My Exact Daily Routine for Energy, Longevity & Optimal Health

0:03Darin Olien:Welcome to Super Life with me, Darin Olien, a podcast where we explore, discover, and share solutions that promote a healthier life and a better world. Together, we'll ignite possibilities, inspire change, and build sovereignty, creating a roadmap towards a super life for you and for all. Get ready to start living your super life.

0:34Darin Olien:By 2050, there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. Over 500 toothpaste tubes have been thrown away since I've started this ad. You don't think of these small little things, but they add up a lot over time, and we can do something about it. That ends up to be over a billion plastic toothpaste tubes a year alone that ultimately end up in our environment and in our waterways and ultimately ends up in the ocean. Do you want to add to this or do you want to do something different? Plus, maybe that exposure to that plastic, getting the plasticizers and the endocrine disruptors and then putting that toothpaste in your mouth also is not a good idea.

1:23Darin Olien:There's some great solutions. You can DIY stuff. I've got many of these in my fatal conveniences. But the easy ones that I use every day and I'm about to travel a lot more and the traveling makes them really easy, I go to bite. I bite down on a little tablet, which is not interacting with any plastics because it's in a glass bottle. And it's refillable and reusable and sustainable. And there's no unwanted toxic fluorides, flow agents, and solvents in my mouth. So my favorite is this Bite Toothpaste. 100 % home, compostable pouches, subscription models. You don't even have to think about it again.

2:09Darin Olien:You're helping you by putting clean products in your mouth, and you're helping the environment because Bite Toothpaste is one of the best companies I've seen looking at all aspects of their supply chain and their refillable, reusable, sustainable, regenerative practices. So Bite is offering you, all my listeners, 20 % off your first order. Go to trybite.com, T-R-Y-B-I-T-E forward slash Darren20 or just use the promo code Darren20, D-A-R-I-N, and you can get 20 % off your first order with a great new toothpaste without using the tube. Every morning, before I touch my phone, before I read a single message, certainly turn on the phone, before I let a piece of the modern world really enter my nervous system, I go outside.

3:03Of course, I let the dogs out and I stand in the light of the early morning light, not because it's trendy, because tens of thousands of years of the human biology of you and me is waning for that signal. signal. And if I don't give it to my body, my eyes, my cells, my body goes looking for it in all the wrong places, trying to regulate itself, a screen, coffee, cortisol spike at 2 p.m. People ask me all the time, Darren, what do you actually do? And this episode is not about necessarily following what I do, but the intention behind it. So this is not me selling you anything. what do you do every day with your own body, your own mind, your own intention, your own practices.

3:55So today, this whole episode, I'm walking you through my day. I'm leaving out some details because it would be way too much. But the main point, I will let you know from the moment I open my eyes to the moment I shut even the breaker off at my house. Yes, that's correct. and I'm not just telling you what I do. I'm giving you the research behind why. The studies, the numbers, the mechanisms because I don't want you to copy me. I want you to understand so it deeply impacts you so you can build your own version. Here's the frame to hold onto. Food is information. Light is information. Breath is information.

4:39Every input you give your body is a set of instructions and your cells are listening whether you're paying attention or not. So you might as well consciously create your day too. So let's go. Picture a normal modern day. The alarm clock goes off. You probably with the phone, the first light into your eyes is this damn six inch screen. You reach for the coffee before the water. How many of you do that? Indoor lighting all morning, sitting 10 hours a day, staring at a computer, food in a bag wrapped in something, or convenience of course, with a shelf life longer than our car loans. Then at night, the brightest light we've seen all day.

5:31ceiling lights, TVs, phones in the bed right when our brain is trying to make this very, very important hormone, melatonin. And you sleep next to your damn router with a phone charging on your nightstand. This is not for you to go in judgment of yourself. None of it feels dangerous. That's exactly why I call them fatal conveniences. Each one is small. Stack them seven days a week for 30 years. That's your life. The longest lived people I've ever sat with in 30 plus countries around the world didn't have a protocol because it was embedded into their life. They had a rhythm, light, movement, real food, pure darkness, sleep.

