How to Reclaim Your Time and Your Life with Melissa Ambrosini & Nick Broadhurst

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I'm JJ Virgin, Ph.D. dropout. Sorry, mom turned four time New York Times bestselling author. Yes, I'm a certified Nutrition specialist, Fitness hall of Famer, and I speak at health conferences and trainings around the globe. But I'm driven by my insatiable curiosity and love of science to keep asking questions, digging for answers, and sharing the information I uncover with as many people as I can. And that's why I created the well Beyond 40 podcast to synthesize and simplify the science of health into actionable strategies to help you thrive. In each episode, we'll talk about what's working in the world of wellness, from personalized nutrition and healing your metabolism to healthy aging and prescriptive fitness. Join me on the journey to better health so you can love how you look and feel right now and have the energy to play full out at 100. All right, so you know, when I think about what is really important as you are 40 plus, like, it's really time, right? It's, it's time. It's having great health and then having the time to enjoy it. It's having all of that. And gosh, time is that one resource. You can't get it back. And so when I saw that Melissa Ambrosini had written Time Magic, I was like, right on. And you must come on the show. Here is the reading line, the tagline of this book, Time Magic. It is Reclaim your time, Reclaim youm Life. And she wrote it with her husband and Nick Broadhurst. And here's what's super cool about this book. This is not a time management book. That to me is like, you know, when you hear about stress management, it's like, no, no, no, no, no. It is how you take some simple shifts, how you create this structure that creates this freedom so that you find more time. In fact, they said, like, you can listen to the interview that we do here and just one of the things you put into place could get you a year back of time. So listen to this interview. You get a year back. How is that a promise? And the book can give you even more than that. Plus, we're going to go through some top longevity hacks as well. So let me tell you a little bit about Melissa and Nick. I have been on Melissa's podcast before. We will link to that. And Melissa is a self help guru. She was named that by Elle Magazine. She's the best selling author of Mastering your Mean Girl, Open Wide Comparisonitis and the Audible Original Purposeful as well as the winner of the best ebooks of all time as voted by Book Depository. She's the host of the number one rated podcast, the Melissa Ambrosini show where she shares her wisdom and interviews with the biggest thought leaders and experts in the world to help her audience unlock their full potential and live their dream life. She's got a deep commitment to empowering others to become the best version of themselves and believes that awakening is possible for everyone. She strives to inspire others to reclaim their power, bust through fear, step into their truth, live with intention and move in the direction of their dreams. She's also obsessed with health.

Yay.

You know, I remember the days where we were called health nuts. You were considered to be a freak if you were into health and I'm always like why wouldn't you be into health? Like, like hello. So I'm glad that that tide has turned. I hope it has. Maybe it's just turned in my head. But if you're listening to this, I know you feel the same way. And let me tell you about her hubby, Nick. He is a renowned singer, songwriter, a music producer, former member of Aria Award winning band, sneaky sound system, a visual artist, entrepreneur, father of two and an author. The driving force behind all his work is a pure expression of creativity through music and the written word. Time Magic sees him teaming up for the first time with his wife, best selling author Melissa Ambrosini. They are such a an awesome couple too. It's fun now to have some couples that we're featuring on the show. I'm I should do another show just on how couples are working together too. That has been a fun one. Now that I'm working with my husband Tim, I will tell you, this is an interview that I was like, oh yeah, we'll just go 20, 30 minutes. I could have gone for a couple of hours. There are some absolute gems in this interview and you're going to want to get this book because they have got some very simple strategies that you can put into your life that is going to help you reclaim your time. And they've also put together some really super cool gifts you can get too. So I'm putting all of that@jjvirgin.com timemagic and I will be right back with Melissa and Nick. Stay with me.

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All right, I am super excited to have another couple on the show because I just had Jason and Colleen Wakab of Mind Body Green. And now I have Nick and Melissa of Time Magic. So fun. We probably should by the way, guys, at some point get into what's it like to work together. But let's just start by unpacking why you wrote Time Magic.

Well, I mean, for us, we were not always the way we are now. We've come from places where I was in a very successful band called Sneaky Sound System. It was touring, it was a pretty wild time. And I left that career, went into real estate, which is a very big shift, I was gonna say.

Cause that's a total natural segue.

Yeah, natural progression as you do. And musician to real estate.

But I found that when my little boy was 2, 3, 4 years old, I was with him physically, but I wasn't emotionally, mentally, really with him. I was closing deals. I just wasn't present. And it's one of those things I look back on in my life and don't regret it, but just wish, gosh, I wish I'd done things differently. And I didn't know what I know now about how to streamline and optimize my life. And Melissa, you tell your story for me.

