The Resilient Mind - Master Your Morning, Master Your Mind - Gary Brecka

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

What if the secret to mastering your mindset started with the first 90 minutes of your day? In this powerful episode, human biologist and performance expert Gary Brecka shares his top 4 morning habits that activate peak mental clarity, emotional resilience, and long-lasting energy.Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠Download Now⁠⁠This episode is brought to you in partnership with The Icons by Motiversity. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind podcast. In this episode, you will be listening to Master Your Morning, Master Your Mind, with Gary Brecker. Get access to the Resilient Mind Journal by clicking the link in the show notes. If you actually just make little promises and keep little promises to yourself, it is amazing what it will do for your confidence level, your self-esteem, because most of us will do things to ourselves that we don't do to the outside world. We'll say, hey, I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock tonight. We get in bed at 1 o'clock in the morning.

I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock tonight now. I'm getting bed at 11.30. I'm going to work out the first thing tomorrow morning. I get up. I get on my phone. I miss the workout. You keep breaking promises to yourself. And that is the most detrimental thing for our psyche.

When you lose confidence in yourself, which you will by not having a routine and breaking little tiny promises to yourself, now you can't exude confidence and authenticity to the outside world. You pay a price for that. You know, you've been talking quite a bit about your optimal health work that goes this way? I mean, towards others. How about the work that you do towards yourself? I mean, how are you practicing this? What are your routines, your rituals that you

find are the most powerful for you? So this might sound very selfish, but I give the first 90 minutes of every day to myself. And I am absolutely resolute about that. I'm resolute about self-care. My wife teased to be about it all the time. So, you know, I, first of all, I schedule, I schedule flight. and meetings around, you know, exercise and sleep. I don't schedule my sleep and my exercise around meetings and flights and other commitments. I mean, I have an enormous mission in this world. I believe this is God's calling for me. It's my passion.

I know that this is my purpose. And it's easy for me to get consumed. So when I wake up in the morning, I mean, I have a very exact routine that I go through. I'm happy to share it with you. So I wake up in the morning, I splash water on my face. I brush my teeth. and I immediately walk over and I get into a cold plunge. I have a cold plunge outside of my master bedroom.

And I kind of use the David Gagons method, which is like, you know, David Gagins, you know, you can solve anything with massive action. And so I stand at the edge of it. And I used to negotiate with myself. Now I don't because I would say, maybe I should get my coffee first. Maybe I should do this.

So I walk in there and get straight into a cold plunge. For the record, you could also do it with a cold shower. I'm going to tell you my routine. and I'm going to tell you how you could do what I do for free. So I get out of the cold plunge, I dry off, I put shorts on, and in the next room I have a treadmill, and I get on a treadmill, and I walk for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, walk for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds,

walk for three minutes, and sprint for 30 seconds. I'm done at 10 and a half minutes, but I'm using a hypermax oxygen. I actually put an O2 mask on, and I'm breathing 95% O2. This is called multi-step oxygen therapy. or EWAT exercise with oxygen therapy. Fascinating research done by Otto Warburg on this and just the benefits for human beings. So now maybe 15, 20 minutes into my morning,

I walk down the hall, I get into a red light bed for 10 minutes, a phthalate 360 red light bed, then I have coffee and I go outside and I do eight minutes of breathwork. And then on the days that I'm working out, that's when I head to the gym. And it's simple. It sounds like a lot.

it's three or four things all lined up in a row. I can tell the days that I do it in the days that I don't, but I expose my body to cold. I breathe oxygen on a treadmill. I get in a red light bed for 10 minutes. I have coffee. I do breathwork. I'm only 30 minutes into my day at that time,

and it's easy to go right down to the gym. And then by the time, you know, I'm back up from the gym, you know, an hour later, I shower and I start my day. And I do that religiously every day. And when I travel, the one thing that is always, always, always consistent, never, ever, ever, ever miss. Can't emphasize it enough is I do eight minutes of breathwork within 30 minutes of waking every single day.

I will miss a commercial flight not to miss breathwork. It resets your circadian rhythm. If I can, I expose my skin to sunlight at the same time. If you actually just make little promises and keep little promises to yourself, it is amazing what it will do for your confidence level, your self-esteem. because most of us will do things to ourselves

that we don't do to the outside world. We'll say, hey, I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock tonight. They're getting in bed at 1 o'clock in the morning. I'm going to go to bed at 10 o'clock tonight now. I'm getting at 11.30. I'm going to work out the first thing tomorrow morning. I get up. I get on my phone.

I miss the workout. You keep breaking promises to yourself. And that is the most detrimental thing for our psyche. When you lose confidence in yourself, which you will, by not having a routine and breaking little tiny promises to yourself, Now you can't exude confidence and authenticity to the outside world. And you pay a price for that.

Appreciate how you describe that there's the machinery that helps you have that routine, but there's also the free version of that. Simple changes that you can make, you know, non-GMO foods, getting tap water out of your life, avoiding seed oils, breathwork, grounding, sunlight exposure, cold showers. None of these things will add a single dollar to your budget and could entirely change the trajectory of your life. life. What's the potential in that? Are we seeing people kind of feel like, you know, I've got a bit

more energy, or are you actually seeing significant changes based on work that feels intentional, but quite accessible for everyone? Massive, massive shifts. I have a, it's currently an anecdotal study, but about 17,000 patients that have come through our clinic system. We're sanitizing this data. We're going to feed it through AI, and we're hoping to publish it in a very large peer-reviewed journal, backed by a very, very, very well-known Ivy League University. Once this is published, it will actually put a lot of what I'm saying into the light and allow it to go under scrutiny so that, you know, the medical community and the scientific community can evaluate this data for the first time.

When you started your business, you probably didn't know what an income statement was, a balance sheet, a P&L, right? And now you do. And you understand all of these details about your business. and you're really good at it. So apply the same thing to your body. Maybe you've never heard of hemoglobin A1C. You don't know that that's the three-month average of your blood sugar.

Maybe you don't know what DHEA is, but that's okay. There's a few biomarkers. You could educate yourself and, hey, these are kind of the parameters of what's going on in my body. If I want to operate a business, I know I got a top line, I deduct my cost of goods sold, you know, and then I've got to pay taxes. So we start to understand what are the metrics that are important to this. success of this business. You can do the same with the human body, some basic metrics. You know, your hormones, your lipids, you know, your nutrient deficiencies, what's called

a CBC, a CMP, you know, my liver function, kidney function. There's certain basics. And you could, not to practice medicine, but you could understand what these basics mean to your future, just like you understand how your balance sheet, your P&L and your income statement are needed. That data is needed to operate your business. And it's astounding how cute and sharp and focused and aware people are about their business and how completely detached most people are from the temple, right? Which is this is way more important than your business. This is the, this is the only vehicle you have. And it's going to get you and your family and the world you're trying to touch and your product or service and everything else where it needs to go. So this should really

come first. So just apply that same zeal and intellectual curiosity to your body, gamify your health a little bit, and you can entirely change the, you know, I say it all the time, the trajectory of your life. Thank you for tuning in. Continue strengthening your mind by listening to our other episodes.