6:21It was all there. What I've built is an attempt to give me back my body's rhythm and use modern science to sharpen every piece, but most importantly, to go back to our instincts because we've offloaded our instincts to this modernity. First thing, I wake up, I go over and make my water. Yes, I make my water with, you've heard me before, reverse osmosis water. Then I add my Ormus minerals, my Shilajit from Monovitality, because that's what I choose for the most powerful electrolytes. Then I let my dogs out. I go outside and the sun, for me, the sun's not even out yet. But I breathe. I stretch. I let the dogs do their thing.

7:09I take some deep breaths in. It could be foggy, could be sunny, but usually isn't when I wake up. Yes. Okay. I'll tell you, I wake up between four and five every day. That's what I love to do. So again, that's the first movements and motion and things that I do. Now, if you are waking up with the early morning light, it's just 10 minutes with no sunglasses on. If you can, expose some skin. Could be 10 minutes, could be 20 minutes, whatever it is. Could be water in hand, breathing in between sips. Again, no sunglasses, no screens. Because here's the thing. You have a master clock in your brain and really in every cell.

7:59The brain, you have what's called a supraclimactic nucleus, and it takes its cues almost entirely from light hitting your retina with no nothing in between. Morning light tells that clock the day has started. And roughly 14 to 16 hours later, that same clock then shifts releasing melatonin because you told it when the day began. Now, understand if you're not doing these things, the disruption of the clock, the master clock, goes on inside. A 2025 study in the BMC Public Health looked at nearly 1 ,800 adults and found that every additional 30 minutes of sunlight before 10 a.m. shifted the midpoint of their sleep about 23 minutes earlier and improved their sleep quality scores.

9:02Morning light was the strongest lever to your sleep. A separate 2025 daily diary study of the U.S. adults found more time in sunlight predicted better sleep that very night. So the things you're doing in the morning with the sunlight is protecting you and creating your further and later night sleep. Keep that in mind. That is the most important thing. The single cheapest thing you can do for tonight's sleep happens when the sun comes up around 7 a.m. and costs nothing. And so again, I'm drinking my water. I'm getting the early morning light. It's before anything else, before the coffee, before anything.

9:51You've gone 8, 9, 10 hours of sleep without a drop. And even mild dehydration happens. 1 to 2 % of your body weight measurably impairs mood, focus, working memory in the research. So getting that quart or a liter of water as one of the first things you do is paramount to the entire body shifting and creating energy and creating better focus. The next thing I do is meditation. I sit for 10, 15, mostly now 20 minutes, silent. I do some breaths, double inhales in the nose, double inhale. And of course, that is just good. Stripping the mysticism away, which by the way, I love mysticism. The data says profound shifts.

10:462014, John Hopkins researchers published meta-analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine. They screened nearly 19 ,000 citations, kept only 47 randomized trials rigorous enough to trust. the findings mindfulness meditation just even scanning your body without thinking you need to meditate go up and down from the toes all the way to the head feeling your body releasing the tension doing that mindfulness produced moderate real improvements in anxiety depression and pain effect size is comparable to what you'd expect from an antidepressant and of course without side effects.

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15:14Every day you sit and watch your thoughts without chasing them or judging them or just literally observing them, you're rehearsing the skill of not being hijacked by this modern world. That's not spiritual, even though it is. It's common sense. And it's very much neurological. So the breath is one of the fastest levers you have. If you take one thing from this episode, take this. Your breath is the only part of your autonomic nervous system. You can grab the steering wheel directly. So if you're tight and stressed, you're shallow breathing, guaranteed. If you want to shut that down, you can do a lot of changes just with your breath.