I was a people pleaser, stressed out, overworked, overwhelmed. And when we came together, we really optimized every area of our life and we realized that we were wasting a lot of time. And when we're actually doing the research for Time Magic, the subtitle is Reclaim your Time, Reclaim youm Life. We discovered that there is a lot of common areas. We spend time, 26 years of our life, sleeping over 13 years, working over 12 years on our phone. Just, just let that sink in a minute. Over 12 years of your life is spent on your phone. The average person is living to 79 years. So however old you are now, subtract that from 79. That's how long, you know, the average person has left. And so when we worked with this statistician and we looked at all of these different areas where we're spending our time, we divided it up into a pie chart and we took away, you know, 79 years. We took away the 26 years of sleeping, the 13 years of working, the 12 years of social media. Then over nine years watching TV. Over nine years watching TV. Like that blows my mind. And so when we took all of that into consideration, we had 1.2 years left for the things that bring us joy, for the things that light us up, like time with our family, love doing what we love, hobbies, holidays, all of those things. And for us, that was a really big wake up call, a really big smack in the face. And we realized that we don't want to be part of that way of living. We want to make that 1.2 years of our life way more in our personal life. And so we got really intentional about how to live a meaningful life on our terms and how to reduce spending, you know, 12 years online. And so that's what the book is about. It teaches you how to get really intentional with your time, how to Reclaim up to 16 years of your life, which we promise in the book. If you implement some of our strategies, like tick and flick and some of the longevity hacks and all of the things that we talk about in the book, if you actually implement them into your life, you can Reclaim up to 16 years of your life to do the things that you will love. And so the book isn't just about showing you where you spend your time, then giving you the tools to reclaim it, and then going and making a meaningful life. We also teach you how to take your health to the next level, and we've got a whole chapter in there called Everyday Longevity. Because there's no point in extending your life if you don't have your health.

Amen. Healthspan versus lifespan. And now that we are well beyond 40, you aren't. Melissa. Yes, Nick. You're slightly beyond 40. So you guys aren't well beyond 40, but you're. You are, Nick. Well beyond 40. There's something that starts to happen, and I don't know if it happens at 40 or 50 or 60, but all of a sudden, you look at time differently, where you start to go, oh, at first it happened with me, with travel, I'm like, I don't want to go back to the same place because I want to make sure I get to all the places. But then you just start to take that approach with life. I don't want to waste time doing something that doesn't matter. When I could have been with my family, I could have done those things. So I love that you're bringing this all up, and I think it's super appropriate for our audience. And, Nick, you said something before we started that. I was like, ooh, write her downer. And you said, this is not about time management.

Yeah, totally. Time management really is about how can you cram more stuff into your day. That is definitely not what we're talking about in Time Magic. This is about creating a spacious life for the things that we love. And when you look at some of these statistics, we can see that technology is a big part of that with the phone and the tv, and that time spent on your phone is taken from an average now of someone who gets a phone at the age of 15. So. And we know that children are getting phones much younger than that. So it's probably more than that number now. But it is about creating a spacious life and using technology to our advantage because they can be a weapon of mass destruction, or they can be really empowering, and they can actually create a lot of space for you. One thing I found years ago was I didn't have a system of how to operate, run my life. I just had stuff in my head. I had stuff on bits of paper. I just didn't know how to actually operate, whether it's personal or business. And I read a lot of different books on time management, on productivity, and I implemented all those things. And over the years, I just kept refining it and refining it and simplifying and simplifying. And we'd have friends come to us and say, nick, how do you do everything? How are you writing music and recording and touring and investing and building a home, being a father and a husband and CEO of Melissa's business, and how do you do this stuff? And I said, well, first of all, the most important thing is if you have a system that's effective and simple, you never get overwhelmed, ever.

I can vouch for this. He never gets overwhelmed. Like, I'm like, don't you have like? And I still do. Like, I still need to reread Time Magic. Nick said to me the other day, babe, you need to reread Time Magic. And often we do. We need to reread our own books. Nick really does live this, and I do, too, but I sometimes default into old patterns and have to retake my own medicine and then get back on.

Track, which is normal.

Totally.

