☕️ saturday mornings #10

improving health, contemplating death & creating morning routines

Hi all,

I hope you’re having a lovely Saturday morning as you kick off your weekend.

Thanks for being here. Let’s dive in.

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Book I’m reading:

The 4-Hour Body by Timothy Ferriss

I found this book on the dusty shelf of a thrift store, and for $4.99 I figured it would be worth a go. After the past year and a half, it was just the kick I needed to get back into experimenting and testing different variables to improve my health.

The 4-Hour Body is written to be a comprehensive guide to improving your health and well-being, and is centered around three core ideas:

(i)  Much of our general knowledge about health and fitness simply doesn’t stand up in lieu of scientific experimentation and testing

(ii) Really small changes consistently, in diet or exercise, produce big results

(iii) Measurement > Motivation (motivation wanes over time, so through measuring and tracking results, you’re more likely to create long-term adherence to a plan)

The biggest thing that stood out to me, even after playing competitive sports and working out most of my life, was how many assumptions I’ve made about health and well-being that were plain wrong. For example, “you need to work out 4-5 times a week to build muscle” or “the optimal number of exercises is 6-10” or even “you lose weight by controlling calories in versus calories out”.

This book both corrects false assumptions and replaces them with what science suggests. As Mark Twain reminds us “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The crux of this book is achieving breakthroughs through testing basic assumptions. Tim challenged many of these assumptions and did the legwork, completing tests over 3 years with world-class scientists, Olympic coaches, and doctors and a 4-month study involving 3,500 people.

It’s written in a very actionable fashion, offering specific step-by-step plans to follow, and covers a strong cross-section of health and wellness, from muscle and strength gain, to fat loss, perfecting sleep, reversing injuries, improving endurance, and improving longevity.

If you’ve been interested in improving your health or are looking to get back into a routine, I’d recommend checking it out. Not that it makes achieving the body of your dreams easy, but may provide some helpful ideas.

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App I’ve found useful:

WeCroak

WeCroak is an app that sends you five invitations a day to stop and think about death, via a quote or passage from a poet, philosopher, or notable thinker. Its creation was inspired by a Bhutanese folk saying: to be a happy person, one must contemplate death five times daily.

Although it sounds morbid, as I’ve been told, I was attracted to the idea due to its ties to stoic thinking. Stoics believed it was important to meditate often on the prospect of your own death, questioning the fear most people have of dying, and were emphatic about the importance of constant training in overcoming our fear of death.

Although the idea is quite uncomfortable, I believe it’s a reality that’s important to face. Grappling with the realization of death, as far as I can tell, will do nothing but good; provide motivation to live while I’m alive and have gratitude for each day. Similarly, stoics believed a regular practice of contemplating mortality helps us “accept what we must, let go of things that don’t matter and honor the things that do”.

And even though I may be young, Seneca reminds us: “You are younger; but what does that matter? There is no fixed count of our years.”

In short, if exploring some of these ideas is of interest, downloading WeCroak could be a great way to explore for yourself. It’s not for everyone, but facing these thoughts directly instead of pushing them aside has helped me overcome a lot of fear and anxiety about death.

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Challenge for the week ahead:

Wait 90-120 minutes after waking to ingest caffeine

I know a lot of people may be angry at me for this one (sorry Dad) but let me explain.

People feel sleepy when they wake up in the morning due to the buildup of adenosine in their system.

If you immediately compete out any residual adenosine by ingesting caffeine first thing in the morning, you lose the benefit of the cortisol pulse sent through your body, which essentially clears out the rest of the adenosine.

A lot of people, despite the pain of having to do this the first day or two, feel much better throughout the day (with much less of that “rise and crash” feeling on caffeine) if they delay their coffee or tea for about 90 minutes to 2 hours after waking.

Now, if you feel completely fine in the morning, this may not be for you. However, if you feel caffeine gives you those short-term highs followed by a crash and subsequent drop in baseline energy, it may be a helpful experiment.

Note, these findings are from Dr. Andrew Huberman’s research, a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

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Idea I’ve been thinking about:

Morning Routines

Somehow, peddling your “morning routine” to others has turning into a multi-million dollar industry. I can summarize every self-help genius’s morning routine that they religiously follow every morning. Ready?

• Wake up at 5am every day, including weekends, bubbling with motivation

• Effortlessly meditate and journal for 1 hour

• Workout strenuously for another hour

Now, I may be exaggerating a bit, but this is not too far from what I’ve seen.

The reality is that when people pretend they have some superhuman morning routine, and it drives a large part of their success, they can get people to buy their programs, put them on a pedestal and follow them religiously (ie. make money from them).

Over the past couple of years, I’ve tried out a lot of different morning routines from different people, ranging from famous historical figures to modern-day business leaders. The premise still holds that the first couple of actions you take in the morning are important. They can get you in the right headspace and set your day up for success (the majority of the time).

But, as far as I can tell, trying to emulate someone else’s morning routine is flawed in logic for two reasons.

One, causation is confused with correlation. It’s easy to think someone’s success occurred while they were using this routine and this routine impacted their ability to perform, neither of which may be true. For example, Bill Gates would pull multiple all-nighters while he was building Microsoft (with no morning routine) but follows a proper sleep schedule now that he’s climbed to the top.

Two, morning routines are personal in nature. You have different sleep requirements and available time each morning, and different habits may not work for you as well. Part of a morning routine is taking care of your mental health, so it makes no sense to do things you hate. It all depends on the person.

Now, if you’re convinced that (a) morning routines are important, and (b) most of the information out there on morning routines is garbage, hopefully this helps.

After doing a lot of research, speaking with various people, and testing things myself, I’ve compiled a list of different elements you can integrate into a morning routine. None are better than the others.

It’s tempting to feel like more is better, and you should try to do as much as possible. But for a sustainable routine, you have to be an essentialist; focus on the essential 20% of the items that will drive 80% of the benefits and forget the rest.

I strongly believe if you’re able to incorporate 2-3 of these each morning, that you enjoy, you’ll have a better morning routine than what 99% of people try to sell you:

• Wake up before 7 am

• Make your bed

• Drink 1-3 cups of water

• 5-10 minutes of meditation or a breathing exercise

• 2-10 minutes of direct light exposure (triggers the timed release of a healthy level of cortisol into your system and starts a timer for the onset of melatonin)

• Journaling or self-reflection (I’d recommend the 5-Minute Journal or Morning Pages)

• Read a book

• Workout: lift weights, cycle, run, jump rope, etc.

• Light exercise: walk, yoga, stretching, etc.

• Cold shower (entire shower doesn’t need to be cold to derive the benefits, only the last 30-45 seconds & change to cold slowly not to shock your central nervous system)

• In-person interaction with a friend, family member, or pet (similar to light exposure, social cues provide a stimulus for your central circadian clock, signaling to your body when to be active and when to be asleep later)

Note, a lot of these can be batched together in different activities.

I’d encourage you to test some of these ideas and see what works best for you.

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And there you have it, folks.

And, as always, please give me feedback. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? What challenges and ideas are you exploring and grappling with?

Have a wonderful weekend, all.

Much love to you and yours,

Thomas