My 6-Step Morning Protocol for a Better Day

Want to make your own morning protocol? Download Arthur’s guide to help you get started: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/6-protocols — How you start your morning sets the tone for your whole day. In this episode of Office Hours, I share the science and habits behind my “Mad Scientist” morning routine, a six-step protocol I use to lower negative affect, boost positive mood, and make mornings a time of focus and flow. I introduce the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), explain why morning mood matters, and show you the research-backed habits I use to improve mine. In this episode, I cover: • Why your morning starts the night before with an early bedtime • How witnessing the sunrise can help manage poor morning moods • The reason I don’t use the alarm clock on my phone • Why I exercise first thing • How to build a grounding spiritual or reflective practice (even if you’re secular) • Why delaying your morning coffee can improve focus and energy throughout the day • The high-protein, tryptophan-rich foods I eat for breakfast • Why you need to protect your most productive hours of the day • Listener questions on staying compassionate while protecting yourself and whether anger is linked to unhappiness We’d love to hear any feedback you have. Please email us at [email protected]. And please leave a review on Apple or Spotify. Thanks for listening! — Brought to you by: • AG1 https://drinkag1.com/arthurbrooks—Support whole body health around the clock. Get a free Welcome Kit, including a bottle of Vitamin D and 5 AG1 Travel Packs (a $76 value), when you subscribe https://drinkag1.com/arthurbrooks. • The Pump Club https://arnoldspumpclub.com/pages/the-pump-club-app—Finally, fitness you can trust. Join The Pump Club https://arnoldspumpclub.com/pages/the-pump-club-app—created by Arnold Schwarzenegger—for custom workouts and nutrition, habit building, and community—all for 50% OFF the monthly price with the code officehours at checkout. — Where to find Arthur Brooks: • Website: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://arthurbrooks.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://arthurbrooks.com/ • X: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://x.com/arthurbrooks⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://x.com/arthurbrooks • Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/arthurcbrooks/ • Facebook: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/ArthurBrooks/ • YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGuyFRjJQFGCKzfHTBvWM6A • LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/arthur-c-brooks/ • Email: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ mailto:[email protected] — Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (03:02) Introduction to PANAS (Positive and Negative Affect Schedule) (06:36) How to measure your emotional baseline and manage morning mood (08:42) Step 1: Brahma Muhurta. The case for getting up before dawn (13:46) Why your morning starts the night before (14:52) Step 2: Get physical (17:54) Why morning exercise is Arthur’s go-to for managing negative affect (21:27) Step 3: Get metaphysical (26:50) Step 4: Coffee time. Why you should delay it (31:30) Step 5: Eat a tryptophan-rich, protein-heavy meal (35:40) Step 6: Get into the flow (38:55) Q&A: How to stay compassionate while protecting yourself (41:38) Q&A: Is there a direct link between anger and lack of happiness — Referenced: • Leadership and Happiness course: https://www.hbs.edu/coursecatalog/1885.html • How to Build a Life: https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ • The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life: https://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Files-Insights-Arthur-Brooks/dp/B0F4MFQ6VN • Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales: https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.54.6.1063 • Arthur’s PANAS quiz: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/quiz/panas ... References continued at: ⁠⁠⁠https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠ https://www.arthurbrooks.com/office-hours⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.theatlantic.com/projects/how-build-life/ — Production and marketing by ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://penname.co/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://penname.co/⁠. For inquiries about sponsorship, email [email protected]

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:00Arthur Brooks?

  Is morning hard for you? When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings? And maybe a little more stress than you'd like? That describes a lot of people. That will tell you about your emotional baseline. How you wake up feeling in the morning on an average day. Not a day where you slept nothing, or God forbid that you're hungover. I'm talking about a normal day. Where you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're kind of out of sorts. You might say to yourself, "Okay, sure. Sure, buddy. I'll get up at 4:30 in the morning, but I'm hitting the espresso machine first. That's my first stop, right?" No, I don't recommend that. I have used all of my background in behavioral science and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol that is enhancing of my well-being

• 1:43Arthur Brooks?

  by managing the negative side of my affect profile. And you can do it too.

• 1:53Arthur Brooks?

  Hi friends, welcome to Office Hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a professor at Harvard University. I'm also the author of How to Build a Life, a column in The Atlantic about happiness. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And this podcast is intended to help you to do exactly the same thing, to become a happier person and to bring more happiness to the world around you. Thank you for watching my podcast and for subscribing and liking and leaving comments. Thanks also for recommending this show. I know a lot of people are recommending it to others and I appreciate that a lot. We need as many people as we can looking at content about happiness and applying it to their lives.

• 2:35Arthur Brooks?

  Please do leave a review or a rating and a comment. We look at all the comments and we appreciate them a lot. Also, if you have any questions or comments or criticisms or any other way that you want to interact with us, the email to the show is [email protected]. We're looking forward to hearing from you. This week, I want to talk about how to start your day in the best possible way to set you up for well-being. Now, what I'm going to do today is to talk to you about how I do that. My life is based on protocols. My life is based on a tremendous amount of discipline. And the reason for that is because happiness doesn't have to be left up to chance. I mean, a good deal of it depends on what's going on around you, to be sure.

• 3:18Arthur Brooks?

  But there's a lot more of it in your hands than you probably ever understood. And if you follow my work, you know that there are many habits that you can adopt that will make you happier today, also less unhappy. I'll talk about that distinction in this episode. Really, today is about the protocols that I've developed over the years that have tremendously improved my life, that have made my life so much better than it had been in the past. And I'm going to tell you why that is and exactly how you can adopt these ideas and adapt them to your routines as well. Today, Ahmad's scientists...