You know, the fact that you can then reread the book and get control of that, I'm thinking of Marie Forleo came and spoke at Mindshare Summit last year, and Marie said, you know, she was doing a talk about Time, and she said, I don't do Overwhelm. And, boy, every. I mean, this resonated so much with everybody because it really actually is a decision. So, Nick, how do you not do Overwhelm? Can you give us, I'm sure, you know, get the book Time Magic, but can you give us a little hint?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it does involve technology, and this is where technology is so important. There is. And you can use different apps for this, but there is one in particular which we love because of its simplicity and how powerful it is. It's called Things. Okay, so Things is an Apple app, so it doesn't work on both. If you have a PC or an Android, you'd want to get todoist, I think it's called Now, I had read books on how to do this app and all these different types of project management, and it was 300 pages long, you know, to understand how to do it. And I just thought, there's got to be a more simple way. So when we sat down to write this book, I said to Melissa, look, I've got to teach this in three pages. I have to make it simple. And so I kept refining my process. And it's interesting. A friend of mine called me the other day. He just finished the book. He's like, nick, I've been doing tick or flick. I'm like, great. I said, how's it going? He said, I go to bed at night and there's nothing on my mind anymore. I'm like, exactly. That's the whole point, right? If you can go to bed at night and be like, everything's in a safe place, everything's captured, then that's super empowering. And it's good for your health, too. But mind you, because sleep's so important.

As you know, what is the tick or flick. You guys have said this a couple times.

It's essentially the process of capturing everything in one place, okay? So when something comes into your mind, don't think about it, don't let it roll around. Just grab your phone, put it straight in what's called the inbox, and just forget about it because you know it's being captured. And this is the power of this system is that if you have somewhere that's like this holding space, everything that was in your mind and no longer in your mind, you can let go of it, right? So once it's captured, you, then you need to know what to do with it. And that's where the process of tick or flick, you either get it done, you tick it, or you flick it somewhere. And flicking it means flicking it into a project or making it or breaking it down into more steps and then ticking it. It's a very, very simple system. And you have to ask yourself a very simple question each time. Do I tick it or do I flick it?

And so many of our friends and followers have tried it, and it has already changed their life, which is just so cool to see. And, yeah, when I follow this system, my life is so much more pleasurable.

Actually, when she's overwhelmed, I say, let me take a look at your things. And every time she's overwhelmed, she's not using it properly every time.

And I think as a MOT is so important, we have so much on our minds. We're thinking about lots of different things. Work and tiny humans and all of their things. So having some sort of system that can capture all of this and allow you to move through your every day with as much ease and grace as possible is what I'm all about. Because there's so much noise, we are exposed to way more content and noise than ever before. So we need systems. We need systems, we need processes to help us to help our nervous system. You know, we're all so wired and fried and overwhelmed and stressed and we need some tools to help us move through our day with ease and grace and without the stress and without the overwhelm. And yeah, that's just not how we want to live our life. We don't want to live our life in that state. We've done it. We've both ended up in hospital with burnout, chronic fatigue, adrenal fatigue, all of these things. And it's not fun. Like, it's really not fun. Building yourself back up from the hospital bed is a long, very time consuming and expensive journey, which we've both done. So we don't want other people to get to that place.

Do you think some of it is. And you know, you watch this and I think the tide's starting to turn. But for so long it was like a badge of honor to be stressed out and work so hard and work like, you know, excessive hours. I mean, look at people who work at law firms, look at residents and hospitals. Look at this insane amount of like, it's like we celebrate this craziness that, you know, is just the wrong way to live. You know, then you look at what they're doing with some of the new ways of working with employees and they're doing four day work weeks instead. And everybody's healthier and happier and more productive.

Yeah, I think we should celebrate and I certainly do when we are down at the beach, because we live on the beach and we have our lunches down there every day with our daughter that's celebrating right there. Like if we should be celebrating the people who are able to do that because there's so much joy radiating from those people who would able to do that. There's also a time and a place. And this is the thing, there is a time and a place for a bit of push, for a bit of hustle. It's often I found hard to bring something of meaning to life without a little bit of like, okay, let's, like, let's dig into this. For example, the Book time magic. It was easy to write in some respects because it's really just our life, you know, and how we, how we live. But also there's work, you know, there's work involved in doing these things, in promoting a book. There's a time and a place, but having the choice on how much to do and when to say no. And we teach this in the book as well. When to say no. Like the power of saying no and being empowered to say no to things. That's also something which is super important as well.

Yeah, I think Jomo is a very important concept. As you said that. That was one of the things I looked at this year and I went, this is going to be my year of no's. You know what, how do you set up more of that, that structure? So you've mentioned a couple of these, but can you give us a couple other things? Because I love the idea of setting up those boundaries. Any other little changes? Because you're emphasizing small changes. Simple. Which we all love. And I don't think anyone wants to be in overwhelm. So what else can someone do to either shift their mindset or shift their behaviors to free up some time to make them not feel this time pressure?

I think one of the best things that everyone could do straight after listening to this is grab their phone and look at how much time they're spending on certain apps. This is quite a confronting exercise to do. The average person is spending around six hours a day on their phone. Six hours a day.

How do you find out how much you're spending? Like I'm going to do this right now. How do you find out how much you're spending on an app?

