#1: Spiritual Windshield Wipers (How are yours?) (#25)

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

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This is Brian.

Got some exciting data this year. 77 is a little less than I like to be. Actually a lot less than I like to be. But very excited to share what I'm mining out of this and also celebrate. Resting heart rate of 40, heart rate variability of over 100. That's actually really, really, really exciting for me. But we're going to start the day today with me recommitting as we did yesterday to my practices. That's our declaration for optimized coaches. We encourage them to sign it every day. I did it and then when we moved, I wound up having it just up. But every day we recommit, today is going to be a day where I get a little bit better. Let's optimize. Plus one, plus one, plus one. There we go. Now actually, I can leave that there. What do you want to talk about? We want to talk about spiritual windshield wipers, which is one of the ideas from One of the PNTVs I did yesterday. So, yeah, I'm on a roll. I'm pretty excited about the rhythm I'm creating PNTV wise. And I love big stacks of paper. So this is a little stack right now, but it's growing. Plus one, plus one, plus one. So I'm going to show you this stack as it grows and it's going to be a big stack by the time I'm done with it and I get the hundred and one philosopher's notes TVs that I'm creating right now. But in our stillness is the key pntv, which of course is based on our philosopher's note on Ryan Holiday's great book. He talks about spiritual windshield wipers, which is a Julia Cameron phrase for the importance of journaling. So Ryan Holiday journals every day. He and I talked about it in our interview. Of course, I journal every day and we have our coaches journal every day. And so here's my journaling this morning, right? I'm basically just. This took me 10 minutes to do, just unpacking my high level goals. What I'm going for a thousand philosopher's notes by the time I turn 50. 195 weeks. There's an urgency that I'm bringing to my life. My target is 7 hours of deep work a day. Hit 6.85 yesterday. Pure deep work, which is plus teamwork, which is exciting and basically just focusing my energy but also trying to learn on. Okay, what are the Systems that are going to work which lead us to this data. So I'm, you know, 77. Readiness isn't something that I'm like jumping up and down about per se. Although again, this resting heart rate, the heart rate variability. I literally went to sleep last night thinking, you know what, it'd be epic if I could lock in. My new baseline is 40 resting heart rate and 100 heart rate variability, which is. Both of which are absurdly awesome for me. So then to see this, this morning was awesome. Now the readiness is lower than I'd like, so let's talk about why. Now, if you recall, two nights ago I had a readiness of 77. And the reason was my sleep was terrible. And the reason why my sleep was terrible, I was only in bed for seven hours and 33 minutes. I got six hours of sleep. Now the reason for that was I was blowing myself up with inputs. I was super involved strategically. I was on imessages with the team. I was in Dropbox. I didn't do a great job of oscillating, so my mind was all hopped up. So I woke up, you know, basically super early, like just buzzing. But it was just that it was a different kind of buzz and I don't like that kind of buzz. So the next day, and I need more than six hours of sleep, right? So the next day I prioritized my sleep. I recovered in the afternoon, right? Took the afternoon off. I literally went and took care of some wardrobe issues, got some shirts for the PNTV stuff. Thank you, Lululemon. Hooked up the woman there with a little membership and then got the kids two chickens. I relaxed in the afternoon, right? And I wound up having a great night of sleep. Nine hours in bed, eight hours of sleep. Boom. I'll take it. My readiness went up accordingly. Then yesterday was a little different. I got seven hours of sleep. I did wake up feeling energized earlier than perhaps I would like. And so I was thinking, okay, well, but this was different than two days ago. Two days ago I was way too input filled, right? I was just doing way too many things and my mind was hopped up what happened last night. Which is funny because they said, hey, you've been active. You were very active yesterday, but your readiness is still good. How do you feel today? Let your body be your guide. And then it basically, I think, asked me, did you train too hard last night? Maybe that was in the sleep thing. Oh, late workout, right. Your one hour of restorative REM sleep last night was on the low side. Yes. It was. I'm happy with my one and a half hours of deep sleep though. Your high activity levels might have disrupted your sleep. To increase your chance of getting enough rem, try to take time to unwind before bed. So I'm like, oh, that's interesting. Good feedback. What happened last night was I was in the studio. I work until 6pm these days, right? End of summer, blah blah blah. That will shift to 5pm when the time changes. But I was in the studio until 5:30 last night, which is late for me. Then I had a half an hour recovery and this is why that number was off. So now today I'm thinking about, okay, well how do I do this? What's the rhythm? I prep for three of them actually prep for four philosopher's notes. Each one takes me about 20 minutes. This morning I'm going to take a break, hang out with the family, spend an hour with the kids, give Alexander some time, eat breakfast, etc. And work out with the kids. Then I'm going to go crush it. Three is kind of my rhythm. Maybe I'll try to do four right, so I can see my rhythm. But my thing was be done by 4pm you got to be out of the studio by 4pm and we talk about this a lot in different contexts, but you need to have a good shutdown complete, right? So I'm going to go play with this variable today and I'm genuinely like fired up about it. Right? And then my journaling, just so you see it again, it's one word plus a few different things. So I'm an athlete, philosopher, soulmate, identity, virtues, discipline, prolific, connected, again, the big three times two. Energy, work, love, identity, virtues, behaviors. Then I'm going to do these things my 1 