16:022023 Stanford researchers Balbin Huberman Spiegel published a randomized study in Cell Reports Medicine. Over a hundred people, four practices, five minutes a day for a month. Mindfulness meditation, box breathing, cyclic hyperventilation or cyclic sighing, which is the double inhale I mentioned before through the nose, then a long, slow exhale through the mouth. So whatever the breath in was, double it on the exhale. All four helped. So no matter what you do, slowing your breathing, being conscious of your breathing helps. The cyclic sighing was the clear winner. The biggest improvement in daily positive mood and measurable drop in resting respiratory rates, meaning it physically downshifted the people in the study's baseline five minutes a day.

17:04And the more days people did, the bigger effect. The long exhale slows the heart rate through the vagus nerve. The double inhale reopens collapsed air sacs and offloads the CO2. You are reprogramming your nervous system set point, literally. We always talk, now everyone's talking about nervous system regulation, telling you right now, this is the big, big lever. Next thing I do is journal. So after I do my breathing, I go into journal, but I get out of my head. I let it flow onto the page. I write stream of consciousness, a few lines. And of course, I am going through gratefulness. What am I currently grateful for?

17:52I'm currently grateful for so much. So let's acknowledge that. And then if anything's sitting heavy with me, I process that with myself. I let that out. I let myself not through rumination, but through acknowledging pain, emotion. You know, my mother passed away a little over four months ago. Sometimes I have waves of that. I just let it out. So this goes back to James Pennybaker's expressive writing research at the University of Texas, people who wrote about what was going on inside of them for just 15 minutes showed fewer doctor visits and better immune markers months later. That's right. If you don't believe all this stuff, you believe it more when the science, right?

18:44And a 2018 randomized trial in JMIR's Mental Health found 12 weeks of positive effect journaling reduced anxiety and mental distress in people who started out anxious. So if you just journaled about 10 things you were grateful for, people you love, what they give you, your dogs, the land that you're on, the body that you have, All of these things are incredible. An unprocessed thought is a stress hormone waning to happen. Write it down and you move it from the emotional brain into the language brain, which can actually do something with it. Okay, the next thing I do after the light, after the stretching, after the water, after the stillness, after the breath, and after the writing now and only now do I drink my cacao.

19:43That's right. It's not just chocolate. It's real, minimally processed, full bodied, some fat. Obviously, you have all these questions. Most cacao, yes, it's contaminated with heavy metals. These are all. And by the way, the asterisked by this, I'm currently developing an incredible cacao drink that I'm so excited. Full chain of custody where it's from, what it is. And I'm very, very excited to share with you with that in the near future. And I blend that warm. I add for me, I add some monk fruit to make it nice and sweet, not too much, maybe some cinnamon. I do add my adaptogens, triple extracted chaga, triple extracted lion's mane, you name it.

20:32By the way, I'll give you more about that later because that's another project that I'm finally able, willing, and excited to get into and share with you. The biggest study ever done on taking in cacao is the Cosmos trial out of the Brigham and Women's and Harvard. So more than 21 ,000 older adults, randomized, placebo-controlled, three and a half years. So 500 milligrams of cacao flavanols a day. That's right. And if you find a company who are testing those flavanols, very important. The primary outcome of consuming this every day, total cardiovascular events came down by 27 in the cacao group, a pre-specified secondary endpoint, the strongest in the people who actually took it in and actually consumed it consistently.

21:34And in cognition, a sub-study, the people who started with the poorest diet quality saw the clearest brain benefits of this cacao. So if you're not getting things perfectly in your diet and you just include an incredible cacao as a ritual in your life, you will get benefits from it without a doubt. And we're going to dive into a bunch of that stuff as I get into this product that I will be coming out with later. The people who needed it the most got the most benefits. So why is cacao so powerful? With the good quality cacao, the flavonoids and the epicatechins especially boost what nitric oxide which relaxes your blood vessels and improves blood flow including to your brain plus the theobromine a gentler longer acting cousin of caffeine plus huge amounts of naturally occurring magnesium that most people are low in iron, fiber, and one of the highest polyphenol densities of any food on earth.