So on iPhone, there is an app specifically for that and there's also one in Android as well. So they've got different names. So screen time on Apple is the one that you go to look at. And Android, I can't, I think. Is it something to do with health?

Yes, it's in the book.

Digital Health. Digital Health, yeah. And so you just need to go and look at that. It gives you a breakdown of your activity. And again, the friend that I spoke to, he said he was quite confronted with his own phone usage and he's found himself really turning it off now. Something that we practice is we have our phones on airplane mode for the majority of the day. It's actually quite hard to catch us on the phone on a phone call.

No one ever calls us because they can't call us.

But you've also set up the right parameters. I remember reading, you know, when I read the four hour workweek, which was always my big joke is I read the four hour work week and there must have been a hidden chapter because I started working 80 hours a week after reading it. He was like, just return email twice a week. And that's what they'll expect. They won't expect this immediate answer. If people know that they can't get you on the phone, then they won't do that. So you're teaching people how to respect your time too.

Exactly. So once you have got the data on how much you spend on your phone and on certain apps, it's quite confronting. And then you can pick your jaw up off the floor and ask yourself this question, am I okay with that number of how much I'm spending on social media on email? And if the answer is no, then great, you can do something about it and you can do something about it today. So this is the first place to start. Then we set up boundaries around these things. We talk about time, magic, batching in the book, which is when you batch emails, you batch tasks. So you might do two email sessions a day. So maybe at 9 o' clock and then again at 3 o' clock when we do this. Life is so good with a set time limit. Yes. So you'll do like 9 till 9:30 and that's your email time. And then you literally close down email off your desktop and delete it off your phone.

It's actually quite fun. You should see how fast you can get through your emails.

Well, isn't it that whole principle that time expands to whatever amount of time like the task extends to the amount of time you have.

Exactly, exactly.

Right.

So you can batch it. You can also do that with social media. So I check social media. Say you can say at 10 o' clock in the morning and then you can do it again at 4 o'.

Clock.

Whatever. Give yourself a time limit and something that you feel good with. Like what time would you feel okay with dedicating to those things in your life? Like, I am a mom, I have a two year old, I want to have more children and for me that is my most important work, responding to my emails. I'm so grateful for all of my emails, I truly am. But I'm not going to lay on my deathbed and go, oh, I really wish I responded to more emails or I really wish I wrote more emails or I really wish I spent more time on social media. No one says that I've had Bronnie Ware on my podcast, who wrote the top five regrets of the dying? And one of the top five regrets is I wish I spent more time with the people that I love. I wish I did things that light me up more time Magic really allows you to get clear on your core values, what's important to you, what is meaningful to you. Like, do you want to spend more time with the people you love? Do you want to spend more time doing your woodwork or your pottery or your knitting, whatever it is that lights you up? And then let's create space for those things in your life. Because we only get one life. This is not the dress rehearsal. This is the gig. This is the live show. And we only get one opportunity. So we really do need to make the most of it. And we don't want people to read time magic and feel overwhelmed. Just implement one thing a day. Just one thing a day. Start by just reducing your time on some of the apps where you spend a lot of your time and replacing that with something that is going to nourish you. We also talk about rest in the book because people don't rest. Like, when was the last time you rested when you literally just laid down, you didn't have your phone and you just had an afternoon rest or, you know, most people don't even know what rest is for them. And so we really get clear on what that is for you, how to implement that into your everyday life and just how to enjoy your life way more.

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So the other thing that you do have in here, that of course intrigued me completely because again, you said, okay, if we're living to 79 now, I'm entirely planning to push way past that. I think most people listening were like, oh, we're way past that, but way past that in health span, not like, you know, having crappy quality of life. So just planning that all of us will get into the, like 100 plus with amazing quality life. You can still go, hold on. You can still start counting down the years, the. The weeks, the days, the hours, and make you really want to make the most out of everything. But we have to get there. So I know you have some longevity hacks that I have to get out of you.

I just want to also preface this whole conversation with, by saying that we, especially Nick, are hardcore biohacking, longevity seeking, health junkies. And the reason we are is because like I mentioned before, in 2010 for me, and just, just a little bit before that, 2009, both of we weren't together at this time, but both of us were in hospital with not very good health at all. And, and before that, we were not healthy people. We didn't care about sleep. We were flogging our bodies. We had no idea what nutrition was. We just didn't take care of ourselves. You know, we'd sleep four hours a night and be like, yeah, I had that motto, I'll sleep when I'm dead. Who cares? I was. We were partying, drinking, all of those things. Both of our bodies shut down and we really had to rebuild. So this is where our obsession, our healthy obsession with health and wellness and biohacking all came from. So from 2009, we have been on this journey. We have studied it, we studied nutrition, Ayurveda, like everything, because we just are so obsessed with it. And this is now how we live our life. And so putting a chapter in the book about health and longevity is so important because like we said at the very start of this, there's no point in living to 110 if you don't have your health. What is the point? We want to be still doing yoga when we're 110 to talk to some.

