Dhru Purohit Show - A Five-Minute Morning Routine That Anyone Can Do with Dhru Purohit

Episode Date: May 3, 2022

This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Vivobarefoot. Are you a fan of morning routines but have trouble staying consistent with them? If your answer is “YES!” this episode is for you! Here’s the thing about morning routines: how you start your morning often sets the tone for the rest of your day. When we jump straight into our social media feed, the news, or the priorities of others, our day gets hijacked right from the start, leaving us feeling unrooted, ungrounded, scattered, unfocused, and uninspired. Most of us know this to be true, yet so often I hear from my community that the most common reason they can’t stick to a morning routine is that they feel they don’t have enough time. Setting aside just five minutes (yes, five minutes) to nourish your mind and body in the morning is enough to transition into the day feeling calm, relaxed, and ready for whatever comes your way. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru shares an ultra-easy framework for morning routines that his dear friend, Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, created so that anyone can implement it, stick to it, and maybe even look forward to it every morning.  Also mentioned in this episode: -Try This: A Five-Minute Morning Routine That Anyone Can Do -Happy Mind, Happy Life: The New Science of Mental Well-Being -Dr. Chatterjee’s morning routine For more on Dhru Purohit, follow him on Instagram @dhrupurohit, Facebook @dhruxpurohit, Twitter @dhrupurohit, YouTube @dhrupurohit, and TikTok @dhru.purohit. Text Dhru at 302-200-5643 or click here.  Interested in joining Dhru’s Facebook community? Submit your request to join here. This episode is brought to you by InsideTracker and Vivobarefoot. InsideTracker provides detailed nutrition and lifestyle guidance based on your individual needs. Right now, they’re offering my podcast community 20% off. Just go to insidetracker.com/DHRU to get your discount and try it out for yourself. Vivobarefoot footwear is designed to be wide, thin, and flexible—as close to barefoot as possible. They promote your foot's natural strength and movement, allowing you to feel the ground beneath your feet. Vivobarefoot is offering 20% off your first order at vivobarefoot.com/DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi everyone, Drew Brode here. Today we're talking about a simple five-minute morning routine that anyone, yes, I mean anyone can do inspired by my dear friend Dr. Rungen Chatterjee. So let's jump right in. First question, are you a fan or have you been reading about the power of morning routines? But you've had a hard time staying consistent with them. If the answer is yes, today's episode is a thousand percent for you. Now, here's the thing about morning routines.

How you start off your morning, whether you have a routine or not, and often everybody has a routine, whether it's intentional or whether it's not intentional, but how you start off your morning and the energy behind it sets the tone for the rest of your day. When we jump straight into our social media feed or the news or the priorities of others, our day often gets hijacked right from the social media feed. or the news or the priorities of others, our day often gets hijacked right from the start, leaving us feeling unrooted, ungrounded, scattered, unfocused, and uninspired. Now, a couple caveats there that I'll just jump into. This truly is not about being perfect. It's not about having some sort of perfect morning routine, having something that's like super Instagramable, something that is like something that is like,

some idea of what you should be doing. This is really about having a simple couple core practices that can take only a few minutes to bring you back into your body. This is what today's episode is about. It's not about setting you up for failure. And in fact, that's often what I hear from my community. You know, most of my community knows that morning routines can have a benefit and especially if you've never done them before.

I've gone years of having many different types of routines. And then I find that I don't always need a morning routine that's there, and at least in a structured way. But then when I look from the outside, I notice that I'm still practicing a lot of the things that I would do in my morning routine, even though I don't think it's structured. So those habits become ingrained inside of you.