• 3:55Arthur Brooks?

  Morning Wellbeing Protocol. Now, I've just referred to myself as a mad scientist and let me tell you why. In a past episode, I talked about positive and negative emotions. The fact is that the limbic system of the brain produces positive and negative emotions for very specific reasons. You need both. You need positive, you need negative. And if you don't have one or the other, your life isn't going to work right. A lot of people say, "I want good feelings, I don't want bad feelings." And I say, "That's wrong." There's no such thing as bad feelings. If you didn't have negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week. They're an alarm system for what's going on around you. Fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. The trouble is that for a lot of people, they have very intense negative emotionality. As a matter of fact, as makes perfect sense,

• 4:37Arthur Brooks?

  half of the population is above average in the intensity of the production of their negative emotions. We're not all the same. One of the things that I do, and I've talked about a little bit in the past, is the categorization of the intensity of emotions that people feel. Above-average positive, above-average negative, below-average positive, below-average negative. Now, you know that you can interact these two things, and you get four kinds of people. Some people, they're really above-average positive and below-average negative. Isn't that great? We call them cheerleaders. Some people are low on both sides. These are low affect people. They're low positive and low negative in intensity. They're judges. Some people are high negative and low positive. We call them poets.

• 5:22Arthur Brooks?

  And then there are the people who are intense on both. High negative and high positive, those are the mad scientists. And that's me. I feel things very intensely. And that's great on the positive side, but I need to manage the negative side. Today, I'm going to tell you how I do that. Because a lot of you watching, well, one of the reasons that you're watching this content and you're interested in it is not just because you're trying to feel more joyful every minute, but you're trying to manage negative emotionality, which actually has a negative impact from time to time on your happiness. I'm not talking about clinical problems here. I'm talking about ordinary life. And you may, you may have noticed that you have some, you know, some ups, and that's great. But some downs that are pretty intense.

• 6:04Arthur Brooks?

  What can you do every day to manage the intensity of your negative emotions such that it doesn't feel dysregulated and obstruct your quality of life? I'm going to give you a whole bunch of ideas that I follow and the schedule on which I follow these ideas every single day that has dramatically improved my quality of life. During the coronavirus epidemic, when almost everybody was locked down, me included, I thought I could use the time well by experimenting on myself a little bit. That led to a lot of research that I talk about in this show and that I write about as well. But it also included some experiments that I did on my health. I was looking for new ways to get multivitamins that were easy to absorb, pre and probiotics,

• 6:48Arthur Brooks?

  which are great for my health, antioxidants, superfoods. And I made a great discovery during those years. I found AG1. It's an all-in-one-place daily health drink that gives me all the things that I need. And I've been a paying customer ever since. That's why I'm so pleased that AG1 Next Gen is now a sponsor of Office Hours. So head on over to drinkag1.com/ArthurBrooks for a free welcome kit. You'll get a bottle of vitamin D and five free starter packs of AG1. That's a $76 value when you subscribe. That's drinkag1.com/ArthurBrooks to try AG1 today. Now, let's start off with a couple of questions. Is morning hard for you?

• 7:31Arthur Brooks?

  When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings and maybe a little more stress than you'd like? That describes a lot of people. That will tell you about your emotional baseline, how you wake up feeling in the morning on an average day, not a day where you slept nothing or, God forbid, that you're hungover. I'm talking about a normal day, when you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're kind of out of sorts. People with highly intense negative affect, which is what we call mood in my business, they tend to be these people with this high negative emotionality. And that includes me. Now, part of the reason is because I'm a high affect person, because I am this mad scientist. Part of it is because when you wake up in the morning, especially a

• 8:14Arthur Brooks?

  Few, well, more like forty-five minutes after you wake up, you get a spike of cortisol, which is a stress hormone. And that kind of, that pours fuel on your high level of negative affect. And, and I'll top that off in my own case by being a pretty poor sleeper. It's not because I have bad sleep hygiene. It's because I come from a long line of insomniacs. I remember as a kid, anytime that I would wake up, it was weird. If I would get up and go downstairs, I always found my dad. And he was always drinking a cup of, you know, Postum or hot chocolate or something. Two o'clock in the morning, he was up. Four o'clock in the morning, he was up. Until it finally occurred to me, by the time I was about eleven years old, he never sleeps. I asked him about it, and he said, yeah, my dad never slept either. He said, good luck to you, son.

• 8:59Arthur Brooks?

  And sure enough, by the time I hit forty, it became a real problem. So the result of it is that I'm always battling sleep issues. I've got cortisol spikes in the morning like everybody, and I'm a high negative affect person. That all adds up to a big need for me to manage mood in the morning more than any other time. I have used all of my background in behavioral science and everything I've learned about biology as well to put together a morning protocol that is enhancing of my well-being by managing the negative side of my affect profile. And you can do it too. This is a six-part management protocol on negative affect. Here's where it starts. Now, this is going to be a hard one.

• 9:43Arthur Brooks?

