In a past episode, I talked about positive and negative emotions. The fact is that the limbic system of the brain produces positive and negative emotions for very specific reasons. You need both. You need positive. You need negative. And if you don't have one or the other, your life isn't going to work right. A lot of people say, I want good feelings and I don't want bad feelings. And I say, that's wrong. There's no such thing as bad feelings. If you didn't have negative emotions, you'd be dead in a week. They're an alarm system for what's going on around you. Your anger, disgust, and sadness. The trouble is that for a lot of people, they have very intense negative emotionality. As a matter of fact, as makes perfect sense, half of the population is above average in the intensity of the production of their negative emotions. We're not all the same. One of the things that I do, and I've talked about a little bit in the past, is the categorization of the intensity of emotions that people feel, above average positive, above average negative, below average positive, below average negative. Now you know that you can interact these two things and you get four kinds of people. Some people, they're really above average positive and below average negative. Isn't that great? We call them cheerleaders. Some people are low on both sides. These are low affect people. They're low positive and low negative. In intensity, they're judges. Some people are high negative and low positive. We call them poets. And then there are the people who are intense on both. High negative and high positive, those are the mad scientists. And that's me. I feel things very intensely. And that's great in the positive side, but I need to manage the negative side. Today I'm going to tell you how I do that because a lot of you watching, well, one of the reasons that you're watching this content you're interested in it, is not just because you're trying to feel more joyful every minute, but you're trying to manage negative emotionality, which actually has a negative impact from time to time on your happiness. I'm not talking about clinical problems here. I'm talking about ordinary life. And you may have noticed that you have some, you know, so ups and that's great, but some downs that are pretty intense as well. What can you do every day to manage the intensity of your negative emotions such that it doesn't feel dysregulated and obstruct your quality of life? Let's start off with a couple of questions. Is morning hard for you? When you wake up, do you find that you've got some tough feelings and maybe a little more stress than you'd like? That describes a lot of people. That will tell you about your emotional baseline, how you wake up feeling in the morning on an average day, not a day where you slept nothing or God forbid that you're hungover. I'm talking about a normal day when you've gotten enough sleep, but you wake up and you're kind of out of sorts. People with highly intense negative affect, which is what we call mood in my business, they tend to be these people with this high negative emotionality. And that includes me. Part of the reason is because I'm a high-affect person because I am this mad scientist. Part of it is because when you wake up in the morning, especially a few, well, more like 45 minutes after you wake up, you get a spike of cortisol, which is a stress hormone, and that kind of, that pours fuel on your high level of negative affect. And I'll top that off in my own case, but I think a pretty poor sleeper. It's not because I have bad sleep hygiene. It's because I come from a long line of insomniacs. I remember as a kid, any time that I would wake up, it was weird. If I would get up and go downstairs, I always found my dad. And he was always drinking a cup of, you know, post-um or hot chocolate or something, two o'clock in the morning. He was up four o'clock in the morning. He was up until it finally occurred to me by the time I was about 11 years old. He never sleeps. I asked him about it. He said, yeah, my dad never slept either. He said, good luck to your son. And sure enough, by the time I hit 40, it became a real problem. So the result of it is that I'm always battling sleep issues. I've got cortisol spikes in the morning, like everybody, and I'm a high negative affect person. That all adds up to a big need for me to manage mood in the morning, more than any other time. I have used all of my background to behavioral science and everything I've learned about biology as well, to put together a morning protocol that is enhancing of my well-being by managing the negative side of my affect profile and you can do it too. But to understand what I'm about to tell you, I want to take you not to some laboratory here in the United States, but from ancient wisdom across to the other side of the world. And I want to introduce the concept of Brahman Mahurtra. That's two words in Sanskrit that means creator's time. It's an ancient idea. It's probably about 6,000 years old. Now, Brahma refers to God or the Godhead. Mahurtra is a specific period of time. It's 48 minutes to be exact. And so the Brahman Mahurtra specifically is two Mahurtras and that adds up to an hour and 36 minutes. Now, what is that all about? The idea of the Brahman Mahurtra, the creator's time, is to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. The idea was in ancient Vedic wisdom that you'd have a particular kind of insight into the mind