So anyways, as I was saying, most of my community knows that there's some benefits from having a morning routine. But this is the big butt. they feel that the reason they can't stick to it is because they don't have enough time. They don't have enough time. Now, again, that might be true if your morning routine is an hour-long workout, if your idea, rather, of a morning routine should be an hour-long workout,

a lengthy sauna session, you know, cooking or super Instagram over breakfast. And there's nothing wrong with any of those things. There's nothing wrong with people who that might be their morning routine. but that's not going to be most of us. And if you struggle with staying consistent, it could be helpful taking a step back and looking at what you really want, what you really, really want out of your morning routine. The goal isn't about doing some elaborate, time-consuming practice. It's about taking that time for yourself so that you can start your day off feeling grounded.

And that doesn't necessarily mean an hour. it could mean five to ten minutes. Yes, just setting aside five minutes to nourish your mind and your body in the morning could be enough to transition into the day feeling calm, relaxed, and ready for whatever comes your way. Because often a lot of people have the opposite. When they wake up, they immediately start with stimuli. And different people respond to stimuli differently.

Actually, stimuli doesn't really bother me too much. What I mean by stimuli is that you turn on your phone, you start scrolling your feed, and you get pumped with all this content of other people, their priorities, what they're up to, what they're doing. And many times, if your brain isn't primed, you start to set yourself up for, especially if you haven't slept that well or there's something on your mind that you're procrastinating about. Our brain is a comparison machine. So it will start to look at the lives of other people. when it is not in a state of gratitude,

when it is not in a state of groundedness, it'll start to look at the lives of the people, just in the case of like, let's say social media, for example, and it will naturally start to say, well, why am I in this pain? Even if that pain is super minor, like I didn't get the bonus at work that I wanted to get, or I've not been able to make progress in this one project

that I'm trying to make progress on. And somebody else who's posting the highlights of their life, You know, the best things that are happening to them or travel or whatever, our mind can dip into, why don't I have what I need? And then the answer comes in, well, I'm not, I'm not attractive enough. I don't have enough money. I don't have the right connections. I should have done this.

X, Y, Z. When you don't feel good, your brain starts to go on the hunt for answers. I've done past episodes where I've talked about this before. Your brain is like a detective. Whatever you believe, it will go out on the hunt to go find and confirm. So most people don't realize that when they get into doom scrolling, by the way, if anybody doesn't know that term, it's like you're just constantly scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, and for anybody who's like, oh my gosh, it's all these young key people that are like scrolling

on Instagram and social media and TikTok and they're the only ones of this challenge. No, there's the version for what would be typically described as, you know, the generation above us, that that can happen with television. You're constantly watching television or news or reality TV. And if your brain is in a place where it's looking for the answers for why your life isn't making sense, it can start to tap into, well, here's what I don't have. or it's this person's problem. It's this person is the problem and they're the reason that I don't have what I have. The other. And by the way, politicians are great at tapping into this, both from the left and from the right.

Say, hey, are you not succeeding in your life? Well, I'll tell you why. It's these people's fault. Hey, do you feel like your kids are having challenges in their school? Is this going on? Do you feel like you don't have that? America or the world wasn't the same way that you wanted to be, I'll tell you what the problem is, it's these people, these people are the problem. Vote for me and I'll help you fix it.

Now, it's not that people don't have legitimate things that they want to address, but a tactic that people have used for eons, probably since the dawn of humanity, is to take advantage of somebody who feels uncensored, ungrateful, ungrounded in their life and is looking for answers and then they're going to say that the answer is the other and it's their fault it has nothing to do with your life right and by the way it can have something to do with our lives we want to be empowered we want to say like here's the things that we can change and there might be genuine things that we want to improve but that's not what politicians say no they hijack your brain by telling you that it's the other and let's go out and get them vote for me i'm going to fix everything and rarely

does that ever work. Anyways, that's my little tangential on there. So back to morning routines and stimuli now that I got that off my chest. That stimuli that we start off first thing in our morning, when our brain is so vulnerable, can have all sorts of impact on us. It can make us more agitated. It can make us more stress. And if our brain is already heading in the direction where it's ready to believe something, the stimuli can give it the information that it needs to have that false belief. Instead, we want to tap into gratitude. We want to tap into being centered. And that's what today's podcast is about. I'm turning 40 years old and I can honestly say that I've never felt better. So many people have this looming fear around getting older because they think it has to come

