Brian Johnson shares a breathing routine he uses to salvage bad nights into what he calls "good bad nights," plus his Aura sleep metrics and what the latest research says about extending sleep. He's also previewing the OPTIMIZE handbook with Phil Stutz writing the foreword, targeting a holiday release.
Questions this episode answers
Inhale 6 seconds, hold 1 second, exhale 8 seconds; repeat 11 times (and repeat if still awake).
Striving for Balance: 82; Readiness: 90; Sleep score: 90 (previous night was 74).
About 6.5 hours.
Phil Stutz.
Release aimed for the holiday season the following year ("in time for the holidays next year").
You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.
Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry afternoon edition of the number one series. So we've got the Aura score, Striving for Balance, 82, Readiness, 90 Sleep score. I'm going to talk about that because I kind of saved that one. That could have been a less than awesome night. I'm going to share a tip that I use the sleep algorithm. If I wake up in the middle of the night, then I will. I'll just share it right now. Breathe. I'm kind of rusty on this because I typically don't wake up in the middle of the night, so I don't need to run this algorithm that often. But I've been super, kind of mentally, creatively, CEO busy, which tends to make my mind buzz a little bit more. More likely to get up in the middle of the night slash early morning. So anyway, I've tested different things from going through our Virtue Compass or words like thank you, thank you, thank you. And I was reminded last night that breathing to my resonant rate, kind of coherent breathing pattern, which for me is inhaling for six, holding for one, exhaling for eight, repeating 11 times and repeating again if I'm still not falling asleep. Kind of non negotiable. After the quick needs work, which we've talked about before, just do this pattern. But I remember that this works better for me than words. Just quiets my mind, etc. Which leads us straight into Aura. Then I'll give you a book update. Oh, is that a book cover? Oh, yes, it is. I love having designers put this together. We've already optimized that. Which I'll talk about in a moment. And then the Virtue Compass. We're actually going to place the Virtue Compass in the middle of the book cover, which is going to be awesome. So more on that in a moment. So anyway, last night could have looked like the night before. This is a 90 sleep score. The night before was a 74. I only got six and a half hours of sleep, just got up and then wound up getting out of bed. Right. So last night I actually got up around the same time. But this time I ran the algorithm. If you look right around here, I was in a state that I could have just gotten up out of bed, which I did the night before I stayed in, and it probably gave me a little bonus sleep time where I wasn't totally asleep there. But I definitely got more REM toward the end. And as it turns out, they kind of like that. Oh eight and a half hours of sleep. Congratulations. Go me 90 sleep score again driven by the breathing thing. And then I thought of Jim Afromo, the great peak performance mental toughness guy champions the champions mind. He says that the best among us, like golfers for example, know that they're going to have bad shots in a given round. But the greatest golfers like the Jack Nicholson's and the Jack Nicholas, I always get them confused. Jack Nicklaus and Rory McIlroy, they expect to have bad shots and then they know how to have good bad days, right? Or play ugly but effective. UBE is what? Ugly but effective is what Jim Aphromo calls it. So last night for me was a good bad night. I played ugly effectively, right? By doing this different pattern I wound up getting a pretty solid score on what could have been a not so good night. The other distinction I made was I do really well when I just say look, nine hours in bed period. And again the Stanford research we talk about in the Sleep Revolution by Arianna Huffington, check out those notes. They talk about keeping these Stanford athletes in bed for 10 hours. It's called sleep extension. And their performance on all measures went through the roof. They didn't get 10 hours of sleep but they got more like eight and a half plus nine hours of sleep or whatever versus they were getting way less before. And simply extending the time in bed optimize their performance. So I'm playing around with the idea of just a nine hour non negotiable. When I get up in the middle of the night there's no negotiation. I'm going to stay in bed and I'll get some extra meditation in or I'll fall back to sleep. Anyway. Breath count good. Bad nights ugly but effective Virtue Compass has been fun. I'm finding that I really love setting my intention virtue wise with this compass as we've discussed, you can set it so it doesn't float around, right? So I had some strategic discussions