7 Things to Tell Yourself Every Morning (Follow This Simple Morning Reset to Calm Your Mind Before the Day Begins)

Today, Jay shares how, before we even get out of bed, our minds are already filled with worries, quiet anxieties, and thoughts we didn’t choose. Instead of intentionally creating our day, most of us unknowingly inherit stress from yesterday. Drawing on both modern neuroscience and ancient wisdom traditions, Jay reframes the morning not as a routine, but as the foundation of our mental “operating system”, a critical window where our thoughts shape how we experience the next 16 hours. Rather than relying on empty affirmations, Jay offers a more grounded, evidence-based approach rooted in how the brain actually works. He explains how our minds are most programmable in the early morning, when emotions are heightened and our critical thinking is still waking up. This creates a rare opportunity to interrupt automatic patterns, reset our focus, and consciously direct our attention before the world begins to pull us in different directions. In this episode you'll learn: How to Take Control of Your Mind First Thing in the Morning How to Stop Inheriting Anxiety Each Day How to Rewire Your Thoughts in Minutes How to Protect Your Attention Early How to Measure Your Day with Purpose Not Productivity Every morning is a quiet reset, an opportunity that doesn’t ask for perfection, only intention. You don’t need to have everything figured out, and you don’t need to feel ready. SpringFest is happening now, and our best lineup is here at Lowe’s. Visit: https://www.lowes.com/ With Love and Gratitude, Jay Shetty JAY’S DAILY WISDOM DELIVERED STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX Join 900,000+ readers discovering how small daily shifts create big life change with my free newsletter. Subscribe here: https://news.jayshetty.me/subscribe What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 01:26 Your Morning Is Programming the Rest of Your Day 04:17 The Creator's Hour 08:48 #1: I Am Awake Before My Problems 12:29 #2: I Am Not Yesterday 15:17 #3: Today I Direct My Attention 18:40 #4: I Won't Try to Solve Problems That Haven't Happened Yet 21:48 #5: My Body Isn't a Vehicle For My Head 25:14 #6: I Focus on What Matters Most, Not What Feels Urgent 28:25 #7: I Measure Today by Who I Am, Not Just What I Achieve See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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• 0:30Jay Shetty?

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• 1:13Jay Shetty?

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• 1:54Jay Shetty?

  For a limited time, save 20% on your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro at drinkag1.com slash onpurpose. That's drinkag1.com slash onpurpose. Seven things to tell yourself every morning. Let's start with what actually happens when you wake up. Before your feet hit the floor, before you check your phone, before you brush your teeth, your mind starts talking. It says, what do I have to do today? Did I reply to that? I shouldn't have said that yesterday. This is gonna be stressful. I'm already behind. Before your feet hit the floor,

• 2:39Jay Shetty?

  your brain had already pulled up yesterday's unfinished argument, the bill you haven't paid, the thing your boss said, the weight you haven't lost, the text you're dreading, that low-grade anxiety that just lives in your chest now. And here's what's terrifying about this. You didn't choose a single one of those thoughts. They chose you. Your mind hijacked the most neurologically valuable minutes of your entire day and used them to rehearse your fears. Most people don't wake up and create their day. They wake up and inherit their anxiety. And the problem isn't that your mind speaks in the morning. The problem is that you let it speak unchecked.

• 3:23Jay Shetty?

  What you tell your mind in the first minutes of your day sets the emotional direction of the next 16 hours. And that is not spiritual exaggeration. That's neurological fact. Most people think the morning is just the start of the day. It's not. The morning is the start of your operating system. What runs in those first minutes doesn't just affect your mood, it architecturally shapes how your brain will process every single event, conversation and decision for the next 16 hours. And the worst part? You've been handing over the keys to this process every single day.

• 4:04Jay Shetty?

  To anxiety, to dread, to mental clutter you never asked for. Today, that stops. By the end of this video, I'm going to give you seven things to tell your mind every morning. And I want you to wait till the last one because each one is propulsive and helps the one before. Now, I need to be clear about something before we go any further. This is not positive thinking. This is not stand in front of a mirror and say I am rich and abundant until the universe delivers. These are not affirmations. They're not, "I am a powerful manifesting being of light." I'm talking about specific cognitive instructions,

• 4:46Jay Shetty?

  each one backed by peer-reviewed neuroscience and ancient wisdom that understood the architecture of the mind thousands of years before we had brain scanners. The affirmation approach can fail because your brain has a built-in nonsense detector, the anterior cingulate cortex. And when you say something you don't actually believe, it flags the contradiction and creates more internal resistance, not less. Studies from the University of Waterloo found that people with low self-esteem who repeated positive affirmations actually felt worse afterwards, not better. So I'm not asking you to lie to yourself.