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That's inside tracker.com slash D-H-R-U for 20% off. You know, in my experience, sticking to on the topic of morning routines to short, simple morning routine sets me up for success for the rest of the day. I'm more productive, I'm more motivated, and I'm in an all-around better mood. Plus, the little things that come up, again, that stimuli, the news, social media, whatever it might be, these little things don't stretch me out compared to days when I don't do that. If I get a little stressed out in the morning from these stimuli, opening my email too quickly when I'm not even in work mode, I haven't even grounded myself, I haven't gotten my morning sunlight,

I haven't taken a quick round of, you know, walk around the block that takes me like three or four minutes to do. when I check my email and I'm just jumping right into the day, an email that's maybe not the greatest news in the world is more agitating to me versus if I wait and I look at that a little later on after I've grounded myself, it's like, all right, cool, it's no big deal. I'm in control of my life. I have autonomy. I have agency over my life. I'm grounded. I'm resilient. And I'll be able to handle this and everything else that I want to be able to do. Now, since I can leave. literally feel the difference in my mindset, my morning routine in some form. There are times where it's very formalized. There's other times where I just have habitualized these practices.

But either way, because they've become so much a part of who I am, my morning routine is non-negotiable. Non-negotiable. But just hear me out. I'm not doing something elaborate. I often have tools in the toolbox. It looks a little bit different each day. But there's some. Something that's happening that I do to get myself grounded every single day before I jump into the priorities of everyone else. And the reason that I can do this is because it doesn't take me a long time to do it. That's why today's podcast I wanted to share this ultra easy framework for my morning routines that my dear friend Dr. Rungan Chatterjee created so that anyone, and I mean anyone can implement them, stick to it, and maybe even look forward to it every single. single morning. All you need is five minutes. That's it. I promise. And it will make a world of a difference. But you got to try it out for a period of time, right? Take two weeks, really to give it a shot

and to notice the difference. So here's why it works. Changing behavior is hard, which is why I'm such a huge fan of habit stacking and why Dr. Chatterjee recommends it in his book, Happy Mind, Happy Life, the new science of mental well-being, which, by the way, is already out in UK, but it's coming out in the U.S. soon. You can pre-order it in the show notes. He also recommends this practice to his patients to help them adopt healthy behaviors. And he finds that if they practice this morning routine, all their other health goals are much more likely to happen. Now, let's talk about habit stacking. And we've had one of the pioneers of habit stacking on the podcast before. His name is Dr. B.J. Fogg, and he's a professor at Stanford University. Now,

Habit stacking is where you take something that you already do every single day and stack another habit or behavior that you want to start doing on top of that. The idea is that stacking a new behavior on top of an old one provides a stimulus or a trigger that makes it easier for you to remember to do it in the first place. A perfect example of this is, by the way, regarding morning routines is to use the time that it takes to brew your morning cup of coffee or tea, free tea drinkers, to do all the five-minute self-care rituals that we're going to be talking about below. So imagine this. You wake up in the morning, you grabbing a glass of water, ideally, hopefully first, maybe even

keep a little glass of water by your bedside. That's what I do. But a little glass of water by my bedside. And I wake up first thing in the morning. The body is super dehydrated. and we're drinking a little bit of water. Some people prefer to brush their teeth before they drink water. That's fine as well too.

I can support that. So in this example that I shared, imagine that you're brewing your coffee after you drink your water, brush your teeth, whatever. You go to the kitchen. You're brewing your coffee. You're brewing your tea. You're putting your tea in your tea bag,

letting it steep a little bit. And in that entire process while it's steeping, you can do your five-minute morning routine. Just imagine that. Can you visualize it? Can you see yourself doing it? Okay, beautiful. Well, we'll get into what exactly it looks like.

