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This column generally focuses on how to become happier. But over the years, I’ve found that the questions I most often get from readers are less about getting happier and more about becoming less unhappy. People inquire about how to resolve relationship disputes, quit a job they hate, or deal with anxiety and sadness. Getting happier or less unhappy might strike you as equivalent efforts, but they aren’t. Indeed, neuroscientists have found evidence that certain positive and negative emotions are produced in different regions of the brain. This makes sense when we understand that emotions exist to alert us to opportunities and threats, and parts of the limbic system specialize in producing each type of notification.
This distinction between your positive and negative emotions also means that their intensity does not move in tandem. Having below- or above-average intensity in positive and negative moods—which psychologists call affect—has been a topic of a lot of research, and it has led scholars to develop a test called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule. You can take the test yourself and learn whether you are above average in both positive and negative affect (the so-called Mad Scientist profile), high positive and low negative (the Cheerleader), high negative and low positive (the Poet), or low on both positive and negative (the Judge).
What this test will tell you is whether your personal well-being challenge involves getting happier (Judges), getting less unhappy (Mad Scientists), or both (Poets). If you’re a Cheerleader and doing great on both counts, bully for you. I’m not. In fact, I am way out on the Mad Scientist fringe, scoring in the 90th percentile for both positive and negative affect. My own problem is not, as a rule, how to feel happier but how to manage intense levels of negative affect. Although this characteristic of mine does not constitute anything clinically concerning (it’s not constant), if unchecked, it can really damage my well-being.
Especially for those, like me, who feel negative affect intensely, one’s experience can vary a lot over the course of a day. Some people feel best in the morning and are grumpier at night. I tend to experience the reverse, with my highest negative affect coming in the early hours of the day. This is probably because of elevated stress-hormone levels in the hours after waking, sometimes exacerbated by poor sleep, a trait I inherited from my father (and his father).
So my personal well-being challenge is to manage strong negative affect in the morning. I do this with the help of a six-part daily protocol, based on the neuroscience and behavioral-science research that is my trade. If you, like me, struggle to feel human in the morning, this protocol can probably help you. If you’re a Poet or Judge, or you simply want to stay a Cheerleader, then you can surely find ways of adapting the routine that, regardless of the time of day, work for you.
1. Experience the brāhma muhūrta.
I rise daily at 4:30 a.m. In the Hindu religion, brāhma muhūrta means “the creator’s time” and refers to the period that begins precisely one hour and 36 minutes before sunrise. This is a time considered to have powerful properties, when the mind is most receptive to spiritual awakening. Although modern neuroscience has found no evidence for positive effects that one might experience by rising precisely 1 hour and 36 minutes before sunrise, good experimental—not just observational or anecdotal—evidence suggests that predawn rising can lead to better attentiveness and recall throughout the day. A benefit from this discipline that particularly improves one’s affect is waking to the light of dawn, which research has shown lifts mood.
Some people might be skeptical, feeling that they’re not a morning-lark chronotype (as opposed to the night-owl variety). They will typically cite what they regard as their natural, biological sleep timing. Fair enough, because studies tend to show that a person’s chronotype is partly their genetic inheritance. But sleep behavior and patterns are also highly environmental, which means they can be altered with training. In my 20s, I was convinced that I was a natural night owl; I never saw the sunrise. In fact, I was actually just a musician who drank too much. With some effort, I shifted myself to a morning-lark schedule, a change that has been found to be very worthwhile for many people.
2. Get physical.
My first activity, starting at 4:45 a.m., is to exercise for an hour—usually 30 minutes of heavy-resistance training (weight lifting) plus 30 minutes of “zone 2” cardio (a degree of exertion that induces heavy breathing but still permits one to talk). Lots of research has shown that a person’s mood improves and depressive symptoms decrease with vigorous physical exercise. Numerous hypotheses have been advanced by neuroscientists to explain this finding. For example, depressed people tend to have lower hippocampal volume than others; strenuous exercise works to reverse this.
Is 5 o’clock in the morning optimal for this effect? Fitness experts and scholars argue endlessly about the best time of day to exercise, but those arguments are always about strength and muscle building, not mood management. For optimal mood management, I think the answer is obvious: Exercise when you need it the most. For me, that’s the morning—bearing in mind, also, that exercise late in the day can disrupt one’s sleep, which is bad for well-being.