• 5:28Jay Shetty?

  What I'm asking you to recognize is that you are already talking to yourself every single morning, non-stop. The question was never, "Should I talk to my own mind?" You don't have a choice. Psychologists estimate that we have over 6,000 thoughts per day, and the vast majority of them are repetitive, automatic, and unchecked. You've been running a script every morning for years. You just never wrote it. Someone else did. Your fears, your past, your parents, your failures, your social media feed. All I'm saying is, if the conversation is already happening, if the monologue is already running,

• 6:11Jay Shetty?

  then you should probably be the one choosing the words. This isn't woo-woo. This is common sense combined with neuroscience. You're not adding something new. You're replacing something that was already there and doing it with precision instead of accident. But first, you need to understand why the morning matters this much. Because once you understand the science and the ancient framework behind it, you'll never waste. Another morning again. In the Vedic tradition, one of the oldest continuous knowledge systems on the planet, there is a concept called Brahma Murta. It translates roughly to the creator's hour. It refers to the period approximately ninety minutes before sunrise.

• 6:57Jay Shetty?

  But the broader principle extends to the first hours of waking. The ancient texts, including the Ashtanga Rhythm and the Charaka Samita, foundational texts of Ayurvedic medicine dating back over five thousand years, prescribe this period as the single most important window for shaping the mind. Not because of mysticism, because of observation. These traditions notice something through thousands of years of disciplined introspection. The mind in the early morning is in a state they called Satva, a quality of clarity, receptivity, and stillness. It's the mental equivalent of calm water.

• 7:39Jay Shetty?

  Whatever you drop into calm water creates a clear, powerful ripple. Whatever you drop into the turbulent water disappears. The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali describe the untrained morning mind as having minimal mental fluctuations. The mind hasn't yet been bombarded by stimuli, social input, and reactive patterns. This is why every serious contemplative tradition on earth, Buddhist, Stoic, Vedic, Christian monastic, Sufi, place their deepest practices at dawn. Not by coincidence, by design. They understood that the morning mind is not just fresher, it is structurally different.

• 8:23Jay Shetty?

  And now, modern neuroscience confirms exactly why. When you wake up, your brain transitions through specific brainwave states. During the first twenty to thirty minutes after waking, your brain is predominantly in a theta to alpha wave transition. Theta waves between four and eight hertz are the same brainwave state used in hypnotherapy. Alpha waves between eight and twelve hertz. Are associated with relaxed but alert awareness. Here's why this matters. In this theta alpha state, your brain's prefrontal cortex, the rational executive function centre is not yet fully online. But your limbic system, the emotional brain, particularly the amygdala, is already active.

• 9:09Jay Shetty?

  This creates a window where emotional and subconscious processing is heightened, while your critical filter is still waking up. Dr Bruce Lipton's research at Stanford on cellular biology, along with work from the Laboratory of Neuroimaging at USC, shows that this transitional brainwave state is when the subconscious mind is most programmable. It's the same reason hypnotherapy works, reduce critical faculty, combined with heightened suggestibility. But it goes deeper than brainwaves. In the first hour of waking, your body produces a natural cortisol spike, called the cortisol awakening response, or CAR. Researchers at the University of Westminster

• 9:54Jay Shetty?

  and the Technical University of Dresden have extensively studied this. The CAR is not stress. It's your body's neurochemical preparation for the day. It enhances memory consolidation, sharpens attention, and primes your hippocampus for learning. But here's the critical finding. The content of your first thoughts interacts with this cortisol spike. If those first thoughts are anxious, ruminative, or fear-based, the CAR becomes fuel for your threat detection system. The amygdala uses that cortisol to reinforce hypervigilance. But if those first thoughts are intentional, structured, and directed,

• 10:35Jay Shetty?

  the CAR becomes fuel for focus, resilience, and cognitive flexibility. So the ancients were right. The morning mind is different. It's more receptive, more programmable, and more consequential than any other period of your day. And right now, most of us are flooding it with social media, news alerts, and unconscious dread. Let's fix that. The seven things to tell your mind. The first thing to tell your mind in the morning is I am awake before my problems. They do not get to speak first. Here's why this works. Cognitive psychology has a well documented phenomenon called the Zygotic Effect.

