I believe there is a living layer around us. Everything true, everything felt, held together by love, and still growing. I think our job is to become more aware of it.
That is a strange thing to say before talking about breakfast. But it is the reason for the breakfast. What I believe is why I live the way I do. If I did all of this and believed none of it, I would just be doing chores.
I lost myself once. Not all at once. It happened quietly, over years, in the rush of ordinary life. And I did not find my way back in a single moment either. I found it slowly, one small morning at a time.
So this is a real day. Not an ideal one.
Before anything
I wake around twenty past six. The alarm is an app called Sleep Cycle. It listens from the bedside and wakes me during a light phase instead of pulling me out of the deep part. I use the free version, and it keeps its own record of my nights. I recommend it to anyone.
The first thing I do, before anything else, is give thanks to our Father. I am awake. I am alive. I say a small prayer. That part is private, and it stays private. But the feeling behind it is simple gratitude. It sets the tone for everything after.
Then one tonic, and I alternate between three. Warm water with a spoon of olive oil and a little ginger. Warm water with a big spoon of cider vinegar. Or warm water with a whole lemon. I do not like being too rigid. Routines deserve a little change too.
The first hour
I sit for meditation. Twenty minutes. This is the one practice I never let go of, through everything.
Then I move. Fifteen minutes of stretching and breathing. Much of it comes from an old Taoist practice, longevity exercises for waking up the five senses. Slow breathing and gentle movement. Nothing fast, nothing hard. Then twenty-five minutes with elastic bands.
Then a cold shower. I take one most days.
I want to be straight about this one, because I also wrote our article on it. I do not do it for my health. When we went through the research properly, the big claims did not survive: not aging, not the fat-burning story, and not the anti-inflammatory one. What is left is smaller and more honest than what you will read elsewhere. I keep doing it because of how the first part of my day feels afterwards. That is a preference, not a finding. I am not measuring anything, and I am not telling you to start. Here is what the research actually shows.
Then breakfast, always with protein. Usually fruit, eggs, and matcha.
That is the first hour or so. Nothing here is dramatic. That is the point.
What I put on
Almost everything I wear is wool or linen. T-shirts in wool, all year, including August. Socks in wool. Trousers in wool or cotton. Shoes in leather where I can, with cork and natural rubber. A few things with silk in them.
I should be honest about where I actually am with this. My wardrobe is not finished. A lot of what I own is cotton I bought years ago, and I am replacing it slowly, as things wear out. I am not going to throw away good clothes to prove a point.
Why I moved this way: my cotton shirts feel heavier on me, they hold a smell, and they take forever to dry. In wool I stay cooler in summer than people expect, and I burn less. That is my own experience of it, not a study. If you want the actual science on fabrics, I am writing that up separately, with the sources attached.
For washing, plain tallow soap. For deodorant, an alum stone. Things with one ingredient.
Then I work
Then I work, like everyone else. There is no secret hour hidden in the middle of my morning.
Around noon, or two if the morning has been hard, I put on the Mendi headset. It is a headband I use to train my focus, and it breaks the stress before it carries into the afternoon.
That one is worth a footnote. Before I had the headset, I used the same slot to meditate or to go outside. The device did not add something to my life. It replaced something I was already doing.
During the day I look for nature, even a small piece of it. A garden. A park. And when I can, a real immersion: a mountain, the sea, a forest. Even a few minutes outside change how the day feels.
And I swim whenever I can reach water. That one is not training. It is the closest I get to being put back together.
What I eat
I try to eat a lot of protein, and as naturally as I can. Fruit, vegetables, fish. Breakfast and lunch are the real meals. Dinner is lighter, and my last food is around eight or nine.
I drink coffee, or green tea, or matcha, which I think is the best of the three.
I also take Mitopure capsules twice a day. That is a supplement I am testing, and the company sends it to me. I am not ready to tell you anything about whether it works. When I am, it will be a proper review with the evidence attached, not a sentence here.
And wine. Mostly red, and champagne, and I like mezcal too. I know the best thing is not to drink at all. But life is such a thing, and we also have to enjoy these small pleasures.
I should say the rest of it plainly. Some of these companies now send me their product to test. That does not buy a good word from me. I use a thing for weeks, not days, I only keep what earns its place, and when something is still on trial I tell you so.
In the evening
Dinner around eight. Reading, sometimes television, and I try to stop the screens a couple of hours before bed.
