All protocols

Use caffeine early in the day, typically as coffee, to boost alertness and support focused work or a morning wake-up routine. Front-load the dose and avoid it later in the afternoon or evening—often at least 8 to 12 hours before bed, and earlier if you’re sensitive—to reduce sleep disruption and preserve REM sleep.

Accumulate roughly 150 minutes per week, with 200+ minutes as an ideal target, of steady aerobic work at a conversational pace where you can breathe mostly through your nose and avoid gasping. This can be split across multiple sessions and paired with one longer endurance workout plus one shorter or harder cardio session each week. The goal is to build aerobic capacity and cardiovascular health while keeping the effort sustainable and unlikely to interfere with strength or hypertrophy training.

Schedule ongoing sessions with a licensed therapist on a regular weekly basis, treating it as a standing health practice rather than something reserved for crises. The repeated cadence helps process traumatic memories, shift perspective, and reduce emotional burden over time, much like consistent exercise builds physical fitness.

Take a brief nap in the afternoon when you feel the natural post-lunch dip, typically around 10–30 minutes and generally under 90 minutes. Keep it early enough that it does not interfere with nighttime sleep. These short naps can restore alertness, energy, focus, learning, and emotional regulation without the grogginess of a longer sleep.

A calming breathing pattern that makes the exhale longer or more forceful than the inhale, sometimes including the physiological sigh (two inhales followed by one long exhale). It’s used during stress, before sleep, or whenever heart rate feels elevated to shift the body toward parasympathetic activation, lower arousal, and reduce stress.

Use L-tyrosine as a dopamine precursor to support working memory and mental performance, especially under stress or cognitive load. The protocol emphasized starting with a minimal effective dose rather than the very high study dose discussed, with a practical example around 250 mg, because the goal is to nudge catecholamine availability without overdoing it.

A choline donor used mainly as a pre-workout or cognitive supplement, commonly taken in single doses around 300–600 mg for performance and sometimes split into multiple doses totaling up to about 1,200 mg/day in study settings. It’s used to support acetylcholine production, which may help power output, focus, and other aspects of mental and physical performance.

Prioritize whole-food sources of omega-3s, especially fatty fish and seafood such as salmon, sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, and caviar; algae can be a vegan EPA source, and plant options like flax, chia, walnuts, and soybeans can help round things out. The main rationale is to raise EPA/DHA intake through food rather than supplements when possible, supporting brain function and potentially helping with sugar cravings, skin health, headaches, and overall nutrient balance.

This recommendation is to stay away from nicotine in all forms, especially smoked or vaped products such as cigarettes, cigars, pouches, and e-cigarettes. The core protocol is complete avoidance rather than moderation, with extra emphasis on adolescents and people trying to conceive or reduce cardiovascular risk. The rationale is that nicotine is highly addictive and habit-forming, while inhaled tobacco and vaping exposures can damage blood vessels and lungs, raise clot and cancer risk, and impair fertility and overall health.

This recommendation is to minimize added sugar in everyday eating, with a practical label-reading rule of keeping it to about 4 grams per serving or less and avoiding hidden sugars in processed foods. The main idea is that cutting back on refined and added sugars helps reduce cravings, supports steadier energy and metabolism, and lowers the glucose/insulin spikes that make sugary foods so reinforcing.

Use non-smoked yerba mate as an early-day caffeine source, often in place of coffee or other caffeinated drinks. The idea is to get a focused stimulant effect while avoiding late caffeine that can disrupt sleep, and to favor non-smoked varieties because smoked yerba mate may carry carcinogenic risk.

Build a regular stress-management practice and use in-the-moment tools to calm the nervous system when stress spikes. Common approaches include mindfulness, meditation, relaxation, prayer, counseling, physiological sighs, NSDR, and other quick down-regulation techniques. The goal is to lower chronic cortisol and adrenaline so stress is less likely to disrupt sleep, hormones, training, skin, fertility, and overall metabolic health.

A 50 mg apigenin supplement, typically taken in the evening, derived from chamomile. It’s used to promote sleepiness and help with both falling asleep and staying asleep, likely through its calming effects. One caveat is that it can act as a fairly potent estrogen inhibitor, so people who want to keep estrogen levels high may want to avoid it.

A merged inositol protocol used mainly for calming effects, especially around sleep and anxiety, with some discussion of possible OCD symptom relief. The common pattern is modest myo-inositol dosing, sometimes around 900 mg and sometimes paired with a sleep stack, aiming to smooth arousal and reduce anxious rumination rather than acting as a sedative. Effects are described as subtle but potentially meaningful for people looking for a gentler mood-and-sleep support.

