How To Gain Back 15 Hours A Week With These Smart Hacks | Vishen Lakhiani

What if you could add an extra 30 days to your year every single year? What I'm about to show you is a highly optimized health and well being ritual. Something that involves meditation, eating, exercise, sleep, but done in such a way where no matter how busy you are, you're able to get the benefits of these practices while saving 15 hours a week. Now do the math. Saving 15 hours a week is saving 60 hours a month. That is 720 hours a year or 30 extra days of your life every year given back to you. And the reason I designed this routine is because I am ridiculously busy. This is what my calendar looks like in an average week. In the next 45 days, I'm about to travel to seven different countries. I have 300 people reporting to me. I'm writing two books, producing four online programs, and running mindvalley projects online across the world. And then I have these two people in my lives. So as a single dad, doing all of this stuff can be really overwhelming. So I needed to find a way to get my health and wellbeing practices done right. Now, I know these practices work because I've been changing and evolving very rapidly over the last few years. This is a picture of me three years ago. This is a picture of me today. You'll see that I'm getting healthier and fitter as I get older, even when my life increases in complexity. So let's get started with these practices. This is what I do when I wake up. So the first thing I do is I check my sleep using my sleep tracking Oura ring. So the reason I'm so diligent about my sleep is because sleep is one of the things we most forget in modern life when it comes to making ourselves healthy. I track everything about my sleep. And with the data I get from my Aura device and my iPhone, I know exactly what I'm doing, right or wrong, to allow me to have the best sleep possible. Not all sleep is equal, and many people can lie in bed for seven and a half hours but not get optimal sleep. Now, when you can optimize the way you sleep and do it scientifically, you wake up feeling so darn refreshed and you're ready to go through the day at a whole different level. So by optimizing my sleep this way, I estimate that I'm saving about half an hour every single day. I may sleep seven hours, but I'm getting about seven and a half hours of sleep. And that's not even counting the fact that my brain and my body are healthier because I'm able to access a higher ratio of deep rejuvenating sleep during my hours in bed. Now, after checking my sleep stats, I take off my aura ring and the next thing I do is I go into meditation. The meditation I use is the six phase meditation, which I designed myself. Many of you don't know this about me, but I was a meditation teacher for five years before I went on to start mindvalley. So meditation is my thing. And the six phase was created based on everything I learned about meditation and putting it into an optimized stack so you get the most out of your meditation. Now, I do the six phase in the following way. I first put on headphones and I power up the MindValley meditation app, Om Bana, the official home for the six phase. So you're going to choose six phase on the Om Bana app. And the beautiful thing about the Om Bana app is that you can play different background sounds with the six phase meditation. This allows you to customize the background track over my voice to choose a background sound you like, Whether it's jazz or the sound of waterfalls or a binaural beat. Then the entire meditation takes a mere 20 minutes, and you go through all the most optimized states of being so that you show up in your best form every day. Now, by meditating this way, I estimate that I saved myself three and a half hours a week of useless meditation. And at the same time, it optimizes my performance every single day so I'm able to give and perform my best. So people think of breakfast as one thing. In reality, it's not. There are three different ways I optimize my breakfast. There's breakfast as ritual, breakfast as fuel, and no breakfast at all. Let's start with breakfast as ritual. Now, on weekends, I have breakfast as ritual. The kids haven't left for school. I have company. So I have my elaborate breakfast, and I have my company by my side. What's up, Eve? So that's the most fun way of breakfast. But very often the kids have gone to school, I'm all alone by myself, and all I want to do is rapidly consume something so I have the energy I need for the day. That's when I look at breakfast as fuel, and this is what it involves. But don't be afraid. I'm not putting all of this in my body in any given day. Rather, what I'm doing is I'm looking at the supplement stack. And based on what I know of what my body needs, I'm creating an optimized stack of breakfast supplements for what I need to do that day. Breakfast as fuel is an interesting idea because our bodies need variety. And based on what we're trying to accomplish in a given day, whether we need to optimize for cognitive functioning or optimize for muscle growth, we need to give our body what it needs. A good thing about breakfast for fuel is just how efficient it is. I get to make and consume my breakfast in under five minutes. Let me give you a look. But now let's talk about no breakfast at all. A lot of people think skipping breakfast is bad. Not if you practice intermittent fasting. Intermittent fasting essentially gives your body a break from the requirements. It needs to digest food and our bodies need that. So I aim for a 16 hour fast. What this means is that after completing my previous meal at 8:30pm the previous night, I skip breakfast the next day and do not eat anything until lunchtime, which is 12:30. This gives my body a 16 hour fast. When you do this once or twice a week, the health benefits can be incredible. And it saves time. When I look at how I put breakfast together in a given week, one or two days of intermittent fasting, three or four days of breakfast as fuel, and two days of breakfast as ritual, I find that it saves me one hour every week. Now, one of my most important rituals is the importance of strength. We forget just how much strength contributes to your well being. Do you know that according to CBS News, if you're an American over the age of 70, the number one cause of accidental death for such people is falling down? Why? Because as we age, our bones get more brittle and our musculature degrades. It's called sarcopenia. And then when you're 70, a fall can kill you. So this is what people get wrong about exercise. The traditional idea is that you have to go to a gym and spend hours working out or hours on a treadmill. This is no longer True. Since 2013, the science has shown that short high intensity interval training in four to seven minutes can give you the equivalent of 30 to 60 minutes of regular exercise. So when you think minimum effective dose, how to get the best results in the smallest dose, you save two hours a week on exercise. This is how I do it. First you take your iPhone and you set your timer. Now you're gonna be very precise with this time. I'm gonna do what is called a tabata push up. But you can do tabata, burpees, tabata squats, any type of tabata Style. You want a Tabata push up. Works like this. You're gonna go all out for 20 seconds, rest for 10 seconds, all out for 20 seconds, rest for ten seconds, and you're gonna repeat this for four minutes or eight sets. Sometimes when I'm doing Tabata burpees, I even wear these weights on my leg because you really, really want to stress your body for just for four minutes. So this is what a Tabata push up looks like. Again, I'm setting the timer and I'm gonna go all out for 20 seconds. And then when I hit 20 seconds, I pause, I catch my breath, and at the 30th second, I continue. Now four minutes have elapsed. I'm completely tired at this point, but it only took me four minutes to give my body an extreme workout. And this is what Tabata is all about. So the next thing I do is speed reading. This is one of the most powerful things you can learn to bring into your life. By some estimates, in any given day, you're going to be reading two to four hours worth of material. This is counting social media, WhatsApp messages, Slack messages, emails, memos, and of course, books. But the problem is, according to Jim Kwik, who is the speed reading author at Mindvalley, most of us never really learned to upgrade our reading skills since we were six. Therefore, most of us read like six year olds. When you master speed reading, the average speed improvement is about 3x. That's 300% faster reading of all the books piling up on your bedside table. Now, I worked with Jim Kwik. I was already a fast reader, but I did manage to increase my reading speed by 50%. This saves me a whopping four hours a week. And that adds up. So there you have it. Those are the practices I bring into my life pretty much every single day. And this gives me an extra 30 days every single year to just be alive. So taking care of your health and wellness does not have to be complex. It does not have to take up a lot of time. When you practice the latest scientifically tested methods, you can get incredible results really, really fast. So if you found those ideas interesting, many of those ideas I learned from one guy, Ben Greenfield. He's the official longevity and biohacking trainer on Mindvalley, and I just filmed a masterclass with Ben. Ben taught me so much about optimized sleep, about optimized eating, about the exercise routines I just shared with you, Sam.