Friends, often. Going out. That part matters more than any supplement on this page.
I like art. I love it, because in the end it is beauty, and I take beauty wherever it shows up: music, sculpture, painting, theatre, a concert.
And I write. I make voice notes too, on my phone or my computer, but writing is different. Something happens when the idea has to come out through your hand.
Before sleep, when I can, I meditate again. Ten or fifteen minutes. It closes the day the way the morning prayer opened it.
How I sleep
Linen sheets. A wool mattress, wool pillows, a duvet of wool and silk. The window is open all year, and the room is as cold as I can keep it. Under a wool duvet there is no risk of being cold.
I go to bed around half past ten and wake around twenty past six, and I hold those hours whatever else is going on. Of everything on this page, that is the one I would start with. It costs nothing.
I wear an Apollo on my ankle. Not my wrist. I used to track sleep with an Apple Watch and I stopped. I do not want a watch on my wrist all night. The Apollo on my ankle I barely notice.
The company sent me this one to test. Everything below is what actually happened, over about two months of wearing it every day.
In the app you set a bedtime and a wake time. Mine are half past ten and half past six. At bedtime it starts a slow vibration that settles me, and towards the morning a faster one that brings me up.
The app tells me I get about thirty minutes more sleep a night. I do not trust that number much. The Apollo has a motion sensor, so it can tell roughly when I fell asleep and when I woke up. What no device can tell is how I would have slept that night without the Apollo, and that is exactly what “more sleep” means. Apollo's own model fills in that gap, and one of the things the model looks at is how much I use the device. They call it an estimate. It is.
And even so, I feel much more relaxed and recovered in the morning since I started wearing the Apollo.
The change I actually notice does not need an app. I used to take half an hour or more to fall asleep. Now I am gone almost as soon as I lie down. And I used to wake in the night to drink water, or go to the bathroom, or just to shift position for no reason. Now it almost never happens. And when it does, the Apollo sends a soft pulse on its own and I am back asleep quickly. It has a setting for exactly that.
That part I am sure about. My hours have been fixed for years, long before the Apollo arrived, so neither my bedtime nor my wake time changed. Only the falling asleep did.
Around six the vibration starts on my ankle, and Sleep Cycle wakes me a little later, when the sleep is light. Some mornings I notice it, some mornings I do not. I think it helps me come up gradually instead of all at once.
And here is what I actually find interesting about it. Most of these things watch you. They keep count, and they hand you a chart. This one does something. It sends a signal and tries to shift how you feel, right then. I am not saying that is better. I think it is complementary. I still like the ones that measure, and I still use them. But I believe we will see more devices that do something for you instead of only measuring you.
When it does not work
I am not a robot, and I cannot live like this every day. Travelling breaks most of it. I do not have my bed, or my morning.
So I take elastic bands, because they fit in a suitcase and they work in a hotel room. Sometimes the Apollo comes. The Mendi headset never does.
What always comes is the part that needs nothing. Meditation. The sea, if there is one. A mountain, a garden, a walk. Those are the base. The devices are a complement, and I found the base first, years before any of them existed.
Some days it is harder to meditate, harder to connect at all. We are still human. I do my best.
Why any of this
Everything above comes from what I said at the start.
If there is a living layer, and it is made of everything true and everything loved, and it is still growing, then the practices are not chores. Meditation is how I get quiet enough to notice it. Nature is where I feel it most obviously. Gratitude in the morning is me acknowledging it. Even the wool and the linen come from the same place, which is a preference for things that are what they say they are.
People ask what changed me. They want the one thing. The breakthrough.
There was no breakthrough.
I have lived this way for more than twenty years. Consistency is what helps. There is no magic. It came slowly, one ordinary morning after another. Coming back to myself was not a moment. It was showing up, again and again, until the practices became part of who I am.
Right now I am reading a book called Four Thousand Weeks, by Oliver Burkeman. He says that if you live to eighty, you get about 4,000 weeks of life. That is all a life is. If you are in your thirties or forties, you may have around 2,000 to 2,500 weeks in front of you. I do not say this to make you sad. It is the opposite. The point is not that time is running out. The point is that the weeks you have left deserve to be lived fully. Life is short. Be brave with it. Stay close to who you really are, and use your weeks for what you are here to do.
You do not need my whole routine. Start with one thing tomorrow. A glass of warm water. A minute of quiet. A word of thanks.
Then do it again the next day. That is all it takes. That is all it ever took.