So, by the way, if you don't drink coffee or tea in the morning, you can pick something else that you do regularly every day. That's already a habit. It's already a habit. Like having a dog and letting your dog outside to go, you know, potty, basically. Is that right? do you say potty poop pee anyways so here's how it works dr chattery breaks it down and we have a clip of it below if you want to watch it in the video version you can click on this uh link where it says

morning routine video dr chattery breaks it down into three steps that he calls the three ms you don't have to do the three ms in any particular order just try to do them every morning in a way that makes sense to you and spend about one or two minutes on each of them If you want to stick to that five minute time frame. All right, step one of the three M's, mindfulness, one to two minutes. Mindfulness can mean a number of different things to different people. But it's really just a practice that allows you to slow down and be in the present moment. There's no past.

There's no future. Those are all ideas in our head. there's only the present moment and every moment that we're in is always the present moment. If you want to read more about that, the power of now, fantastic book, completely really helped me rethink this process of how my brain is constantly living in psychological time, constantly projecting in the future, constantly projecting in the past. Here are some examples of how to incorporate mindfulness into your morning routine. So one of the most simplest ones, and there's a bunch of free apps that are available in the app store for this, the first one is mindful breathing.

The second one is a short meditation, a one, two minute short meditation. The crazy thing is even one to two minutes of closing your eyes. You know what? If you're here with me and you're listening, let's just even just try this right now. One or two minutes, if you're listening with me, even 30 seconds. Let's take a moment here. If you're not driving, right, and you're sitting and you can sit somewhere, or even if you're standing, and you can do it comfortably. Just close your eyes for a second. Just a little bit of time here. Close your eyes and just get comfortable whether you're sitting, you're standing. And just for a second here, notice your breath. No need to do anything fancy. Just notice your breath. Notice your breath coming in, notice your breath going out. Notice your breath coming in, notice your breath coming out.

Nothing fancy, nothing crazy, just sitting here for a minute. Sounds may come and go, you might hear background noise, let it be. Just keep coming back to your breath. Noticing the breath coming in, noticing the breath coming in, noticing the breath. going out, breath coming in and the breath going out. Thoughts will come, thoughts will go, just imagine them as traffic passing by on the street. Each thought is just a car coming and going, we're just observing it from a distance and we keep coming back to our breath. And one last time noticing the breath coming in and the breath going

out. And then together, if you want, it's a nice way to end this practice, which I call falling still. I learned from a mentor of mine, Serano Kelly. Let's take a deep breath in, hold it inside, exhale out, and let it all go. And slowly and gently, when it feels good to you, open up your eyes. All right, here we are. Now, that practice, which again I call falling still, something that I incorporate most mornings into my routine, a practice that was taught to me by my mentor, Serrano Kelly. His whole reasoning behind this practice is that

even a minute or two of falling still going inward can make such an incredible difference in our lives because every time you do it, every time you notice the breath, every time you go inward, that is a moment where you're taking a little bit of separation between the external world and the internal world. And even a minute or two makes a difference. Well, don't take my word for it.

If you did this with me, how do you feel? Do you feel a little bit more refreshed? Do you feel a little bit more grounded? I hope you do because even for me, I felt that. So going back to the first M in mindfulness, this was, a one to two minute mindful breathing a one to two minute simple meditation or falling still practice or even another version if none of those speak to you a one to two minute while your coffee tea is brewing or while your dog is going you know pee or poop outside stepping outside for some

sunshine on your face and getting some light directly into your eyes. Dr. Andrew Huberman, who's been on this podcast twice, has his whole morning routine that he shares with his audience. And one of the first ones is getting morning sunlight for a few minutes to help center our circadian rhythm for the rest of the day. And all the evidence in science that's around that. Okay, so that's the first M in mindfulness. Let's go into the second M, which is movement. One to two minutes with movement. Now, Dr. Chatterjee, keeps two-handed weights in his kitchen. By the way, I've been to his house in Manchester,

and I can verify this. He keeps two-handed weights in his kitchen and does some squats and arm exercises in his pajamas while his coffee is brewing. I love that idea. And if that idea doesn't feel right for you, you could try something else that you can do that you'll enjoy.