today with my right hand guy Michael, our head coach and a couple of members on our leadership team today and I pinned it on hope. We were talking about big picture strategy for next year, 2025, 2030. Vision, right? And wisdom. Leaning toward wisdom so we say, grounded in reality yet really courageously looking forward to what we can create in the years ahead. And I also love how the directional point is toward hope and wisdom, but the sub direction or opposite is self mastery and curiosity. We're open to what possibilities and strategies might be the best and we're going to be disciplined in our approach. Anyway. Loving that. Appreciate all your kind words on that. Excited to get that developed. It won't be until 2021 when we have that ready to go. So here's the first, very first version of the book, right? One of our Head of Impact's friends, Yana's friends, turn this around for us incredibly quickly. I've got a quote up there that's kind of a placeholder. And then we've already added something to this. Got confirmation today from my coach, my spiritual godfather and Yoda Phil Stutz, author of my favorite book ever, the Tools and Coming Alive. He's writing the foreword for the book. Super Fired Up. We're gonna make the image here. This is just a placeholder. Our brilliant illustrator Yasmin, who's done all of our workbooks and if, you know, optimize, you know, her work, did the sketch of our compass, right, and we're gonna actually add some color to that now. And that's going to become kind of the iconic symbol on the COVID of the book. Again, fired up about that. And then the big news is that although I could push and publish this thing, and there's a lot of reasons why I wanted to, I was thinking about publishing this on our own, maintaining some creative autonomy and some kind of business autonomy on looks like we're going to commit to going the traditional route. I really want to create a number one New York Times best selling book. I think this has the opportunity to be a catalytic force multiplier in what we're doing with Optymyze. I'm incredibly confident that we can sell, you know, 10,000 plus books out the gate with 2,000 coaches who've been asking for this for a long time. I think we can do that and it'd be a shame to do that, which would be enough to get us in the running to be on that New York Times list. But you have to publish basically with a traditional publisher and sell books beyond just Amazon and online channels. You got to sell them in multiple outlets around the country. So anyway, that's exciting. And it looks like we might be walking through the creative process of finding an agent, selling the book to a publisher, then getting it ready. We would want to release it basically in time for the holidays next year. And the other thing is, I've worked so hard for so long to distill my stuff into the Mastery series and into what will become the book that I just want to lean in and give this thing my absolute best and create something we're really proud of. As we ramp up from 2000 coaches, almost 2500 coaches from 70 something countries to our goal is very clear. At the end of next year we want to have 10,000 coaches from 101 countries en route to 100,000 in the decade. So anyway, this is going to be an exciting part of that. Again, I appreciate your kind words and support on that process. I will be sharing more behind the scenes as we go through that. That's all I got today. Hope you're doing great. Look forward to sharing more. I'm about ready to spin this thing to love as I move from deep work to deep love. But not before I go on another walk on the trail. My buddy who follows along shout out to you is challenging me now. Colin Patera, he tells me he's now up to like 17 and a half thousand steps a day. I'm like, dude, I got to get my game on. Let's see where we're at. We're at 14,025 steps so far today, which pegs our average for the week so far at 17,729. I told him, you know what, I've wanted to walk 20,000 steps a day for a while. I guess you're going to get me over that threshold. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Let's go. Today's the day. Oh, I didn't sign anything. I'm in.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.
Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that number One quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize, check us out at Optimize Me. The team has set up a free two week trial where you can get instant access to all 600 plus philosopher's notes, all the PDFs, the MP3s, get it on the app, et cetera. And 50 optimal living 101 classes on a range of subjects and of course the thousand plus optimized plus ones. And then if you want to go all in, check out Optimize Coach. Optimize Me for the free trial, for the core wisdom. Optimize Me Coach if you want to go all in and master yourself, serve heroically and empower others to do the same. Have a great day, see you tomorrow.