• 11:16Jay Shetty?

  The brain preferentially recalls unfinished tasks and unresolved problems. Your mind doesn't bring up yesterday's worries because you're a negative person. It does because neurologically, open loops create tension that the brain is driven to resolve. When you wake up, your default mode network, the brain system most active during mind wandering and self referential thought, immediately starts cycling through these open loops. Research from Washington University shows that the default mode network is what creates that stream of uninvited morning thoughts. By making a conscious declaration that you speak first, not your problems, you are performing

• 11:59Jay Shetty?

  what neuroscientists call a pattern interrupt. You're inserting a top down prefrontal intervention into what is otherwise a bottom up limbic driven process. The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius began every morning with the explicit practice of pre-framing his day. In Meditations, he writes that he told himself each morning he would encounter difficult people and difficult circumstances, not to dread them, but to strip them of the power of surprise. He chose to define the terms of engagement before the day could define them for him. See, today, we're told, say things like, "Today's gonna be a great day."

• 12:41Jay Shetty?

  And the moment you see evidence in your day that doesn't feel great, the gray clouds, the person who didn't smile at you, your colleagues who's in a bad mood, you think to yourself, "It's not gonna be a great day." Marcus Aurelius thought about it the opposite way. He knew there were gonna be difficult encounters. What that did is it took away the element of surprise and actually prepared him to be ready for it. Here's how to implement this. Before you pick up your phone, before you check anything, place your hand on your chest and say out loud or internally, "I am awake before my problems. I speak first today." This should happen before your feet touch the floor. It takes three seconds.

• 13:24Jay Shetty?

  Those three seconds redirect the trajectory of the cortisol awakening response from anxiety into agency. Ancient wisdom teaches self-mastery overreaction. In the Bhagavad Gita, equanimity, not emotionlessness, but steadiness is power. Today, we think if I'm detached and disconnected, if I avoid an emotion, then I'm powerful. The ancient wisdom tradition suggests it's not about being emotionless. It's about steadiness. And neuroscience agrees. When you pause before reacting, you activate the prefrontal cortex, which regulates impulse and emotional response. Without intention, your amygdala drives the day. Here's a practical step.

• 14:07Jay Shetty?

  Stop starting your day with your phone, because that's not checking messages. That's letting someone else's priorities become your first thought. That's letting an algorithm decide what you feel before you've even decided how you feel. Stop starting your day with your phone, because you didn't wake up anxious. You woke up neutral, and then you opened a screen and borrowed everyone else's chaos and called it being informed. You weren't informed, you were hijacked.

• 14:48Jay Shetty?

  The call that changed your life. I want you to think about a moment that many of us remember very clearly. Imagine the phone ringing and feeling your heartbeat a little faster as you reach to answer. When you pick up the phone, someone says something that changes everything. Maybe it was the call telling you that you got accepted into the school you'd been dreaming about for years. Maybe it was the call where someone unexpectedly offered you a job that opened the door to a completely new chapter of your life. Or maybe it was the call where someone called to say hi for the first time, and suddenly the world felt a little more exciting. When we look back on our lives, it is fascinating how many of the moments that change our direction begin with something incredibly simple. They begin with a phone call.

• 15:32Jay Shetty?

  This year actually marks one hundred and fifty years since the very first phone call was made, which is remarkable to think about. For more than a century and a half, people have been picking up the phone to share news, reconnect with someone they love, or tell someone something that truly matters. While the technology has evolved dramatically since that first call, the human experience of receiving a call has not really changed at all. We still feel that sense of anticipation when the phone rings, we still feel that brief moment of silence before someone shares important news, and we still recognise that instant when we realise something in our lives is about to change. Those emotions are timeless. When you think about it, many of the most meaningful calls in our lives arrive unexpectedly.

• 16:17Jay Shetty?

