Transcription
The truth is that most men are wasting 80% of their day or more, and they don't even realize it. When I was being trained by CIA, we were taught how to literally bend time. How to get more done in one hour than most people get done in one day. The crazy thing is, you can do it, too, if you know one simple secret.
My name is Andrew Bustamante, and I'm a former CIA intelligence officer, New York Times best-selling author, and viral internet voice. I spent seven years operating around the world with CIA's National Clandestine Service, and now I teach spy skills that break barriers to unlock your peak performance. I've had viral interviews with Diary of a CEO, Shawn Ryan, Flagrant, Lex Fridman, and many other top-tier podcasters and mainstream media outlets. If you've seen one of my interviews in the past, go ahead and leave a comment below and tell me what you remember the most. The spy skills I teach have helped tens of thousands of people around the world increase their income, decrease their waistline, and shortcut their way to wealth, happiness, and even love. And today, I want to share a new spy skill with you.
CIA taught me that the most important hour in any day is actually the first hour of the day. This is completely contrary to much of what you learn at home, in school, in college, or even at work, where they try to make you think that your most productive hour has to be one of your core work hours. Those eight hours a day between when you get to work and when you leave work. In reality, CIA teaches that the most important hour is the first hour because a productive first hour of the day sets the tone, the foundation, and the pacing for every other hour that follows it. So, the question becomes, how do you make the most out of that first hour of the day? And that's what we're going to cover today.
First, let's talk about how that first hour of the day will impact every hour of the day that is yet to come. First, the way that your body physically feels. If you feel bloated in that first hour, there's a good chance you're going to feel bloated for multiple hours that follow. If you feel tired or lethargic or unable to focus, what you feel in your body in that first hour will carry with you for many hours yet to come. The way your brain feels in that first hour, if it's focused, if it's scattered, if it's angry, if it's happy, how your brain feels in the first hour of the day sets the tone for not only how you will cognitively perform during the day, but also how you will emotionally perform throughout the day. So, if you already feel slow and maybe angry, or maybe you feel slow and depressed, you're going to carry those cognitive and emotional feelings with you as you progress through your day. You already know what this feels like. If you've ever felt crappy when you wake up, and then you continue to feel crappy when you get to work. Maybe you even continue feeling crappy until after you've pumped yourself full of caffeine and sugar and had some kind of turnaround around lunchtime.
Even more important than your brain or your body during that first hour is actually your behavior. Because the behavior that you set in the first hour of the day becomes the default behavior that you will carry with you throughout the day. So, if you are behaving in a reactive way, an aggressive way, a defensive way in the first hour of your day, you are more likely to carry that behavior with you forward, continuing your aggression, your defensiveness, and your reactivity to all of the new stressors and inputs around you. And most important of all, how you execute the first hour of the day will actually come back tenfold in the last hour of the day when it's time for you to try to go to sleep. So, if you've ever had a bad night's sleep after a bad day that started with a bad morning, you already know what this feels like. It's not you, it's not a problem with your mentality, your attitude, or your motivation. It is literally biological, and the way that you encode your body upon wake up is how your body will process the code before it goes to sleep. Your first hour literally programs your hormones, your attitude, your gut, your cognition, and plays that code throughout the day. So, if we want to unlock your peak performance throughout the day, we need to unlock your peak performance in the first hour of every day.
CIA taught me this skill when I was first going through the Field Tradecraft Course, or FTC, something that we commonly call "The Farm." The Farm is a long day every day for many weeks and many months. And because there is so much learning, so much exercise, so much activity, we focus very much on the first hour of the day to set the tone for productivity throughout the entire day. You don't get a chance to go back in time. You don't get a chance to miss a day or skip a day. Nobody lets you have a redo anytime that you're going through CIA training. So, every single day matters. And it's a competition. You might start with 100% of CIA new recruits, but only 80% of those new recruits are actually going to graduate on graduation day. And the reason that last 20% fall out has nothing to do with their intelligence or their capability; it has everything to do with whether or not they were able to adopt a daily routine that allowed them to maintain optimum performance for such a long period of time.
