But is this a problem? While high blood pressure is correlated to cardiovascular disease, an analysis of eight randomized controlled trials showed insufficient evidence that the reduction of salt in one’s diet prevented cardiovascular death or disease. Two further epidemiological studies on populations of 11,346 and 3,681 subjects confirm those findings. There is no conclusively proven benefit to sodium restriction when it comes to preventing heart disease or death—especially for those with a healthy heart. What likely happened here was a classic case of correlation, rather than causation. High blood pressure is correlated to obesity. Obesity is correlated to heart disease. But the increase in high blood pressure caused by salt has not been shown to cause heart disease. As we’ll learn throughout this book, this isn’t the first time that the authorities got their nutrition advice wrong. They should have looked to the history books for some commonsense guidance.

Salt has been a part of our diet for millennia. Roman soldiers of antiquity were “paid” with an allotment of salt. The words salt and salary are derived from the same Latin root word: sal. When we describe people’s worth or utility, we refer to whether they are “worth their salt.” So why was salt such a big deal? Well, if you were a Roman soldier marching around the empire, swinging swords everywhere you went, you had to hydrate and replenish the minerals you lost through sweat, and salt was the surest way to do that.

Can you overdo salt consumption? Of course you can. All medicine becomes poison at a certain dose, but the point of all this is that salt, particularly in its most mineral-rich form, is not the demon it has been made out to be. As for which sea salt to choose, pink Himalayan salt comes from ancient oceanic deposits—long before oil tankers and Jet Skis were crisscrossing Earth’s waters—and also has the benefit of additional iron, which gives it its pink hue. For women who tend to be lower in iron, cooking, seasoning, and mineralizing with pink salt is a great option. But any regular old sea salt will do, as long as it comes from a good source. Kosher salt means nothing nutritionally; it is purely a religious distinction, so don’t get confused. Shalom!

Get Lit

You can give a plant all the water it will ever need, but if it isn’t exposed to enough light, it just won’t grow. It’ll only drown. The same is true for human beings. You can hydrate until you have mineral cocktail coming out of your ears, but that’s only one of the variables in this morning math problem we’re trying to solve. A lack of sufficient or timely exposure to light will short-circuit every attempt you make to start your mornings off with the kind of energy necessary to own the day. This is a problem that everyone faces, from students to self-employed moms to workaholic dads to professional athletes. Biologically we are supposed to wake up with the sun and go to sleep with the stars. This is the timing that our body patterned for millennia, and the essence of circadian rhythm.

To the average person, circadian balance might not seem all that important until you realize that, as your circadian rhythms go, so goes the rest of your life. Women with atypical circadian rhythm, for example, have unusual eating and hormone patterns. This physiological and behavioral cycle follows the typical twenty-four-hour day, and controls a huge variety of biological processes, from the sleep-wake cycle to body temperature, metabolism, and even the life of the cell. The timing of these rhythms can easily become altered by the environment or choices we make, which can cause internal desynchronization. Sometimes this desynchronization manifests as jet lag, sometimes as sleep problems. There is even an association with increased incidence of cancer. Not to mention waking up extremely freaking early, even though all you really want to do is sleep in a little bit. What this means, very simply, is that the more synchronized your circadian rhythms are, the better your life becomes.

The strongest synchronizing agent for the circadian system? You guessed it: light. Specifically, blue light. Even more specifically, environmental light, aka sunlight, which is the most natural and abundant source of blue light. None of this should be too much of a surprise. The natural life-giving, regulating force of the sun—whether we understood it as a source of blue light or not—has drawn humans toward it for millennia. It’s why we find ourselves wandering out so often to look at the sky during dawn and at dusk. It’s why sunset cruises are so popular at beach vacation resorts. It’s why the road up to Haleakala Crater on Maui is packed at 4:00 a.m. during the high season in anticipation of the epic sunrise. It speaks to us. It’s our body being drawn, unconsciously, to the energy and rhythm of the sun. When we deny it, we begin to fall out of our own rhythm. When we accept and engage it, things begin to fall into place.