3. Get metaphysical.
After exercise, I get cleaned up and, at 6:30 a.m., go to daily Catholic Mass with my wife. This lasts for about 30 minutes. When I am on the road, which is roughly half of the time, and cannot attend Mass, I instead pray the rosary, a venerable Catholic meditation that takes about 25 minutes. Obviously, if you are not Catholic, this is not for you. But focused meditation or prayer of some sort—whether formally religious or not—is an important component of this protocol. Research has shown that these activities are very effective for emotional self-management. Prayer, for example, allows one to express emotion safely, reinforces positive self-appraisals, and facilitates reflection on one’s own feelings. Meditation, even by the inexperienced and for short periods, can significantly lower negative mood. As with exercise, at least one of the neural mechanisms involved in meditation operates in the hippocampus, which is generally larger in volume among meditators than nonmeditators.
4. The magic bean.
By the time I’m back from Mass, I have been awake for three hours and have taken no sustenance besides water and a multivitamin. This is the point at which I introduce caffeine. I love coffee and have been drinking a very dark roast since the eighth grade, as I was growing up in 1970s Seattle near the first Starbucks. Coffee is central to my negative-affect management, and I am not alone: Millions of other people do the same—and for good neuroscientific reasons.
Caffeine blocks the A2A receptors in the brain from detecting adenosine, a neuromodulator that depresses energy and promotes drowsiness. Caffeine doesn’t in fact pep you up; rather, it stops you from feeling lethargic. More important, being moderately caffeinated demonstrably lowers one’s negative affect. The reason appears to be that the chronic stress some people experience—Mad Scientists in particular, I’d wager—increases the density of their A2A adenosine receptors, making a depressed affect more pronounced. Caffeine disrupts this process.
You might wonder why I don’t take a couple of hits from the old espresso machine first thing, at 4:30 a.m., instead of waiting for several hours. I have experimented with caffeine timing over the years and found that, as others have hypothesized, delaying my intake reduces the coffee crash that I get in the early afternoon if I’ve had my coffee many more hours beforehand. I also prefer not to have any stimulant in my system during prayer.
5. Tryptophan time.
With my coffee I take my first meal, which is a large dose of protein in the form of unsweetened Greek yogurt, whey protein, nuts, and berries. In general, I try to get 150 to 200 grams (roughly 5 to 7 ounces) of protein a day to fight sarcopenia and maintain healthy muscle mass—something vital to do after age 60—so this first meal gets me well on my way toward that goal. But the affect-management properties of this first meal are significant as well. Researchers have shown that proteins that are high in an essential amino acid named tryptophan raise serotonin activity in the brain. In other words, this dietary approach improves mood by encouraging calm.
Don’t get me wrong: I crave a plate of waffles as much as the next person does. But I have learned that staying with clean protein helps me establish an emotional equilibrium that lasts to midday, when I hit the same dietary lever again with another protein-rich meal.
6. Get into the flow.
The last element of this morning protocol is work, to which I turn my attention by about 7:30 a.m. When I am at home, my mornings are dedicated to creative activity. I take almost no meetings or calls before noon so that I can get several hours of uninterrupted time to write, prepare lectures, develop new ideas, and read research by others. This is work that I love, in which I achieve flow—the intensely rewarding psychological state of absorption and focus first identified by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the ’70s.
The flow state, which balances mastery and challenge in such a way that I am fully engaged yet not stressed out, is closely linked to an improved affect balance, raising positive mood and lowering negative mood. When I experience flow fully, aided by the neurochemical balance achieved through the prior five steps, I can easily and productively work for four hours with minimal breaks. This is when my creative output is highest, in both quantity and quality, and when my negative affect is least problematic.
These six protocols have changed my life in a very positive way. I wish I’d had the knowledge to develop them—and the discipline to stick with them—when I was 30. But that would have been impossible: They have required decades of education, lots of research, and experimenting with what works best for me. None of that was accessible to me when I was younger.
Your challenges may be different from mine, as will be what works best for you. But if your affect profile is at all similar, you might want to use this protocol as a starting point. Then you can carefully vary each of the elements, keeping painstaking records of the results. In short, be a Mad Scientist working on your own experiment. I predict that your well-being will improve as each new day’s peevishness evaporates through your efforts.
The post A Mad Scientist’s Morning Well-Being Protocol appeared first on The Atlantic.
