Sam Parr and his wife have kept their 24-year marriage vibrant with a daily ritual: running to each other, hugging, and kissing when he gets home. He treats emotional regulation like athletic training—repeated peak emotional states build the muscle to make them your baseline, not a performance.
My wife and I have this little thing that we do. It's like, honey, I'm home. And then we look for each other and we run towards each other. We just hug each other and kiss. It's a beautiful ritual. We've been together 24 years and we still have this aliveness and passion for each other because we still put ourselves in those high energy states. It's easy because of being worn down by work or environments or kids or some of your family's ill or financial pressure in your business. Your state drops. And then when you're around your partner, that's what they experience all the time. And then their state's low and then you're both filtering life through that. It's really important if you're going to get up and perform in a peak state, you got to train yourself to do it at home. And then after a while, it's not phony. If you see an athlete, they have muscles. Why do they have the muscle? Because they work out regularly. Well, when you push yourself into a great state regularly, it becomes your standard.
