Night Time Success Ritual

Tonight we're going to talk about the NTSR. NTSR stands for the NightTime Success Ritual.

I feel like this is one of the aspects of most people's life that is missing. I know for me, this was something that was missing for me for a long time. Up until not that long ago, only a few years ago, I was one of those people that I used to think I did my best work between 10 o'clock at night at midnight, or 10 o'clock at night and one in the morning and so I kind of wait for everybody to go to bed, and then I'd go work and I'd get a lot of good work done between 10 and midnight, 10 and one. There was a problem with that, though, there were actually several problems with that. First of all, when I was done working, I was wired, I was wired, and so I couldn't go to sleep. So then, you know, I would channel surf on TV, or look at my phone or something like that and it would take me an hour, hour and a half, two hours to wind down. So if I'm done at midnight, just on the conservative side, it wouldn't be till 1: 30 or two in the morning until I could actually fall asleep. Then I'm trying to get up at five in the morning to get to work. So the next morning, I was exhausted. Now physiologically, this causes all kinds of issues with cortisol and cortisol is something that really helps regulate your body and if you go with cortisol, the cortisol cycle in your body, everything works really smoothly, but if you go against it, like I did when I stayed up late at night, it causes all kinds of problems. It can cause rapid weight gain, it causes us to hold our fat in our stomach. It messes up our sleep so you don't sleep well. It messes up the impulses in the body of knowing when to work out, when not to, when to rest, when not to, when to eat, when not to. 

So anyways, I switched a few years ago, and this has had a massive impact on me. Now I go to bed between 10: 30 and 11 every night, and I get up at 4: 55. Having consistency in my bedtime really sets me up well for the next day. It dramatically improves the quality of my sleep and I know this because I actually wear a whoop band. I could talk more about this another time, but the Whoop band is amazing for really being able to track your sleep. Now in the nighttime success ritual, the purpose of this is to set up a ritual that prepares you for bed, prepares you mentally for bed and this is a great transition from working through your day to starting to communicate to your body, hey, get ready, because we're going to be going to sleep. Now, when you start if you do not have this, what I would recommend is you get a consistent bedtime and you know, as people go to bed at nine o'clock and like okay, well what do you do on a Friday night? What do you do on a Saturday night? Do you go to bed at eight o'clock at night? That's pretty hard to do on a Friday night if you're trying to be with your spouse or your friends. So try and make it realistic, I sleep six hours a night, six to six and a half and I'm good with that, that works for me. So if I'm in bed by 11, I can still go out and I can go to dinner and go to movies and that kind of thing and I get up at five and I pretty much do that seven days a week. Occasionally I'll sleep in a little bit with my wife because I love hanging out with my wife, but other than that, I pretty much do that every day. 

Now in the ritual, if you've never done this before we get the consistent bedtime and make it really really simple. Really, it could just literally be I'm going to brush my teeth before I go to bed. I'm going to change my clothes and put into pajamas. I'm actually wearing a t shirt and look at this, I'm actually wearing my skull pajama bottoms. Yeah. So but it could literally just be changing into pajamas, or brushing your teeth that would signify to your brain Hey, we're gonna get ready to go to sleep. Then as you go further along, you can add to it if you want. If not, you're good. In my routine, what I start off my nighttime is I actually do the dishes and take the garbage out. There's something I do for my wife. She never asked me to do it, but I looked around what was going on in her house and I was like, You know what, if my wife get up in the morning and walk into the kitchen, and the kitchen was totally clean, I bet that would reduce her stress, because she's running around in the morning trying to get our daughter ready, trying to get herself ready and just a lot going on and so he's like, I bet if we could just keep the kitchen clean that would help reduce her stress. So that's something I do for her every night. So I would do the dishes. I'll take the garbage out, then from there, I start to move into a series of things that get me ready for bed. 

So one of the things is I got this cool little shaker and I found this company that's called Early Bird, right here, Early Bird morning cocktail. I was heavy, heavy caffeine user, you know, 800,000 1200 milligrams of caffeine a day, I would just consume it all day long. Anytime I felt tired, just slam the caffeine baby and just keep going and about a year ago, I felt God was telling me he's like, you know, you cannot hear me because you're so jacked up all the time on caffeine. I want you to give up caffeine. So I did, I gave it up, we gave it up entirely and I did that for about nine months and then about three months ago, I went back, and I started taking this club earlybird. So you basically just take this powder, you put water in with it, and shake it up, and then you put it next to your bed. So I literally will have this next to my bed. So when my alarm goes off, I'll take a sip of this and I'll sip it, it'll be the only caffeine in general I have all day, I usually have this in the morning, and it's it, it's all I need and I don't even necessarily even need this, I kind of sip it just a little bit to wake me up. So I get that ready to take that upstairs to go to bed. One other thing that is really, really powerful. anytime of the day, there's electrolytes. Now you'll hear people talk about this. I really like this one. This is called light balance and I want you to notice this is a liquid electrolyte. It's not a powder. This is high concentration electrolytes. So I'll put a cap full of this in my early bird cocktail that I'll drink in the morning, but also put this anytime I'm drinking anything for me, I put this in here, this is so potent, that if you were to drink a cap full of this straight, you'd puke, you'd immediately get sick it's way, way, way, way too strong. But this is fantastic for the body. Electrolytes are a great source. Just think of the name electric, electro, it helps your cells speak to each other, it helps electricity to flow through your body. That's what electrolytes do. 