  You're not going to necessarily like this. But to understand what I'm about to tell you, I want to take you not to some laboratory here in the United States, but from ancient wisdom across to the other side of the world. And I want to introduce the concept of Brahman Mahurta. That's two words in Sanskrit that means creator's time. This is an ancient idea. It's probably about six thousand years old. Now, Brahma, it refers to God or the godhead. Mahurta is a specific period of time. It's forty-eight minutes, to be exact. And so the Brahman Mahurta specifically is two Mahurta's. And, and, and that adds up to an hour and thirty-six minutes. Now, what is that all about? The idea of the Brahman Mahurta, the creator's time, is to Get up an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn.

• 10:28Arthur Brooks?

  The idea was, in ancient, ancient Vedic wisdom, that you'd have a particular kind of insight into the mind of the godhead. You'd have a special enlightenment. You'd have clarity of thinking an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn. So don't miss it, is what they were saying. Now, of course, there are no good treatment, control experiments, peer-reviewed studies talking about exactly an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn. And a lot of you are not going to get up an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn, so you can have this special connection to, to God. I know that, and especially if you're, you live pretty far north, in the middle of summer, there's no way you could get up an hour and thirty-six minutes before dawn. I was talking about this, this summer, this last summer, when I was in Helsinki.

• 11:10Arthur Brooks?

  And I was there at the end of June, and, and somebody pointed out that it doesn't get dark. So, you know, good luck to you on the Brahmanakurtam. That's not the point. The basic point is that, that, that modern research shows that whether or not you can connect to the divine at this time or not, that if you get up before dawn, and this is based on treatment and control experiments. Again, all of this research is going to go into the show notes, don't worry. But this is Kumar and Raghavendra and Mujanath in 2012 in the Indian Journal of Physiological Pharmacology. This is an excellent study that shows where students are in treatment and control. One gets up at seven o'clock in the morning, and the other gets up something like an hour before dawn and gets to work,

• 11:52Arthur Brooks?

  that the earlier group has significantly higher attentiveness and recall throughout the day. There's also higher levels of creativity and focus. If you get up before dawn, your work is going to be better. Now, that's not just a question of higher performance. It's also the case that people who witness the dawn, who are up before dawn and fully conscious and witness the dawn, they have lower levels of negative affect. This is especially true for people who have seasonal affective disorder, people who have a lot of trouble with depression come January or February. It's actually pretty easy to get up before dawn in February, because the sun is coming up so way, so late. My advice is to use the happiness effect of this and the effectiveness, the productivity effects of the Brahman Mahakirta,

• 12:35Arthur Brooks?

  getting up before dawn in a way that that will significantly change your life. Now, let me talk a little bit more about the science of how this works and how to use that time. I get up at 4:30. 4:30 is my time to rise from bed. But I travel a lot too. And so there are times when I'm really jet lagged and I have to alter that a little bit. But I always try to get up before dawn because of these these good effects, which I've noticed in my life. I've seen in the research and I've been able to witness in my own life as well. Now, you might be saying to yourself, yeah, man, good for you. You're obviously a morning lark. No, I'm not. And there's a lot of research on chronotypes. Chronotypes are the different kinds of people who are either night oriented people or morning oriented people.

• 13:19Arthur Brooks?

  And the morning lark versus the night owl. But and there's interesting research on that, by the way, that shows that people who tend to be have trouble going to sleep and want to sleep in, they probably have a circadian rhythm that's where the day in their brain, the day is not 24 hours, it's a little bit longer. And so the result of that is that they're not tired at night. They're chronically a little bit not tired at night. And that's possibly the case. And if it is, it's almost certainly genetic. But we also have a ton of research out there that that chronotype is also extremely environmental. For the longest time, I never saw the sunrise. I didn't. All the way through my twenties, I was making my living as a professional musician. And I got up when the sun was warm. I went to bed when it was nice and late.

• 14:04Arthur Brooks?

  And I always thought I was a night owl. Well, looking back on it, no, I was just a musician who drank too much. Now I don't drink at all and it turns out it's easier to get up. Not super easy. I'm not one of those people who gets up without an alarm clock. No, I use an alarm clock every single day. I did this morning and it went off at 4:30 and I didn't like it. I said, uh, because that morning alarm is something I would like to sleep through. But winning the day is a big deal as the first battle in fighting negative affect and raising my weight. Well being and it's so effective that I jumped out of bed as I ordinarily do now. When does this morning at four thirty start? The answer is last night.

• 14:48Arthur Brooks?

  Right? The the truth is that the most important way to be able to wake up early in the morning is to go go to bed on time. And and I'm I'm I try to be in bed by nine fifteen. And for me, if I'm getting seven hours of sleep, that's a great night and and I feel great. I don't fall asleep at the wheel. I'm not falling asleep during meetings. I don't. I never take naps and I have plenty of energy. Right now I'm taping this in the middle of the afternoon and. I hope it's clear that I'm wide awake. One of the reasons that people don't aren't able to get to bed, especially in their twenties, I've written about this a little bit, is called nighttime procrastination. And what this is is a phenomenon where you're sort of rebelling against yourself, especially as a young adult. You remember you have this vestigial memory being put to bed. You didn't want to be put to bed and so you rebel against it by.

• 15:32Arthur Brooks?

  Even though you're the one setting the rules, it's unproductive. Remember, be metacognitive. I've talked about that in past episodes. Think about what is actually motivating you and you can manage yourself better. That's the first battle is. Getting to bed, waking up, for me, it's four thirty. Now, the first thing that I do when I wake up, fifteen minutes after I wake up, I'm in the gym. I'm very lucky. I have a gym in my house. That's a. A must have for me. I've had a gym in my house for a long time, precisely because I get up so early. I don't feel like getting in the car. I want to go downstairs. I go down to my basement. I've got a real nice setup there, all the things that I actually need because I've been working out almost every day for the past thirty years. I'm a I'm a bona fide gym rat.

