When I was young I was a full fledged night owl.

• At 4 I would stay up until 12pm playing with legos

• At 6 my parents let me do all out sprints for 1 hour+ just to calm me down

• At 14 I would fire away at my computer well into the night.

But as I got older, my sleep schedule quickly became a pain in the ass.

I couldn’t get quality work done in the morning, my sleep quality was like a nap and daily life was a battle to say the least.

I never felt like working or studying when I did, I never really felt like exercising when I was and I never felt like experiencing life when I had the chance.

Nothing I did ever felt natural.

There was always this tension in daily life. As if I was never where I was supposed to be.

But a few of years ago, I was listening to a podcast by Andrew Huberman.

(In case you’ve lived under a rock, he’s a neuroscientist with one of the world’s largest podcasts)

He was talking about the importance of light for sleep. And me being the impressionable teen that I was, jumped out of bed the next morning and went off staring at the sun.

And after a few days, my life literally started to change.

I actually woke up with energy, could be optimistic through the day and calm down at night. And the more I went into the literature — the more my eyes widened.

I was never really a night owl.

I was just really misaligned in the 4th dimension.

I’m now 20 years old.

And I keep a very boring and ordinary sleep schedule.

But I enjoy productivity and energy in the morning, performance in the afternoon and a slow decline into rest in the evening.

And the solution was just annoyingly simple.

But before I tell you what it is, let’s set the scene…

Your Body’s Place In The 4th Dimension

Most people are completely out of line with their biology.

They live in such disharmony with their natural rhythm that their bodies don’t know when, where or who they are.

Their lives and biology never aligns and all experience becomes a chaotic mess of misaligned feelings and action.

• Their work never aligns with their productivity

• Their physical training never aligns with their energy

• Their life never aligns with their motivation and ability to live it

They live in biological chaos and their hormones, emotions and experience of life becomes a disoriented turmoil.

A place most people spend their entire lives without realizing it. Their experience, a chronic sense of frustration. Their lives, one giant mess.

All this is to say:

You feel horrible because you’re out of rhythm.

You have a natural rhythm of living.

A time when you’re the most productive, when you perform the best, when you’re the most creative and when your life is the best lived.

This is your circadian rhythm

And it’s is always distributing your energy, motivation and performance through your day.

But when you don’t pay attention to it (as most people do), you scramble your entire life.

Every experience you have becomes a mess of feelings, lack of resources and confusion. Because your inner state never aligns with your outer state.

Your feelings never align with your actions. And your life never aligns with your ability to live it:

• You never have the energy when it’s time to train

• You never have the productivity when it’s time to work

• You never have the motivation or enthusiasm when it’s time to live

Your body and mind wants to be at two places at once and your life turns into a constant state of stress and anxiety as a result.

This happens because you have to force yourself through life. What you want to do, or what you’re the most capable of doing — never actually aligns with what you are doing

You’re not working with your biology, you’re working against it. And you never tap into your fullest capabilities as a result.

• You never realize the strength and beauty your body is capable of

• You never take advantage of the mental energy you were meant to have

• You never get to see just how far you’re able to develop yourself

To put it another way, you spend your entire life living below your potential.

Let me give you an example.

Neglecting your circadian rhythm is like swimming against a giant river.

It doesn’t matter how hard you swim, you’ll just tire yourself out and get swept away by it anyways. And after having finally gotten torn away from your insistent path, you now have no energy left to steer while you float along.

You can’t swim to the sides or avoid obstacles in your way, and you end up drowning in a chaotic mess of energy.

Which is not that fun.

Just as fighting that river robs you of your ability to use it to your advantage, the longer you insist on fighting your circadian rhythm — the worse your life is going to get.

Because the more you refuse to acknowledge your it, the more it gets deranged. And the less energy, motivation and performance you have available to you.

Let me paint you a picture.

• You can’t get into flow and miss out on one of the highest joys in life

• Your sleep quality becomes that of an airplane nap and your energy to take on life fades.

• You lose all your motivation and daily life becomes a battle you have to fight your way through.

