Work 1 Minute After Waking Up. It'll Change Your Life.

Your morning routine probably sucks. Maybe you've fallen prey to the morning routine dilemma, where you either have a sprawling routine loaded with biohacks and optimized to the anthidae. But you don't really start doing any actual work until 10 or 11 a.m. or you don't have a routine. Instead, you wake up, press snooze, pick up your phone, scroll for way too long, see that it's almost 8.30 or 9 o'clock and are now in a rush, stress to get the day started. You know you should be doing a morning routine and maybe sometimes you do, but most of the time you skip it because you went to bed later than you wanted, which means you wake up later than you wanted. You have this kind of persistent nagging guilt about the fact that you're not doing your meditation or your journey or whatever it is. So I'll show you how to avoid these mistakes and how to use neuroscience to make your mornings as productive as possible.

你的早晨习惯可能不够好。也许你已经陷入了早晨习惯的困境，要么制定了冗长繁杂的晨间例程，充满了各种生物优化的技巧，但实际上你直到上午10点或11点才真正开始工作。要么根本没有固定习惯，起床后按下贪睡按钮，拿起手机刷屏太久，发现快到8点半或9点了，然后就开始慌乱紧张地开始一天的工作。你知道自己应该有一个早晨例程，有时也会照做，但大多数时候因为睡得比计划晚，导致起床也晚而跳过。你总是对没能进行冥想、写日记或其他计划感到内疚。所以我将向你展示如何避免这些错误，并如何利用神经科学让你的早晨尽可能高效。

Now my name is Reandarce. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Flow Research Collective with Stephen Kotler, where we help professionals use science-based behavioral change to access Flow State as well. What is the point of a morning routine in the first place? Because it's a topic that's both constantly talked about and persistently misunderstood. Now when growing up in Ireland, I had a comically excessive morning routine. I did whatever young biohacker does, lemon water, yoga, journaling, exercise, affirmations, mushroom, coffee, ice bath, sunlight, stick in my feet on the wet Irish grass for grounding. It would take forever. So long in fact that I wouldn't start work until just before lunch.

现在，我叫Reandarce。我是Flow Research Collective的联合创始人兼首席执行官，与Stephen Kotler一起工作。我们帮助专业人士使用基于科学的行为改变来进入流状态。首先，晨间例行活动的意义是什么？因为这是一个既被频繁讨论又常常被误解的话题。我在爱尔兰长大时，有一套滑稽冗长的晨间例行活动。我做了年轻的生物黑客们通常会做的一切：喝柠檬水、做瑜伽、写日记、锻炼身体、进行自我肯定、喝蘑菇咖啡、冰水浴、晒太阳，把脚插在湿湿的爱尔兰草地上以实现接地。这整套流程花费了很长时间，事实上，每次我开始工作都快到午餐时了。

And then years later, after doing this routine for a long time, I moved to LA and met tech titans and famous startup founders and billionaires who ran circles around me from a productivity and results standpoint. And guess what I noticed? None of these folks cared about their morning routines. We're talked about their morning routines. For example, you don't hear Elon saying that he's had a bad day running SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter because he forgot to foam roll his glutes or didn't do red light therapy that morning. Instead, these folks just wake up and get to work. They just get it done. So this blew my mind. I decided that I would test what I was seeing with all these successful folks in the states here.

多年以后，在长期坚持这个习惯之后，我搬到了洛杉矶，遇到了科技巨头、著名创业公司创始人以及那些成绩斐然的亿万富翁。让我感到惊讶的是，他们中没有人关心自己的晨间习惯，甚至很少谈论这些。比如，你不会听到埃隆·马斯克抱怨，因为早上忘记滚泡沫轴或没有做红光疗法，而导致他在管理SpaceX、特斯拉和推特时度过了糟糕的一天。相反，他们只是醒来，然后投入工作，完成任务。这让我大开眼界。因此，我决定在这里试验一下这些成功人士的做法。

And I decided I'd start just waking up and working and following their approach. And at first it felt really weird. My morning routine was supposed to give me an edge. So I was nervous. I'd stumble into work and perform poorly. Kind of in a groggy zombie-like state. But right away, I realized that the billionaires were onto something. In fact, it worked shockingly well. I could just wake up and get to work and slip straight into a flow state. A peak state of consciousness where the work I was doing felt effortless. Productivity surged and hours went by in what felt like minutes.