• 16:14Arthur Brooks?

  Now, what do I not do? I don't ingest anything except for a little bit of electrolytes, creatine monohydrate, which is the thing. I used to take five grams a day in creatine monohydrate. I'm now taking ten or even fifteen because of the new research that shows that it has incredibly powerful neurocognitive benefits. As well as the physiological benefits with respect to muscle protein synthesis, or at least volumizing muscles when you're doing resistance training. And so the result of it is that that's all I'm taking. I'll talk to you in a minute about why I'm not taking anything else besides that when I start my workout. I work out sixty minutes a day and I work out seven. Days a week. Now, you might be thinking, that sounds insane. You do you. You got to figure out actually how much rest you need. But if you're working out seven days a week, you're obviously not working out the same muscles seven days a week.

• 16:59Arthur Brooks?

  I'm 61 years old. I would be bent over and hurting all the time if I did that. I have all kinds of splits that I've been working on and I have routines and I have cycles that I've been doing for years and years. My protocols for exercise are something I'm going to cover in a future episode of the show. But boil it down to I'm doing a combination of zone two cardio. That's the cardio where you can actually talk. You're breathing hard, but you can actually talk. You're not that out of breath. And serious resistance training. So I'm either doing half and half or I'll do resistance training and then half an hour of zone two cardio. Or more likely, I'll actually warm down with zone two cardio and I start with 45 minutes of serious resistance training. I'm lifting weights is what it comes down to. Later in the day, I always do a lot of steps. I get a lot of walking.

• 17:45Arthur Brooks?

  Esther and I, we go out for a walk for about 40 minutes every night after dinner. We live in a nice neighborhood where we can walk around. We're unlikely to get run over by a car and it's certainly not dangerous. And that's a real privilege, I have to say, but also it's really good right after dinner to do that. It's good for your digestion. It has a lot of protective benefits. And it's one of the practices that my friend Dan Buettner has talked about that people walk after meals are some of the healthiest, longest lived people in the world. Probably you've seen some of the science on that. Maybe I'll drop some of that in the show notes as well. Okay, so I'm starting my day at 4:30 beep beep beep beep beep with the alarm clock. Side note, I don't use my phone to wake me up. Part of digital detox is detoxing from digital all night long, starting an hour before I go to bed.

• 18:29Arthur Brooks?

  And an hour after I wake up and that means I got to wake up a different way. I have this incredible device. It's called a $5 alarm clock that I got off Amazon and it always works. So I'm not using my phone. Very important, especially for a poor sleeper like me. I recommend it. Then within 15 minutes, I've got my workout drink and I'm down in the gym and I'm doing that for an hour. Okay, now, there's a lot of research that suggests that for different goals, different times of day for exercise might be better. Example, for muscle For muscle hypertrophy, it's probably a little bit better to work out later in the morning, middle of the day, sometimes even in the afternoon. I don't recommend working out right before you go to bed because that can stimulate a lot of cortisol and that can keep you awake and you don't want that.

• 19:12Arthur Brooks?

  You want your melatonin, your cortisol to cross so that you can, you can go to sleep. But when we're talking about mood, you need to do your exercise when you need the exercise for mood management. This is the most powerful tool I've got over the course of the day. Okay, what do I know? People who have high levels of negative affect, intense negative affect. Again, we're not talking about clinical problems here. We're not talking about mood disorders of clinical depression or generalized anxiety. We're just talking about above-average negative affect, intensity of negative emotion. There are some really bad ways to manage it and there's some really good ways to manage it. The single worst way for you to manage your negative affect is drugs and alcohol. If you're numbing yourself, you're going to have problems.

• 19:54Arthur Brooks?

  The second worst way to, to lower your negative affect is workaholism, just staying really, really distracted from your own feelings. Don't do that, you're going to ruin your relationships. You're going to lower your quality of life. What are the good ways to do it? Well, to begin with, go pick up heavy things and run around. That's a great way to manage negative affect. And, and here's the interesting point. I have found in my research that people who can't stay in the gym and who hate exercise and find a real trouble with the discipline to stay in, stay in the gym, they almost always have below-average intensity of negative affect. They're not mad scientists. What they are is cheerleaders, generally speaking, and, and God love them. But that's what I find for the people who struggle with this. The people who say, "Yeah, love getting in the gym. I get in the gym every day.

• 20:39Arthur Brooks?

  This is not hard for me." That's because they noticed that they feel better, even though they can't quite articulate what's happening with their bodies. This is actually happening. They're regulating stress hormones and they didn't know it. So if you struggle with it, congratulations, you probably don't have a high negative affect issue, but you've still got to stay in the gym because it's good for you. Me, on the other hand, I'm going for an hour a day at 4:45 every day for the rest of my life and I hope that's a bunch more years. That's step two. Get physical. When people ask me about happiness, I usually outline four areas of life: faith, family, friendship, and meaningful work. But there's a fifth element that's also really important for well-being, something that I

• 21:21Arthur Brooks?

  pay a lot of attention to myself, and that's your health and fitness. Every morning, my happiness routine starts with a workout. And it's not just because I'm obsessed with bigger biceps and abs. That ship has sailed. Well, unhappiness and getting a better quality of life, exercise and nutrition, actually will do more for your well-being than most people imagine. That's why I love the Pump Club app. It's actually not about hacks and trends that promise a lot, but don't deliver very much, as we all know. The app, which was built by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is called The Positive Corner of the Internet because it brings people together to become healthier, fitter, and create better habits and a more joyful life. As a listener of Office Hours, you can get 50% off the monthly price