When you refuse to acknowledge your rhythm of living — you’re fighting a losing battle.

You’re swimming upstream the river of your biology and it won’t work.

Because when you’re fighting your biology, you’re fighting yourself.

You’re fighting the Universe.

So man let go.

Learn to use the river and the force of your biology.

But how do you do that?

Swimming With The Stream Of Yourself

You have a natural rhythm of living.

A time and place for all activities that makes life — life:

• Learning

• Sleeping

• Creativity

• Socializing

• Productivity

• Performance

A distribution of energy, motivation and performance that always follows a similar pattern

And when you start to listen to that rhythm, funny things start happening.

When you build your life around the way you were meant to function — you start to flow with life rather than fight against it.

You hit a key with nature and your feelings and actions start to align:

• You easily get into flow and savor the highest rate of performance and joys in life.

• Your energy gets used up during the day and you can actually catch some sleep at night.

• Your emotions and actions align and you lose the constant sense of stress of wanting to be somewhere you’re not.

Life becomes easier.

You get the energy to deal with it that you so desperately crave.

And once you do, it may feel like you’ve taken control over your life. That you’ve finally grabbed it around the horns.

But what you did was surrender to the natural rhythm of the Universe. To let your mind work when it does its best work. To let your body perform when it best performs. To let yourself live life to the rhythm that it is best lived.

What you did was actually fix and listen to your circadian rhythm.

”But Simon, everything can’t be effortless. Sometimes you need to do shit you don’t want to do”

I agree.

But do you understand that you’ve just gone to the other extreme?

Of course there will be times when you have to do things agains your emotions.

That’s not the point.

This isn’t an argument for the lazy and spineless approach to life.

It’s to tackle the obstacles in life in the way that makes sense to tackle them. To fully use your potential and to get the most out of your day. To get the most out of your life.

It doesn’t mean that you don’t cut wood, it means that you cut wood along the lines where wood is the most easily cut.

This is not a case for making all your dreams and wishes effortless to achieve.

They will still require massive amounts of effort. (Which I’m sure you’ve realized by now). But to put in that effort, you also need the energy to put behind it.

And that energy is locked away from you until you acknowledge your circadian rhythm.

Your life has a natural rhythm.

And if you’re intelligent, you learn to play your life to it.

The Rhythm Of You

Circadian rhythm:

”The physical, mental and behavioral changes an organism goes through in a period of 24 hours.”

The point of having a circadian rhythm is to regulate your energy to match the activities you perform in any given day. To match your inner environment to that of your outer environment.

Read that again.

By understanding that one statement you’re pretty much set.

But I want to really cement this in your head. Because understanding is worth knowledge in gold. So to fully connect the dots, we need to dive a bit deeper into how the entire process works.

Let me paint you a picture.

Your circadian rhythm is controlled by a brain region called the SCN. This is the master time keeper of your body. It keeps track of where and when you are in all dimensions. What time it is, your latitude and where the sun is in relation. It’s function is to match your inner environment to your outer environment.

Think about it like this:

If the sun is up, you need a lot of energy

If the sun isn’t up, you don’t need a lot of energy.

To achieve this, it listens to the signals from your environment and the behaviors you’re doing during the day. It then regulates your hormones (the code of your biology) to match your inner state to those signals.

And the most important signal is light.

When light hits your eyes, receptors translate it into electrical signals. These are then sent to your SCN. Depending on the spectrum of light, blue light, red light, white light — it regulates your hormones differently.

That was pretty abstract.

So let’s make it concrete with an example.

Let’s say that the sun has just risen. The light that’s hitting your eyes is now made up of blue light to a large extent. This tells your SCN that it’s daytime and that it’s time for activity. It responds to this by increasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, increasing your metabolism (giving you more energy) and releasing more testosterone.

And now let’s imagine that the sun is setting. The light hitting your eyes is now more made up of red light. The red light coupled with the fading light overall, tells your SCN that it’s time to relax and get ready for sleep. Digestion is inhibited, metabolism is slowed down and stress hormone release is inhibited.

