#1: Rebound days (aka What to do after an off day) (#17)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in less time.

Hey, guys, what's up? This is Bry. Very special morning. I never do anything before I meditate. I'm about ready to meditate. That's the new little nanov technology thing that Alexander got us. That's the PEMF machine. So I'm going to meditate on that. Two sets of 11 minutes and 40 seconds. So I set my timer every day to 16 minutes and 40 seconds, right? That's a thousand seconds. That's my counter to get up if I'm at the desk.

Boom.

Get up, move around. We know that our insulin changes. We know that our overall metabolic optimization is affected by being sedentary, which is why we encourage our coaches and their clients. And. And I personally get up every thousand seconds. Right. Anyway, I reset that to 11 minutes and 40 seconds. And I'm going to do two sets of meditation there. The first will be a breathing exercise. Breathing, less to breathe. Right. A la Patrick McGown. And the second will be a wisdom virtue, kind of the optimized virtue compass meditation. Anyway, I never do anything before my meditation, but I realized, you know what? I'm going to experiment a little bit with these number ones and just share with you my reflections on my 1, 2, 3, what's working, what needs work, what I'm going to do. Quick aura recap right after I look at it while it's fresh. All life is an experiment. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, the more the better. So let's experiment with this. So 6:23. As I film this, stoked about my. My readiness score being back at 90. As I said yesterday, I don't like it hanging around 83 at all. Sleep score was great. I mentioned yesterday we went to bed yesterday at 8:25. Day before, we went to bed at 9:22. And both of those may seem absurdly early to you, but that's a huge difference for us. We usually go to bed closer to 8:25. So when I have a bad day and yesterday wasn't a great day for me, my energy was not where I wanted it to be. Only got the seven hours of sleep instead of eight. I'll show you that again, just so you see this. And I want you guys to feel into how you feel. And we teach our kids, make the connection. When you eat that food, how do you feel when you don't do this, how do you feel? Make the connection so you can change your behavior in bed for 9 hours and 24 minutes. Got 8 hours and 15 minutes of sleep versus 8 hours and 22 minutes yesterday and 7 hours and 12 minutes now. Some of this is out of my control. My daughter is no longer breastfeeding. And that's, that's leading some challenges and whatever. You know, you have kids, you do what you can, but you want to control your controllables. And we could control what time we went to sleep. So we did. And look at what happened. We got results that I got results that are a lot better than I got yesterday. My wife Alexander was just off the charts. I'm actually jealous of her score this morning. But here's the thing. Rebound days. So if you have a bad day, right, and oh, your energy is just not where you want to go, then you need to needs work it. 1, 2, 3. What did you do that didn't work for you? Then rebound. Make the next day even better. Use your negative experience to make you better today. And especially as it relates to what Michelle Seeger calls and we talk about a lot in our program, everything we do at optimize. What's your number one self care habit? What's the thing that you do when you're on right. Eating, moving, sleeping? What is it for you? For me, it's unquestionably sleep. There's absolutely no debate about it. And in fact, yesterday afternoon my brain was kind of dead. So I just organized the philosopher's notes that I'm going to do TV episodes on, right? And the number one I'm going to do is why we sleep. This is the very foundation of our well being. And just as an aside, I am giddy. I roughly organized them according to the books that I thought were the best ones that I've read since I last did my last set of notes. So we got why we sleep. We got tiny habits. Check it out. Here's Emerson's behavior map. So I was teaching him BJ Fogg's behavior equals motivation times ability times prompt. I'll walk you through that another time. But then he drew it out. Teaching him how to make a behavior easy to do and more likely to become a habit or harder to do and less likely to become a habit. Anyway. Tiny habits, the joy of movement. Kelly McGonagall, such a good book. Jocko Willink's Discipline Equals Freedom. Amazing. Maslow's book. I've mentioned Eric Butterworth, Maya Angelou's Spiritual Advisors. That's one of Oprah's favorite books ever. The Second Mountain by David Brooks, Life's great question. Tom Rath Staring down the Wolf Mark Divine food fix. Great book by Mark Hyman, blah blah blah. Ryan Holiday's new book, Stillness is the key. Back to our rebound days. So if you have a bad day, then you need to run the algorithm. Then I'm even more committed. My number one the following day is to crush my number one self care habit that I violated and just didn't execute the way I could the day before. So that's precisely what I did yesterday. The number one thing, the plan for our whole family was get to bed. Get to bed. And we went to bed at 8:25 versus again the night before. It was 9:25, literally an hour earlier, which is exactly what I said we would do. And I structured our days such that our family got to do that. And then I feel so much better with that quality sleep. Hour and 44 of REM hour and 40 of deep. And I do not like not having great energy. And I'm very clear on what's going on and what's working, what's not because I'm constantly analyzing it. Which is why I turned on this video this morning and why I'm doing these videos now is I want to encourage us. Hopefully I can share a tip or two that's helpful here and there on Pay attention. Life isn't complicated. What's working, do more of it. What's not working, stop doing that now. We'll never be perfect. And even this may not have worked out. I don't have control over my daughter or any other external variables, but I can control the controllables. And when I do, I tend to get better results. So think about that. What's your number one self care habit? If you are having a bad day, then you figure out what's the thing you need to do today to make sure that tomorrow is a better day. That's the main thing I wanted to talk about today. And then the secondary thing I think is worth mentioning briefly is I spent a lot of time with the team yesterday and the day before. And I'll have another meeting today, just kind of helping set some strategic vision. I spend a little, very little time on the business, all in on deep work. God bless our team. Love you guys. And we start every one of our meetings with a and end every one of our meetings with a breathing meditation. So a different person on the team will do it. Right. So yesterday Michael was walking us through our virtue compass, right. Which I've shared a number of times. And I'm going to journal that this morning. Wisdom, self mastery, courage, love, hope, gratitude, Curiosity and zest, right? And by the way, this virtue, curiosity is what we're doing together every morning. We're looking at what's working, what's not working. This is a very important virtue, right? Anyway, he's doing an amazing meditation, and he says, okay, you know, bring yourself up with wisdom, seeing the game you're playing and how to play it well, then bring yourself down into the earth. And he's doing this great meditation, right? With self mastery, etc. And it made me think of Barbara Fredrickson, one of the world's leading positive psychologists, says that you want to be simultaneously up and grounded, right? But she uses the words, you want to have levity, so you want to be up. And I always draw this arrow to represent being up. Levity, right?