  It might be the call that reconnects you with a friend you have not spoken to in years, it might be the call where someone tells you they are proud of you, or it might be the call where someone simply says they needed to hear your voice. So today, I want to invite you to reflect on something for a moment. What was the phone call that changed your life? Maybe it was the moment you realised a new chapter was beginning, maybe it was the moment you felt supported when you needed it most. Whatever it was, that moment likely stayed with you long after the call ended. Now, I want to ask you one more question. Who in your life might be waiting for a call from you? Because sometimes the call that changes someone's life is not the one we receive. Sometimes, it is the one we decide to make. This moment was sponsored by AT&T.

• 17:01Jay Shetty?

  Connection changes everything.

• 17:07Jay Shetty?

  The second thing to say to yourself when you wake up in the morning is, I am not yesterday. My brain is physically different than it was twenty-four hours ago. Here's why this works. This is not a pep talk, this is neurobiology. Dr Eleanor Maguire's landmark research at University College London, along with decades of subsequent work in the field of neuroplasticity, confirms that your brain physically restructures itself every single day. Synaptic connections that were active yesterday are either strengthened or pruned during sleep. New proteins are synthesised, new neural pathways are available.

• 17:49Jay Shetty?

  You are literally, not figuratively, you are literally operating on a different piece of hardware than you were yesterday. The person who failed yesterday, who was anxious yesterday, who couldn't focus yesterday, had a different brain. This is measurable. The problem is that your narrative identity, your story about who you are, doesn't update at the same speed as your neurobiology. You're running old software on new hardware. And that old software says, "I'm the person who always struggles with this. I'm the person who always fails. I'm the person who's lazy."

• 18:29Jay Shetty?

  Telling your mind, "I am not yesterday," is a cognitive reappraisal technique. Dr. James Gross's research at Stanford on emotion regulation shows that reappraisal, reframing a situation before the emotional response locks in, is the single most effective strategy for emotional regulation. It is significantly more effective than suppression, distraction, or avoidance. Buddhism's core teaching of Anika, impermanence, is not philosophy. It's perceptual training. The Buddha instructed practitioners to observe every morning that the self they inhabited yesterday has dissolved.

• 19:10Jay Shetty?

  Clinging to yesterday's identity was considered one of the primary causes of suffering, not because it's a nice idea, but because it is observably true. You are a process, not a fixed identity. Here's how to implement this. During your first five minutes awake, take three slow breaths. On each exhale, consciously let go of one thing from yesterday: a failure, a worry, a conflict. You're not suppressing it, you're acknowledging that the version of you that experienced it has physically changed. Say, "That was a different brain." This one has new options.

• 19:51Jay Shetty?

  Do this consistently for two weeks and you will notice a measurable drop in morning rumination. The next thing to say to yourself when you wake up every morning is today I direct my attention. My attention is not available for hijacking. Here's why this works. Attention is not an abstract concept. It is a finite neurochemical resource governed primarily by two neurotransmitters. Dr. Michael Posner's attention network research identifies three distinct attention systems in the brain. The alerting network, the orienting network, and the executive control network. Every time you check a notification, scroll a feed, or entertain an uninvited worry,

• 20:36Jay Shetty?

  you are spending from this finite neurochemical budget. Dr. Gloria Marks' researcher UC Irvine found that after a single distraction, it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to the original task. Not because you're weak, but because attention re-engagement requires a full neurochemical reload. Here's what's worse: your phone is not designed to inform you. It's designed by teams of engineers using variable ratio reinforcement schedules, the same operant condition pattern that makes slot machines the most addictive machines ever created. When you pick up your phone in the first hour,

• 21:18Jay Shetty?

  it's like walking into a Vegas casino, sitting at a slot machine, and playing the game. You're placing your attention at its most valuable and vulnerable state into a system specifically engineered to extract it. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna tells Arjun that "the disciplined mind is a person's greatest ally, and the undisciplined mind is their greatest enemy."

• 21:44Jay Shetty?

  The Sanskrit concept of darana, concentration, is described not as a talent, but as trainable capacity. The Yoga Sutras explicitly state that the entire purpose of practice is the intentional direction of mental fluctuations. They understood that an undirected mind is not a free mind. It is a captured mind. Here's how to implement this. Do not touch your phone for the first thirty to sixty minutes after waking. Buy a four-dollar alarm clock so your phone is not in the room. During this protected window, decide with pen and paper if possible, the three things that will receive your best attention today.