Think of it like this:

If your circadian rhythm is finely tuned to your environment, it will give you a lot of energy in the early day and decline it towards the night.

And because of the different stages of activity, your body temperature also follows that predictable pattern. You begin to heat up in the morning, your body temperature peaks a bit after noon and then drops as the night approaches.

Think of the heat produced by an engine.

When you first fire up the engine, it starts heating up. And after a while it starts to get really damn hot. The moment right before you turn it off — it’s as; glowingly red, hot as it ever will be. That’s kind of how your metabolism works.

(Yes I know it’s a bit more complicated).

But how does this relate to getting more out of your day?

I’ll tell you.

Your physical performance is closely linked to your body temperature. Because the warmer you are, the stronger you become (At least up until a point). This gives us a time window to place our workouts in order to perform at our very best.

And the mixture of bodily processes, hormones and neural activity, creates a distribution of brain activity through the day that can be perfectly matched to the things you want to pursue in any given day.

That was mouthful.

(But you know, in your head).

• In the morning you have a lot of beta waves which are perfect for productivity.

• In the afternoon you have a lot of theta waves which are perfect for taking in information.

• In the evening you have a lot of alpha waves which are perfect for creativity and relaxing.

All this is your macrocycle of activity.

You performance starts slowly in the morning, and then rises higher as more time goes by. Until enough time goes by and it starts to drop again.

Here’s a graphic for more clarity:

This cycle is produced by a clever little feedback loop that exists in in all of your cells.

The whole process is pretty complex, but I’ll try to make it as simple as possible.

(Because by understanding this, you’re in a great position to use a tool I’ve been thinking about).

Imagine this for a moment.

In all your cells, you have a protein bundle that regulates the expression of your genes (CLOCK & BMAL1 transcription factors).

A transcription factor is a protein that latches on to your DNA and changes what parts of the DNA are express. In other words, what proteins are created and what processes are fueled.

The transcription factor can themselves also be activated or inhibited.

If they’re activated, they can do their job. If they’re inhibited, they can’t.

Are you following along so far?

Great.

• When the transcription factors are active, the expression is: wakefulness, energy and motivation

• When they’re inhibited, the expression is: sleep, relaxation and drowsiness

Funnily enough, these transcription factors also code for their own inhibitors. So as you’re sending more signals for wakefulness, you’re also creating more of the proteins that will inhibit it.

These inhibiting proteins are:

• CRY

• PER

(The names are not important)

When these bind to the transcription factors, ”CLOCK & BMAL1”, they stop regulating your genes and your cells stop creating wakefulness. Your cella activity slows down. And you become sleepy.

At some point, your transcription factors will be so inhibited that you’ll fall asleep unless you brute force yourself not to.

This is the lowest point in your circadian rhythm.

(And it’s when normal people engage in something called sleep).

Until these inhibitors are gone, you’ll be in this low state of activity. So the only way you’re ever going to get to be awake again — is by breaking them down.

This is done automatically by your body. And the more they get broken down, the more your cells will stimulate wakefulness again. And around it goes.

Now here is where it gets interesting.

One of the proteins that’s responsible for this breakdown is the protein kinase ”AMPK”.

And because it can be stimulated by things like fasting or intense exercise, it opens up a potential tool for setting your circadian rhythm.

And we’ll get to that in just a moment.

Here’s an overly complex graphic of the entire process:

(Biologists seem to despise simplicity for some reason)

I won’t go fully into the importance of AMPK here because we’ve already talked extensively about it. So instead check out:

• ”Why you’re never ready (or have the energy to workout)”

• ”Read this if you want to stay at 12% bodyfat permanently”.

Let’s continue.

Other than macrocycles, there are also microcycles of activity.

These are called ”ultradian cycles” (a cycle shorter than a day). They peak for 90 minutes and then go into a dip for 20.

This is important to keep in mind because it means that your productivity and performance moves in 2 cycles. Your circadian (the big cycle) and your ultradian cycles (the small cycles). You may be more productive in the early day, but every 90 minutes, you’ll fall into a 20 minute dip.

