Aubrey Marcus - Own the Day, Own Your Life - Optimised practices for waking, working, learning, eating, training, playing, sleeping and sex

Owning It

On an ordinary day a thousand years ago, Emperor Marcus Aurelius had trouble getting out of bed. We know this because he wrote about it in his journal, a remarkable document never intended for publication that somehow managed to survive through the eons. What’s most remarkable is how modern Marcus’s struggle reads to us.

A notorious insomniac but a dedicated public servant, Marcus writes: “At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: ‘I have to go to work—as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for—the things which I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?’”

Of course, no matter how much we love our life, getting out of bed is no easy task. As a Stoic, Marcus suggested one remedy for getting over this hump: discipline. His sense of duty was what propelled him through the morning and into the world.

You can have all the stoic discipline you want, but if you don’t handle the first twenty minutes after you get out of bed correctly, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle all day. Tough mornings aren’t tough because of insufficient willpower. They’re tough because no one teaches us how to make them easy, let alone perfect, even though the perfect start to your day is perfectly within reach.

It’s about building momentum. You know this because you’ve had one of these mornings before. When there isn’t a rushed second, when you feel like you’re a step ahead of everything and the whole day feels like it’s at your leisure. Most of us have these days completely by accident, but the reality is, we can have them on purpose, and we can have them regularly.

Hydration

The first step is proper hydration. Sixty percent of the average adult human body is made up of water. About the same percentage of Earth’s surface is covered by water. The world is water, we are water, yet here we are, every morning, essentially starving for it. And we wonder why we wake up feeling miserable so often.

A glass of water from the bathroom tap or tipping your head back in the shower is not going to cut it, however. This isn’t just about curing cottonmouth. Health coach and sleep expert Shawn Stevenson calls that first glass of water in the morning “a cool bath for your organs.” Another way of putting it: it’s priming your internal fluids before hitting the road.

All I am asking is that you swap your first-thing-in-the-morning coffee for some water and minerals, in a drink I call the morning mineral cocktail. I’m not asking you to eliminate coffee—God forbid, coffee is delicious—just hold off on it until you’ve hydrated properly and can mix it with some fats like butter or coconut oil to slow it down. (You’ll learn more about the importance of fats in the coming chapters.) The components of my morning mineral cocktail are water, sea salt, and a splash of lemon. I’m not saying that the cocktail is magic, but … it’s basically magic. (Drink it and thank me.)

Morning Mineral Cocktail

350ml filtered water

3g sea salt

¼ lemon, squeezed

WATER: DO IT RIGHT

Despite the proliferation of fitness magazine listicles and online hydration calculators, there is no magic formula for the amount of water you should be drinking. Depending on habituation, diet, workload, toxicity, and a number of other fluctuating factors, every individual’s water needs will vary. As a general rule of thumb, err on the side of more water than not enough. Make a good glass or aluminum water bottle your favorite accessory so you have water available to you at all times. If it’s in another room and you’re like me, you’ll probably wait until you are dying of thirst to get up and go chug some water like a toddler who just found his sippy cup after a long day on the playground. Keep your water close, and sip often.

Just as important as drinking enough water is drinking the right kind of water. Water is one of nature’s best solvents, which means that most of the solids it comes in contact with eventually dissolve into it. That’s great when it comes to absorbing minerals, but problematic when it comes to certain solids like plastics that contain harmful chemicals like BPA that can throw your hormone balance out of whack and set you up for a host of associated issues. As such, it’s important to choose your water sources wisely.

In a perfect world, you’d be able to suckle from the teat of Mother Nature and drink spring water exclusively. Spring water has the right balance of what you want (useful minerals), with little to none of what you don’t (chlorine, heavy metals, contaminants). When I switched to spring water, I stayed more hydrated through the night, which meant a better quality of sleep all around. The reason is that my body wasn’t just thirsty for water; it was thirsty for the minerals called electrolytes that are present in spring water but absent in most filtered waters.

I recognize that buying several liters of spring water in glass bottles every day can get expensive, but many of us still have access to free spring water. Before you go buying anything, check findaspring.comto see if there is any clean, free spring water next to where you live. For those of us not quite that lucky and who also do not have a line item for water in our grocery budgets, the next best thing is filtered water—either through a Brita pitcher you fill and stick in the refrigerator, a Pur filter you attach straight to your kitchen tap, or whatever high-quality filter is available near you. This takes care of the problem of things floating in your water that you don’t want. But then you have to make sure you get enough of the stuff you do want. Specifically, you need to add mineral electrolytes, like those found in sea salt, to get you properly hydrated and mineralized. A small pinch of sea salt into distilled or filtered water should help reset the balance. Add a wedge of lemon juice for some additional refreshing nutrients (a lighter version of the morning mineral cocktail) and you’ve optimized your water. It’s what the pro fighters do when they are recovering from cutting weight, and if it’s good enough for the best in the world on their most important day, it should be good enough for us too. (We’ll cover the effects of inadequate mineralization in chapter 4.)

SALT: THE ORIGINAL MINERAL SUPPLEMENT

Sea salt contains upward of sixty trace minerals above and beyond the sodium, chloride, and iodine in regular table salt, including phosphorus, magnesium, calcium, potassium, bromine, boron, zinc, iron, manganese, and copper. Together they are essential for healthy bodily function and contribute meaningfully to optimal performance. Sodium binds to water in the body to maintain the proper level of hydration inside and outside our cells. Along with potassium, it also helps maintain electrical gradients across cell membranes, which are critical for nerve transmission, muscle contraction, and various other functions. Without it, needless to say, we would be toast.

Unfortunately, salt has become a dirty word over the past few decades—for two reasons: (1) it causes water retention (really just another way to say “makes us more hydrated”), and (2) it increases blood pressure. Both of these claims are technically true. When there are higher concentrations of salt in the body, it is able to hold more water, and your blood will be a little bit thicker. Thicker blood raises your blood pressure slightly because it takes more force to pump.

But is this a problem? While high blood pressure is correlated to cardiovascular disease, an analysis of eight randomized controlled trials showed insufficient evidence that the reduction of salt in one’s diet prevented cardiovascular death or disease. Two further epidemiological studies on populations of 11,346 and 3,681 subjects confirm those findings. There is no conclusively proven benefit to sodium restriction when it comes to preventing heart disease or death—especially for those with a healthy heart. What likely happened here was a classic case of correlation, rather than causation. High blood pressure is correlated to obesity. Obesity is correlated to heart disease. But the increase in high blood pressure caused by salt has not been shown to cause heart disease. As we’ll learn throughout this book, this isn’t the first time that the authorities got their nutrition advice wrong. They should have looked to the history books for some commonsense guidance.