of the Godhead. You'd have a special enlightenment. You'd have clarity of thinking an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. So don't miss it is what they were saying. Now, of course, there are no good treatment control experiments. Pure reviews study is talking about exactly an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. And a lot of you are not going to get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn so you can have the special connection to God. I know that. And especially if you live pretty far north in the middle of summer, there's no way you could get up an hour and 36 minutes before dawn. I was talking about this summer, this last summer when I was in Helsinki. And I was there at the end of June and somebody pointed out that it doesn't get dark. So good luck to you on the Brahman Mahurtra. That's not the point. The basic point is that modern research shows that whether or not you can connect the vine at this time or not, that if you get up before dawn, and this is based on treatment and control experiments, again, all of this research is going to go into the show notes. Don't worry. But this is Kumar and Raghavendra and Mujanath in 2012 in the Indian Journal of Physiological Pharmacology. It's an excellent study that shows where students are in treatment and control. One gets up at 7 o'clock in the morning and the other gets up something like an hour before dawn and gets to work. But the earlier group has significantly higher attentiveness and recall throughout the day. There's also higher levels of creativity and focus. If you get up before dawn, your work is going to be better. Now that's not just a question of higher performance. It's also the case that people who witness the dawn who are up before dawn and fully conscious and witness the dawn, they have lower levels of negative affect. This is especially true for people who have seasonal affective disorder. People who have a lot of trouble with depression come January or February. It's actually pretty easy to get up before dawn in February because the sun is coming up so late. My advice is to use the happiness effect of this and the effectiveness, the productivity effects of the Brahmin-Muhurta getting up before dawn in a way that will significantly change your life. Now let me talk a little bit more about the science of how this works and how to use that time. I get up at 4.30. 4.30 is my time to rise from bed, but I travel a lot too. There are times where I'm really jet lag and I have to alter that a little bit, but I always try to get up before dawn because of these good effects, which I've noticed in my life. I've seen in the research and I've been able to witness in my own life as well. You might be saying to yourself, yeah, man, good for you. You're obviously a morning lark. No, I'm not. There's a lot of research on chronotypes. The different types of people who are either night-oriented people or morning-oriented people and the morning lark versus the night owl. There's interesting research on that, by the way, that shows that people who tend to be have trouble going to sleep and want to sleep in, they probably have a circadian rhythm that's where the day in their brain, the day is not 24 hours, it's a little bit longer. The result of that is that they're not tired at night. They're chronically a little bit not tired at night and that's possibly the case and if it is, it's almost certainly genetic. We also have a ton of research out there that chronotype is also extremely environmental. For the longest time, I never saw the sunrise. I didn't. All the way through my 20s, I was making my living as a professional musician and I got up when the sun was warm. I went to bed when it was nice and late and I always thought I was a night owl. Looking back on it, no. I was just a musician who drank too much. Now I don't drink at all and it turns out it's easier to get up. Not super easy. I'm not one of those people who gets up with that in alarm clock. No. I use an alarm clock every single day. I did this morning and went off at 4.30 and I didn't like it. I said, because that morning alarm is something I would like to sleep through. But winning the day is a big deal as the first battle in fighting negative affect and raising my well-being. It's so effective that I jumped out of bed as I ordinarily do. When does this morning at 4.30 start? The answer is last night. The truth is that the most important way to be able to wake up early in the morning is to go to bed on time. I try to be in bed by 9.15. For me, if I'm getting seven hours of sleep, that's a great night and I feel great. I don't fall asleep at the wheel. I'm not falling asleep during meetings. I'd never take naps and I have plenty of energy. Right now I'm taping this in the middle of the afternoon and I hope it's clear that I'm wide awake. One of the reasons people don't aren't able to get to bed, especially in their 20s, I've written about this a little bit, is called night time procrastination. What this is is a phenomenon where you're sort of rebelling against yourself, especially as a young adult. You remember, you have this vestigial memory being put to bed. You didn't want to be put to bed and so you rebelled against it by even the year the one setting the rules. It's unproductive. Remember, be metacognitive. I've talked about that in past episodes. Think about what is actually motivating you and you can manage yourself better.