This is why using focus sessions of about 90 minutes can be so effective.

Alright.

Can you see how this is slowly turning into a framework?

But before we get into matching your life and circadian rhythm, we need to go over one crucial point…

Bio individuality.

Everyone’s biology works a little bit differently.

And everyone has slightly different ”clock genes”.

And logically, everyone has slightly different circadian rhythms.

Some are early birds, other night owls and most somewhere in between.

This means that you can’t just adopt any arbitrary schedule. Because you are you. And you have to find your own circadian rhythm. Only then can and should you build your life around it.

Which we’ll get into in the next section.

And for all this to work, your circadian rhythm also has to be aligned to your environment.

Because when it’s not, your confused SCN is scrambling your entire biology. It’s matching your biology to the confused signals your lifestyle is sending it.

And so it doesn’t matter if you optimize your entire schedule, because your body isn’t even following a rhythm. It’s just thrown about by a million different mixes of hormones and signals.

To put it simply.

If your body doesn’t know in what dimension it’s in, trying to optimize your life around that won’t make a difference.

Your energy is randomly spread out during the day, your mental stability hormones drops and how you feel becomes a matter of blindly throwing darts.

Building your life around that is not a good idea.

It’s like trying to build a skyscraper right on top of two shifting tectonic plates. It’ll fall apart just a few weeks after you’re done.

All this is to say:

To build your life around your circadian rhythm and work with your biology — you have to make sure it’s working in the first place.

You have to learn how to send the right signals. Because if you build your life around what you think is your circadian rhythm, your state can change in an instant and your entire life will be plunged into chaos again.

(Just like that skyscraper…)

So to get the most out of your days, you need to set your circadian rhythm in stone, perform experiments until you nail it down.

And only then can you build your life around it.

So let’s get into that.

The Chronotypes

”Variety is the spice of life.”

Before we get into nailing and finding your circadian rhythm, I think it’s worth going over the 4 chronotypes.

By finding the one you relate to the most, you can cut down the time of experimenting until you find your personal rhythm.

There are 4 sleep chronotypes:

• Lions

• Bears

• Wolfs

• Dolphins

As we go over each, try to match your experience and find the type you identify the most with.

Let’s dive in.

Lions

Lions are 15% of the population.

They wake up early with loads of energy, enthusiasm and vigor.

They’re ready to take on the day from the start (and often even before the sun is up).

Wake up time: 4am - 5am

Most productive hours: 6am - 10am

Bed time: 10 pm

These are the Jocko Willing types.

Bears

Bears are 55% of the population.

That’s why the standard schedule is perfect for bears.

They wake up a little groggy and slow, but still have some enthusiasm for the day.

Wake up time: 7am - 8am

Most productive hours: 9am  - 14pm

Bed time: 10pm - 11pm

This is the chronotype that is right in the middle.

Very normal, orderly and regular.

The middle path enjoyers.

Wolfs

Wolfs are 15% of the population.

They wake up late and stay up late.

Getting out of and into bed is a battle for these people.

They have trouble with both getting fired up and shutting dow.

Wake up time: 10am - 12am

Most productive hours: 5pm - 10pm

Bed time: 12pm

These are the Bruce Wayne types.

Dolphins

Dolphins are 10% of the population.

They are light sleepers and often have a very fragmented sleep schedules.

Sometimes they’re morning larks, sometimes night owls and on average — right in the middle.

Wake up time: 6 am

Most productive hours: 3pm - 7pm

Bed time: 11 pm

These are the crazy scientist types.

Experimenting Is The Path To Success

You won’t fit exactly into one of these.

That’s the point.

They are starting points to iterate from.

Because the foundational principle of health will always be experimentation.

So here’s a 3 step method to finding and nailing your circadian rhythm:

1. Align biology And environment

2. Experiment with different schedules

3. Observe yourself and find your rhythm

4. Build your life around it

This particular experiment will take about a week (at most).

Let’s jump right in.

1. Align Biology And Environment

Unless your circadian rhythm is working — you can’t find it.

