I read this book recently and it’s one that I will always recommend when people ask me why I wake up so early every morning. It’s a book called The 5 AM Club by Robin Sharma.
To be fair, I was waking up super early long before I read this book BUT this book cemented my thoughts around the benefits of early rising.
🔑 Concepts that resonate with my mindset
These are a few of my favorite principles:
Solitude and enhanced brain state
“All of us have limited mental capacity or cognitive bandwidth. And throughout the day, our attention is given to more and more things: work, the news, interaction with others and social media. Our bandwidth gets used up by all of these so, by lunchtime, we can’t really concentrate on anything at all. By constantly shifting our focus from one thing to another, we give nothing enough attention. But if you get up at 5:00 a.m., you have a golden opportunity to focus on one high-value activity without your brain getting distracted.”
Allotting time for focus
“Finally, the billionaire shared the final focus of historymakers: personal mastery practice. According to psychologist Anders Ericsson, a person must invest at least 2.75 hours of daily practice in a skill for ten years for the first signs of an elite-level of mastery to appear. So if you want to master yourself, you should spend your first hour each morning working deeply on you, your mind-set and also your approach to health, spirituality and love.”
Exercising for a minimum of 20 mins per day
“The first step is to move – to perform vigorous exercise for 20 minutes. What’s really important is to make yourself sweat. That’s because sweat gets rid of cortisol, the hormone of fear. Sweat generates the protein BDNF, or brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which repairs brain cells and accelerates the formation of new neural connections. So by sweating for 20 minutes, it literally means you’ll think faster!“
Application in action
These are my top three concepts to apply to my daily life.
I start my day with sitting and breathing for a few minutes, then I move to reading The Daily Stoic to enrich my mind, I watch something informative on YouTube, then I head to the garage to lift heavy things and put them back down.
For me this helps put structure in place and when everything else is going haywire, I can count on this process being a constant tether to my sanity.