我决定开始早上醒来后直接工作，尝试跟随他们的方法。最开始的时候，我觉得这很奇怪。我原本期待我的晨间习惯能让我占据优势，因此感到有些紧张，担心这样会让我在工作时表现不佳，像一个晕乎乎的“僵尸”一样。但很快我意识到那些亿万富翁的方法确实有道理。事实上，这种方式效果好得令人震惊。我可以在醒来后立刻投入工作，并迅速进入一种“心流状态”，在这种高峰意识状态下，我的工作变得毫不费力。生产力大幅提升，时间仿佛过得飞快，几个小时的工作一晃而过。

And it turns out it's due to what's called flow proneness, which was discovered by psychologist Mehi Chik-Semihai in the 1970s. Now flow proneness is simply our tendency to experience flow state. And that's when the dots connected for me. Because a morning routine is meant to heighten your productivity. That's the point of a morning routine. But how does a morning routine do this? Well, it does this by increasing your flow proneness. Case in point, cold showers boost dopamine by up to 250% for two hours afterwards, which plays a key role in focus, which is key for flow.

事实证明，这与所谓的“易流性”有关，这是心理学家米哈伊·契克森特米哈伊在20世纪70年代发现的。易流性简单来说就是我们体验“心流”状态的倾向。当我意识到这一点时，一切豁然开朗。因为晨间例程的目的是提高你的生产力，这就是它存在的意义。但晨间例程是如何做到这一点的呢？它通过提高你的易流性来实现。举个例子，冷水浴可以将多巴胺的水平提高多达250%，并持续两小时，这对集中注意力至关重要，而专注是进入心流的关键。

Meditation helps drive attention into the present moment and improve self-regulation, both being key for flow. Journaling helps to clarify goals. Clear goals are a trigger for flow. So all of these routines and many others share a common theme, which is that they boost flow proneness. They make us more likely to get into flow later on in the day, which then boosts our productivity. So really the unspoken purpose of a morning routine is to boost flow proneness. But here's the wild thing. As soon as you wake up in the morning, when you would normally be doing your morning routine, if you're a biohacker, your flow proneness is naturally and organically highest.

冥想有助于将注意力集中在当下，并提升自我调节能力，这两者对于进入心流状态（flow）都非常重要。写日记则有助于明确目标，而清晰的目标是触发心流的关键。因此，这些惯例，还有许多其他惯例，都有一个共同的主题：它们提升进入心流状态的可能性。它们使我们今天更有可能进入心流状态，从而提高我们的生产力。所以，说到底，晨间惯例未明说的真正目的就是提升心流的可能性。但有趣的是，作为生物黑客（biohacker），在你早上醒来打算开始晨间惯例的时候，你的心流倾向其实已经处于自然的最高状态。

And that's for two reasons. The first is that your cognitive load is low. Think of it like a ram in a computer. Cognitive load is lowest upon waking up because we haven't yet loaded anything into our conscious mind. The less cognitive load we have, the easier it is to access flow. And second, upon waking, your brain waves are close to flow. The neuro-electrical signature or brain waves of flow are not far from theta or delta, which are the brain waves of sleep. And this makes it easier to slide out of bed and deep into a flow state.

这是因为两个原因：第一，你的认知负荷较低。可以把它想象成计算机里的内存。刚醒来的时候，认知负荷最低，因为我们的大脑里还没有装入太多信息。认知负荷越低，我们就越容易进入“心流状态”。第二，刚醒来时，你的大脑波动接近心流状态。心流状态的大脑波动与睡眠时的θ波或δ波相差不大。这让我们更容易从床上起来，进入深度的心流状态。

So what does this mean for your morning routine? Well, since flow proneness is highest as soon as you wake up, you don't want to cannibalize that prime flow time that your biology is just giving to you with an elaborate morning routine. The biohacker wakes up and squanders the flow that they could have with an elaborate routine that ironically is designed to help them get into flow later on. Does it make any sense? Whereas the billionaire types wake up and dive straight into high priority work immediately and they're rewarded with flow. The productivity from doing this both moves you towards your goals immediately and you get into flow doing it, which makes it a win-win.

