Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 hung over. I'm talking about a normal day when you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're

Starting point is 00:00:22 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 to behavioral science and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol

Starting point is 00:00:39 that is enhancing of my well-being 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.

Starting point is 00:01:03 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

Starting point is 00:01:44 any other way that you want to interact with us, the email to the show is office hours at Arthur Brooks.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,

Starting point is 00:02:29 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 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

Starting point is 00:03:16 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 it 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.

Starting point is 00:03:44 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.

Starting point is 00:04:11 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 they're the people who are intense on both. High negative and high positive. those are the mad scientists.

Starting point is 00:04:28 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

Starting point is 00:04:44 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 you may have noticed that you have some you know so 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,

Starting point is 00:05:30 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-in 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,

Starting point is 00:06:00 and I've been a paying customer ever since. That's why I'm so pleased that AG1 NextGen is now a sponsor of office hours. So head on over to drinkag1.com slash Arthur Brooks 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. That's drinkag1.com slash Arthur Brooks to try AG1 today. Now, let's start off with a couple of questions. Is morning hard for you?

Starting point is 00:06:31 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 hung over. 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. 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. And that includes me. Now, part of the reason is because I'm a high affect person, because I am this mad scientist. Part of it is because when you wake

Starting point is 00:07:12 up in the morning, especially a few, well, more like 45 minutes after you wake up, you get a spike of cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And that kind of, that pours fuel on your high level of negative effect, and I'll top that off in my own case by being a pretty poor sleeper. It's not because I have bad sleep hygiene, it's because I come from a long line of insomniacs. I remember as a kid, any time that I would wake up, it was weird. If I would get up and go downstairs, I always found my dad. And he was always drinking a cup of, you know, postum or hot chocolate or something, 2 o'clock in the morning. He was up, 4 o'clock in the morning he was up, until it finally occurred to me by the time I was about 11 years old. He never slept. He never sleep. He never slept. He was

Starting point is 00:07:53 I asked him about it. He said, yeah, my dad never slept either. He said, good luck to you, son. And sure enough, by the time I hit 40, it became a real problem. So the result of it is that I'm always battling sleep issues. I've got cortisol spikes in the morning like everybody, and I'm a high negative affect person. That all adds up to a big need for me to manage mood in the morning more than any other time. I have used all of my background to behavioral science and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol that is enhancing of my well-being by managing the negative side of my affect profile, and you can do it too. This is a six-part management protocol on negative affect. Here's when it starts. Now, this is going to be a hard one.

Starting point is 00:08:43 You're not going to necessarily like this. 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. And I want to introduce the concept of Brahma Mahurta. That's two words and Sanskrit that means creator's time. It's an ancient idea. It's probably about 6,000 years old. Now, Brahma, it refers to God or the godhead. Mojurta is a specific period of time. It's 48 minutes, to be exact. And so the Brahma mojorta specifically is two mahjurtas, and that adds up to an hour and 36 minutes. Now, what is that all about? The idea of the Brahma Milhorta, the creator's time, is to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn.

Starting point is 00:09:28 The idea was in ancient Vedic wisdom that you'd have a particular kind of insight into the mind of the godhead. You'd have a special enlightenment. You'd have clarity of thinking an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. So don't miss it is what they were saying. Now, of course, there are no good treatment control experiments, peer-reviewed studies, talking about exactly an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. dawn. 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. I know that. And especially if you're, 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.

Starting point is 00:10:05 I was talking about this, 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. So, you know, good luck to you on the Brahma Mikorto. That's not the point. The basic point is that that that, that Research shows that whether 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, again, all of this research is going to go into the show knows. Don't worry. But this is Kumar and Raghavendra and Mujanath in 2012 in the Indian Journal of Physiological Pharmacology. This is an excellent study that shows where students are in treatment and control, one gets up at 7 o'clock in the morning 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. There's also higher levels of creativity and focus. If you get up before dawn, your work is going to be better. Now, that's not just a question of higher performance. 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