• 22:04Arthur Brooks?

  and get an annual membership for just $79. That's just a little more than $6 per month for your health. Visit thepumpclub.com and use the code OFFICEHOURS at checkout. That's the type of investment that you want to make in your future. The next step, well, since we call that last step "get physical", step three is get metaphysical. And I learned this one from my extensive work with His Holiness the Dalai Lama. Those of you who've followed my work for a long time know, for the past 13 years now, I've been working quite closely with His Holiness. And I go every year to Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, where His Holiness has his monastery. And we've done a lot of programs together. We've written together. On a future episode of this show, I think a series of episodes on this show,

• 22:49Arthur Brooks?

  we're going to show you content from one of my last interactions with him. So we'll do probably four episodes in a row where you'll meet the Dalai Lama and hear the conversations that we've had, which are very deep and very meaningful. But in one of my first trips, I asked him about how he starts his day. I'm really interested in how people in different walks of life actually structure their day, how their discipline works. He gets up super early, earlier than me, like 3:30 in the morning. He pedals on his bike. He has a bike, he has an exercise bike. I mean, he's got to stay in shape, too. And then, his metaphysical experience starts with analytical meditation. Now, I know, when you think meditation as a Westerner, you're probably thinking about single-point meditation, where you're trying to focus, trying to focus.

• 23:34Arthur Brooks?

  And for most people, they're early in the morning. If they're doing that, even if you exercise first, you're going to fall asleep, you're going to feel really groggy. Analytical meditation in Tibetan Buddhism is much like what Roman Catholics call "mental prayer".

• 23:50Arthur Brooks?

  And what it is, is you're contemplating a little passage of scripture, or a saying, or something wise, and thinking about it, deeply, deeply thinking about what it means to you in your life. That's how the Dalai Lama starts, a couple of hours of that after his exercise. I thought to myself, yeah, that's really good, because what do we need? We need body and soul. This is to manage your negative affect, to increase your happiness, and to make yourself more productive for the course of the day. This is a really good idea. I adopted that myself. Now, I'm a Catholic, and it's really important to me. So what do I do? After I exercise for an hour, by this point, it's 5:45 in the morning. I go in, I take a shower, and by about 6:10, I'm in the car, because I go to church. I go to mass every day.

• 24:34Arthur Brooks?

  When I'm on the road and there isn't a church nearby, there's not a 6:30 mass, I pray an ancient, venerable Catholic meditation called the Rosary, which is a series of repeated prayers over contemplation of certain mysteries in the life of Jesus. It's great. That's 25 minutes in the mass. The daily mass is 25 minutes. The Rosary takes about 25 minutes. And that's that metaphysical state where I'm calibrating the work of the soul. I could also tell you, actually, what's probably going on in the hippocampus of the brain, because there's brain science that accompanies all of the metaphysics, all of the spiritual work. Of course, these two things work together. The net-net result is, I'm ready to work when I'm done, and I'm a lot less on edge as a result of that,

• 25:18Arthur Brooks?

  because I've done those two things together. I've worked my body, I've worked my mind, I've worked my soul, I've worked my heart, and that's done at 7:00. That's part 3. Now, you're not Catholic and you're not a meditator. You can still do this. You find your way. Some people will talk about this by journaling for 20 minutes or half an hour, doing something that's... Contemplative, that's what you need. Something that's calm, that's focused, that's centering, that's highly metacognitive, where you're thinking about thinking. That's what you actually need. That's what your brain needs. Why? Because when you're in a naturally high level of negative emotional affect, you need to pay attention to that, to manage that.

• 26:03Arthur Brooks?

  You need to be in an active posture of managing your limbic system, so your limbic system isn't managing you. That's what I'm doing when I'm in mass or when I'm praying my rosary. That's what the Dalai Lama is doing in analytical meditation. That's what you can do, using any of these metacognitive techniques, from journaling to prayer, to any form of meditation that you like. Find something that you get really good at, and that, my friends, is step three. Getting metaphysical. There's a lot of research behind, in the neuroscience and benefits. Let me drop some of that stuff in the show notes as well. For meditation, even by the way, among completely inexperienced meditators, a lot of people beat themselves up, like, "I'm a terrible meditator."

• 26:48Arthur Brooks?

  You're really gonna judge yourself on that? Even for very short periods, it significantly lowers negative affect because of the metacognitive effects that we're talking about here. Really good study, that's in behavioral brain research from 2019. I'll drop that in the show notes. That gives you treatment and control experiments that actually how that works. Interestingly, one of the neural effects that we see in studies of the brain are that when, that people who are more depressed, they have lower hippocampal volume. And what we find is that both exercise and meditation, people who are exercisers over the long period, and people who are meditators over the long haul,

• 27:32Arthur Brooks?

  they actually have higher hippocampal volume. In other words, this is neurophysiologically protective. This induces changes, biological changes, to the brain, almost certainly. Okay, now, one thing you might have noticed is I haven't said anything about psychostimulants. I don't use any imagination on that, I mean coffee. I haven't had any coffee yet. You might say to yourself, okay, sure, sure, buddy. I'll get up at 4:30 in the morning, but I'm hitting the espresso machine first. That's my first stop, right? No, I don't recommend that. I actually strongly recommend against doing that. And I know it makes it harder, but I, but, but trust me, when you get used to this, you're going to love the results of what we do. Now, I'm not one of those guys who just doesn't hear about coffee.