As long as it wakes up the body and gets your blood flowing and your lymphatic system. You know, a lot of people don't know. We often think of our body as mostly being filled with blood, but we have also our lymphatic system which pumps lymphatic fluid.

But unlike our blood, which has our heart as a pump to continuously make sure that organs, muscles, and everything vital in our body gets access to blood, our body doesn't have a pump for the lymphatic system.

So if you've often heard this analogy, sometimes we'll say, you know, I just feel stuck right now. Well, that stuck feeling is often related to just feeling stuck in your body and your lymphatic fluid not moving. So what is the primary way to move the lymphatic fluid that's in our body of which there's a lot? I believe, I don't have the stats exactly, but I believe that there's twice as much lymphatic fluid as there is blood in our body. I will fact check that here in a second and report that back out to you to make sure I'm giving accurate information on this

health podcast, but what actually gets our lymphatic system to move? Movement. So even a few jumping jacks, even a few push-ups, even a few squats. And if you can't do squats, just even a little bit of dancing. Everybody can dance a little bit. And if you want to do something a little bit more challenging, but you can't do full-on push-ups or squats, one really simple thing is. And And this is a technique that a lot of physical therapists that I work with teach their older clientele that's starting to get a little bit more frail, maybe hasn't been prioritizing movement, putting a chair. So if you're brewing your cup of coffee or your tea in the morning, taking a chair inside of

your living room, your kitchen, and just simply getting up, sitting up and then sitting down in your chair, but trying to use less and less of your. hands. So typically, if you would get up from your chair by using your hands to help you push you up, try to use a little less hands on a regular basis. It might be for the first few days, you're using a lot of hand pressure to help sit up from the chair. Right? So you're literally just imagining you're sitting in a chair and now you're standing up and you go slowly and controlled to sitting down again in that chair and then you're standing up. And by the way, even if you are really fit, a way to take this up to the next level. And

this is what I'll often do in my morning routine is I will get up with no hand movement and just balancing with one foot. So be careful. If you've never done this before, right, that's not what you want to jump to because it can be a little bit shaky, but that's one way to practice your balance and incorporate some movement. I honestly like one of my go-toes in addition to the chair thing is squats. Squats is just such an easy way to get blood flowing all around your body, all around your brain and incorporate a little bit of that movement that starts to make you feel centered back in your body how do you get in your body you move your body that's a big part of it one way which was the first m you cut off the external world just for a minute and you go inward you go inward and you

pause stimulation to you and you just recognize the beauty that's there in you being alive the second one which is movement, we just went through that. You get in your body by moving your body. And third, we have mindset. This is the third M mindset. Also one to two minutes. So a while back, I was talking to my dear friend, Dr. Rungen Chatterjee, about this persistent knee pain that I was experiencing, which was super weird because I stretch regularly and I work out at least a few times a week with a big focus on mobility. Now, Dr. Chatterjee asked me a super, simple question. He said, could your shoes be causing the problem? That simple but profound question opened an entire rabbit hole for me around the idea that our footwear should conform to our feet,

not the other way around. And that's when I discovered Vivo Barefoot, the minimalist footwear company. Vivo Barefoot is unique because it was created from the concept that the human foot is a biomechanical masterpiece. And when left to its own devices, it can thrive. But by cramming our feet into modern shoes, we are really messing with our feet strength and function, which can have a whole stream of cascading effects. In my case, it was the chronic knee pain that I was experiencing, even though I had top of the line sneakers. So I switched to Vpo barefoot, and I never look back and get this, within two weeks my chronic knee pain completely went away. How crazy is that? What I love about Vivo Barefoot is that it was designed to be wide, thin, and flexible. So you feel as