那么这对你的晨间习惯意味着什么呢？由于我们刚醒来的时候是最容易进入“心流”状态的，所以不应该用复杂的晨间行程去浪费这个自然给予的宝贵“心流”时光。那些热衷于生物优化的人一早起来就把精力耗费在复杂的晨间规划上，讽刺的是，他们这样做本来是想以后更容易进入“心流”状态。这样做有意义吗？而那些成功人士则会在醒来后立即投入到重要的工作中，这样他们就能顺利进入“心流”状态。这样的做法不仅立刻推动你朝着目标前进，同时也让你在过程中感受到“心流”。这真是一种双赢的策略。

Or is it? Well, after trying this wake-up and flow approach for a year while I was getting tons of work done for this thing in the morning, I actually did start to burn out and I saw this with the billionaire types and successful entrepreneurs that was observing as well. I found that while these titans were productive, the picture wasn't as pretty. They were tired, somewhere overweight, they had lots of bad relationships and I too started to feel a little tired, a little brazzled and I missed the calm, clarity zen state that came from my previous morning routine with practices like meditation and ice baths yoga, all the usual suspects. So I realized that this approach of waking up and working all morning wasn't quite right either and the research reveals why.

还是这样吗？好吧，在尝试了一年的晨起即工作的方式后，虽然我早上完成了大量工作，但我实际上开始感到疲惫。而且，我也观察到那些亿万富翁和成功企业家们，他们虽然高效，但生活并不如表面那般美好。他们很累，有些甚至超重，还存在许多糟糕的人际关系。我自己也开始感到有点疲惫，焦躁不安，并且怀念过去早晨例行的宁静和清晰的状态，比如冥想、冰浴和瑜伽等常见的做法。因此，我意识到这种一早醒来就全力投入工作的方式并不太正确，而研究揭示了其中的原因。

It turns out flow isn't binary, it's not like a light switch that you can just flick on and off. Instead, there's a cycle to flow with four distinct phases so it's more like a dimmer switch. What matters most here is the recovery phase. Flow is expensive for the brain to produce. There's a lot of neurochemistry involved and because you can expand a lot of energy effortlessly while in flow, it requires recovery in order to access flow again into flow a second time. And so it's no wonder the billionaire entrepreneur types were burning out. They never took the time to recover. When it comes to recovery, the biohackers crushed it. They were doing amazing. Their meticulously optimized morning routines are really powerful recovery protocols.

事实证明，"心流"并不是一个简单的二元概念，就像电灯开关那样可以随意打开或关闭。而是，心流有一个循环过程，由四个不同的阶段组成，更像是一个调光器。在这个过程中，最重要的是恢复阶段。产生心流对大脑来说是一种昂贵的消耗，涉及复杂的神经化学反应，因为在心流状态下即使能毫不费力地消耗大量能量，也需要通过恢复才能再次进入心流状态。因此，不难理解为什么那些亿万富翁企业家会感到精疲力竭，因为他们从未花时间去恢复。在恢复方面，生物黑客们做得非常出色。他们精心优化的早晨例行程序实际上是非常有效的恢复方案。

So we want to avoid the mistakes on both sides of the spectrum. Biohackers block the morning flow that their biology naturally serves up to them with these elaborate routines and the entrepreneurial types don't do any elaborate routines and they burn out as a result. And based on the research, there's a sweet spot between the biohackers, elaborate carry on, and the entrepreneurial types know nonsense approach. There's a few steps to this. The first thing that we want to do is implement what we call wake up and flow. So instead of the elaborate routine, wake up and dive into your highest priority work. Not in an hour, not even in 10 or 15 minutes. We're talking within 90 seconds of opening your eyes while you're still half asleep so that your brain waves are closer to data or delta.