Starting point is 00:11:14 levels of negative affect. This is especially true for people who have seasonal effective disorder, or people who have a lot of trouble with depression come January or February. It's actually pretty easy to get up before dawn in February because the sun is coming up so late. My advice is to use the happiness effect of this and the effectiveness, the productivity effects of the Brahma Hurtah, getting up before dawn in a way that will significantly change your life. Now, let me talk a little bit more about the science of how this works and how to use that time. I get up at 4.30. 4.30 is my time to rise from bed. But I travel a lot, too. And so there are times where I'm really jet-legged 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. I've seen in the research and I've been able to witness in my own life as well. Now, you might be saying to yourself, yeah, man, good for you. You're obviously a morning lark. No, I'm not. And there's a lot of research on chronotypes. Chronotypes are the different kinds of people who are either night-orienting.

Starting point is 00:12:16 people or morning oriented people and the morning lark versus the night owl. And there's interesting research on that, by the way, that shows that people who tend to be, have trouble going to sleep and want to sleep in, they probably have a circadian rhythm that's where the day in their brain, the day is not 24 hours, is a little bit longer. And so the result of that is that they're not tired at night. They're chronically a little bit not tired at night. And that's possibly the case. And if it is, it's almost certainly genetic. But we also have a ton of research out there. That chronotype is also extremely environmental.

Starting point is 00:12:52 For the longest time, I never saw the sunrise. I didn't. All the way through my 20s, I was making my living as a professional musician. And I got up when the sun was warm. I went to bed when it was nice and late. And I always thought I was a night owl. Well, looking back on it, no, I was just a musician who drank too much. Now I don't drink at all.

Starting point is 00:13:12 And it turns that it's easier to get up. not super easy. I'm not one of those people who gets up with that an alarm clock. No. I use an alarm clock every single day I did this morning and went off at 4.30 and I didn't like it. I said, because that morning alarm is something I would like to sleep through. But winning the day is a big deal as the first battle in fighting negative affect and raising my well-being. And it's so effective that I jumped out of bed, as I ordinarily do. Now, when does this morning at 4.30 start? The answer is last night, right?

Starting point is 00:13:48 The truth is that the most important way to be able to wake up early in the morning is to go to bed on time. And I try to be in bed by 9.15. And for me, if I'm getting seven hours of sleep, that's a great night. And I feel great. I don't fall asleep at the wheel.

Starting point is 00:14:03 I'm not falling asleep during meetings. I don't, I'd never take naps, and I have plenty of energy. Right now, I'm taping this in the middle of the afternoon. and I hope it's clear that I'm wide awake. One of the reasons that people don't, aren't able to get to bed, especially in their 20s. I've written about this a little bit,

Starting point is 00:14:17 is called nighttime procrastination. And what this is is a phenomenon where you're sort of rebelling against yourself, especially as a young adult. 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.

Starting point is 00:14:35 Remember, be metacognitive. I've talked about that in past episodes. think about what is actually motivating you and you can manage yourself better. That's the first battle is getting to bed, waking up, for me, it's 4.30. Now, the first thing that I do when I wake up, 15 minutes after I wake up, I'm in the gym. I'm very lucky. I have a gym in my house. That's a must have for me. I've had a gym in my house for a long time, precisely because I get up so early. I don't feel like getting in the car. I want to go downstairs. I go down to my basement. I've got a real nice setup there, all the things

Starting point is 00:15:08 that I actually need because I've been working out almost every day for the past 30 years. I'm a bonafide gym rat. Now, what do I not do? I don't ingest anything except for a little bit of electrolytes, creatine monohydrate, which is the thing. I used to take five grams a day in creatine monohydrate. I'm now taking 10 or even 15 because of the new research that shows that it has incredibly powerful neurocognitive benefits as well as the physiological benefits with respect to muscle protein synthesis or at least volumizing muscles when you're doing resistance training. And so the result of it is that that's all I'm taking. I'll talk to you in a minute about why I'm not taking anything else besides that when I start my workout. I work out 60 minutes a day and I work out seven days a week.