Of those points to make it into the book for the everyday longevity chapter. I set some criteria and I wanted to make sure because there's some pretty, you know, you can read Life Force by Tony Robbins and it's super interesting.

But there's like stem cells.

It's super not doable as well.

I know. It's like the guy right now who is that billionaire who spent like millions so far, like, because he wants to be like 20 and he's 50 and, and what I find with so many of these is that they are, they haven't gotten the majors right yet.

I'm so glad you said that.

Right. Like, okay, I'm like, all right, you're going to go over there and do that, but you're diet's not even dialed in and you're not sleeping well and you're not exercising. What am I missing?

I'm so glad you said that because we literally, I felt like we needed to develop like a separate program just to teach the basics Because I don't blame people for getting confused. I've been confused as well in the past because there's so much conflicting information out there.

There's a lot of noise.

There's a lot of noise. But I wonder if some of it's conflicting. Here's my theory that, you know, all my friends are diet book authors, let's be honest. And everyone writes the book for them and then they think it's the book for everybody. And the reality is there's some foundational truths.

Yes.

But then there's the tweaks for you.

Yes.

And your tweaks will be different than other people's tweaks. Right. And I think it's, it's way simpler to go, I'm just going to try this hack over here. But I don't think you should do any hacks till you've addressed the foundation. That's like trying to decide what paint you're going to put on the walls. And you haven't figured out like where the walls are going yet.

Yeah, let's talk about foundations first then.

Because we call, we call them. Sorry, I was just gonna say we call them the low hanging fruits.

Yeah, it is. It's such low hanging fruit. And something we say in the book quite a lot is the easy things are easy to do. They're also very easy not to do.

Good one.

You can choose if you get into bed. Like we're in bed at 7:30, hands down, every night we're reading, we've got our blue blocking glasses on and our little red lights and we're reading our book and we're getting time together and everything's dimly lit and we've stopped eating three hours before that. We've got these sort of processes in place. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about sleep. Because I think if you're going to pull one lever in your life, I think the two biggest levers. Well, you said them before, there's probably three levers. There's sleep, diet and exercise.

Really? And I put sleep at the top. I'm right there with you. Like if your sleep sucks, everything sucks. Everything sucks. You'll be insulin resistant. You won't want to work out. Like it's all, it's all going to fall apart.

So.

And it's funny because last night Melissa was backstage with Jay Shetty on his tour and she got home at 1am.

Which she never does. I've never, like, I can't even, I can't even tell you the last time I Did that probably like 15 years ago when I was on the dance floor in some nightclub. But you know, it was a one off and I really enjoyed it. But most of the time we are in bed at 7:30.

This morning was the first time I've seen her look a little bit tired. Like seriously, because we're so particular about our sleep. So here's some quick sleep hacks which I think these are foundational for sleep and that is, and you would have heard these before potentially, but stop eating three hours before you get into bed. This is the big one, right? Such a big one.

I always like these to be hit because I want people to hear it and hear it and maybe they'll hear it from you going, I heard them say this and I'm going to do it. I'm like, amen, totally. And tell everybody why. Because I've tested it with my aura ring, I've tested eating right before bed and see what happens.

It's important because there are certain things, there's certain stages of the day that your body should be performing certain tasks when you're asleep. It should not be digesting food, right? That's a totally different time of day when you fall asleep. You should be assimilating all the nutrients from the food because they've already passed through your digestive process. You want to get to around that sort of 2:00am time, whereas this prime detox time where your liver is doing all the work. But that doesn't really happen if it's still trying to digest food that you had at 9 o' clock before getting into bed at 10. Especially in Ayurveda. If you look at Ayurveda, the different phases of the day from vatan pizza and kapha, it's the same all the way through the evening into your sleep time. There's different phases, your body's doing different things. So essentially and also you've got more powerful digestion at different times of the day. So it gets weaker and weaker as you go into the evening. So if you look at our average time of going to bed is around 7:30. We stop eating at 5:30. Now we'd like to do it three hours, we do two because it's a bit early for us to eat at 4:30.

But you're not actually falling asleep at 30. Mine's kind of the rule of thumb is like three hours before you fall asleep. Yeah, you're good, you're, you're doing, you're amazing. Okay, so I now I want to know, okay, like what time do you wake up if you're going to. You fall asleep around 8:30.