When you take electrolytes, it actually helps energize you. So I put that in my early bird morning cocktail. Then from there, I make a drink for myself every night that I sleep. My goal is to fast for 12 hours a day. Now, if you look at bodybuilders, or you look at people who are trying to put on a lot of weight for football or something like that, I mean they're literally eating 24 hours a day. That's because they have to keep feeding their muscles, the way you get your muscles to grow, you have to keep feeding them. So I lift a lot and I want to be in great shape that way, but I'm also trying to bite when I fast, I allow my cells to repair. I give my body a break, which your body loves. So my standard thing is out, I won't eat for 12 hours a night I'll be done around seven or eight and I won't eat again till seven or eight which really isn't that bad, but if I'm trying to build muscle, which I am, then what I can do is I can take something like this, this is called Qigong. Ben Greenfield sells this and I'll take another one called Fortagen and what this is, it's essential amino acids. So you can take this while you're fasting and it helps repair muscle without breaking your fast, it has no calories. So it's just essential amino acids that go in and help support muscle repair while I'm sleeping. So I make a cocktail of this before I go to bed right, I put it in this Qigong, I put in creatine and then I add another, early bird has another thing called nightcap and this has magnesium and zinc which are actually really good to take before you go to bed and it has pharmaGABA and it has glycine, theanine and then this one I don't know it's called rutaecarpine, that I've not heard of, but anyways I take that helps relax me. I put that in my Iron Man shaker and I shake that up and I drink that before I go to bed. The only downside is I typically have to get up in the middle of night to go pee, but that's okay. It really works well in supporting my body even though I'm going fast. 

So as I have to get that done, then I'll go up and floss and brush my teeth, I wash my face, I put on like a kind of a moisturizer for my face. I'm 54 Yeah, so I'll look old as shit if I don't put something on my face. So I put on moisturizer before I go to sleep, only takes the white wash my face and put that on takes like a minute. It's quick, but then what I do is then I start preparing my brain. Now, one of the things I believe is that actually, we're so quick to forget. We as humans are so quick to forget. So a lot of times we have so many blessings that come our way every single day. A lot of times we never know what they are, but blessings that we're aware of, but we're so quick to forget him. So one of the things I do is I keep, essentially like a gratitude journal and before I go to bed, I'll fill out the things I'm grateful for from this day. I also thought magic moments were special things that happened today, like tonight, I took my daughter, we went to this place called Kids Empire. It's got this gigantic place set, so she loved that and that was a special time that my daughter and I had without going there. Now, that's one of the things that if I don't write that down, I'm going to forget about that. I'll totally forget about it and you know, what's useful is if I go back, at the end of the quarter, or the end of the year, I can actually go back really quickly through my journals and I can see all these magic moments I had throughout the year, that I would have totally forgotten about had and not documented them and what you start to realize is when you document your blessings, and you document these magic moments, you go back and be like, Damn, my life is pretty freakin awesome. It really is, your life is pretty freakin awesome. You're just forgetting so many of the great things that happened to you and there's so many little things that happen to us we don't even pay attention to or we can easy to forget about it. Somebody opens the door for you or you go and you find out, you're getting $10 off something at the store, like these are minor, minor things, but you know what, they're all blessings. They really are. Somebody pays you a compliment that you weren't expecting, somebody sends you a card, sends you a text, whatever the case may be. So I document these things, because I'm going to go to sleep filled with gratitude. 

Now, so many people struggle sleeping. You see everybody with COPD, insomnia, anxiety, all these other things, but I think one of the issues, going back to the power of the NTSR is they don't prepare themselves for sleep. When you prepare yourself for sleep, if you prepare your brain, if you go to bed, being grateful of everything that happened in the day, you're not going to feel anxiety during the night, you're going to sleep so much better. You'll sleep so much better. So I fill out a gratitude journal, I have some affirmations I write out quickly and one of the big things I do is I set my intention for the next day. What is the thing that I want to get done in the morning? I'm a big believer in programming the subconscious mind. So when I set this intention right before I go to sleep, I have set it in my brain, and then my brain will go to work on finding a solution for that intention. A lot of times I'll wake up in the morning, and I'll be very clear about what I need to do or out of nowhere, something will happen and it doesn't need to be done or it's done without me doing it. It's really crazy, but that's the power of intention. So I'm setting myself up to be able to go to sleep in a state of gratitude.  When I hop in bed, one of the things my wife and my daughter and I do, we have a gratitude rock, where each person holds a gratitude rock and they say one thing that they're grateful for for the day and then we pray together and then off we go. Now one of the things that I also do is I take a CBD CBN melatonin gummy, and I don't need to take it like I sleep well, but when I take it, it just totally chills me out and I sleep really, really well. So I've got that down where on six, six and a half hours sleep, I'm ready to rock in the morning. I'm refreshed. I'm ready to go and these routines have told my brain that it's time to go to sleep. So it's time to go to sleep, I am out. Gone. Amazing dreams, like it's all good. 

I wanted to share this with you because so many people struggle with sleep. So many people struggle with the morning. You cannot win the morning, unless you win the night first. If you get up in the morning and you're exhausted and everything is chaos around you. No wonder you're not going to follow through. No wonder you're not going to do what you said you're going to do. Because you can't find the clothes you're supposed to wear. You're exhausted. You're just getting jammed up on caffeine, you're hitting the snooze, all these things are happening and they're not setting you up to succeed. They're setting you up to fail. They're setting you up to not realize the potential that you have that you know you have. So to really kick ass in the morning, we need to do the work at night. It's not a big deal, but it's going to set a frame that's really going to help you succeed by getting you to bed, getting you rested and ready to go the next day. So I'm actually going to share with you my EMSR which is the Early Morning Success Ritual. I'll be doing that tomorrow (on facebook), but hopefully you found this helpful. Hopefully this is something that you can lean into to develop your own rituals and get your ass sleeping well and set you up to win. I appreciate you.