Starting point is 00:15:49 Now, you might be thinking that sounds insane. You do you. You got to figure out actually how much rest you need. But if you're working out seven days a week, you're obviously not working out the same muscles seven days a week. I'm 61 years old. I would be bent over and hurting all the time if I did that. 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. My protocols for exercise are something I'm going to cover in a future episode of the show, but boil it down to I'm doing a combination of zone two cardio. That's the cardio where you can actually talk. You're out, you're breathing hard, but you can actually talk. You're not that out of breath. And serious resistance training. So I'm either doing

Starting point is 00:16:27 half and half or I'll do resistance training and then half an hour of zone two cardio, or more likely I'll actually warm down with Zone 2 cardio and I start with 45 minutes of serious resistance training. I'm lifting weights is what it comes down to. Later in the day, I always do a lot of steps. I get a lot of walking. Esther and I, we go out for a walk for about 40 minutes every night after dinner. We live in a nice neighborhood where we can walk around. We're unlikely to get run over by a car and it's certainly not dangerous. And that's a real privilege, I have to say. But also, it's really good right after dinner to do that. It's good for your digestion. It has a lot of of protective benefits.

Starting point is 00:17:04 And it's one of the practices that my friend Dan Gutner has talked about that people walk after meals are some of the healthiest, longest-lived people in the world. Probably you've seen some of the science on that. Maybe I'll drop some of that in the show notes as well. Okay. So I'm starting my day at 4.30. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep with the alarm clock. Side note.

Starting point is 00:17:21 I don't use my phone to wake me up. Part of digital detox is detoxing from digital all night long, starting an hour before I go to bed and an hour after I wake up. And that means I got to wake up a different way. I have this incredible device. It's called a $5 alarm clock that I got off Amazon, and it always works. So I'm not using my phone. Very important, especially for a poor sleeper like me.

Starting point is 00:17:42 I recommend it. Then within 15 minutes, I've got my workout drink, and I'm down in the jam, and I'm doing that for an hour. Okay, now, there's a lot of research that suggests that for different goals, different times of day for exercise might be better. For example, 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. I don't recommend working out right before you go to bed because I can stimulate a lot of cortisol and that can keep you awake and you don't want that. You want your melatonin, your cortisol to cross so that you can go to sleep. But when we're talking about mood, you need to do your exercise when you need the exercise for mood management. This is the most powerful tool I've got over the course of the day.

Starting point is 00:18:27 Okay, what do I know? People who have high levels of negative affect, intense negative effect. Again, we're not talking about clinical problems here. We're not talking about mood disorders of clinical depression or generalized anxiety. We're just talking about above average negative affect, intensity of negative emotion. There are some really bad ways to manage it and there's some really good ways to manage it. The single worst way for you to manage your negative affect is drugs and alcohol. If you're numbing yourself, you're getting have problems. The second worst way to lower your negative effect is drugs and alcohol. The second worst way to lower your negative affect is drugs. You're not going to be a drug. negative affect is workaholism, just staying really, really distracted from your own feelings. Don't do that. You're going to ruin your relationships. You're going to lower your quality of life. What are the good ways to do it? Well, to begin with, go pick up heavy things and run around. That's a great way to manage negative affect. And here's the interesting point. I have found in my research that people who can't stay in the gym 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. They're not mad scientists. What they are is cheerleaders, generally speaking,

Starting point is 00:19:32 and God love them. But that's what I find for the people who struggle with this. The people who say, yeah, love getting in the gym. I get in the gym every day. This is not hard for me. That's because they notice that they feel better, even though they can't quite articulate what's happening with their bodies. This is actually happening. They're regulating stress hormones and they didn't know it. So if you struggle with it, congratulations, you probably don't have a high negative affect issue, still got to stay in the gym because it's good for you. Me, on the other hand, I'm going for an hour a day at 4.45 every day for the rest of my life. And I hope that's a bunch more years. That's step two. Get physical. When people ask me about happiness, I usually outline four areas of life,