22:50Powerful antioxidant. One caveat, just don't go for the alkalized version. It strips most of the flavonoids away. And don't go heavy on cacao that has a huge amount of poor quality refined sugar. Okay, next thing I do is then I train. And I've been going through all kinds of cool innovations of training. But for the most part, I'll keep it simple. Resistance training. The cool thing is you have a body that weighs something and you have gravity. So you can do a bunch of body weight stuff. Squats, push-ups, sit-ups, planks, you name it. You can do that anywhere. Hotel rooms. if you have five minutes if you're waiting for a meeting you can do all of those things i love kettlebells you can do of course traditional weights bands sandbags rocks you name it whatever legs pulling pushing carrying all of this stuff doesn't have to be complicated and move through just not just linear planes.

24:04Move through it. Take the kettlebell and move it around and feel your body shifting and adjusting from your abs to your back to your posterior chain to your glutes to your hamstrings, your quads. All of it activates when you move non-linearly. The mortality data shocks people with resistance training. 2022 meta-analysis in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine. Resistance training alone was associated with 15 % lower all-cause mortality, 19 % lower cardiovascular mortality, 14 % lower cancer mortality. That's right. By you just using your body and using resistance lowers your cancer risk.

24:54But write this one down. Combine resistance training with light aerobic activity going for a walk. You can even do it at a different part of the day. Cool thing is I walk with my dogs. I've created that into my world. Or I sprint. I love sprints, actually. I sprint my mountain bike up the hills, run the dogs with the mountain bikes, go for a cruise, get outside, all of this stuff. Light aerobic activity, walking is just again, so good. And that lowers all cause mortality by over 40. So these things, this is not a drug. This is just you using your body, getting back to our ancestral ways because modernity has got us sitting staring sedentary for far too long of our lives muscle is your biggest glucose disposal site more muscle more blood sugar muscle is an endocrine organ keep that in mind when it contracts it releases myokines that talk to the brain the bones, and your immune system.

26:01And another great thing is check your grip strength. Grip strength alone is one of the most reliable predictors of how long and how well you live. Do hangs. You can do hanging every day, whatever it is. My competitive career ended with injury, and it took me years to rebuild that kinetic chain in my relationship with training. And it wasn't a punishment. It was through curiosity. And even today, I went outside today and you could call it a dance, but I was dissecting the brain. I was going into certain parts of muscle groups and firing them up, moving them through space, acting and almost turning on the neurological system.

26:51So standing outside, being outside, shirt off, sun coming down, getting more sun, and then moving the body. These things are just great to do and have fun. Make it fun. It's simple. I train so that I can do more things. So I can show up more. I can grab my surfboard. I can run up a mountain. I can pick up my dog when I need to, whatever it is. The other thing here now, we'll move into what I do, and this is food. Here's the sentence this whole episode is built towards. Food is information. All right, everyone, I'm going to pause the episode right here. We've covered my morning routine, the vital importance of early sunlight, nervous system regulation through breath work, and the mortality-lowering benefits of stacking resistance training with aerobic activity.

27:44But as I mentioned, the entire episode builds towards one core concept. Food is information. Over on Patreon in the second half of this episode, I break down exactly what I eat every single day, from my first meal of the seasonal fruits to my massive polyphenol-rich salads and specific superfoods. I also reveal my strict non-negotiable nighttime routine, including why I physically cut the breaker to my bedroom to achieve optimal sleep. To unlock the rest of my daily protocol, head over to patreon.com slash Darren O 'Lean right now. That's patreon.com slash Darren O 'Lean, D-A-R-I-N-O-L-I-E-N. click the link in the show notes, type it in, and I'll see you over there right now to finish this deep dive into my daily habits.

28:42Let's build this super life.