what can you do every day to manage the intensity of your negative emotions such

that it doesn't feel dysregulated and obstruct your quality of life?

I'm going to give you a whole bunch of ideas

that I follow and the schedule on

which I follow these ideas every single day that has dramatically improved my quality of life.

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.

That led to a lot of research that I talk about in this show and that I write about as well.

But it also included some experiments that I did on my health.

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.

And I made a great discovery during those years.

I found AG1.

It's an all-in-one-place daily health drink that gives me all the things that I need.

And I've been a paying customer ever since.

That's why I'm so pleased that AG1 Next Gen is now a sponsor of Office Hours.

So head on over to www.drinkag1.com for a free welcome kit.

You'll get a bottle of vitamin D and five free starter packs of AG1.

That's a $76 value when you subscribe.

So drink AG1.com slash Arthur Brooks to try AG1 today.

Now, let's start off with a couple of questions.

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.

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That's what I'm doing when I'm in mass or when I'm praying my rosary.

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That's what the Dalai Lama is doing in analytical meditation.

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That's what you can do using any of these metacognitive techniques from journaling to prayer to any form of meditation

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that you like.

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find something that you get really good at.

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And that my friends is step three, getting metaphysical.

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There's a lot of research behind, uh, in the neuroscience and benefits.

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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,

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a lot of people beat themselves up.

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It's like, I'm terrible meditator.

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You're really going to judge yourself on that.

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Even for very short periods, it significantly lowers negative effect because of the metacognitive effects that we're talking about here.

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Really good study.

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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

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Ấn Tượng Đầu Tiên

Các bạn có thấy buổi sáng là thời điểm khó khăn không? Nhiều người trong chúng ta thường cảm thấy lo âu hoặc căng thẳng ngay khi vừa thức dậy. Video này mang đến cho chúng ta một cái nhìn sâu sắc về cách bắt đầu ngày mới một cách tích cực và hiệu quả. Đây là một tài liệu nói chuyện rất tốt cho việc luyện tập shadowing tiếng anh, bởi vì nó không chỉ mang lại thông điệp tích cực mà còn chứa đựng nhiều câu nói tự nhiên và gần gũi mà bạn có thể học hỏi.

Phân Tích Câu Nói

Trong video, diễn giả nói: “Hạnh phúc không phải là ngẫu nhiên.” Câu này gợi mở tư duy rằng chúng ta có thể chủ động xây dựng hạnh phúc cho bản thân. Nghe câu này, bạn sẽ nhận ra cách diễn đạt tự nhiên và rõ ràng, nhấn mạnh tầm quan trọng của việc kiểm soát cảm xúc. Điều này rất quan trọng trong việc luyện phát âm tiếng anh chuẩn, vì ngữ điệu và nhấn nhá ở đây rất rõ ràng.

Câu khác: “Bạn cần cả cảm xúc tích cực và tiêu cực.” Đây là một câu khẳng định mạnh mẽ. Nó không chỉ khơi gợi sự tò mò mà còn giúp người học hiểu rằng cảm xúc tiêu cực cũng có giá trị của nó, từ đó giúp bạn phát triển kỹ năng nói một cách tự nhiên hơn.
Cuối cùng, câu: “Hãy bắt đầu ngày mới một cách tốt nhất.” Câu này khuyến khích người nghe hành động và tạo động lực, đồng thời dễ dàng để ghi nhớ và thực hành trong quá trình shadow speak.

Thói Quen Thực Hành

Một cách tuyệt vời để luyện tập là tạo ra một vòng lặp đơn giản. Bạn có thể chọn một đoạn ngắn trong video và thực hành lặp lại. Hãy làm theo các bước sau:

Chọn một câu trong video mà bạn thích.
Nghe câu đó và dừng lại để lặp lại theo.
Ghi âm phần bạn vừa lặp lại.
Nghe lại bản ghi âm và so sánh với câu gốc để cải thiện phát âm và ngữ điệu.

Bằng cách này, bạn không chỉ cải thiện khả năng phát âm tiếng anh chuẩn mà còn nâng cao kỹ năng giao tiếp của mình. Hãy nhớ rằng kiên nhẫn và thực hành hàng ngày là chìa khóa để trở thành một người nói tiếng Anh tự tin và lưu loát!

Ngữ pháp trong video

Những cấu trúc người nói dùng nhiều nhất, kèm đúng cụm từ trong video:

Cấu trúc	Trong video
Thì hiện tại hoàn thành tiếp diễn have/has been + -ing — việc bắt đầu từ trước và vẫn đang tiếp tục	I've been working · I've been drinking · I've been doing
Thì hiện tại hoàn thành have/has + quá khứ phân từ — việc đã xảy ra nhưng còn liên quan đến hiện tại	you've slept · you've gotten · I've learned
Câu bị động be + quá khứ phân từ — nhấn vào việc xảy ra, không phải người làm	is intended · is based · be left
Mệnh đề quan hệ who / which + mệnh đề — thêm thông tin về người hoặc vật	people who are · probiotics which are · affect, which is

Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?

Shadowing là kỹ thuật học ngôn ngữ có cơ sở khoa học, ban đầu được phát triển cho chương trình đào tạo phiên dịch viên chuyên nghiệp và được phổ biến rộng rãi bởi nhà đa ngôn ngữ học Dr. Alexander Arguelles. Nguyên lý cốt lõi đơn giản nhưng cực kỳ hiệu quả: bạn nghe tiếng Anh của người bản xứ và lặp lại to ngay lập tức — như một "cái bóng" (shadow) đuổi theo người nói với độ trễ chỉ 1–2 giây. Khác với luyện ngữ pháp hay học từ vựng bị động, Shadowing buộc não bộ và cơ miệng phải đồng thời xử lý và tái tạo ngôn ngữ thực tế. Các nghiên cứu khoa học xác nhận phương pháp này cải thiện đáng kể phát âm, ngữ điệu, nhịp điệu, nối âm, kỹ năng nghe và độ lưu loát khi nói — đặc biệt hiệu quả cho người luyện IELTS Speaking và muốn giao tiếp tiếng Anh tự nhiên như người bản ngữ.

Phương pháp shadowing: đọc hướng dẫn từng bước đầy đủ →

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Phương Pháp Shadowing Là Gì?