Starting point is 00:20:13 faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work. 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. Every morning, my happiness routine starts with a workout. And it's not just because I'm obsessed with bigger biceps and abs, that chip is sailed. Well, unhappiness and getting a better quality of life. Exercise and nutrition actually will do more for your well-being than most people imagine. That's why I love the Pump Club app. It's actually not about hacks and trends that promise a lot, but don't deliver very much, as we all know. The app, which was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is called the positive corner of the internet

Starting point is 00:20:55 because it brings people together to become healthier, fitter, and create better habits in a more joyful life. As a listener of office hours, you can get 50% off the monthly price and get an annual membership for just $79. That's just a little more than $6 per month for your health. Visit the pumpclub.com and use the code office hours at checkout. That's the type of investment that you want to make in your future.

Starting point is 00:21:20 The next step, well, since we call that last step, get physical. Step three is getting metaphysical. And I learned this one from my extensive work with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. 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. And I go every year to Darm Sal in the Himalayan foothills, where His Holiness has his monastery. And we've done a lot of programs together.

Starting point is 00:21:44 We've written together on a future episode of this show, I think a series of episodes on this show, we're going to show you content from one of my last interactions with him. 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. But in one of my first trips, I asked him about how he starts his day. I'm really interested in how people in different walks of life actually structure the day, how their discipline works.

Starting point is 00:22:12 He gets up super early, earlier than me, like 3.30 in the morning. he pedals on his bike. He has a bike, he has an exercise bike. I mean, he's got to stay in shape too. And then his metaphysical experience starts with analytical meditation. Now, I know when you think meditation as a Westerner, you're probably thinking about single point meditation. We're trying to focus, trying to focus.

Starting point is 00:22:34 And for most people, they're 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. Analytical meditation in Tibetan Buddhism, is much like what Roman Catholics call mental prayer. And what it is is you're contemplating a little passage in scripture or a saying or something wise and thinking about it deeply, deeply thinking about what it means to you in your life. That's how the Dalai Lama starts, a couple of hours of that after his exercise.

Starting point is 00:23:07 I thought to myself, yeah, it's really good because what do we need? We need body and soul. This is to manage your negative affect, to increase your happiness, and to make yourself more productive. for the course of the day, this is a really good idea. I adopted that myself. Now, I'm a Catholic, and it's really important to me. So what do I do? After I exercise for an hour, by this point is 5.45 in the morning, I go and I take a shower. And by about 610, I'm in the car because I go to church. I go to mass every day. When I'm on the road and there isn't a church nearby, there's not a 630 mass. I pray an ancient, a venerable Catholic meditation called the Rosary, which is a series of

Starting point is 00:23:43 repeated prayers over a contemplation of certain mysteries in the life of Jesus. It's great. That's 25 minutes in the Mass. The daily mass is 25 minutes. The rosary takes about 25 minutes. And that's that metaphysical state where I'm calibrating the work of the soul. 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, all of the spiritual work. Of course, these two things work together. The net net result is, I'm ready to work when I'm done and I'm a lot less on edge as a result of that because I've done those two things together. I've worked my body.

Starting point is 00:24:21 I've worked my mind. I've worked my soul. I've worked my heart. And that's done at seven. That's part three. Now, you're not Catholic and you're not a meditator. You can still do this. You find your way.

Starting point is 00:24:34 Some people will talk about this by by journaling for 20 minutes or half an hour. Doing something that's contemplative. that's what you need, something that's calm, that's focused, that's centering, that's highly metacognitive, where you're thinking about thinking. That's what you actually need. That's what your brain needs. Why? Because when you're in a naturally high level of negative emotional affect, you need to pay attention to that, to manage that. You need to be in an active posture of managing your limbic system so your limbic system isn't managing you. That's what I'm doing when I'm in mass or when I'm praying my rosary. That's what the only Lama.