• 22:29Jay Shetty?

  Write them down. Not ten things, just three. This single act of prioritization activates your prefrontal cortex and puts it in the driver's seat before the limbic system can take over. Research from Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University found that people who write down their goals are forty-two percent more likely to achieve them. You don't have a motivation problem. You have a, you picked up your phone before you picked up your life problem. You don't have a motivation problem. You have a, you gave your best energy to your screen problem. Uh, you answered everyone else's agenda before your own problem. You don't have a motivation problem.

• 23:11Jay Shetty?

  You have a, you never protected the only thing everyone is stealing from you problem. Remember that. The fourth thing to say to yourself every morning is, "I will not solve problems that have not happened yet or don't exist yet." This is why this works. This targets the single most destructive mental habit human beings engage in: anticipatory rumination. A landmark study from Harvard psychologist Dr. Matthew Killingsworth and Dr. Daniel Gilbert, published in Science, tracked thousands of people in real time and found that the human mind wanders forty-seven percent of the time.

• 23:53Jay Shetty?

  And critically, that mind wandering predicted unhappiness regardless of the activity. But it gets more specific. The brain does not distinguish between a vividly imagined scenario and one that is actually occurring. Neuroimaging studies from the University of Colorado Boulder show that when you mentally rehearse a difficult conversation, your amygdala fires, your cortisol rises, and your body enters a low-grade stress response. You are physiologically experiencing an event that is not happening. Now, I want to make a caveat here. This is good if you're rehearsing it on purpose. If you're preparing for a difficult conversation at work, if you're preparing for a difficult conversation with your partner,

• 24:37Jay Shetty?

  but not one that hasn't happened yet, not one that doesn't exist, not a problem that you've created, invented, imagined, right? It's very different. Rehearsing for a play and a drama that you're going to perform on stage, which is actually happening, is different from inventing drama that hasn't happened or might not happen. You are paying the biological tax on a problem that may never arrive. Seneca wrote 2,000 years ago, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality." This was not a platitude for him. It was a diagnostic observation. In Zen Buddhism, this is captured in the instruction. When sitting, sit. When walking, walk. Above all, don't wobble.

• 25:21Jay Shetty?

  The mind that is rehearsing tomorrow while living today is wobbling, and a wobbling mind is an exhausted mind. Here's how to implement this. When you catch yourself rehearsing a future conversation or spiraling into a what-if scenario, use a technique called temporal labeling. Say to yourself, "That is a future thought. I am in the present." You're not suppressing the thought. You're tagging it accurately so your brain can deprioritize it. Practice this every morning, and it will begin to generalize across your entire day within weeks. You're not stressed about your life. You're stressed about a version of your life that hasn't even happened yet. You're not stressed about your life.

• 26:06Jay Shetty?

  You're stressed about the argument you haven't had, the rejection you haven't gotten, the worst case that only exists in your head. Your body can't tell the difference. Your nervous system is paying full price for something that isn't real. You're not stressed about your life. You're stressed by your imagination.

• 26:37Jay Shetty?

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• 27:22Jay Shetty?

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• 28:06Jay Shetty?

  This episode is brought to you by Mazda. The best habits are the ones we hardly notice, the ones that quietly shape the way we move through life, giving us the confidence to focus on what really matters. That's Mazda's approach to safety. Every Mazda is designed with proactive safety features that help keep you more aware, more connected, and more engaged with your drive, so you can stay present behind the wheel. That commitment has earned Mazda recognition as Consumer Reports' safest new car brand. And as of July 2026, Mazda has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick Plus awards than any other car brand.

• 28:42Jay Shetty?

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• 29:08Jay Shetty?

  The fifth thing to say to yourself every morning is my body is not a vehicle for my head. I will listen to my body today. Here's why it works. The modern default is to treat the body as a taxi that carries the brain to meetings. This is not just philosophically wrong, it's neurologically backwards. Your gut contains roughly 500 million neurons. The enteric nervous system, sometimes called the second brain. It produces over 90% of your body's serotonin and about 50% of your dopamine. The vagus nerve, the longest cranial nerve in your body, carries signals from your gut, your heart, and your viscera up to the brain.

• 29:51Jay Shetty?

