Your health is your most valuable asset, closely followed by your energy (attention, time, & effort). So thanks for spending your greatest resources with me today. I’ll make it worth your while.

I have an actual question for you today (seriously send me an email and answer me, please!)

What did the first 15-20 minutes of your day look like today? I have a very small sample size in my house.

My husband, God bless him, is usually up around 4 to get himself ready for the gym. His first breath outdoors isn’t until he gets there around 4:45 or so.

My daughter (who is almost 2), wakes up on her own and plays in her crib for anywhere from 10-45 minutes. When we get her from her crib, we change her diaper, lift the curtains in her room, and wave good morning to the day, then we usually go play or pet Hank, or 70lb chocolate lab.

Me ? I’ve implemented a practice since January that’s making a huge impact on my life. I wake up (to an alarm that uses light, and then eventually the sound of seagulls), pee, an then go immediately outside. I take 5 deep breaths. And I hold their inhales for as long as I can. I make the exhales long and deliberate. I practice being present. I try really hard to only focus on my breathing.

It usually takes me 2 minutes. And the energy that I can then attack the day with is startling.

Before implementing this this year, my morning was haphazard. I’d still wake up to my lovely alarm clock, I’d still pee, and then my next move was usually to make coffee, which requires a clean Bialetti (yes, a patient turned me onto that way and now I love it), which I usually hadn’t cleaned the night before. So my first 10 waking minutes were annoyed at myself as I emptied the dishwasher and cleaned the sink.

Now listen, my first 2 minutes are spent breathing outside, and then sometimes my NEXT 10 are spent emptying the dishwasher. Or sometimes I do yoga, or write notes (or this newsletter) from patient visits. Sometimes I do a movement video, sometimes I MAKE a movement video.

But my point is this:

This practice has made me think hard about our ancestors. Only a few hundred generations ago, your and my ancestors would leave their cave (or whatever dwelling they’d slept in), check for danger, and then go out an hunt or gather. Their whole family and village was within reach from the moment they woke up. The early morning sun hit their eyes and skin. The sky was remarkable (and much more clear than ours is…and perhaps different configurations of the stars and planets way back then!) There was a concern of when and where they’d find food that day, and if a lion or predator was going to eat them, or if there’d be a natural disaster that would wipe them out. There was stress, but it wasn’t the kind that made them diagnose themselves with cancer at 2am.

I’m down this rabbit hole of ‘ancestral health’ because of a book and author called ‘The Story of the Human Body’ by Harvard professor Dan Lieberman.

He’s written a few books (and if anyone has an ‘in’ at Harvard, please help me see if I can have him on my podcast!)

The part that’s sparked my digging is the idea of ‘mismatched diseases’. The idea that our evolutionary ancestors had a MUCH different environment than we do, and that our biology has and does evolve much, much slower than our culture has.

So now, instead of plagues or disease, we are dying from diseases of a mismatch from our biology to our environment. We over-eat, we under-move, we over-stress, we under-community ourselves.

I do think there’s value in looking at our ancestors, the way they moved, ate, and managed their stressors. I’m the last one to give up modern toilets, dentistry, and wifi.

I may be the first in line though, to say, hey, a lot of folks could avoid my treatment table (or the surgeon’s knife, chiropractor’s cracks, ‘stretch lab’s stretchers, the massage therapist’s techniques, the pharmacist’s drugs), if we’d only look towards the lifestyle our ancestors lived.

And , knowing what we know about decision making, willpower, and making changes, we simply are delusional if we think we can ‘willpower’ ourselves into better decisions or behaving more like our ancestors did.

We’re far better off setting up our environment to look and feel more like theirs. So here’s my $0 environment hacks to help you change some habits and stay off my table.

1. No chairs - put a great rug down in the living room and sit on that for 5-10 minutes a day.

2. Community - check in frequently with your loved ones and get together with friends this week. A simple text to reconnect you to someone you care about may be all it takes

3. Eat real food - try it with me this week. Go 1 or 2 days of a vegetarian diet or no processed sugar. See how you feel. Appreciate that our ancestors didn’t have the option to raid the freezer for ice cream at 9pm

4. • 4. Move. Our ancestors actually sat about the same amount that we do. The biggest difference is they took between 15-30,000 steps per day. So, see if you can increase your step count by 10% from last week this week.