Starting point is 00:25:13 is doing an analytical meditation. That's what you can do using any of these metacognitive techniques from journaling to prayer to any form of meditation

Starting point is 00:25:24 that you like. Find something that you get really good at. And that, my friends, is step three, getting metaphysical. There's a lot of research behind in the neuroscience

Starting point is 00:25:35 and benefits. Let me drop some of that stuff in the show notes as well where meditation, even by the way, among completely inexperienced meditators. A lot of people beat themselves up. It's like, I'm a terrible meditator.

Starting point is 00:25:48 You're really going to judge yourself on that? Even for very short periods, it significantly lowers negative effect because of the metacognitive effects that we're talking about here. Really good study that's in behavioral brain research from 2019. I'll drop that in the show notes that gives you treatment and control experiments that actually how that works. Interestingly, one of the one of the, the neural effects that we see in studies of the brain are that when that people who are more

Starting point is 00:26:19 depressed, they have lower hippocampal volume. And what we find is that both exercise and meditation, people who are exercisers over the long period and people who are meditators over the long haul, they actually have higher hippocampal volume. In other words, this is neurophysiologically protective. This induces changes, biological changes. to the brain almost certainly. Okay. Now, one thing you might have noticed is I haven't said anything about psychostimulance. I don't use any imagination on that. I mean coffee. I haven't any coffee yet. 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.

Starting point is 00:27:03 I actually strongly recommend against doing that. 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. Now, I'm, I'm, I'm not one of those guys who just doesn't hear about coffee. On the contrary, I grew up in Seattle. And I was a kid in middle school when there was one Starbucks. I'm talking about the 70s, I need 78. It was near my house. Near enough to my house, I could walk there because I didn't have a driver's license, obviously.

Starting point is 00:27:30 And I would walk down to the first Starbucks. And I've been drinking Starbucks dark-rozed coffee since I was 14 years old, 13 years old. Yeah, man. I've got a grizzled adrenal system. Yeah, a little respect here. I've been doing that for the longest time. And that's one of the reasons I love dark roast coffee because Starbucks coffee was traditionally

Starting point is 00:27:51 like super, super like burnt. It doesn't taste burnt to me. You could introduce something called Indonesian ashes and I would buy it and I would drink it because I love that stuff. So yeah, I love coffee for sure. But I don't drink it when I first wake up and there's a whole bunch of reasons for that.

Starting point is 00:28:06 As a matter of fact, I don't have my first cup of coffee until 7.30 in the morning. Sounds early. Not if you're waking up at 4.30. I don't drink it for the first three hours. And there's a lot of research that talks about why that might be the case. 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.

Starting point is 00:28:27 Adenosine is an inhibitory neurochemical. What it does is it kind of, your brain is always in a state of homeostasis between excitatory and inhibitory neuromodulators or neurotransmitters. and what they're doing is pepping you up and calming you down such that you're not too up or too down all day long and there was up and there was on and off and one of the ones that keeps you groggy or makes you calmer and grogier is adenosine. When you wake up in the morning, there's a lot of circulating adenosine in your brains. One of the reasons that you still feel groggy. Now, how does caffeine work?

Starting point is 00:29:00 Caffeine works by going in the little sockets that the adenosine is ideally suited for because the molecule is shaped the same way. And when it does that, adenosine can't get into the receptor, and so it can't make you groggy. So when caffeine, which very quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier and goes into the receptors for adenosine, the dendocene has no place to go, and that's why you feel peppy from the coffee.

Starting point is 00:29:29 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. But I find it compelling, less. So take it as you will. These are, by the way, if you're keeping track, these are A2A adenosine receptors. There's a number of different kinds. 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. When

Starting point is 00:29:53 inevitably you metabolize the caffeine, usually or two or three in the afternoon, because it takes a while. There's a half-life for the caffeine. All the adenosine is going to go into the receptors at the same time and it's going to give you a crash. That's one of the explanations that people often give for the caffeine crash or the coffee crash that you or the energy crash that you get in the in early afternoon. If you wait until you clear the adenosine, naturally, you don't get the crash. That's the theory. I've tested it out. It completely works for me. You try it. Delay your caffeine consumption. But more than that, it actually, it actually helps mood. A2A adenicine receptors are pretty interesting because you find that people with high stress,