close to barefoot as possible, but with a ton of comfort. They promote your foot's natural strength and movement, and studies have shown that foot strength increases by 60% in a matter of just months just by walking around in them. I honestly can't recommend these shoes enough, and I'm so thankful I've found them. Right now, Vivo Barefoot is offering my community 20% off their first order at Vivo Barefoot.com backslash Drew. That's V-I-V-O-V-O-B-A-R-F-O-O-T-O-O-T-O-O-O-T-com slash Drew, D-H-R-U. If you missed that, just click down to the show notes and you'll find there. I also wanted to let you know that Vivo Barefoot is a certified B corporation, and it's extremely passionate about using sustainable and recycled materials. They make their footwear in

small batches, and certain styles are limited. So if you see something you love, don't wait to grab it. And if regular styles are out of stock, you can sign up to get email alerts when it's available again. Plus, Vivo Barefoot offers a hundred-day free trial. I know you're going to love these shoes as much as I do. I've been recommending them to everyone I know. Check them out. By the way, it's taking a little bit of a time to explain this five-minute routine for you.

But once you get it, it genuinely takes four to five minutes. If you want to make it longer, great. We'll talk about that in a second. But it really doesn't take that much time to do. Quick falling still, one to two minutes. Quick little movement, you know, two minutes of squats. Right? So we're at like three minutes.

Now, mindset, one or two minutes. This M is critical for starting your day off on what I would call a positive or centered note. The goal of mindset is the portion of your, the goal of the mindset portion of your routine is to gather your thoughts and steer them in a calm, quote unquote, positive, not fake positive, right? Positive I would attribute to agency to gratitude and bringing in some contrast. You know, how we practice gratitude is by setting up contrast.

We take something that we take for granted. The fact that our heart is fucking beating right now and we're alive and we're listening. And no matter what else is going on the world, we're just thankful to be alive. We're thankful to be here. So in this moment, we're taking something that we take for granted and we're putting contrast on it. I'm thankful for a house that I get to live in. And I wouldn't normally think about that. So I have to set up contrast.

What would it look like if I didn't have a place to live? What if it would look like if I didn't have my health? So mindfulness is an opportunity for contrast, but it doesn't have to be just gratitude. And I have another version of that gratitude that I'd like to share with you. It could be journaling. There's friends of mine, Alex and Mimi, that have created what I would call one of the best journals in the game

because it's called the five-minute journal. And it makes journaling in this process of journaling super simple. Now, in transparency, I've never been a journaler. I don't like to write down my feelings. Instead, I like to talk them out. So my version of mindset in the morning is I practice gratitude, but my favorite way of doing it is calling someone I love or even sending them a voice note, right?

On WhatsApp or the iPhone, you can send a voice note and just sending somebody a little note of gratitude. And I'll often regularly do that with my family, with my close friends, and sometimes I'll just scroll through my phone book and I'll click on a name that I haven't talked to in years. and I'll just send them a note remembering a time that we spent together. Remembering an incredible moment that we had together. Definitely not anybody that I've been in a past relationship with.

That's what you want to stay clear of. But friends, family, people that you met up at a dinner one time. You just remember them being a grateful person. I can tell you when my friends or my acquaintances get this voice note from me, genuinely acknowledging them, right? I'm not forcing it. If I don't have anything nice to say about somebody, I'm not going to go force it and come up with something.

When people get a little note, a little text from me saying, you know what? I was thinking about this time last year, and I just want to say that project that I was involved in, I was so worried about it. And you gave me advice, and it was really helpful and I felt so much more at peace. Just like thank you for that simple,

phone conversation you had. That's an actual one that I've sent before, by the way. When people get that out of the fucking blue, and I know, listen, people don't like me cursing sometimes on this podcast. I've heard from some of the vocal minorities saying like, why do you curse? You have such a great message. I will curse in moments of emphasis because guess what? That's also how I talk in real life. I'm not cursing to be crass. I'm cursing to make sure that I capture your attention in this moment to really emphasize it. So what I'm really trying to say is it makes their day. It makes their day when somebody hears from you out of the blue a quick little note that took you nothing, no time at all. It makes their day. And all the studies around gratitude show that giving gratitude to others

is one of the way to immediately start to get that change in your own brain and all the beneficial properties of gratitude and all the amazing things that are happening in the brain when you give gratitude, giving gratitude is a great way to get those benefits yourself. You can also do this. Some people are into affirmations and some people are into reading. You can read, people read scripture. People read an inspirational book. They read messages.