To rely on the sun to live in accord with Earth’s natural biorhythms, however, is virtually impossible in modern life. Everyone would have to go to bed shortly after it gets dark (for most of us equator huggers, that’s around 9:00 p.m.) and wake up when it’s light (around 6:00 a.m.). The real world often requires a different schedule. Maybe you’re a very early riser, or you sleep during the day and work at night, or you simply decide that nocturnal pleasures outweigh the delights of dawn. (Personally, I enjoy when the house is quiet after 10:00 p.m., so I prefer a midnight–7:00 a.m. sleep schedule.) Whatever the reason, you and the sun might not be on speaking terms on occasion. This creates a twofold problem: circadian rhythm disruption and a lack of means for fixing it.

This is what Duncan Keith, assistant captain of the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks, was feeling during his 2014–15 season. His body clock was getting out of whack because he traveled a lot and worked at night in a profession where he spends most of his time during the season in darkness. A lot of hockey cities are in the frozen north, above the wall where the wildlings live, and two-thirds of the regular season schedule take place there, coinciding with the curious daylight savings custom. This meant that walking outside to get some sunlight was rarely an option for Duncan. As a result, his circadian rhythms were often out of sync with the ebbs and flows of his life. It was enough that he was noticing an effect on energy and alertness come game time.

To help solve Duncan’s problem, we talked about a tweak to his routine that everyone can, and should, make to their own routine to reset their circadian rhythms. He got into the light every time he woke up—from sleep or from a nap.

The results of this blue-light tweak, with other supplement and nutrition improvements to Duncan’s game-day protocol, speak for themselves: not only did the Blackhawks go on to win the Stanley Cup that year, but Duncan was named Finals MVP as the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy. ESPN called his performance during the postseason an “indefatigable two-month surge” and “one of the most dominant … in NHL history.” He played more than thirty minutes per game and logged more than 700 minutes of playing time over the course of the playoffs—both of which are ridiculous numbers that put him in rarefied company as a defenseman. I’m not going to take any credit for his performance—he’s a fucking savage—but the adjustment to his postsleep light exposure and the rest of the tips and tactics you’ll find in this book certainly didn’t hurt! And it certainly won’t hurt your performance either.

Movement

I haven’t said anything about order for these first three essential ingredients to the perfect wake-up, but I will tell you how I start the best of my mornings: I wake up quietly. I have my morning mineral cocktail. I step outside into the rising sun. Then I sneak up on my just-waking fiancée. With ninja stealth, I make a slow and calculated attack. She protests, I laugh. I tease her in a bad Portuguese accent about her nickname “Miss2Jits” and the fact that she is a blue belt and I’m just a white belt. Eventually she’s had enough of my mouthiness and we grapple to see who can gain dominant position.

To me, there is no better start to the morning than this. It’s a chance to practice my “jits” and wrestle with a beautiful naked woman. While it’s a disaster for keeping the fitted sheet on the mattress, it’s totally worth it. If you’ve never tried coed naked jujitsu, you haven’t really lived! (Side note: Remember how popular those Coed Naked sports shirts were? Whatever happened to those?) But this isn’t just a fun little diversion to delay getting to work. There is real science behind adding a few minutes of playful activity in the morning. Even light exercise boosts circulation and improves cognitive performance. It releases endorphins and, most important of all, helps entrain that fickle bastard, our circadian rhythm. In addition to sufficient blue-light exposure, regular activity—however brief—sends strong cues to the body that it is time to wake up and get going. It helps set that internal biological clock.

Prescription

The morning prescription comes in three parts: hydrate, get lit, and move it.

Hydrate. There are no secret, scary, crazy steps to combining these ingredients into the morning mineral cocktail, but there are a couple things you want to be mindful of during preparation and consumption. First, the water should be room temperature. When you’re looking to maximize mineral absorption and aid digestion, room temperature is always best for any beverage. And second, the salt needs to dissolve or stay off the bottom of the glass when you drink it. Salt is the essential component for mineralization, but since it is denser than water, it sinks to the bottom before it dissolves if you let it come to rest after mixing. Then you end up with a salty sludge at the bottom of your glass that, unless you have a tongue like beef cattle, you’re gonna find hard to get out of there.