Starting point is 00:30:34 high, you know, negative affect, they tend to have a lot of A2A receptors. It's one of the reasons that coffee blocking those receptors makes them feel so much better. But you want to do it when you're not going to get a whole bunch of adenosine coming in behind it because if you drink your coffee too early and you get the crash in the afternoon, there's a lot of adenicine going into the receptors at two or three in the afternoon, you're going to feel really crummy and your high negative effect is going to come back in a rush if you're a naturally high negative affect person like me. You get the point that I'm trying to make.

Starting point is 00:31:08 So wait, wait, wait, and I like wait in three hours. It's a really good feeling because I'm not trying to wake myself up. On the contrary, I'm trying to use caffeine to focus. This is where it gets really good. That's step four, the magic bean at 7.30. Now my day is really, really starting at 7.30 in the morning. And you might say, would you eat breakfast? that's when I eat breakfast. And that's when I'm eating my first very high protein meal. I keep a very

Starting point is 00:31:36 high protein diet because I want to be able to have a relatively efficient level of muscle protein synthesis, which means I need to eat a much higher protein diet than I would have when I was 50 or 40 or 30 when you can, I mean, you can have a piece of beef jerky and build muscle when you're 20 for a piece sake. But now you have to eat a lot more protein because your body is less efficient at doing that. So I try to eat between 175 and 200 grams of protein a day. My natural body weight is 170 pounds, and I'm trying to stay at that, you know, one gram per pound of body weight or a little bit above. And that's why I said a little margin for error on that.

Starting point is 00:32:13 And that means that I'm going to have to eat high protein meals starting absolutely first thing of the day. So my first meal actually does two things for me. And that's I eat it just as I'm making my coffee at 7.30 in the morning. And this is step five. I call this triptophan time. Now, I know when you've heard of triptophan, triptophan is the thing you get in the turkey, right?

Starting point is 00:32:32 I'm not eating a turkey dinner for breakfast. Trust me. I'm weird, but I'm not that weird, and that's gross. I eat Greek unflavored non-fat Greek yogurt, which I put a scoop of weight protein into, and then I mix it up with walnuts, which are really good for you in berries, which have a low glycemic index,

Starting point is 00:32:52 and they're really high in antioxidants. So I usually blackberries, blueberries. I like strawberries. And sometimes I'll put in a little bit of stevia to make it a little bit sweeter. But that's real high in tryptophan. And I'm usually getting about 60 grams of protein for breakfast with a very, very good nutritional profile. It's low in carbohydrate. It's relatively low in fat as well.

Starting point is 00:33:15 And it makes me feel great. It keeps me full all through the morning and fueled up. And I got my first 60 grams of protein out of the way. I'm not hungry until noon or 1230 when I have my next very very. protein-rich meal, which is generally speaking cottage cheese, chicken, vegetables or something like that. And I do eat a lot of vegetables to make sure they get a proper amount of all the other micronutrients that the vegetables are going to bring. So I usually eat, you know, five, seven, even nine servings of vegetables a day. I guess I would count the berries in that to start the day as well.

Starting point is 00:33:46 Now, one source of protein that's not good for this, by the way, is collagen. Collagen. Collagen protein is very low in tryptophan. Why am I talking about triptophan? Because triptophan actually has a nice effect on your neurochemistry. Most notably, that high triptophan diet actually will increase the amount of serotonin in your brain, which makes you feel calmer, which is good for your negative affect. And so you eat 60 grams of protein in Greek yogurt, and you're going to say, I think I can face the world. I'm not quite sure why. That's why. Triptophan, serotonin, calm, and it's better. It's a great paper on this that I'd like you to read. If you're wondering about some of these. issues. And just for, just for laughs, I'm going to tell you that here's the title of the paper.

