Own the Day, Own Your Life: Optimized Practices for Waking, Working, Learning, Eating, Training, Playing, Sleeping, and Sex

Very good book, focused on practical hacks and tips to optimise every aspect of your daily routine/performance/well-being. Some advices were a bit off-tobacco and open relationships come to mind as far as I am concerned but then it doesn’t take away any of the goodness of other parts on nutrition, fitness and Co. Take what you like leave the rest and think for yourself.

Caso já tenha lido livros sobre performance, especialmente os do Tim Ferris, não tem para que comprar o livro.

(you don’t want to do cold immersion when you’re sick or already under a simultaneous acute stress load). Contrast is not necessary, but for me it seems to produce the best effect. Listen to your body, not to your mind. Learn to distinguish the voices of resistance and prudence. After all, wrapped up in this concept of hormesis, of exposure to good, acute stress, is recognizing the appropriate dose. A hormetic stressor is only as good as the body’s ability to fully recover from the resistance it overcomes. If the body can’t, then the stressor isn’t promoting growth, it’s toxic and it’s prompting decay. Chronic stress is literally killing us, and the traditional medical model offers us very little help to deal with it. Counterintuitively, one of the best ways to deal with chronic stress is to seek certain forms of acute stress. Through a process called hormesis, acute stress will help you adapt and become stronger. Cold exposure is one of the best sources of acute stress, and can be accessed in showers, cold tubs, and cryotherapy. The cold also offers the opportunity to practice an essential life skill—what I call “mental override”—the ability to make yourself do something you don’t want to do. The breath, when used in accordance with the Wim Hof method or other forms of intentional deep breathing, is an invaluable tool to modulate and adapt to acute stressors like cold shock, while also helping to melt away chronic stress on its own. It was the Buddha who said, wisely, “To keep the body in good health is a duty, otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.” There are two primary reasons to supplement: to remediate potential deficiencies, and to gain access to unusual or hard-to-find nutrients. You don’t need to think of supplements as something that comes in a capsule, either. Getting the right amount of sun, sleep, and food is itself a kind of supplementation, and the first line of defense. The key things to consider supplementing are greens, probiotics, B vitamins, krill oil, vitamin D, and additional minerals. Psychologists even have a term for it: narcotizing dysfunction. In fact, the more you follow the news, in some cases, the less likely you are to be an active, involved citizen, because you’ve confused consuming information with acting on it. To combat the potential negative impact of the commute, as well as to practice greater presence and peace of mind, use conscious breathing techniques along with mindfulness practices like the wide peripheral gaze. Nootropics have been proven to assist with memory and cognitive performance. Huperzia serrata is a great place to start and is a part of one of the most rigorously tested formulas on the market. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. Laughter is the diffuser of intensity. Anytime you are pushing t...

I would have given one star but he does lay out some good concepts and nutritional advice if a person were starting from a ground zero totally unhealthy diet. Overall the book was very slow and basic. Full of cheesy little one liners and unnecessary profanity to try to portray the image of "cool and modern." Plus plenty of tooting his own horn and encouraging users to buy his products. I do not recommend this book.

I just finished the book yesterday—and although I considered myself pretty enlightened when it came to a lot of this...I take cold showers at the end, do burpees in the morning, already had a lot of lemon water in the morning, often wear blue blockers at night and for computer screens, etc— I learned a TON in this book. Here are my 10 things I’m adding to my daily schedule from the first reading of the book: 1. Morning cocktail: add salt to my lemon water and make it room temperature, the night before. 2. Do Wim Hoff breathing technique before the cold shower, increase length of time for cold shower. 3. Be outside when sun comes up, can do it with my journaling, meditation, exercise. 10 minutes of sunshine minimum. 4. Use scent in office and workspace to help get into flow. Set an environment to focus and get after it. Essential oils for focus and productivity. 5. Create your own ethos, your own mantra, “Go hero go,” as example. 6. Evening playtime. You earned it. Best time for “me” or “we” time. Schedule Laura time. 7. Specific supplements and food help with very specific needs. Ginger, chocolate, wine at night. Aww, yeah. 8. Use driving mindfulness techniques. Wide gaze, take it all in. Use as practice to lengthen time between stimulus and response. Exercise in the time when anger is usually the worst. 9. Pro usage: aura rings for sleeping, lights for the ears, special yogurt, onnit supplements, get a rebounder for the morning. 10. Body weight exercises like the bear crawl, sit throughs, 23 burpees are enough. 11. 4 things to do for yourself: I love you, I’m sorry, I forgive you, thank you. Yeah, it’s 11. I’m not bound by limits.👍