  And 80 to 90% of vagal traffic flows upward from body to brain, not the other direction. What this means is that your body is not just reacting to your thoughts, it's informing them. Dr. Antonio Dimasio's sematic marker hypothesis, developed through decades of work at USC, demonstrates that bodily sensations are not separate from decision-making. They are a critical input. People with damage to the brain areas that process body signals make catastrophically poor decisions even when their logical reasoning is intact. When you ignore your body's signals, the tight jaw, the shallow breathing, the knot

• 30:34Jay Shetty?

  in the stomach, you are cutting off a primary data channel that your brain needs to function properly. In traditional Chinese medicine and in the Vedic system alike, the body was never considered separate from the mind. The concept of prana in yoga, life energy, is tracked through the body, not the intellect. The Taoist tradition describes the body as the root and the mind as the branches. If the root is neglected, the branches wither regardless of how much you tend to them. The Buddha's foundational meditation instruction. The discourse on the foundations of mindfulness begins not with thoughts, not with emotions, but with the body.

• 31:15Jay Shetty?

  Body awareness is the first foundation because the ancient contemplatives recognize that an unembodied mind is an unstable mind. Here's how to implement this. Within the first 10 minutes of waking, do a 60-second body scan. Start at the top of your head and slowly move your awareness down through your face, your jaw, your neck, your shoulders, your chest, your abdomen, your hips, your legs, and feet. You're not trying to fix anything. You're simply registering what's there. Tension in your shoulders? Note it. Tightness in your gut? Acknowledge it.

• 31:59Jay Shetty?

  This practice activates the insular cortex. Your gut has been trying to tell you something for months. You keep ignoring it and wonder why you feel lost. Your gut has been trying to tell you something for a long time. That tightness in your chest wasn't random. That not in your stomach before you said yes wasn't nothing. That exhaustion that sleep doesn't fix isn't laziness. Your gut is constantly trying to tell you something. You just keep scrolling past the answer, looking for it in someone else's content. This next one is really important. I want you to listen in. I choose one thing that matters over 10 things that are urgent.

• 32:44Jay Shetty?

  That's the sixth thing I want you to say. This principle attacks the single greatest productivity illusion of modern life: the equation of busyness with progress. The Eisenhower Matrix attributed to Dwight Eisenhower's observation that what is important is seldom urgent, and what is urgent is seldom important, has been validated extensively in organizational psychology. But the neurological reality is even more stark. Your prefrontal cortex, which handles complex planning and prioritization... Is a slow, energy-expensive system. Every notification, every quick question, every email marked with an exclamation point activates the limbic urgency pathway.

• 33:29Jay Shetty?

  And the brain, because it is wired for survival, will always default to the urgent over the important if you don't intervene. The concept of Swadharma in the Bhagavad Gita, one's own duty or essential purpose is not about doing more, it's about doing the right thing, even if it's difficult, rather than the comfortable or easy thing. The reason why we do the urgent thing is because often it's easier and comfortable. The reason we avoid the important thing is because it's harder and challenging. Krishna's instruction to urgent is essentially, stop being distracted by all the things you could do. Do the one thing you must do.

• 34:13Jay Shetty?

  In the Zen tradition, there is the concept of ichigyo zami, single-minded absorption in one activity. This is one of my favorite Zen teachings. The master does one thing at a time and completes them. The beginner does many things at the same time and never completes them. Here's how to implement this. Every morning, before you open your email or your task manager, answer one question on paper. If I could only accomplish one thing today, and everything else would be forgiven, what would it be? Write that thing down, circle it, that is your non-negotiable. Everything else is secondary.

• 34:55Jay Shetty?

  Protect at least ninety minutes for that one thing before you allow anything urgent to enter your field. Schedule it as a meeting with yourself if you must. Research from the Harvard Business Review found that professionals who set a single daily priority report significantly higher satisfaction and performance than those who manage long-to-do lists. You're not lazy, you're just busy with the wrong things and calling it productivity. You're not lazy, you answered every email, you sat in every meeting, you said yes to everyone who asked. You were incredibly busy. You just weren't busy with the one thing that actually matters. The one thing you keep pushing to tomorrow.

• 35:41Jay Shetty?