The best way to avoid that problem is to simply mix the cocktail in a shaker or a water bottle. You can make the whole thing the night before, you can make a concentrate and add the water in the morning, or you can do the whole thing from scratch every day, like a little ritual, but doing it in something with a lid allows you to drink at a pace you’re comfortable with, which is important. You don’t want to force the cocktail down; that only turns the whole process into something that feels more like punishment and less like nourishment. Whichever method is best for you is the method you should employ, because this is the ultimate lubricant for sliding into the day, and it would be a shame if you missed out on it.

Get lit. Upon waking, either from sleep or a nap, blast yourself with five to ten minutes of direct blue-light exposure. Ideally, you’ll be able to do this by stepping outside and exposing as much of your skin as possible to that giant yellow orb in the sky, basking in its bright, warm blueness, like a cat with less body hair. When that’s not possible, you’ll need to adapt. Fortunately, there is a good biohack at your disposal that can do the trick.

Pro Tip—Human Charging

Light-emitting earbuds. Believe it or not, the retinas are not the only light-sensitive receptors on the human body. These receptors are also found in many locations on the brain, including the cerebrum and the hypothalamus. One of the surest ways to shine light on them is through the ears. A device called the HumanCharger25, made by a company named Valkee out of Helsinki, Finland, has pioneered this technology for consumer use. Their light-emitting device uses earbuds, like the kind you’d buy at an airport newsstand or an Apple Store, that make it feel like you’re shining light straight onto your brain through your ear canals. It sounds crazy, I know, but a number of studies have shown it to be incredibly effective in reducing symptoms and increasing cognitive performance in people with seasonal affective disorder who have limited exposure to natural sunlight.

Move it. Of the three parts to this energy equation, this is by far the most difficult for people. The urge to crawl back under the blankets and slam the snooze button like a whack-a-mole is incredibly strong. The key to overcoming that resistance is understanding that what we’re talking about here is not a morning workout. This is morning movement.

There are many ways to get this movement in. Even just light movement will increase core temperature, cortisol, circulation, and the release of endorphins that will make you more alert, and put that grogginess behind you. I want it to be fun for you, so pick what you like: light yoga, pushups, air squats, jumping jacks, a Richard Simmons clip on YouTube. Chase your dog around the house or pick your kid up and fly her around like an airplane. It doesn’t really matter; it’s all part of circadian entrainment. Here are some of my go-to morning movements.

QUICK AND DIRTY: 1–3 MINUTES

Twenty-three burpees. Why? I like the number 23. I wore it on my back for years out on the basketball court, and to this day it makes me happy. If you are feeling frisky, add the pushup to the bottom of the burpee. If you need to break this up into several sets, go for it. Otherwise the whole thing should be over in about a minute. If twenty-three feels like a real workout to you, make up your own number. The key is simply that your heart rate gets elevated and muscles start working.

SLOW AND SEXY: 5–10 MINUTES

This is a little yoga flow I developed for the morning. I hold each position for two full intentional breaths, allowing up to one breath for the transition. Start standing with your palms open and facing outwards. Then forward fold. Walk your hands forward into down dog. Bring your left leg up parallel to your hands, into lizard lunge. Take your left hand and open it up to the sky for spinal twist. Put your hand back down. Take your leg back to high plank. Do a pushup (drop to knees if necessary). Repeat on the right side. When you complete the pushup, walk your hands back to forward fold. Roll up one vertebra at a time. Raise your arms, into a gentle backbend, then bring your hands down and your arms to center prayer pose. Repeat as many times as you like.

Pro Tip—Rebounder

Buy a dorky little mini trampoline called a rebounder to get the juices flowing. If you watched the Tony Robbins documentary I Am Not Your Guru, this is one of the things he uses to jump-start his biology before heading out onstage at the event venue. Proponents claim benefits to the lymph system (key to healthy immune function) due to the G-forces created from gravitational unloading. While this has yet to be conclusively proven, regular low-leg exercise has been shown to improve lymph movement. So regardless, the rebounder qualifies. Not only that, the bouncing is going to help build coordination and balance as well, as shown in a study on fighter pilots. For me personally, I feel like it brings circulation all the way from my head to my feet. Nothing shakes off the grogginess like bouncing like the one and only Tigger. Super triple bonus points if you sing the Tigger song, “The Wonderful Thing about Tiggers”, while bouncing.

The point here is not to exercise, it is to elevate your heart rate and get the lead out—all without crossing the threshold for activity that requires some form of recovery. You don’t want to be sore as a result of this early-morning activity, and you don’t want it to diminish your workout later, but generally speaking you want to eliminate the segregation between ordinary sedentary life and that forty-five-minute block of time where you work out at the gym. We want to add movement, activity, and play into all parts of your day, especially the beginning, to set the tone for the day to come. I think you’ll find that a little play wrestling can do as much as a cup of coffee, especially if you’re ticklish and the claws come out.

Now Do It

Starting and finishing are the two hardest parts of any task. Taking the first step is bringing your inertia from a dead halt into motion. Or as billionaire PayPal founder Peter Thiel would say, going from zero to one. It’s like trying to push a car. The bulk of the effort is actually getting the wheels to start rolling. From there you can mostly coast and steer. Getting hydrated, getting light, and getting moving is that initial momentum. We’re not asking you to wake up in the morning like a Jamaican bobsledder, jumping from the sheets into a full sprint, we’re just asking you to complete three simple tasks.

Accomplish these in the first twenty minutes, and you have set the tone for the entire day. It’s your on-ramp to the highway of happiness and effectiveness. It ensures you will be sufficiently warmed up and lubricated, so when we hit the gas later on in the day, you roar like the muscle car you are.

So ask yourself, are you going to hide from the day under your blankets, squander these minutes and let them pass by, lazily waking up, checking your social media, shoving another pod into the espresso machine? Are you going to succumb to comfort? Or are you gonna own it and stretch yourself a little bit? It’s an exercise of will. It’s an exercise of choice. It’s a routine that will determine how you perform throughout the day and even how you sleep later that night.

Hydration, light, movement. That’s all it takes. That’s all it will ever take. With a regimen this simple, great mornings should not feel like miracles. They should not arrive like a rainbow—a beautiful surprise that is out of your control. You are the captain of your internal universe. You choose to go get the sun and the water and to move the clouds of stagnation in your body to make your own fucking rainbow.

THREE POINTERS

Circadian rhythm influences many biological functions. To optimize circadian rhythm for performance, you need to add light and movement to the first twenty minutes upon waking up.

Most of us are chronically dehydrated, particularly in the morning. To start your hydration off right, drink the morning mineral cocktail to ensure you are getting adequate water and electrolytes.

We are highly sensitive to momentum. By starting your morning off with intention, you set your day off on an important positive trajectory.

DEEP BREATH, DEEP FREEZE

If you tiptoe into cold water, you’re missing out on the rush of plunging in headfirst.

SIMONE ELKELES

Breath and the cold are the best friends you never knew you had. In fact, you’ve probably been ignoring one and hiding from the other for as long as you can remember. Well, it’s time to emerge from your cozy hiding spot in the hot morning shower and embrace your new allies in the ﬁght against stress and its many cohorts. Once you’re done washing and indulging, take a deep breath, then thirty more, and crank that shower knob to as cold as it can get, because each morning needs to involve the rush that comes with exposing yourself to nature’s extremes for a few minutes and the willpower you cultivate in the process.

Getting Owned

Wim Hof owns two dozen extreme sports world records. He has run a marathon above the Arctic Circle with no shirt on. He has hiked past the death zone on Mount Everest, also with no shirt on … in a blizzard. You might think he just hates shirts, but there is a method to his madness. At age fifty-seven, Wim hasn’t been sick in a decade, his joints don’t ache, and he still enjoys a Heineken (or two) with dinner. His nickname is the “Iceman” but he wasn’t born a superhero, he made himself into one. He isn’t a daredevil, either. He’s just dared to tap the potential we all have inside, by exposing his body to the resistance of extreme natural stressors, so that it—and he—may grow stronger as a result.

Wim’s uniqueness is undeniable, but there is nothing unreplicable in this man. He is not a physical anomaly, nor part penguin. He could be you or me, or anyone. Or rather, we could be him, if we made some of the same choices he has made. Instead, most of us have shied away from exposure to the acute stress of difficult conditions. We choose cozy over cold, automatic over intentional, and with nothing to harden us, we get soft.

Think about it. Our cars have climate control. We have jackets and scarves, and fans, and air conditioning. We can spend the whole day in our office—lunch delivered—without ever going out in the blistering Texas heat or the biting Chicago wind. If we’re lucky, our homes have heated floors so when we go to the bathroom in the night our little feetsies don’t get cold. Our entire culture is built on the elimination of the difficult and the pursuit of the comfortable. Everything panders to it, and we buy into it because we’ve got all these old scripts running through our heads from our mothers and doctors and crazy old neighbors: If you go out in this cold without a jacket, you might catch your death. Put some shoes on, you’ll catch a cold.

Though it was always scientifically dubious, there was a time when this idea wasn’t so crazy. It used to be the harshness of nature that was the greatest threat to human survival, not heart disease or driving. In that sense, one way to look at the frantic warnings of our elders is as the modern version of the prehistoric fight-or-flight stress response. For most of primate history (including our brief history as human primates) we had things trying to fight us, hunt us, and kill us—whether animal, environmental, or fellow man. Our bodily response to that stress is brilliant. We temporarily shut down all systems inessential to the necessary response. We scuttle immune response, reproduction, growth, and digestion processes in favor of musculoskeletal efficiency and cognitive performance. In other words, when threatened we push all our energetic resources to help us move well and think fast. That process—largely modulated by “stress hormones” like cortisol, adrenaline, and norepinephrine—has saved countless human asses and is probably why your grandma can’t totally explain why, when you were a kid, she scrambled to wrap you in a jacket made out of a sleeping bag when it dropped below 60 degrees and then hustled you inside once you were done with whatever brought you outside in the first place.

The real problem is when the body can’t distinguish between physical threats and psychosocial threats—threats to our job security, or bank account, or social status. These threats often have no concrete conclusion, and so the stress hormones that were built for brief bursts to ward off acute stress go buck wild in your brain box, and chronic stress develops. Leading neuroscientist and stress specialist Robert Sapolsky summed it up for the Stanford News: “If you plan to get stressed like a normal mammal, you had better turn on the stress response or else you’re dead. But if you get chronically, psychosocially stressed, like a Westernized human, then you are more at risk for some of the leading causes of death in Westernized life.”

That is the great irony of the modern, westernized world. Times have changed. We’ve advanced. Things have gotten better. So why is it that now that everything is so comfortable, we are sick all the time? America spends more on health care than any other nation, and yet we keep getting sicker. And that isn’t just among the older, high-risk population. Young Americans are getting sicker too. A 2013 report by the Institute of Medicine and National Research Council found that “for many years, Americans have been dying at younger ages than people in almost all other high income countries.” Survival rates of American women under fifty, for example, are plummeting in comparison to their first-world peers. How is this possible? We are the inventors of Nike, the Fitbit, and the kale smoothie, dammit! We should be terminators. We have every app and gadget in the world, all trying to make it easy for us. Yet everything seems so damn fraught and complicated.

And that highlights the problem, right there. You see, collectively and individually, we are in a dysfunctional relationship with stress. We have too much of the bad, chronic kind, and not enough of the good, acute kind. What makes things worse, we don’t force ourselves to confront acute stress, because chronic stress has eaten away at our willpower, and as a result we don’t know how to strengthen the muscles of our resolve. We become powerless to cultivate the willpower we require to make the best choices for our lives. The bad stress beats us down, exhausts our energy, and in a very real sense, starts to kill us. My friend the Olympic gold medal skier Bode Miller used to describe this state as “overwhelmed and underqualified.” (He also taught me a lot about the solution—a skill I call mental override—but more on that later.) It is fertile ground for the unvirtuous cycle of stress and illness.

In fact, in a survey reported by the American Psychological Association, there was a strong correlation between high levels of stress and poor health scores. Chronic stress, which brings with it chronic inflammation, suppresses the immune system, increases occurrence of pain, and is a major correlative to depression. That’s a lot. It’s no wonder that upward of 75 percent of all doctor visits have a stress-related component. What is a wonder, however, is that less than 3 percent of doctor visits include counseling about stress. Maybe it has something to do with the 76 percent of physicians surveyed who lacked confidence in their ability to counsel patients about stress, or the 57 percent who “rarely” or “never” practice stress reduction techniques themselves. Institutionally, individually, collectively, and sometimes even me personally—we are getting owned by stress.

To fix the problems, what we need are simple strategies for reducing the bad, chronic stress and diving feetfirst into the good, acute stress. Fortunately, we can find both in a two-part regimen from that crazy Dutchman who went topless to the top of the world. Wim Hof’s conscious breathing techniques and cold exposure practices are going to deliver for us the reduction in bad, chronic stress we need for greater health, and the increase in good, acute stress we need for more consistent growth in both our body and our character. The best part: we can do them at the same time, just like it happens in nature, and develop our willpower in the process.

Owning It

Wim Hof’s many physical feats are astonishing even to consider, but what is truly impressive is what he has been able to teach others to do. Wim has trained groups of ordinary men and women as old as sixty-five to climb with him up Kilimanjaro. And yes, some of them went without a shirt on. He has proven in a laboratory-controlled study that he can teach people to alter the immune system’s inflammatory response to pathogens—rewriting both textbooks and expectations in the process. His work on breath and cold has also turned him into a performance coach of sorts for some of the greatest athletes and performers in the world, including the biggest of all coaches (in more ways than one), Tony Robbins.

Arguably the most successful motivational speaker in history, Tony Robbins is nothing short of a human dynamo. He’s a bundle of indefatigable energy capable of nearly inhuman feats. He’s six feet seven inches tall but spry and nimble. He can walk across hot coals and keep a crowd of thousands captivated during his legendary weeklong motivation marathons. All of this he embodies at virtually the same age as Wim Hof himself (they’re born ten months apart), after decades of emotionally demanding work and a calendar perpetually filled with grueling international travel.

If you ask Tony, a big part of his capability springs from the fundamentals of the routine I am going to lay out for you in this chapter. As he says, “It’s not exactly a gentle way to wake up, but that’s beside the point.” In fact, it is the point, because this two-part ritual—deliberate, conscious breathing exercises and cold-water exposure—goes a long way toward explaining Tony’s bottomless resolve, vitality, and energy. It also explains why he’s been one of the most successful people in history: he practices overcoming resistance every single day.

The Breath

There are hundreds of different breathing traditions from all over the world. Some are shrouded in arcane symbolism. Others come with complicated instructions, like the world’s worst IKEA dresser: ring finger to the left nostril; spiral helix breath in lotus posture; “turn your stomach into the shape of a vase.” Huh? Wim Hof cuts through that bullshit. His instructions are simple. He just wants you to get the breath in. It doesn’t matter which hole it comes through, because it’s what the breath does for you that matters to him. Here is his method in two steps.

STEP 1: THIRTY TO FIFTY POWER BREATHS

Inhale through the nose or mouth into the belly with deep, powerful breaths. Exhale without additional effort, just let the chest fall. Keep a steady pace and make sure to focus on drawing the breath deep into your belly. Do this until you feel a slight light-headedness and a tingling sensation in your extremities. That is the sign that a shift is happening and your blood is hyperoxygenated. For most people that effect starts to kick in around thirty breaths, but it can take up to fifty, depending on certain factors.

Note: It’s important not to overbreathe to the point of serious light-headedness, strong tingles, or involuntary closing of the hands. That will take you beyond the currently desired effect and into the realm of a practice called holotropic or shamanic breathing, which is a topic for a different book.

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