through 10k. I'll share a little bit on my activity as well. People were asking about that. Thanks for the question, Jonathan, and the support, etc. I'm going to eat by 4pm that's my secret sauce. But then I realized, oh, I need my last output by 4pm My last intense output needs to be by 4pm and again, we talk about it in different contexts, but the Roman Senate never took on new matters after 4pm, their equivalent of 4pm, their 10th hour. I need to not take on intense new matters after four, otherwise I'm going to suffer a little bit there. And again, the spiritual windshield wipers effect of me doing this quick journaling is like, oh cool, get the rain off the windshield now again, whatever practice you do, just do something to clear your mind of It. So after that 10 minutes, I go and I prepared for these 10 Philosopher's Notes TVs. We're going to do Food Fix by Mark Hyman. We're going to do the Practicing Stoic by Ward Farnsworth. Then we're going to do make youe Bed and Sea Stories by Admiral William McRaven, which I'm stoked about. So. And then also just to make the point, I'm trying to find my edge here. I'm trying to find how hard can I go while still recovering. And only those who are willing to go too far can find out how far they can go. Which is why I'm not at all concerned about a number that's a little bit lower. It's all data. Boom, let's go. So again, we got the celebration there. Sleep is what it is. And then the activity level. So yesterday's activity level as measured by aura, it walked over 20,000 steps according to aura. Now that's a little bit not right because it's gonna give me steps sometimes and I'm moving my hands and stuff. But it's pretty well correlated to my Suunto watch. I'll show you that just for fun. So then Suunto tells me that my average over the last week is 17,423 stops, which is a little lower than it actually is because it. I haven't done anything yet today. Then it tells me that Yesterday I walked 20,000. Where are you? 20,000 steps. I try to hit 14,000. 20,000 on that is kind of a new fun goal that says 21,000. So they're close enough, etc. But just to briefly show you the activity screen here, we want to be active throughout the day and avoid periods of sedentaryness. So that's pretty good. Three hours of inactivity. You know, I sit, I read, I prep and stuff like that. But I'm getting up every thousand seconds, right? I move every hour. I don't even worry about that. I meet my daily goes, go me. Daily goals, go me. And then the higher training is from my workout with the kids. And then I'm moving throughout the day, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'll save it for another time. But I continue to do my one one through 10k is my protocol, right? So one sun salutation, 10 pull ups, 100 burpees, hero makers, a thousand meters of row, and then 10,000 steps. Although I'm now doing 20,000 steps. And then I train for 30 minutes a day moderately. I'm not going hard these Days. And I go on at least three walks, which is why my step count is so big. I just walk around our property. It's like a third of a mile to a half a mile depending on what I do. Here we go. Now here's another good thing actually, our training. This is my non legible writing, illegible writing. My apologies. You want to be specific in your training, so what are you training for is the question. I'm training for energized tranquility so I can bring my best to my work and my love. That's my number one thing. And energized longevity is an idea we play around with in the Mastery series as well. What are you training for? Are you specific? When I became a personal trainer for fun, like almost shoot, over 15 years ago. My goodness, time flies. Wow. That was like 18 years ago. I became a trainer just to kind of optimize my energy. And number one thing is, well, specificity. What are you training for? You know, if you want to be a world class athlete, you train differently than if you want to be energized tranquility or you want longevity, whatever. So what are you training for? And then you do what we call Aristotle's yoga. In our movement session for the Mastery series. Some people are not training enough. Some people are training too much. There's a virtuous mean. You need to find that virtuous mean. Which way are you going? And making sure that you're training in recovery. We'll talk about Phil Maffetone in his heart rate zone soon. But then ultimately it's all about consistency for me. We have a soul force equation that is brought to the power, the exponential power of consistency. I also talked about the step count that is correlated with depression in our PNTV on the joy of movement. So super great book by Kelly McGonigal. 5649. If you are getting less than that, you are making yourself more vulnerable to anxiety and depression. So the question is, how many steps are you getting these days? Now, 20,000 is absurd. I go for 14,250 or so, which means 100,000 a week. But we hold our coaches to the standard of 10,000 steps a day. Let's go champions. Do more have the strength for two. But how many steps are you making? Simply measuring, taking on a given day, simply measuring that will improve your performance. We know this, that simply having a pedometer or whatever you use to measure your steps will increase the number of steps by about a mile according to the research. Now when I measure all of these things. Guess what? What you measure improves because I can look at it, I can do something about it. So whatever you want to improve in your life, get specific on what the goal is you want to achieve and then start measuring how you're doing in pursuit of that. That is more than enough for today. Let's go out. Make today another awesome day. We have optimized coach class three. We now have over 2000 optimizers in our first three coach classes from over 70 countries. 73 countries. And class three starts in like, what is it? Today's Thursday, So it starts 1, 2, 3. It starts on Tuesday. So a few days, check that out. Optimize Me Coach. And then of course the general optimize community at Optimize Me. And most importantly, let's do this. Make today an awesome day. What's one idea that just jumped out? How can you analyze your number one thing to work on today? Go get it. Have fun. See you soon. Bye.

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