So, very early in our training, they teach us a simple morning routine, and that morning routine is what I want to give you right now. First, you have to understand that your brain only has two core functions. It can either index information, meaning it can store information for later retrieval, or it can absorb new information, which is another way of saying it can learn. So, your brain cannot both learn and index simultaneously. So, your brain has to constantly switch between learning something new and remembering something old, observing something current and recalling something from the past. Your brain cannot do two things at one time. So, in order to optimize your brain function, you have to dedicate space, particularly in the morning, to letting your brain do one thing or the other. And in the morning, the most important function for your brain is actually indexing. And the reason that indexing is so important is because when you're asleep at night, your subconscious is very active. It's connecting disparate ideas. It's making memories and combining them with creativity. It's creating dreams. It's actually a very active brain state. You are actually learning in your sleep, a process that you've probably heard called osmosis in the past. What that means is that when you wake up, it's really your brain's first opportunity to stop learning something new, stop thinking creatively, stop engaging in its prefrontal cortex, and actually start to save, download, buffer, index the information that it has come into contact with overnight.
If you're one of those people that realizes that you have new ideas in the morning, you may already have a little automatic indexing going on. So, we're going to give your brain a boost every morning by creating a window of time between 2 and 5 minutes where you don't introduce any new sensory information into your body. And the reason I'm focused on sensory information is because your body has five organs that it uses to intake new information. And those five organs are your sensory organs. What you see, what you smell, what you taste, what you hear, what you touch. These are all forms of sensory input. New information must come through a sensory channel. So, if we can avoid engaging any of your sensory organs for the first 5 minutes of the day, it means that your brain has no other option except to index the information that it collected overnight. And your brain can index at a remarkable speed if it's given just a few moments, minutes, or even seconds to do that indexing. So, that's what we're doing in the first 5 minutes of your day. You wake up and you stay exactly where you are. Under your sheets, in your pajamas, you don't drink anything, you don't get up to go pee, you don't talk to anybody new, and you for sure don't look at your phone. We give our brains 5 minutes with no new sensory input so that it can start connecting the dots for what it learned about itself over the preceding night.
After that 5 minutes is over, the first thing you're going to do is consume water. Not juice, not coffee, not food, but water. And the reason you're ingesting water is because your body is dried out. It's dehydrated. For the last 8 hours, your body has been in a form of sleeping stasis. And in that sleep stasis, your body has not been hydrating; it has been dehydrating. So, all of your internal organs from your esophagus to your stomach to your upper and lower intestine have all become dehydrated overnight for as long as you've been sleeping, whether that's 4 hours or 10 hours. Water, first thing in the morning, jump-starts a rehydration process for your entire body. And that rehydration process will pay dividends throughout the entire day, starting in just the next 10 or 15 minutes after your first sip of water.
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After your 5 minutes of quiet and when you start rehydrating your body, the next thing you want to do is get near a window or even go outside because you're looking for 10 to 15 minutes of daylight exposure. You actually want the outside daylight, the light coming off the sun, the light reflecting from the sun off of the clouds on a gray day. You want that natural sunlight to come into your eyeballs. Because as it comes into your eyeballs, it creates a number of natural hormonal reactions inside your body that wake you up, trigger your cortisol, act as a natural energy source that will boost your morning and carry you through the day. But most importantly, it actually has a relationship with the serotonin levels in your body that will benefit you when you go to sleep at night. So, the next most important thing you do after you start drinking water is somehow get yourself into a position where you can look outside, go outside, walk the dog, go for a jog, and start absorbing some of that outdoor light.