I thought I was a night owl for such a long time, but when I actually started taking care of my circadian rhythm, my whole life started to shift.

I’m now somewhere in the middle of a lion and a bear.

And I feel so much better than I ever did optimizing for a night owl schedule.

So the 1st step is to align your circadian rhythm to your environment.

Here are the 4 most important points:

• Catch the sunrise. Seeing the morning sun will send signals to your SCN (the master time keeper of your body) and tell it it’s morning. Your circadian rhythm will then align to the rise and fall of the sun. So get outside as soon as you can in the morning (ideally within 20 minutes of waking) and go stare at the sun; 10 minutes on clear days, 20 minutes on overcast days and up to 30 minutes on really overcast days. Don’t stare at it if it hurts your eyes. You can look slightly below it. (Note: missing one day won’t kill you).

• Catch the sunset. Just as blue light fires you up, red light slows you down. Our ancestors would watch every sunset without fail, and teeny probably slept like Gods because of it. Take a lesson from your elders. And go out on a 20 minute evening walk. If you want to go even further, you can install red light bulbs in your bedroom.

• Max your time spent outdoors. The more you’re exposed to the natural light of your environment, the better your circadian clock will be ordered. Try to spend a whole day outside if possible. I recently went camping were I was exposed to sunlight for all the time the sun was out. My circadian rhythm the next day was on point and the sleep I got that night — was as if I was Hypnos himself.

• Declining food intake.”Eat breakfast like a king, lunch like a prince and dinner like a pauper." Eating at the wrong time will interfere with your circadian rhythm because metabolism is one of the main processes that are regulated by it. In the early morning and evening, your digestion and metabolism isn’t fully ready to handle food. You’re body is in a state of repair and relaxation. So when you eat 3000 calories immediately after waking or just before going to sleep — you mess that whole thing up. And your circadian rhythm becomes deranged. Not good. Ideally, you should wait 1-2 hours after waking before breakfast and stop eating at around 6pm. And if you can’t, stop eating before 8pm. Your ability to process food is the best in the morning and the worst in the evening. So follow the common saying on this one.

• Avoid blue light in the evening. This will completely mess up your circadian rhythm. When you’re looking at your phone after sunset, you’re basically telling your body it’s daytime. Your body will then crank out the little energy it has left to keep you awake. But as a result, you won’t be able to catch a high quality sleep bout. Because your brain hasn’t settled down. So hide all your electronic devices after 20:00 or turn them all to night mode after 19:00.  (Make them fully yellow).

• Exercise early in the morning. Remember what we said about AMPK? It breaks down the inhibitors of your wakefulness. More than that, exercise clears away adenosine which is the byproduct of being awake (and the thing that makes you sleepy). It also spikes cortisol and adrenaline which is like a nootropic in it of itself (kind of like steroids for your brain). But for the release to take place, it needs to be moderately intense exercise. So go for a run and catch some morning sunlight in the process.

• Cut out all caffeine and stimulants. I know this one’s touchy. I a bit of a caffeine addict myself.. But it’s only for a short time (7 days or less). When you don’t ingest caffeine, your sleep pressure works as it’s supposed to and you’re able to see the times of day when you’re the most productive. Which will be important in the later steps. If you’re having trouble cutting it out, start o slowly transition to green tea and then finally fasting from it. It gets easier.

Out of all of these, the most crucial point is light.

Because it’s the thing that directly informs your SCN about the outer environment.

I can’t fully stress the importance of it in this letter. So after you’re done with this, go check out ”how to use photosynthesis for a fuller life (7 tools for leveraging the sun)”. Put it in another tab or on your reading list so you don’t lose it.

I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

Alright.

Now that you’re aligned with your environment…

It’s time to start experimenting.

2. Experiment With Different Schedules

You probably don’t have 100% control of your schedule.

There are classes to attend, work to be done and meetings to be had.

And if you do have complete control, that’s great. But most people aren’t there yet.

That’s why I want to stress this point.

80% of the results will come from experimenting with 20% of the day everybody has access to.