  You're not lazy, you're hiding from the real work inside the fake work. And this last one will transform everything. Every morning, I want you to say, "I will not measure today by what I get, but by who I am while I do it." Here's why this works. This final instruction rewires the deepest layer of your motivational system, your relationship with outcomes. Dr. Carol Dweck's research at Stanford on mindset theory, one of the most replicated findings in modern psychology, shows that people who orient around a process, a growth mindset, consistently outperform people who orient around outcomes,

• 36:25Jay Shetty?

  a fixed mindset, across academic, professional, and personal domains. But the effect isn't just on performance, it's on resilience. Outcome-oriented people experience failure as identity-threatening. Process-oriented people experience failure as information. This is arguably one of the most important teachings in the Bhagavad Gita. Chapter 2, verse 47. "You have a right to the work, but never to the fruit of the work." This is not passivity. It is the most sophisticated motivational technology ever articulated. It says, "Pour everything into the action, release attachment to the result." Not because results don't matter,

• 37:08Jay Shetty?

  but because attachment to results degrades the quality of the action itself. You don't get better at something by wanting better results. You get better at something by improving the process. If you get better at the process, the results come off their own accord. But if you don't get better at the process, and you keep focusing on the results, you just get mad at yourself. Here's how to implement this. At the end of each morning routine, ask yourself, "What quality do I want to bring to this day?" Not, "What do you want to accomplish?" What quality of character do you want to embody? Patience, courage, honesty, calm, focus? Choose one word. Write it on a sticky note or set it as your phone wallpaper.

• 37:51Jay Shetty?

  When you make decisions throughout the day, filter them through that quality. Would a patient person respond to this email right now? Would a courageous person avoid this conversation? This isn't soft. This is the hardest practice on this list. Because it means you can no longer blame your circumstances for who you are. Stop chasing results and wondering why you're exhausted. Stop chasing results because you can check every box and still feel empty. You can hit every target and still feel behind. You can win the whole day and still lose yourself doing it. Stop chasing results. The question was never, what did I get done?

• 38:35Jay Shetty?

  The question was always, who was I while I did it? And who did I become in pursuit of it? Every ancient tradition, the Vedic sages, the Buddhist monks, the Stoic philosophers, the Zen masters, arrived at the same conclusion through radically different paths. The morning is not the beginning of the day. It is the foundation of this self. Modern neuroscience has now confirmed why. Your brain is more receptive, more programmable, and more consequential in those first waking minutes than at any other time. Because the question we've been answering this whole time is who's in charge today? For most of your life, the answer has been your anxiety, your habits, your phone. Starting tomorrow, the answer is you.

• 39:19Jay Shetty?

  Not because you say a magic phrase, not because you manifest anything, but because you take the most powerful neurological window your biology gives you and you fill it with intentional, directed, evidence-based instructions that tell your brain exactly who's running the show. If you loved this episode, you'll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  They don't do things until someone's mad at them to get it done. They need stress in order to get stuff done. And that just makes everybody around them stressed.

• 39:58Speaker 03

  Whenever fall comes back around, it always feels like a fresh start. This year, I've been layering in some styles from the new Lululemon fall drop because the weather is shifting and I find I have to be ready for the entire day and not just one part of it. Lululemon's fall line has some really versatile transitional pieces, so I can just wake up, throw on a matching set, add a jacket or a fleece, and head out, knowing that I'll feel comfortable enough to go wherever the day takes me. Check out the new fall arrivals in store and online now at lululemon.com.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Ugh, I hate Mondays.

• 40:29Speaker 05

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Swirl Bite?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Uh, Taylor Hanson? Sure, I'll try one. Mmm.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Hey, let's get back to work, please.

• 40:38Speaker 04

  But Taylor Hanson's making my day way better with these new soft and swirly King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites.

• 40:42Speaker 05

  Taylor Hanson? Nice. Try one. Mmm.

• 40:49Speaker 06

  King's Hawaiian Cinnamon Bites. There's nothing like it.

• 40:58Speaker 07

  This episode is brought to you by Netflix's new series, East of Eden. A bold reimagining of John Steinbeck's masterpiece, following generations of the Trask family. Through love, betrayal, and the choices that shape humanity. Starring Mike Feist and Christopher Abbott as the Trask Brothers. And Florence Pugh as Kathy Ames, the complex anti-heroine determined to build the life she wants. No matter the cost. Watch East of Eden, October 1st, only on Netflix.