Starting point is 00:34:31 This is why I love academia. Here's the title of a paper. The bovine protein alpha lactobumin increases the plasma ratio of triptophan to the other large neutral amino acids and in vulnerable subjects raises brain serotonin activity, reduces cortisol concentration, and improves mood under stress. That's not the article. That's the title. Anyway, it'll go in the show notes. Go read it. Okay, so where are we? That's step five is, is true. And man, at this point, 7.45 in the morning, and I'm ready to rock and roll. I'm ready to face the day. I mean, I'm set up. My negative affect is managed. My, my focus and creativity are really working great. One of the wonderful things about the caffeine that I've ingested. And I'm not embarrassed to tell you that I've probably, at this point, I'm in the middle of about 20 ounces of Starbucks, Starbucks dark roast coffee. I like French roast because it's the most burnt. is that what that's doing is just vacuuming dopamine into my prefoldal cortex. Most of you know that dopamine is a neuromodulator that's implicated in a lot of different things,

Starting point is 00:35:35 anticipation of reward, for example, wanting, learning, liking, but also creativity and focus. I'm ready to go and my job is creative stuff. I have to prepare this podcast. I write my column. I'm always working on a book. I'm preparing my lectures for the university. I need creative focus and I need big ideas. And what I'm coming out of the shoot with in the next two hours is my absolutely,

Starting point is 00:35:57 absolute best work. I promise you that this setup of what I've done about Brahma Mahorta and the hardcore exercise and the metaphysics and then the coffee and the triptophan and altogether what this is adding up to is the perfect neurochemical milieu where I can do this work that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Now, what I've noticed is that a lot of people waste this time. They waste this time by checking email and reading the paper. 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. Don't do that. Don't waste your neurochemistry. Don't waste the dopamine in your prefrontal cortex. You've got to be good to go. Leave all that stuff aside.

Starting point is 00:36:40 Don't take any Zoom meetings, friends. Don't take any phone calls. Look at your phone once every hour. There's nothing good coming in. Don't read the paper yet. Go. When I do that, I can actually get two hours of super high quality creative work and about four hours total of creative work. And I can get a lot done. I can get more done between eight o'clock and noon with this setup. I mean, and this requires that nobody bug me and that nobody bug you. This is sacred time for you. I can get more done in that time than I would have been able to do when I was a younger man in three days. I'm like superhuman because of the way this whole thing is set up. I'm in the flow. I'm in the flow for the rest of the day. And the neuroscientific benefits of this really are related to what Cheek-Senteni Hai, the great social psychologist, we call the flow state. I'll throw something on the flow state into the show notes as well. 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. But you've got to set yourself up neurochemically to be in the flow. And part of that is making sure you've managed your negative affect, your high levels of negative effect.

Starting point is 00:37:54 This is my morning protocol, my friends. I hope this is useful to you. Does it sound insane? All right. Try it. And then experiment on yourself. This is the result of my experiments. You need the result of your experiments. Tell me how you're altering it. Tell me how you're doing it differently. Put it in the comments on any platform you're looking on this. 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. any objections that you have to this. But if all of this is new for you, use this as a template. You'll see in the show notes that this is all kind of laid out if you're missing it. You don't have to rewind and watch the whole show again, but you might want to. Hope that's useful. It's a good way for me to start this day. That's how I'm starting tomorrow too.

Starting point is 00:38:45 And every day. Let's go to some audience questions. Love it. I've got a couple of really interesting ones. One that came in over YouTube. This is Skeltona. Skeltona one. Interesting question. How do we stay compassionate while protecting ourselves? This is based on something I've done in previous episodes. I'm talking an awful lot about how this is that the art of happiness is not just about trying to get happier. The real art of happiness is making other people happier, lifting other people up. But so doing good questions, Skelton Nah one, how do you stay compassionate toward others while still protecting yourself? Now, The way to do this is by understanding the difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is a very overused emotion.