• 28:15Arthur Brooks?

  On the contrary, I grew up in Seattle and I was a kid in middle school when there was one Starbucks. I'm talking about the seventies, ninety seventy eight. It was near my house, near enough to my house. I could walk there because I didn't have a driver's license, obviously. And I would walk down to the first Starbucks and I've been drinking Starbucks dark roast coffee since I was 14 years old, 13 years old. Yeah, man, I've got a grizzled adrenal system. Yeah, a little respect here. I've been doing that for the longest time. And that's one of the reasons I love dark roast coffee because Starbucks coffee was traditionally like super, super like burnt, doesn't taste burnt to me. You could introduce something called Indonesian ashes and I would buy it and I would drink it

• 28:59Arthur Brooks?

  because I love that stuff. So yeah, I love coffee for sure, but I don't drink it when I first wake up. And there's a whole bunch of reasons for that. As a matter of fact, I don't have my first cup of coffee until 7:30 in the morning. Sounds early, not if you're waking up before 30. I don't drink it for the first three hours. And there's a lot of research that talks about why that might be the case. Now, if you watch a lot of other fitness and, and biology based kind of shows on this, you know that, that caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors. Adenosine is an inhibitory neurochemical. What it does is it kind of, your brain is always in a, in a state of homeostasis between excitatory and inhibitory neuromodulators or, or, or neurotransmitters. And, and what they're doing is pepping you up and calming you down such that you're not

• 29:44Arthur Brooks?

  too up or too down all day long. And there was up and there was on and off. And, and one of the ones that keeps you groggy or makes you calmer and groggier is adenosine. When you wake up in the morning, there's a lot of circulating adenosine in your brains. One of the reasons that you still feel groggy. Now, how does caffeine work? Caffeine works by going in the The little sockets that the adenosine is ideally suited for, because the molecule is shaped the same way. And when it does that, adenosine can't get into the receptor. And so it can't, it can't make you groggy. So when caffeine, which very quickly crosses the blood-brain barrier and goes into the receptors for adenosine, the adenosine has no place to go. And that's why you feel, that's why you feel peppy from the coffee.

• 30:29Arthur Brooks?

  The problem is that if you leave, and this is one of the theories. This is like everything else in neuroscience. This is a highly contested theory. So, but I find it compelling nonetheless. So take it as you will. These are, by the way, if you're keeping track, these are A2A adenosine receptors. There's a number of different kinds. The problem is that when you block all the adenosine receptors, when there's a lot of adenosine that's circulating in your brain, first thing in the morning, the adenosine is going to keep circulating in your brain. When inevitably you metabolize the caffeine, usually at 2 or 3 in the afternoon, because it takes a while, there's a half-life for the caffeine, all the adenosine is going to go into the receptors at the same time. It's going to give you a crash. That's one of the explanations that people often give for the caffeine crash or the coffee crash or the energy crash that you get in the, in early afternoon.

• 31:13Arthur Brooks?

  If you wait until you've cleared the adenosine, naturally, you don't get the crash. That's the theory. I've tested it out. It completely works for me. You try it, delay your caffeine consumption. But more than that, it actually, it actually helps mood. A2A adenosine receptors are pretty interesting because you find that people with high stress, high...

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• 32:37Arthur Brooks?

  You know, negative affect, they tend to have a lot of A2A receptors. And it's one of the reasons that that coffee blocking those receptors makes them feel so much better. But you'll want to do it when you're not going to get a whole bunch of adenosine coming in behind it. Because if you if you drink your coffee too early and you get the crash in the afternoon, there's a lot of adenosine going into the receptors at 2:00 or 3:00 in the afternoon, you're going to feel really crummy and your high negative affect is going to come back in a rush if you're a naturally high negative affect person like me. You get the point that I'm trying to make. So, wait, wait, wait. And I like waiting three hours. It's a really good feeling because I'm not trying to wake myself up. On the contrary, I'm trying to use caffeine to focus. This is where it gets really good.

• 33:22Arthur Brooks?

  That's step four. The magic bean at 7:30. Now, my day is really, really starting at 7:30 in the morning. And you might say, well, do you eat breakfast? That's when I eat breakfast. And that's when I'm eating my first very high protein meal. I keep a very high protein diet because I want to be able to have a relatively efficient level of muscle protein synthesis, which means I need to eat a much higher protein diet than I would have when I was 50 or 40 or 30. When you can, I mean, you can have a piece of beef jerky and build muscle when you're 20, for Pete's sake. But now you have to eat a lot more protein because your body is less efficient at doing that. So I try to eat between 175 and 200 grams of protein a day. My natural body weight is 170 pounds and I'm trying to stay at that, you know, one

• 34:07Arthur Brooks?

  gram per pound of body weight or a little bit above. And that's why I say... A little margin for error on that. And that means that I'm gonna have to eat high protein meals, starting absolutely first thing of the day. So my first meal actually does two things for me, and that's I eat it just as I'm making my coffee at 7:30 in the morning. And this is step five. I call this tryptophan time. Now, I know when you've heard of tryptophan, tryptophan is the thing you get in the turkey, right? I'm not eating a turkey dinner for breakfast, trust me. I'm weird, but I'm not that weird, and that's gross. I eat Greek, unflavored, nonfat Greek yogurt, which I put a scoop of whey protein into, and then I mix it up with walnuts, which are really good for you, and berries,

• 34:50Arthur Brooks?

  which have a low glycemic index, and they're really high in antioxidants. So I usually blackberries, blueberries, I like strawberries. And sometimes I'll put in a little bit of stevia to make it a little bit sweeter. But that's real high in tryptophan, and I'm usually getting about 60 grams of protein for breakfast with a very, very good nutritional profile, it's low in carbohydrate, it's relatively, it's relatively low in fat as well, and it makes me feel great. It keeps me full all through the morning and fueled up, and I got my first 60 grams of protein out of the way. I'm not hungry until noon or 12:30, when I have my next very protein-rich meal, which is generally speaking cottage cheese, chicken, vegetables, or something like that.