Notice that we're about 25 minutes into your new morning routine, and I haven't said anything about food or caffeine. There's a reason for that. At CIA, we're taught that all consumables fall into two categories: water and not water, something that we call food. There is no second fluid that can replace water. It can't be coffee, it can't be juice, it can't be Gatorade, it can't be some kind of energy drink. There is only water and not water. So, now that we're 25 minutes into your day, now that you have rehydrated your internal organs, it's the time to start introducing food. But, it's important that we introduce real food. Even more importantly, we introduce foods that contain natural sugars that also contain high amounts of fiber. The reason for that is because we want that natural glucose source and that natural fiber source to complement the other processes already happening inside our gut that came from our hydration in the morning, our morning sunlight, and of course, our time without any new sensory inputs. So, we don't want to put some kind of processed food or processed chemical like caffeine into our gut yet. We want to start with sources of food that are high in fiber, high in antioxidants, and high in natural sugars. So, we turn towards berries and other types of fruit. Strawberries are excellent for this, blueberries are excellent, pears are excellent, apples are excellent. These are all sources of high fiber, natural sugar, and antioxidants. These foods, mixed with the systems that have already been triggered by your morning routine, are going to reduce bloat, increase digestion, increase energy output, and reduce any kind of swelling or bloating. This is what makes you feel good all day. It doesn't matter what you eat at 10:00 a.m.; it matters what you eat within the first 60 minutes after waking up. I'm not saying you have to give up coffee or tea or energy drinks. What I am saying is that you want to give your body a chance to work for itself before you start to supplement it with chemical energy sources. And the right time to introduce those external energy supplements is after 90 minutes. 90 minutes from the moment that you wake up, whether you wake up to an alarm or whether you wake up naturally. If you let 90 minutes pass, then you are in the ideal window to start introducing something like caffeine through coffee or tea or a pre-workout drink.
Those first 90 minutes of your day will be energetic because they will be energized by the natural sources that you are coming in contact with through your new morning routine. You will have a natural spike in sugar from the fruits that you're eating. You will have a natural spike in energy from the cortisol that comes into your body simply by getting up and walking around. The sunlight outside that you take in through your eyeballs will literally energize your body in much the same way that the sun energizes Superman. All you have to do is remember to delay the introduction of caffeine until after the first 90 minutes of your day. Give yourself that strong first hour, and then give yourself 30 minutes for that high to slowly start to taper down before you introduce caffeine, which will then pick you back up again and carry you well into and beyond lunch.
This is how CIA trained me to take advantage of the first hour of the day to exponentially increase my productivity for the rest of the day because not every hour of the day is created equal. In fact, the first hour is the most important hour because it sets the tone, it sets the trajectory, it sets the pace of productivity for every hour thereafter. This secret has unlocked incredible opportunity for me ever since I learned it with my first day at CIA in 2007. It kept me safe while I was operating around the world with the National Clandestine Service. It helped me build a business when I left CIA. It helped me build a YouTube channel. It helped me build a following and it helped turn me into a multi-million dollar business owner. Not because I'm great at noon, but because I'm so focused on the first hour of my day every day. And you can be too. Literally, a new day awaits you if you can just change the first 60 minutes.
So, here's my challenge to you. Starting tomorrow, give yourself 5 minutes after you wake up to do nothing. To just lay in bed. I don't care if you stare at the ceiling or stare at the inside of your eyelids, but don't change anything. Don't introduce any new sensory inputs and just watch what happens to your brain in that first 5 minutes of the day. Even if you skip out on everything I said about water and sunlight, caffeine and food, that's fine, but give yourself 5 minutes tomorrow morning just to see that simple difference. And when that difference changes your day, come back, watch this video again, see how much better you feel and how much better you perform when you start to apply every other element of the morning routine that I just taught you. If you learn something new here today, don't keep it to yourself. Go ahead and click on that subscribe button right now. Leave a comment. Share this video with a friend. And if you want to learn more spy skills to unlock your peak performance, go ahead and click on the top link in the description below and take a quiz to learn your secret spy superpower. I'll see you on the other side.