(Except for maybe shift workers. Please find a better work schedule)

The aim of this step is to find the circadian rhythm you’ve now aligned to your environment (as much as is genetically possible).

To find your chronotype, there are 5 experiments I want you to try out:

• Bed time — Experiment with going to bed at the preferred times of all chronotypes. 10pm, 11pm,12pm. Note how refreshed you feel in the morning and how much energy you have through the day.

• Wake up time — Try all the preferred wake up times of the different sleep chronotypes. 6 am, 7 am and 7:30 am. Keep it up for longer than 2 days to let your body adjust and then come to a conclusion.

• Focus sessions — Experiment with doing focused work at different times of the day. This could mean studying, writing, building projects or doing mental tasks that simply require lot of concentration. Experiment with the differently most productive times of day of all sleep chronotypes.

• Exercise timing — Test out different times to exercise in the day. Morning, afternoon, evening. Try to find out when your peak body temperature is, then you can derive your starting point from thereon. (This will make sense in the next section).

Keep your experiments longer than 2 days and shorter than 7 days.

(To minimize artifacts)

And always do on/off experiments:

• Try a new schedule, record your results, try your normal schedule, record the results.

• If the new schedule works better — incorporate it into your life.

Simple as that.

Note: If you know by you personal history that a certain timing doesn’t work for you, there’s no need to perform the experiment. You want to make as good of a hypothesis as possible for all these (to avoid wasting time).

3. Observe & Find Your Rhythm

Through your experiments, keep track on the following:

• Mental clarity

• Mood and life enjoyment

• Physical and mental performance

• Psychological and physical energy

Every day, pull out a notebook or open a page in notion and write down the results on these as accurately as you can.

• When did you perform a certain activity?

• How well did you do?

• How well aligned were your feelings, body and mind with it?

Always try to notice patterns.

Maybe you got twice as much done when you put your focus session at 10 am.

Maybe you broke a personal record when you worked out at 4pm.

And so on.

Here is an example:

If you performed best physically at 5 pm, that’s probably the time your body temperature is the highest (Muscle performance generally increase with core body temperature).

Then go back 12 hours, which is in this case, 5 am. That’s when your body temperature is at it’s lowest. Add about 2 hours and you get your ideal wake up time. In this case; 7am. You’re somewhere in the middle of a bear and a lion.

After you’ve determined your ideal wake up and bed times, it’s time to map out your dream schedule:

• When do you want to wake up?

• When do you want to do mental work?

• When do you want to eat and train?

• When do you want to relax and be creative?

• When do you want to go to bed?

To give you some pointers:

• Productivity is usually highest 2 hrs after waking.

• Muscle performance is usually highest 10 hrs after waking

• Relaxation and creativity is usually highest 12 hrs after waking

• Food is best processed 2 hours after waking and 4 hours before bed time

Then do everything in your power to build your life around that.

It may mean negotiation with your boss, teacher or colleagues. It may mean aligning the systems of how your business is run according to your biology. And so on.

This is the one true path to getting the most out of your day.

And when you get the most out of your days — you get the most out of your life by default.

Do everything you can to work with your biology, not against it.

1. So set your circadian rhythm in stone with:

• Early exercise

• Avoiding blue light

• Morning & evening sunlight

• Eating late & cutting it out early

• Maxing your time spent outdoors

• Cutting out all caffeine and stimulants

2. Do ”on/off” experiments to find your chronotype with:

• Differently timed focus sessions

• Different wake up and bed times

• Different food and exercise timing

• Different work and social schedules

3. Record your results and build your schedule around that:

• Wake up when you have the most energy

• Do your work when you’re the most focused

• Eat your food when your metabolism is at its best

• Workout when your body temperature is the highest

• Do brainstorming & ideation when your mind is the most fluid

• Go to bed when you’re the most relaxed and tired

Do this and you’ll naturally start to flow with your biology, life and the Universe itself.

Ir will make life smoother, remove the friction of existence and your life one more worth living.

And with that my friend, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading this.

I thank you for your time from the bottom of my heart.

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I’ll see you in the next one.

-Simon