Starting point is 00:39:29 It really is about feeling somebody else's pain. We valorize that a lot because feelings are such a big deal, man. That's how I feel. As a matter of fact, a lot of reasons that people can't follow this protocol I've talked about here is because they're comfy between the sheets at 4.30 in the morning and they don't feel like getting up. Win the day, man. All of us, we should be doing that. And one of the ways that we can do that is by being a little bit skeptical about the overused

Starting point is 00:39:55 emotion of empathy. I'm not against empathy. I just think it's incomplete. What I like is compassion. Compassion and empathy are not the same thing. Compassion is an algorithm that contains empathy. It starts with an understanding of what somebody is suffering. Number two is enough feeling of that person's pain for you to deepen your understanding and want to

Starting point is 00:40:17 act. But not too much because you don't want to be paralyzed. The third is understanding what to do, and the fourth is having the conviction and the courage to do it. And a lot of the time compassion is flinty hard. It's something that people don't want. 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, which is just awesome to watch them struggle. And I say, I'm so sympathetic.

Starting point is 00:40:43 I'm always saying things like, oh, I'm sorry. His diaper exploded on the plane. I'm so sorry. And, you know, I don't think he's, I don't think he's possessed by Satan. It's great. I'm having so much shot in Friday. Anyway, I digress. The point is when I had teenage kids, it was very important to be compassionate and not just empathetic.

Starting point is 00:41:03 If you just are empathetic and your kids are doing something they shouldn't be doing is bad for them, you're a bad parent. Furthermore, I wouldn't be able to protect myself emotionally. There's an old saying that you're never, you're never happier than your unhappiest child. That's bad parenting. Nobody wants an unhappy mother. Nobody wants an unhappy father. Your job is to take care of yourself and give your kids what they actually need. So, Skeltona one, compassion, not empathy.

Starting point is 00:41:31 Next question. This is from Eduardo Soria of 638. Also on YouTube. A couple of good YouTube questions today. Is there a direct relation between anger and lack of happiness? Yes, yes, there is. And this gets back to what we've talked about with respect to the limbic system and positive and negative emotionality.

Starting point is 00:41:47 The four negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. So anger implicates the amygdala part of the limbic system. It's part of your fight or flight response. Fight is anger. Flight is generally associated with fear. Same basic setup, different kinds of reactions. And these are negative emotions. Now, negative emotions, don't forget, these are an indication that something isn't right

Starting point is 00:42:10 and you need to react. So thank God for your amygdala and thank God for these negative emotions. 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. So you're not feeling happy when you're angry. That's just the fact. Also when you're disgusted, sad or afraid, you're not feeling happy and you're not supposed to feel happy under the circumstances.

Starting point is 00:42:33 That's perfect and fine. The problem is when anger is dysregulated, when anger is disequalibrated, when you're when you've got a hair trigger, when you're having to apologize because of your bad temper, or Or when you simply are not just too fast to anger, but you're angry too much of the time and for too long. 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, physically bigger amygdala.

Starting point is 00:43:02 And you need to take care of that. You need to actually self-regulate. That doesn't mean you need to go on some sort of pharmaceutical regimen. What it means is you need metacognitive techniques. Count to 10, count to 100, prayer, journaling. meditation. There's a lot of different ways to therapy. There's a lot of different ways to deal with this. 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. You want to learn to manage it using

Starting point is 00:43:29 many of the techniques that we've talked about right here. Thanks for that question. It's terrific. And we've come to the end of the episode. Ah, the Mad Scientist Morning Protocol. Hope it's useful for you. And I can't wait to see your feedback on this as well. Let me know your thoughts at office hours at Arthur Brooks.com or leave your comments on any platform that you're using. We will see them. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple. Leave a comment. Even if it's negative, we want to see it. We want to make the show as good as it can possibly be. Follow me on Instagram. Arthur C. Brooks is my handle on LinkedIn, all the other platforms. And don't forget to order the happiness files, my latest book, Insights on Work and Life. I hope you have a wonderful week. Tell your friends,

Starting point is 00:44:11 we need another couple million or billion people watching this so that we can change the world together. Join me and being a happiness teacher. And until next time, stay happy.

Office Hours with Arthur Brooks - My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day

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