• 35:33Arthur Brooks?

  And I do eat a lot of vegetables to make sure that I get a proper amount of all the other micronutrients that the vegetables are gonna bring. So I usually eat, you know, five, seven, even nine servings of vegetables a day. I guess I would count the berries in that to start the day as well. Now, one source of protein that's not good for this, by the way, is collagen. Collagen protein is very low in tryptophan. Why am I talking about tryptophan? Because tryptophan actually has a nice effect on your neurochemistry. Most notably, that high tryptophan diet actually will increase the amount of serotonin in your brain, which makes you feel calmer, which is good for your negative affect. And so you eat 60 grams of protein and Greek yogurt, and you're gonna say,

• 36:15Arthur Brooks?

  I think I can face the, I think I can face the world. I'm not quite sure why. That's why. Tryptophan, serotonin, calm, and it's better. There's a great paper on this that I'd like you to read if you're wondering about some of these issues. And just for, just for laughs, I'm going to tell you that here's the title of the paper. This is why I love academia. Here's the title of my paper. "The bovine protein alpha lactobumin increases the plasma ratio of tryptophan to the other large neutral amino acids, and in vulnerable subjects raises brain serotonin activity, reduces cortisol concentration, and improves mood under stress." That's not the article, that's the title. Anyway, it'll go in the show notes. Go read it. Okay, so where are we? That's step five, is, is tryptophan.

• 36:57Arthur Brooks?

  And man, at this point, 7:45 in the morning, and I'm ready to rock and roll. I'm ready to face the day. I mean, I'm, I'm set up. My, my negative affect is managed. My, my, uh, my focus and creativity are really working great. One of the wonderful things about the, the caffeine that I've ingested, and I'm not embarrassed to tell you that I've probably, at this point, I'm in the middle of about 20 ounces of Starbucks, Starbucks dark roast coffee. I like French roast because it's the most burnt.

• 37:27Arthur Brooks?

  Is that what that's doing is just vacuuming dopamine into my prefrontal cortex. Most of you know that dopamine is a, is a neuromodulator that's implicated in a lot of different things. Anticipation of reward, for example, wanting, learning, liking, but also creativity and focus. I'm ready to go, and my job is creative stuff. I have to prepare this podcast. I write my column. I'm always working on a book. I'm preparing my lectures for the university. I need creative focus and I need big ideas. And what I'm coming out of the shoot with in the next two hours is my absolute best work. I promise you that this setup of what I've done about brahmamukhurta, and the hardcore exercise, and the metaphysics, and then the coffee,

• 38:08Arthur Brooks?

  and the tryptophan, and altogether what this is adding up to is the perfect neurochemical milieu where I can do this work that I wouldn't be able to do otherwise. Now, what I've noticed is that a lot of people waste this time. They waste this time by checking email and reading the paper. And it's kind of like, you know, before a dog wants to get into its bed and go to sleep, it kind of circles the bed and circles the bed like 90 times. Don't do that. Don't waste your neurochemistry. Don't waste the dopamine in your prefrontal cortex. You've got to be good to go. Leave all that stuff aside. Don't take any Zoom meetings, friends. Don't take any phone calls. Look at your phone once every hour. There's nothing good coming in. Don't read the paper yet. Go. When I do that, I can actually get

• 38:53Arthur Brooks?

  two hours of super high-quality creative work and about four hours total of creative work, and I can get a lot done. I can get more done between eight o'clock and noon with this setup. I mean, and this requires that nobody bug me and that nobody bug you. This is sacred time for you. I can get more done in that time than I would have been able to do when I was a younger man in three days. I'm like superhuman because of the way this whole thing is set up. I'm in the flow. I'm in the flow for the rest of the day, and the neuroscientific benefits of this really are related to what Csikszentmihalyi, the great social psychologist, would call the flow state. I'll throw something on the flow state into the show notes as well.

• 39:37Arthur Brooks?

  I've got a nice paper here in Horizons of Psychology called "The Experience of Flow and Subjective Well-Being in Music Students," which I like an awful lot. But you've got to set yourself up neurochemically to be in the flow, and part of that is making sure you've managed your negative affect, your high levels of negative affect. This is my morning protocol, my friends. I hope this is useful to you. Does it sound insane? All right, try it. And then experiment on yourself. This is the result of my experiments. You need the result of your experiments. Tell me how you're altering it. Tell me how you're doing it differently. Put it in the show, put it in the comments on any platform you're looking on this. I'm going to be reading those comments, and I want to see what's working for you, what's not working for you, what works better for you,

• 40:22Arthur Brooks?

  how you interpret the research differently than I do, and the objections that you have to this. But if all of this is new for you, use this as a template. You'll see in the show notes that this is all kind of laid out. If you're missing it, you don't have to rewind and watch the whole show again, but you might want to. Hope that's useful. It's a good way for me to start this day. I'm starting tomorrow too, and every day. Let's go to some audience questions. Love it. I've got a couple of really interesting ones. One that came in over YouTube. This is Skeletna. Skeletna, Skeletna one. Interesting question. How do we stay? Compassionate while protecting ourselves? This is based on something I've done in previous episodes.

