PPI #26: SD8: The Evening Routine that Drives Success

Everyone these days wants to have a great start to their day. They want to be more productive and they think about installing a morning routine. But that's not the place to start. If you want to have a great day, you actually need to start the day before with a great evening routine. Because you know what happens? You get your morning routine installed, you're waking up early. The first few days, things are going great, but then suddenly fatigue sets in and suddenly the morning routine slips. You can't keep up with it. You start missing a day or two here and there, and suddenly a month goes by and poof, the routine is completely gone. You forgot that you're even doing it. As a matter of fact, it might even take three months before it dawns on you, oh, yeah, maybe I should start a morning routine again. But no, you don't want to start on a morning routine. That's not your solution to getting a better start to your day when we have to start the day before with an evening routine. Hi, I'm Eric Partaker, and I help CEOs, entrepreneurs and individuals close that gap between who they are and who they're capable of being by giving them practical peak performance insights that they can install in both their business and life. And on the subject of evening routines or morning routines, let me say that this is an area in which I'm well versed. Because for years I focus on the morning routine. All the rage of trying to join that 5am Club and wake up early and get everything done before the kids wake up before the day starts. And I kept slaving away, hammering away, trying to make that work. And I literally, as I just described earlier, got myself into a point of exhaustion. I was more irritable. I actually wasn't having great days. I was developing fatigue. I was running out of gas the afternoons. And it's because, once again, I was starting in the wrong place. We need to start the night before with an evening routine. So, sedate SD8. What does that stand for? So the S stands for a shutdown ritual. Too often when I'm coaching CEOs or individuals, I find that they're not creating a proper divide between their work and their home life. And I've talked about this in other videos as well. So you may have already heard me describe a shutdown ritual, but if you haven't, the way it works is a shutdown ritual is simply a static appointment that you put in your calendar. It's an appointment that you set with yourself. And it's an appoint. It's an Appointment, which is like the line of demarcation between your workday and your home life. And in that appointment you just put a simple checklist. What I literally mean is you, you put an appointment in your calendar, right? You click on that appointment and in the meeting description of that appointment, write a few bullets, create a checklist. What I would do or what I do and what I suggest you do is start with a final check of your email, then look at your calendar for the next day, update your to do list with any action items for the day, choose your top three things that you're going to be working on the next day and, and then drop those top three things into the white space of your day. All of that is contained within your shutdown appointment and it should take you half hour max to complete. And I would schedule that appointment to go off at the same time every day or to begin at the same time every day, 30 minutes before you would like your day to end. So if you'd like your workday to end at 5:30, at 5:00', clock, it's your shutdown appointment. That means if somebody asks you for a meeting, you to go from 4:30 to 5:30. Sorry, I'm not available. I have an appointment from 5 to 5:30. I could do 4:30 to 5 or you can find another time. But don't disrespect that appointment with yourself because if you do that, you'll never get out of the rat race and you'll constantly find that your work is bleeding into your home life because you're not properly shutting down your day. So we've shut down our day. What's the next thing in our evening ritual? Well, we want a digital sunset. Why do we want a digital sunset? And that's the D. So sedate SD8s for shutdown. D is for digital sunset. We need a digital sunset because of a small gland in the middle of our brain the size of a pea, called the pineal gland. Now that gland has a, well, many purposes, but one of them is to produce melatonin. What is melatonin? Melatonin is, is a substance that induces sleep and helps us sleep restoratively, helps us sleep very restfully, helps us sleep a full eight hours as we need to. And that melatonin production linked to that gland is linked to how much light, especially blue light that our eyes are receiving, that are coming in through our eyes. Now if you're on your digital device, phone or watching television to fall asleep, or you got the iPad open, if you're on one of those devices in the half hour. Sorry, in the one hour before you go to bed, it's been shown to reduce your melatonin production by 50%. Why is that? Because the pineal gland sees the blue light coming in, which is the same spectrum of light that it would expect to see in the high point of the day at the sun. And it says, well, hang on, it's the high point of the day. Stop producing melatonin. We don't want to induce sleep. Why? Well, because inducing sleep during the day would be dangerous. You know, we want to sleep at night, we don't want to be exposed during the day when anybody could see us. You have to think back to our.

Ancestors and think about their evolution. That's dangerous. It's dangerous to sleep during the day. So the pineal gland says, shut down the melatonin. It's the high point of the day. Now this is ludicrous because it isn't right.

We're at home, it's not the high point of the day, but our bodies don't know that. And without that digital sunset, the end result is that you won't properly engage with your family, you know, because you'll just be stuck on your digital device. You won't sleep properly because you won't have enough melatonin in your brain. Which then leads to the number eight. So what do we want to get as the last part of our evening routine? Eight hours of sleep. Why eight hours of sleep? Because it's been proven to be associated with near term benefits such as waking up the next day and feeling properly energized and having enough, you know, gas in the tank to do whatever it is that we need to do to have the energy to work out, to have the energy to engage in whatever projects or tasks that we're doing throughout the day. And lots of people, especially entrepreneurs and high achievers and peak performers, think that, ah, now I have this special gene that allows me to survive with less than eight hours of sleep. And they are exactly right. They will survive with less than eight hours of sleep. But it's not survival that we're after. We want to thrive with more. So there is a gene associated with being able to throw, being able to thrive with less than eight hours of sleep. Your chance of having that gene is about 1 in 12,000. So you don't have the gene. I think that's also equivalent to your chance of being struck by lightning. So unless you've been struck by lightning, I don't think you have the gene. Now, funnily enough, of course, all high achievers, peak performers, entrepreneurs, CEOs, those types, they all think that they have the gene. Why is that? Well, because it's convenient, because they can justify working more. They associate that with greater productivity, but also because they've just become accustomed to operating at a lower baseline. So over the years, they've lost their reference point. They don't know what it's like to sleep with eight hours of sleep anymore. They become so accustomed to six, seven, and sometimes horribly five hours that they think that's how life feels like. But yet they're a little bit sluggish, they're a little bit prone to say irritability. They lose their focus. And when it comes time to spending time with the family or with friends in the evening, they're out of gas, you know, and they're, they're, they're not present, they're not available. And let's take a step back. You know, why is it that we're trying to introduce an evening routine? Well, a lot of people are ultimately trying to string together more winning days and have better days. And that's why a lot of people focus on the morning routine. If you remember, I say go back, start on the evening routine first. But there's another reason to start with an evening routine or to focus on implementing an evening routine. And it's just to properly rejuvenate. It's to have.

A better relationship with your family. It's about being able to rest. If we look at peak performance, we don't achieve peak performance just through stress. Stress plus recovery equals to growth, you know, equals growth. If you go to the gym and if you're just constantly stressing your muscles and if you're not recovering, will you grow? Of course you won't. And it's the same with your life. It's the same with your business, home, you know, after work, that's, that's your chance to recover. So if you focus on that acronym, sedate, shut down your day properly, have your digital sunset so you're not just glued to your digital devices all evening long.

Set that at least one hour before you're going to go to bed such that you get eight hours of sleep. Do all those things, sedate yourself, not with wine, but with a good routine, and you'll see that you'll start closing that gap between who you are, who you're capable of being. And once you've done that, then you can focus on installing a good morning routine because you won't be handicapping yourself. You won't be sabotaging your success. It'll be primed for performance. So I hope you've enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website@ericpartaker.com you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter.