Daily RoutineChappy's Core Daily Routine

Why wake up extremely early? Here are a few of my favorites:

• It’s easy, actually
  • It doesn’t really take any extraordinary willpower to wake up early! Fundamentally, I’m still sleeping the same amount as anyone else would, I’m just shifting my schedule earlier. Commit to it for a couple of weeks and watch your circadian rhythm naturally shift!
• I get 4+ hours completely to myself
  • That give me time to grab full control of my schedule before anyone can disturb me!
  • I try to allocate as much of this time as I can to “eating the frog” – working on the day’s biggest and most important project
  • Once the meetings + comms bombardment starts, my plate gets filled up will small yet urgent tasks which can easily engulf the rest of my day
• I can’t miss a workout
  • When I work out this early in the morning before all meeting, it’s nearly impossible to make an excuse to miss it (not that working out too little is ever an issue 😅)
• I only have to shower once
  • There are naturally two points where I have to shower daily: once after my workout and once before my meetings. Why not line the two up?!
• I have enough time
  • This gives me enough time to work out early in the morning, shower, and get going
  • My benchmark is at least 4 hours between waking and first meeting. That’s the minimum I can fit my full morning routine into and not feel too rushed
• I naturally out-work everyone
  • By starting work before 4am every morning, most people’s 9-5 becomes my 12-hour work day. The inertia naturally becomes that I out-work everyone!

Taken from Why We Sleep, here’s how alertness naturally varies throughout the day:

Given this, you could argue that alertness follows a sawtooth pattern throughout the day. However, I think most people actually experience a sinusoidal pattern of alertness.

Finally, most people would probably tell you they desire a square-wave pattern of alertness if it were reasonably achievable.

Here’s my best attempt at doing so!

• AM: Get the blood flowing, caffeine + ⍺-GPC, and artificial sun exposure ASAP
• PM: Sleep stack + melatonin (and a whole routine in general) to prime the body for sleep

Make this your #1 priority!

Despite popular opinion, caffeine is actually a very safe drug with tons of benefits and very few risks. As such, I’ve grown much more liberal with my intake of caffeine over the past few years.

The biggest “risk” of caffeine is reduced sleep quality. This is definitely something I want to minimize. Analyzing my own average caffeine consumption throughout the day (see the sawtooth graph below), I go to sleep on approximately 110mg of caffeine. Obviously not ideal but 🤷‍♂️ . (source)

Contrarian opinion: I think most people actually get too much sleep!

Yes, I’ve read Why We Sleep which makes a statistically rigorous argument for 8+ hours daily. However, studies also show that anywhere between 6-8 hours works. In fact, all cause mortality with 8 hours is actually higher than with 5 hours: (caveat: correlation vs causation). Also, my father was a lifelong 4-6hrs/night sleeper so I might’ve inherited the gene from him!

When I oversleep, I often feel more lethargic the following day yet have trouble going to sleep at the end of the night.

After travel, an outstanding weekend, or something else that kicks me off my normal routine, I’ve developed a simple strategy to get back on track.

My top priority is always to get back to my normal sleep schedule. In fact, I’ve even done 12-hour schedule flips (US ↔ India) without any jet lag whatsoever.

How? Using supplements to modulate alertness: caffeine as an extender, the sleep stack with melatonin as a light switch.

Take the time to learn how your body reacts to both and how you can then use them as tools to get back on track after disruption!

For me, I find that once I get back into my normal sleep routine and have those first 4 hours in the morning to grab full control of my schedule that the rest falls back into place rather quickly 😄