Boom.

You're inspired is the word I use. And you want to have gravity. You want to be down. You don't want to be manically flying away into fantasy land.

You can be too positive.

She says you need to ground yourself in reality, right? And she says when you do that, when you have levity and you have gravity, you have buoyancy. That's cool. And I don't know if buoyancy is a weird word to spell. I don't know if that's how you spell it. I'm not going online to check levity, gravity, buoyancy. But I was thinking, as Michael was doing that, you know, that the way I like to frame it is we're inspired, right? We can see the better future that we're moving toward. We're fired up, yet simultaneously and very importantly, we're grounded. We drill into the ground via our fundamentals, right? This is the triangle I draw representing Maslow's hierarchy in us actualizing. But the foundation has to be incredibly strong, from the eating, the moving, the sleeping, etc. If you want to sustain a high level of inspiration, you must be grounded in. The more intense you are, the more fired up you tend to get, the more committed you need to be to the very basic. You're probably ignoring them. Fundamentals, at least. You tend to think they're not that important. They are. They found they ground everything into reality such that you can move forward with this deep inspiration. Then what do you get when you do that? You get a sense of energized tranquility, and you get a sense of calm confidence. Again, I found that to be a little bit more resonant than buoyancy and levity and gravity. That's our number one today. Hope you enjoyed. Let me know what you think and just fired up. Appreciate being able to share my life with you and hope you're getting something out of it. And I appreciate all your kind words. It means a lot to me to be able to connect in this context, which is why you're seeing me floating around the comments these days. I don't usually spend time on social media, but I do appreciate being able to see you and let's do this. Make today a great day. See you.

We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me.

Hi, this is Brian.

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