Yes, 8, 8:30. Melissa tends to wake up anywhere from 4 till 5 o'. Clock. I'm anywhere from 5 to 5:30.

He needs a little bit more sleep than me.

Yeah, it's body types, we're all unique.

Yeah. When I first met my husband, he was like sleeping five to six hours a night. I'm like, this is not going to work. This is a major problem. Because he thought, oh, I just don't need to sleep that much. I go, yeah, I don't buy that. And as he started to let his body sleep, it was like, whoa. Lo and behold, we generally are 9 30s to 6 30s.

Yeah, perfect.

It was earlier on the west coast, by the way. East coast, we get up a little later. West coast, we were going to bed like 9 o' clock and getting up at night, 5:30, 6, right?

Yeah. Everyone's unique. You got to find your routine. You know, if you live in Europe, it's different because of twilight, you know, so find your rhythm. And the other thing is liquids. Be super mindful of how much liquid you have because there's just no point getting up to get out of the toilet in the middle of the night for no reason because it's just going to break that beautiful deep sleep in the REM sleep, REM sleep that we all want. So that is generally two hours before. But honestly we don't have many liquids from probably 3 o' clock onwards because again, we value our sleep so highly. If I have to get up to go to the toilet, I'm actually kind of annoyed. I'm like, oh, far out. I must have. Where did I go wrong there? You know, the other thing of course, is devices. So getting off your phone and your tv. Honestly, there's probably no hard and fast rule, but it's as early as you can because if you're exposing your eyeballs and your body to that blue light, you're making your body think that it's midday and it's just not. So you're not producing the melatonin that you need to get a beautiful deep sleep.

So in the book we have the three, two, one rule and we talk about this, the time magic three, two, one rule. So stop eating three hours before, stop drinking two hours before, no devices one hour before. If you can do more, great. But as a general rule, 3, 2, 1, think of those things and that will really help your sleep. And then there's so many other things that we talk about in the book. Like the temperature in the room, making sure it's cooler, you know, wearing earplugs if you need to, the blue light blocking glasses and lights all around your home. These are all little things that are going to help you optimize your sleep. Getting rid of the tv, getting rid of all of the devices outside of the bedroom, just all of these little tweaks can really move the needle. And for me, like, like I've said before, I'm a mum of a toddler and I need my energy. One of my goals is to be the best mom that I can be. And in order for me to be the best mom that I can be and still be an entrepreneur means that I have to get into bed early, otherwise I am not showing up as the best mom I can be and the best boss that I can be. And so it's a priority. So we don't go out for dinners at night at, you know, 8 o' clock at night. We don't go out, we don't do those things. And it's just not a priority in our life. Like, we still are incredibly social, but we have lunches with friends. When we invite friends over for dinner, they come at 4:00 in the afternoon. So, you know, it's, it's just about doing what is in alignment with you, changing your habits from unhealthy ones to healthy ones that are going to help you thrive.

It was funny, I was speaking at an event in the Maldives and walking through circadian rhythm and eating by the clock and living by the clock and also just the window you should be eating in. And lo and behold, they're having dinner at, you know, eight, nine o' clock at night. I'm like, I'm going like, this is when I go to bed, you know, and you're having. And I thought, oh, gosh, we should have had a conversation before, before I came here so we could have designed this thing appropriate appropriately, where everyone's not scratching their head going, wait, you told us to eat three hours before and not go to bed three hours later because I ate late and now you did this. And I'm like, sorry. So it is funny because, you know, all my friends are health friends, so we go out to dinner and they're like, can we meet at 5:36? You know, we all go out early. So.

And JJ, you know, I think your audience would love this. And I don't know if you're familiar with the DNA company. Have you come across them? Yes, yes. And the reason I mentioned that is because it actually shows you, according to your DNA, your ideal eating patterns, but also time. So the windows of time for eating for your body, which was super interesting. I'm still working to nudge my body into that window. I've sort of used to eating in a bigger window. I have found personally that a 12 hour fast is kind of my. That's it for me. I don't really need much more. I have this sort of tendency to be more sympathetic, dominant, more catabolic. So for me, I have to eat a lot of food, do resistance training to maintain my muscle mass. And if I go for long periods without eating, then it doesn't actually serve my particular body type very well.

I'm really glad you brought that up because that is, first of all, intermittent fasting is not fasting for 12 hours. That's normal behavior, right? But everyone all of a sudden thinks they should skip breakfast, which I don't believe in skipping breakfast. I will tell you, like we're all wagging our head. No. But all of a sudden it's like, eat one meal a day, eat. And I go, well, what about people 40 plus who are losing muscle?

Totally.