Glasses designed to filter short-wavelength light from screens and indoor LEDs, typically worn in the evening after sunset or late at night. The common protocol is to use them during nighttime screen use or bright indoor lighting to reduce melatonin suppression, help keep cortisol lower, and make it easier to transition to sleep.

Use short self-hypnosis or clinical hypnosis scripts as a quick NSDR-like reset, often for about 10 minutes or even 1–2 minute refreshers. The practice is used to downshift stress and anxiety, improve sleep and focus, and support pain control or other targeted behavior change by promoting deep relaxation and neuroplasticity.

A short bout of deliberate fast, deep breathing followed by a breath hold, usually done seated or lying down and never near water or while driving. Common versions use about 25–30 forceful inhale-exhale cycles, sometimes repeated for a few rounds, then an exhale hold or full-lung hold. It’s used to spike sympathetic arousal and adrenaline, which can increase alertness and focus and may serve as a form of stress inoculation.

A low-dose, short-term melatonin strategy used mainly to shift sleep timing during travel or other circadian disruptions, rather than as a nightly sleep supplement. The main rationale is that it can help with sleep onset when the body clock is out of sync, while regular use is often avoided because common commercial doses are much higher than physiologic levels and may have unwanted hormone-related effects.

Take a warm-to-hot bath or shower in the evening, ideally in the second half of the day and not so long that it becomes draining. The key idea is to heat up first and then let your body cool afterward, which can make it easier to fall asleep and may improve sleep depth and relaxation.

Keep the bedroom cool at night, often around 18.5–19°C (about 67°F), while using blankets or layers so your body stays comfortable. The goal is to help core and brain temperature drop enough to fall asleep and stay asleep, which can improve sleep onset, deep sleep, and sleep maintenance.

A simple weekly running structure: one long slow run, one medium faster run, and one shorter interval or speed-focused session. The long run is often 60 to 90 minutes, with the other runs around 30 minutes or built around harder efforts. This mix builds endurance, speed, and overall running capacity while keeping the training balanced and sustainable.

Leave a gap of about 2 hours before sleep, and up to 3 hours if practical, between your last meal and bedtime. The main rationale is to support better sleep and overnight physiology by avoiding a full stomach and keeping insulin and blood glucose lower during the early night, which may also help growth hormone release and nighttime cardiovascular recovery. If you’re genuinely hungry enough that it would disrupt sleep, a small, light snack is a reasonable exception.

This recommendation is to keep alcohol intake very low, with zero being ideal and roughly 0–2 standard drinks per week the commonly cited upper range for generally healthy non-alcoholic adults. The rationale is that health risks rise with increasing regular consumption, including worse brain health and greater overall disease burden, so staying near abstinence appears safest.

A fan-resistance air bike used for hard interval training, typically in short all-out efforts with brief rests or 30-seconds-on/10-seconds-off style work. It lets you drive heart rate and breathing very high while keeping the movement simple and relatively low-impact, which makes it a practical option for sprint and VO2 max sessions.

A warm soak in a hot tub or bath in the evening, typically for 20 to 30 minutes, followed by a cool or warm shower to help the body shed heat. The goal is to trigger compensatory cooling and lower core body temperature by about 1 to 3 degrees, which can make it easier to fall asleep.

During focused work or learning blocks, physically separate yourself from your phone by leaving it in another room, turning it off or using airplane mode, and often disabling Wi‑Fi as well. The goal is to make distraction inconvenient enough that attention can settle into longer, uninterrupted stretches, which improves concentration, working memory, and overall output.

Set a caffeine cutoff well before your usual bedtime—ideally 8 to 12 hours earlier, and at minimum about 8 hours before sleep. This helps protect sleep quality and architecture, including deep and REM sleep, because caffeine can still fragment sleep and reduce slow-wave sleep even when it doesn’t keep you from falling asleep.

Build in regular steady-state endurance work each week, with most of the volume kept below the burn threshold so you can still talk in full sentences. A common target is about 150 minutes per week, including at least one longer continuous session of 20–30+ minutes. This kind of moderate aerobic work is highlighted for supporting cardiovascular fitness, mitochondrial health, capillary growth, and brain function.

Before a focused task, keep your eyes open and hold attention on a single external point or small target for about 30 seconds to 3 minutes, blinking normally and gently returning your gaze if it drifts. The idea is to narrow visual attention first, which may help shift the brain into a more focused cognitive state and improve attention for the next work bout.

Take about 2 g of glycine every third or fourth night, usually as part of a standard sleep stack, to make it easier to fall asleep. The intermittent schedule matters because using it too often seems to blunt the benefit and can make overall sleep worse.