我们希望避免两种极端的错误。生物黑客们通过复杂的晨间例程来打断身体自然的晨间节奏，而企业家类型的人则完全不进行这些复杂的程序，结果却导致精力耗尽。根据研究，存在一个在这两者之间的最佳平衡点。我们需要做的第一步是在醒来后立即进入工作状态。与其耗费时间在复杂的晨间例程上，不如在睁开眼睛后的90秒内马上投入最重要的工作，而不是等待一个小时，甚至10或15分钟。此时你的大脑波动更接近于theta或delta波段，仍处于半梦半醒的状态。这样可以有效利用自然生理节奏带来的专注力和创造力。

It'll be a struggle at first within 15 minutes or so. You'll be deep in flow and you'll essentially wake fully up while working in a flow state. And then after we do this, wake up and flow protocol on our highest priority tasks for one to three hours. You can do everything that makes you feel great for the rest of the day. The lemon water, the stretching, the yoga, the red light, therapy, ice baths, whatever it is. Think of this as the inverted morning routine. Work first, recover, laser, but never skip recovery. This is backed up by research, but it's not just theoretical. So this is the perfect blend of what the biohackers and billionaires bring to the table and solves the morning routine dilemma because we harness the natural period of flow pronus our biology gives us and we also recover a boost flow pronus for the rest of the day.

一开始的15分钟左右可能会有些困难，但是很快你就会进入一种专注状态，你会在工作中完全清醒。完成这些高优先级任务一到三个小时之后，你可以做任何让你感觉良好的事情，比如喝柠檬水、拉伸、瑜伽、红光疗法、冰浴等等。把这看作是颠倒的晨间例行程序：先工作，再恢复。千万别跳过恢复环节。这不仅有研究支持，而且也并非仅仅是理论上的东西。这种方法结合了生物优化者和亿万富翁的智慧，解决了晨间例行程序的困扰，因为我们利用了生物学赋予我们的自然专注期，并且通过恢复来增强一天剩余时间的专注能力。

Now just two more tips that you want to make sure you implement as you pin this new routine down. The first is to prepare an advance. You need to set the task up the night before in extreme detail. So that you don't waste any time figuring out what to work on when you wake up. So that when we're half asleep and we're waking up and going straight to work, we can mindlessly glide right into the task rather than having to wonder about what we should work on or how we should do it or what materials we need to begin. And the second thing is to just make sure that you allocate enough time to really have this long flow block. Aim for one to three hours of dedicated high priority work to harness flow and take advantage of wake up and flow starting your day now.

现在还有两个建议，在你确定这套新惯例时一定要落实。 首先是提前准备。你需要在前一天晚上详细地安排好任务，以免早上起床后浪费时间去思考该做些什么。当我们半梦半醒地起床并直接投入工作时，可以不用费心思考该做什么、如何做或者需要什么材料，而是能自然顺畅地开始任务。 其次，要确保你分配足够的时间来进行长时间的专注工作。目标是进行一到三个小时的高优先级工作，以便利用专注状态，并从清晨的状态中获益，开启你的一天。

I challenge you to actually do this tomorrow. That means tonight prep the task prep whatever high priority work you're going to do first thing in the morning and untangle the first step of the first step. Identify exactly what it is you need to do to complete that task and get it all organized nicely so that you can glide right into it.

我挑战你明天真的去做这件事。这意味着今晚就做好准备，安排好你明天早上首先要完成的高优先任务，并理清第一步需要怎么做。明确你需要做哪些事情来完成这个任务，并把所有东西都整理得井井有条，这样你就可以顺利地开始。

And then tomorrow as soon as you wake up, ideally within 60 to 90 seconds of opening your eyes, drop into the task and you'll find that you'll drop deep into flow very quickly and effortlessly. Then ride that wave for two to three hours and then do your reboot routine to recover and boost flow pronus back up for the rest of the day.

然后明天，当你一醒来，最好在睁眼后的60到90秒内，立即开始任务，你会发现自己很快且轻松地进入心流状态。然后，在这种状态下持续两到三个小时，接着执行恢复程序来恢复状态，并提升当天剩余时间的专注力。