Like what? Let's go through each of these things and what are you using them for? And then how do you use it in the right thing for you? And don't just blindly grab everything because it's okay if we want to restore some insulin sensitivity quickly. But think about like if you're someone who loses muscle quickly, has to really work to put it on. Like when I've worked with athletes, I have a meeting four meals a day to make sure they're getting in what they need.

I eat four meals a day because you know, the way that I work is I'm physical so I stay really fit. And I'm also a creative, so I'm writing music at the moment. I'm doing a big project for. I can't actually say yet, but it's a big project and to be honest, it's taking up a lot of my brain power and I'm just finding I'm eating probably 50% more just to get through this period because there's so much going on in my mind and I'm also sitting there creating and singing and writing and doing all these sorts of things. Everyone is so unique. And to say that we've all got to get 16 hour fasting window or whatever, it just makes no sense. And also the idea of skipping breakfast again is totally. If you look at Ayurveda, for example, there's no way that I would suggest to do that. Especially if you're going the other way, which is skipping dinner. It's probably a healthier way to do it because you're gonna get a better sleep. And even then, I'm still like, I don't know, just have a light dinner.

Think about when you skip dinner. And now you don't have those amino acids on board. And granted, we need to break down muscle buildup, but, you know, you don't wanna be overly catabolic either.

No.

Yes. There's always more to these stories. So we talked about the big lover of sleep. And I love three, two, one. That's so good. I love that you created such simple things in this great structure. Structure creates freedom. So this is fant. What, beyond sleep would you pull out as a important longevity move?

Well, I think we mentioned diet and exercise, and jj, you've got that covered on this show, so we won't go into too much depth there. But there's a lot of things you can do every day that are incredibly simple. I mean, even just the simple thing of watching your omega 3 ratio. So if you. There's a great test you can do. I think it's Great Plains Laboratory. I'm pretty sure it's Great Plains. The Omega 3 test index. Yeah, that to me, is shockingly good. Because if you're low, if, let's say, for example, your fuel ratio is 6 to 1 in terms of omega 6s to threes, you know, guaranteed you're in an inflammatory state. So you've got to do something about it. Right. If you know that your arachnonic acid is high, you got to do something about it. This is one of those simple levers you can do with a simple little, you know, fingerprick blood test at home. And we recently did it, and we hadn't been supplementing like we usually did, and we were just a bit low, and we were sort of planning baby number two. So straight away.

Oh, yes.

Important.

We know what we have to do. So we're like, massively upping the Omega 3s, not. Not stupidly, but sensibly, to make sure that we get our levels back into balance. So it's ideal, you know, that 3:1 ratio.

So I'm glad you brought that up. I will link to that in the show notes. When my son got hit, I was giving him 20 grams of fish oil in the hospital to bring his brain back. And I think one of the reasons he made it through the unsurvivable in the first place was I had him on 5 grams of fish oil a day to begin with, so it protected his brain. What I see a lot when I look at omega 3 index tests with people and they're not really paying attention when they're dining out is they may be supplementing with omega 3s. They're eating healthy, but then they go out and they have salad dressings and they don't pay attention and they don't realize, like these restaurants, the garbage oils, and even nice restaurants in the States. I'm like, you'll ask what the oil? I would say, what's is this olive oil? It's a blend, which means. No, it's an Omega 6. Total inflammatory trash.

I'm so glad you said that. We are like, we're oil freaks. Like, we. Everywhere we go, we're asking about oils.

But to be honest, we don't really eat out much. Like, really we have like, we have like one or two organic cafes that we go to, but we don't eat out for that reason. Purely because 99.9% of places use canola and just very unhealthy seed oils. And if we do ever go out, that's the first question we ask, what oil do you cook in? And usually they'll have some olive oil. So I'm like, please, just use that. Just use, don't use anything else. But most of the places, they have.

Canola and they don't even understand. I travel like half the time. So we figured out we haven't quite started the traveling with your own bottle of olive oil yet. A lot of times I'll have sea salt in my purse. I had sea salt in my purse. Then that spilled and I'm like, oh my gosh, at some point I'm just gonna have to bring my stove to the hotel.

It's hilarious. When we travel, we have hardly any clothes and suitcases of supplements and our toxic free pots and our water filters and our olive oil and our salts. Everyone just laughs at us. But we don't even really think about it anymore because we just do it. Like, we love feeling good.

Well, it's a core value.

And it is. It's a core value for us. And for us, feeling good is everything. Because if we don't feel good, like, no one wants to not feel good. And so we do everything that we talk about in the book because it makes us thrive and life is just so precious.