They read little meditations. Whatever it is, one to two minutes on mindset. That's it. One to two minutes on your mind. mindfulness, one to two minutes on your movement, one to two minutes on your mindset. All that can happen while your cup of coffee is brewing in the morning. And five minutes can make a huge difference. Don't take my word for it.

Try it. I said this above, but it's worth saying again, so many people jump straight into their social media feed news or the priorities of others that their day gets hijacked right from the start. There's no shade on social media. There's no shade on the news. I actually really love listening to the news in the morning. And after I've done my groundedness,

because I really do like to be aware of what's happening in the world. And I pick my news sources very intentionally. Right now, I'm a huge fan of this podcast called Breaking Points with Crystal and Sager. Found it to be a very well-balanced podcast and source of news information. So I love listening to that first thing in the morning. While I get my day set up, I'm doing a little bit of planning. have it on in the background. And I try not to first jump into that before I've done something to ground myself because I don't want my day getting hijacked by bad news or unpleasant news or

other stuff. Those things will all be there. The emergencies of the world generally will all be there. Every so often there's a true real world emergency in your own life, but those are few and far in between. And if that happens, great. Skip your morning routine and go and deal with that thing. but the rest of the stuff that the world says, this is important. You have to pay attention to this right now. Those can wait. Those can wait.

Even five minutes of a morning routine can ground you so that you can go out about your day making sure that your priorities don't get lost. The goal of a morning routine is not to have a morning routine. That's not the goal. The goal of meditation is not to be a meditator. The goal of meditation, which I've been honest in the past, I'm not a regular meditator, right?

Just want to be clear about that. I don't want to make it sound like I have it all figured out and I'm doing everything right. I've had periods of time where I've meditated for years and then I've had other periods of time where I just didn't feel called to do that, even though I know the power of meditation. But I do practice falling still, which I took you through earlier on a pretty regular basis. So the priorities that, you know, the reason I went into this meditation thing is that the goal of meditation is to keep you centered and grounded. So that way, whatever you encounter in your life, whatever goals, priorities you have, whatever

adversities you go through in life, you're so much more grounded and less reactionary. When you're less reactionary, you can decide, you have agency, you have autonomy, you can make a decision and you're not just responding to the, you know, the stimuli of the world. You're more intentional. You are more thoughtful and you're more long-term focus so that you can put your plan into action. That's the point of also a morning routine. Even if it's five minutes, little things start to build up over a period of time and when you feel good you're like you know what I feel really good right now I don't have my next meeting until a little while I don't have to be into work a little later or the kids are you know you know their dad or their mom is taking care of them this morning or you know I dropped them off to school I have a little bit of period time what do I actually want to work on maybe I want to write a little bit

maybe I want to come up with that business idea maybe I want to reach out to that friend that I haven't talked to in a long time maybe I want to apologize because I don't feel like I handled this situation in the past with a loved one in the way that I wanted to. Morning routine clears the slate, makes it so that you can be intentional with whatever the heck it is that you want to give love and attention to for the rest of the day. And the way to make that morning routine stick is to start off with a core habit that you do every day regardless of what's going on in the world and stacking a new habit on top of that. Take something you're already doing and add this to it. Most people drink coffee.

Most people drink tea. I had a friend asked me the other day, well, what if I go and pick up coffee on my way to work? I said, okay, great. So you pick up coffee at the Starbucks. Maybe right afterwards, just pull in the parking lot or if you're already in the parking lot, could you do your morning routine from there? The movement piece might be a little bit tough, but just step out of the car.