• 41:05Arthur Brooks?

  I'm talking an awful lot about how this is that the art of happiness is not just about trying to get happier. The real art of happiness is making other people happier, lifting other people up. But so doing, good questions. Skelton, one, how do you stay compassionate toward others while still protecting yourself? Now, the way to do this is by understanding the difference between empathy and compassion. Empathy is a very overused emotion. It really is about feeling somebody else's pain. We valorize that a lot because feelings are such a big deal, man. That's how I feel. As a matter of fact, a lot of reasons that people can't follow this protocol I've talked about here is because they're comfy between the sheets at 4:30 in the morning. They don't feel like getting up. Win the day, man, all of us.

• 41:50Arthur Brooks?

  We should be doing that. And one of the ways that we can do that is by being a little bit skeptical about the overused emotion of empathy. I'm not against empathy, I just think it's incomplete. What I like is compassion. Compassion and empathy are not the same thing. Compassion is an algorithm that contains empathy. It starts with an understanding of what somebody is suffering. Number two is enough feeling of that person's pain for you to deepen your understanding and want to act. But not too much, because you don't want to be paralyzed. The third is understanding what to do. And the fourth is having the conviction and the courage to do it. And a lot of the time compassion is flinty hard. It's something that people don't want. I had three teenagers that I raised and they made it all the way into their twenties

• 42:35Arthur Brooks?

  and they're having their own kids now and they're struggling with their own toddlers, which is just awesome to watch them struggle. And I say, I'm so sympathetic, I'm always saying things like, "Ah, I'm sorry, his diaper exploded on the plane, I'm so sorry." And you know, I don't think he's, I don't think he's possessed by Satan. It's great, and I'm having so much shot in the forehead. Anyway, I digress. The point is, when I had teenage kids, it was very important to be compassionate and not just empathetic. If you just are empathetic and your kids are doing something they shouldn't be doing, it's bad for them, you're a bad parent. Furthermore, I wouldn't be able to protect myself emotionally. There's an old saying that you're never happier than your unhappiest child. That's bad parenting. Nobody wants an unhappy mother.

• 43:20Arthur Brooks?

  Nobody wants an unhappy father. Your job is to take care of yourself and give your kids what they actually need. So. Skelma one. Um, compassion, not empathy. Next question, this is from Eduardo Soria, uh, six thirty eight, also on YouTube. Couple of good YouTube questions today. Is there a direct relation between anger and lack of happiness? Yes, yes, there is. And this gets back to what we've talked about with respect to the limbic system and positive and negative emotionality. The four negative emotions are fear, anger, disgust, and sadness. So anger is, you know, implicates the amygdala, part of the limbic system. It's part of your fight or flight response. Fight is anger. Flight is generally associated with fear. Same basic setup, different kinds of reactions. And these are negative emotions.

• 44:05Arthur Brooks?

  Now, negative emotions, don't forget, these are an indication that something isn't right and you need to react. So thank God for your amygdala and thank God for these negative emotions. You're, you would have been dead a thousand times over were it not for these negative emotions, to be sure, but they're not pleasant because they're not supposed to be. So you're not feeling happy when you're angry. That's just the fact. Also, when you're disgusted, sad, or afraid, you're not feeling happy and you're not supposed to feel happy under the circumstances. That's perfect and fine. The problem is when anger is dysregulated, when anger is disequilibrated, when you're, when you've got a hair trigger, when you're having to apologize because of your bad temper, or when you, when you simply are not too, not just too fast to anger, but you're angry

• 44:50Arthur Brooks?

  too much at the time and for too long. There's interesting research that suggests that people who have this hair trigger and they're angry all the time, they literally have a bigger amygdala than the average person, physically bigger amygdala, and you need to take care of that. You need to actually self-regulate. That doesn't mean you need to go on some sort of pharmaceutical regimen. What it means is you need metacognitive techniques, count to ten, count to a hundred, prayer, journaling, meditation, there's a lot of different ways, therapy, there's a lot of different ways to deal with this. But the whole point is that don't worry about your negative emotionality until it becomes dysregulated, at which point you don't want to eliminate it. You want to learn to manage it using many of the techniques that we've talked about right here. Thanks for that question. It's terrific.

• 45:34Arthur Brooks?

  And we've come to the end of the episode. The Mad Scientist Morning Protocol. Hope it's useful for you and I can't wait to see your feedback on this as well. Let me know your thoughts at [email protected] or leave your comments on any platform that you're using. We will see them. Like and subscribe on Spotify, YouTube and Apple. Leave a comment, even if it's negative. We want to see it. We want to make the show as good as it can possibly be. Follow me on Instagram. Arthur C. Brooks is my handle on LinkedIn, all the other platforms. And don't forget to order The Happiness Files, my latest book, Insights on Work and Life. I hope you have a wonderful week. Tell your friends. We need another couple million or billion people watching this so that we can change the world together. Join me in being a happiness teacher.

• 46:18Arthur Brooks?

  And until next time, stay happy.

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