You know what it felt like to feel bad? Exactly. You did that. You already checked that off. You know how they say, you know he who has his health, has a thousand dreams. He who doesn't, only as one. You already went and experienced that early. That was a gift to experience that early because a lot of people don't experience till later, and they. They can't do as much about it. You got it early and got the lesson. And now you know what it feels like to feel really good, which I think most people don't really know what that feels like. And so they won't make as big of a commitment, you know, but once you're there and you get it, you're like, oh, I'm not giving this up. So we're traveling. People are like, oh, my gosh, you guys bring so much luggage. But we have one whole suitcase that's just like protein powder and collagen and all this. Like, we're going out for 60 days this summer, and, you know, a month of it is Korea and Bali. And I'm like, oh, we have. We're going to bring so much stuff, you know, because who knows? So we'll be prepared. So I love that you said that. And you know, what I'm taking from this is that you've created a book with very, very practical, applicable, easy to do and techniques that will make a big difference. And it's the little hinges that swing the big doors. And I think people always look for the big thing. And I go, it's the little things that compound. It's like compounding interest. So I love that you've done that. And you're also giving a handout something about. So help me with this. It's about successful morning strategies or what successful people do to start their day. Right. Tell me what the free gift is that I'll tell everyone how to get.

Yeah. So if you go to timemagic me, there is on that page a very simple form where you can just put your name, your email, and your order number for the book. And we'll send you two things. We'll send you the Time Magic toolkit, which has a full list of every single thing we've mentioned, plus all the things we actually use ourselves and haven't mentioned in the book that we wanted to add in there that we just love and highly recommend. So it's like a bit of a hack in terms of getting straight to the source of the best stuff. And the how successful people start their day is, I think it's over two hours of audio of some of the greatest thought leaders, athletes, doctors, scientists in the world. And essentially it's their morning routines and we look, we love hearing other people's morning routines. And so we've compiled that into something which is super interesting to hear because to be honest, we didn't put all the ones in there that were just aligned with our belief systems. We put everything in there because it was interesting to see that some people actually just have a coffee for breakfast, some people have eggs and bacon, whatever. And we found it really interesting just to see the broad spectrum of how people start their day. The majority of them, though, are pretty optimized and pretty interesting. So you can also get that audio when you go to timemagic. Me as well.

Cool.

And I'm going to put everything@jjvirgin.com timemagic all of Melissa's books, I think we've done. Haven't we done some other podcasts? Melissa, over the years you have been.

On my show, which was incredible. That conversation was amazing. And we should definitely link to that for everyone to go and listen to. But, yeah, I loved having you on my show. You're amazing.

Well, you guys are amazing. I. This is like such an important book, and especially right now for Everybody. For everybody. 40 plus. Like, I can't think of the thing that's the most important to us. It is time. Like, time and health are it. So you put it together in one book with very simple strategies. It's like a game changer. So I super appreciate you doing that, plus the gifts. And again, I'm going to put all of this@jjvirgin.com Time Magic. And I appreciate you two coming on. I know I went overboard on my time with you, too, but I was like, I couldn't. I couldn't stop. There's just. I could keep going with this. You got so much good stuff, so thank you.

Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we could go forever. It's. It's an amazing topic. And as you said, there's a lot in the book. It's super practical. Just pick a few things. If you get a year back of your life, that was $20, very well spent. That's all I can say.

Yeah, I would definitely pay 20 bucks to get a year. I think I'd pay 20 bucks to get a week. You. You get an hour. Think about it. So, you know, again, time, is that the one thing that you just can't get back? So anything you can do to get more of it that's ethical and high integrity and healthy, I'm in. Thank you. Yeah.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

Be sure to join me next time for more tools, tips and techniques you can incorporate into everyday life. Tool Ensure you look and feel great and more importantly, that you're built to last. And check me out on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and my website JJ virgin.com and make sure to follow my podcast so you don't miss a single episode@subscribetoj.com See you next time.

Hello listeners, this is Anne Bogle, author, blogger and creator of the podcast what Should I Read next? Since 2016, I've been helping readers bring more joy and delight into their reading lives. Every week I tag all things books and Reading with a guest and guide them in discovering their next read. They share three books they love, one book they don't, and what they've been reading lately, and I recommend three titles they may enjoy reading next. Guests have said our conversations are like therapy, troubleshooting issues that have plagued their reading lives for years and possibly the rest of their lives as well. And of course, recommending books that meet the moment. Whether they are looking for deep introspection to spur or encourage a life change or a frothy page turner to help them escape the stresses of work, school, everything, you'll learn something about yourself as a reader and you'll definitely walk away confident to choose your next read, with a whole list of new books and authors to try. So join us each Tuesday for what Should I Read Next? Subscribe now wherever you're listening to this podcast and Visit our website whatshouldireadnextpodcast.com to find out more.