Do some squats there outside. Quickly, 30 seconds. Do a little mindfulness in the car. Do a meditation in the car. Some of my best meditations have happened in the car. And some people are like, do squats in the Starbucks parking lot. By the way, some people are like, that's weird. Well, guess what?

Weird is how you get to health. You know, there's a financial author named Dave Ranzi. I've quoted him a few times. He said, if being broke is normal, I want to be weird for the rest of my life. And so the same thing goes with health. Most people are sedentary. Most people are overweight, not by their own fault. It's mostly a byproduct of the system and the hyper-processed foods that are out there.

I hope we all know by this point in time that being overweight is not a moral failure and is also not as simple as calories in and calories out. Not that calories don't matter, but there's the horrible. whole hormone insulin model of weight gain that we've done many episodes on even if you're not eating that much food if you're eating foods that are constantly spiking your glucose which in turn spike your insulin and keep your insulin high that can trigger a whole cascade of weight gain that's there so you know the population is unhealthy the population is sick and they're all quote unquote normal. So let's be a little weird. Let's have the courage to be a little weird and do things

that are a little weird. If we want to step into our health, which a byproduct of that, you know, we do our healthy exercise is not to be healthy. We do our healthy living, not to be healthy. Just like the goal of meditation is not to be a meditator. The goal of living well is so that we can give attention to all the things that matter to us the most in life. Whatever that is, that nonprofit that you're involved in, that church community that you're involved in. Whatever it is, your grandkids, being around for your kid's wedding, your grandkids wedding, feeling empowered so that you could show up as a leader in your business or the company that you work at. These tools are in our toolbox to help us perform better, not that you're going to be able.

to make us arbitrarily more healthier. And the thing is, when you feel better, your blood work improves, your metabolic labs improve, you make better choices, and you live maybe not longer because a lot of that is dependent on genetics, but you live healthier. Your health span goes up. So this is the point of a morning routine. This is the point of investing in our health, giving love and attention to everything else that matters in our life.

And by the way, if your morning routine some days is longer than five minutes, great. Consistency and starting off by a habit that you already have and then building on top of it is more important. But then you'll naturally start to find that you want to add, at least on some days, a little bit of extra time because it feels good. I don't do my morning routine and it feels bad. I do my morning routine because it feels good. Okay, it may seem overly simple, but adding in the 3Ms to my morning routine has made a world of a difference in my life. and in the lives of many of Dr. Chatterjee's patients. I think if you want to give it a shot,

it can make a difference in yours. The only thing that I do additionally, and I hinted at it in the beginning to the 3Ms, is to have a big glass of water first thing in the morning. I'm huge on that. I really make sure that before I have my coffee, I have a big, you know, 16 ounce glass of water, and then I'll often have another 16 ounce glass of water

that I'm sipping in the morning while I'm drinking my coffee. dehydration is such a big issue and if you want to perform optimally in work everybody's looking for the right neutropic of the supplement that can help their brain move better is water first water first 60 ounces of water ideally before you drink your cup of coffee and then you can sip on a little bit of water while you're drinking your coffee in the day and i've highlighted that through my previous challenge called morning hydration challenge i have a link to it inside of the show notes and uh the newsletter that was the try this newsletter which by the way today's episode was written about in my try

this newsletter you can go to drew perot dot com d hr u p u r o hit dot com and click on try this to sign up for it if you want to hear dr chattery go into more detail about the benefits of his morning routine and how to incorporate the three ends and how it made a difference in his life and on his patients i highly recommend checking out the clips below in the show notes and also pre-ordering a copy of his newest book happy mind happy life which comes out in June 2020 in the United States. All right, let me know how your morning routine was. Hit me up on Instagram or on social media

and share the good news of your day. Drew Proet, signing off. I'll see you next week.